Dear Geoff,
in your comment on PLTP written by D. Pelz you say that pure repetition for motor learning was left behind in the late 80's. What other kind of methods are there to "ingrain" new movemnets and to get rid of unwanted ones?
Modern motor learning places a new emphasis on the cognitive components of learning -- that is, knowing explicitly what to do, how to do it, and why to do it that way. This cognitive knowledge shapes and guides the rote training of movement neurology, and tends to protect the golfer from mistaken notions that just telling yourself to "do what you've practiced" is good enough.
The ensemble of body movements that we use in golf for putting are a very select subset of our total movement repetoire. There are casual daily habitual movements that are very frequent and commonplace, like turning to look left, opening a door, orienting to a sudden sound, and the like. These habitual movements can sometimes crowd out our specialized movements, or corrupt the specialized movement. This is especially so under pressure. The notion that putting movement is simply the old pattern being displaced by a new pattern is just inaccurate. While it is true that movement can become learned to an extent that sports science people label "overlearned," this still is never really "automatic." So causualness opens the door to habitual movements to degrade the specialized control we seek, and pressure not only tends to reactivate an old underlying stroke pattern -- it also opens the door for unintended habitual non-golf patterns of movement.
The time course of motor learning starts with an assessment of the present state of the specialized movement, and sets out an explicit plan to replace it. The plan for the new movement is explicitly designed and understood by the golfer as to how and why it is advantageous, and as to the special kinesthetic and balance and visual cues that ought to accompany its successful execution, or that should not be observed (as coming from bad patterns). Through the course of practicing to learn the new pattern well enough that the old pattern is quited down, the extent to which conscious cognitive attention is required diminishes. But it never really disappears in toto.
A second major theme in modern motor learning is to pay more close attention to what cues are present during practice, whether explicitly noticeable in the surroundings of the practice facility or equipment or the instructional guidance, or simply implicitly present in structuring the practice feedback. For example, the Pelz stroke track presents the golfer with rectlinear cues that are never present in the game or indeed on the practice green without the track. Almost all training aids present obvious cues as well as nonobvious cues that the golfer uses during practice, and once these cues are not available, the brain is susceptible to mistake due to the absence of the cues.
A third major theme is that motor learning is not neatly quarantined apart from perceptual (or cognitive or emotional) processes. The brain in sports action is a highly integrated collection of processes. To treat learning a motor SKILL as if it consists simply of a rote motion pattern is a bit sophomoric, and really is just not how the brain and body work.
For example, Pelz urges people to use his stroke track until they "train" a stroke that doesn't contact the side rails. But he never suggests HOW one should think about the stroke movement, or the movement of the body parts in coordination to make such a stroke more likely. Yes, he suggests that hands should be below the shoulder sockets and the golfer should use a pendulum stroke, but how specifically is that accomplished? As it turns out, there are three of four separate ways one can make a straight stroke inside a Pelz stroke track, so the "feedback"of not hitting the rails really doesn't sort out for the golfer whether he is doing what he should be with the movement planning and execution. The golfer needs to know something like: use the gut and lower back muscles, keep the shoulders and arms and hands all inactive, and start the triangle down and back by sending the lead shoulder vertically down in a plane of rocking so that the sweetspot does not cross beyond the puttline or curl too far inside off the line .... (more) ... because this will maximize the length of path before and after contact when the putt stroke's path is more or less straight and square. The golfer also needs to know a couple of other things about the body, such as the natural tendency of the elbow to stay near the hip as the stroke goes forward into a follow-thru, which causes a pull; or the need to keep the pivot stable; or the desireability of keeping the eye muscles quiet; or the way that gravity in the downstroke provides a smooth acceleration in the stroke so long as you are not tight in your muscles; and how to keep the hands inactive and moving in the plane you want so that the putterface does not twist or the path alter; and so forth. Each of these features of the stroke can be the subject of separate and distinct feedback that does not have anything to do with the stroke track, so in effect the stroke track diverts the golfer from learning these things and implicitly tells the golfer that if he simply won't hit the rails, all will be fine.
And in line with the third theme, using a stroke track without any targeting is a little dangerous. The positions, postures, and movements in the setup and stroke are not really separate from targeting positions, postures, and movements. The adopting of the setup only occurs in the context of aiming the putterface a given direction for a given distance. These aiming procedures are made with a specific stroke tempo in mind, and the targeting plus tempo sets the stroke length for that putt. The putterface orientation behind the ball determines the stance, ball position, hand position, and eye position for the stroke. And the body setup is flush to the surface, not to gravity, so when the ball is below the feet (a left-right breaking putt for a right-hander), the setup should tilt over towards the ball more than on a flat surface. Similarly, for a ball above the feet (right-left breaking putt for a right-hander) the setup is slightly back from the ball more than normal, with a flatter lie angle.
"Learning" a straight stroke from a stroke track's "rail" feedback, then, is a bit stunted -- sort of like trying to learn cooking a cake with an Easy Bake play over and playdough instead of flour, eggs, and milk etc.
And fourth, THEN there is the whole issue of teaching HOW to use the body during targeting. About as good as it gets for this according to the old "rote" model of learning is to use a laser to check whether you can aim the putterface where it should aim. This is a completely "after-the-fact" report about what you have done, and does not in the least tell you HOW to aim the putterface in the first place so that it's straight, or tell you WHAT TO LOOK FOR to decide whether you have aimed the putterface straight. These are matters of "knowledge" and cognition, not a massive number of attempts to do better. The laser "check" on your aiming result does little good for learning HOW TO AIM CORRECTLY in the first place unless you make explicit observations from the laser information about WHAT TO DO or WHAT TO LOOK FOR. For example, you can use you sense of a line across the horizon of your two eyes to help square up the putterface; you can use the spherical shape of the ball to help; you can use the rectilinear shape of the putterhead; you can use cues on the ground in front of or behind the ball; you can practice sensing what is perpendicular; and a host of other tricks and ideas. The laser gadget doesn't prompt the golfer to notice or learn any of this. In general, golf does a very poor job of teaching targeting or spatial awareness of distance and locations and routes and trajectories, and rote motor learning has next to nothing whatsoever to do with this MAJOR aspect of golf performance, so far at least.
I could go on ad infinitum about the limitations and dangers of the 1970s rote motor learning model in golf, but these four big ideas will have to suffice for now.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone http://puttingzone.com
Golf's most advanced putting instruction.
Dear Geoff,
your text contains a lot of information. Unfortunately I can only understand 80 per cent of what you wrote.
Let me sum up what I undertood an what I didn't:
There are 4 important factors relating to the problem.
Factor 1: Knowing what you are doing at the moment, and having a plan of how to learn something else and why.
Factor 2: Presence of teaching aids which are not there when you are out on the course.
Factor 3: Knowing which muscles to use (I couldn't get my head straight on this because to me it seemed to be the same as factor1)
Factor 4: Learning a movement in combination with targeting and posture.
Then something I just couldn't understand:
"movement is explicitly designed and understood by the golfer as to how and why it is advantageous, and as to the special kinesthetic and balance and visual cues that ought to accompany its successful execution, or that should not be observed (as coming from bad patterns). "
One more question:
Are there probably psychological techniques by which you can get rid of old patterns?
You are quite right that my explanation was very unclear. Let me try again.
The old "do it right 20,000 times and then you're cured" school of golf training is outdated because it is unrealistically simplistic, and doesn't work as well as its proponents seem to think.
The four big themes are 1) utilizing carefully designed cognitive structures to guide motor learning; 2) attending to perceptual cues that are relevant to the cognitive and motor processes; 3) respecting the interdependence of "mental", emotional, and movement brain processes; and 4) learning how targeting is a separate and preceding phase of the action of putting that informs and guides stroke movement technique, planning, and execution.
I think the reason the first and third seemed similar to you as I originally explained it is because in both cases I used the word "cognitive." This word means different things in different contexts, but I am mostly using it to mean language-based thought. In the first theme, the learner begins with a language-based understanding of the bstarting situation and what to do to reach a new state -- how to get a new stroke pattern. In the third theme, I now use the term "mental" to refer to how thinking processes are interrelated to stroke movement, as in "thinking is stinking," "paralysis by analysis," "keep it simple," and similar suggestions to focus at the time of making the stroke on body-sense cues and not let analysis and language-based thought detract from physical performance. Clearly, emotional disequillibrium during putting harms physical performance (stress, anxiety, lack of focus, muscle control problems, narrowed perceptions, etc.). The emotional system places "reactive valuation" upon situations and perceptions (a "friendly" face, an "inviting" swimming pool, a "scary" dark alley, an "historic" opportunity to win a major, etc.), and this valuing is a form of "meaning" assignment. The emotions and the thoughts that accompany recognition of meaning in a situation energizes the language-based thoughts of the brain so that we "react" inwardly by thoughts about the emotions. In golf, almost all of this is avoidable by adoption of fundamental attitudes about the game, the event, and ourselves, and other psychological interventions such as deep breathing and relaxation techniques. The point of the third theme is that almost all training aids based on the "rote repetition for feedback" model or training are designed to ignore the influence of situational emotions and thoughts that handicap physical performance. That's not realistic or healthy in the long run.
With respect to this sentence:
"movement is explicitly designed and understood by the golfer as to how and why it is advantageous, and as to the special kinesthetic and balance and visual cues that ought to accompany its successful execution, or that should not be observed (as coming from bad patterns). " --
The golfer really ought to know what his body is doing when he is doing what really works for him. This is not "paralysis by analysis" because I am speaking about learning and practice, not on-course performance and play. Most PGA Tour pros today have the odd notion that they SHOULDN'T try to analyze how it works too closely but instead should concentrate on ATTITUDES and BELIEFS like "putt like a kid," "trust your stroke," "believe in yourself," "just get a feeling for the stroke and go with it," "don't try too hard" and similar notions. These notions probably don't do a lot of harm, but if the pros really want to know what they are doing when they are putting very well, as opposed to what they are omitting to do when they are not putting so well, they will have to pay close attention to how they generate perceptions during targeting and how they control tempo and the thought patterns they have about how their best stroke really happens. For example, Brad Faxon often says he is thinking "nothing" when he putts his best, and that he doesn't try too hard, and that he has the attitude that he is simply "shooting baskets" with a buddy for fun. That's not a badly designed cognitive structure to help keep unwanted thoughts and emotions from interfering with physical performance (theme 3 above), but you and I both know he works diligently on understanding and becoming familiar with repeating body postures and stroke movement cues (hands, shoulders, weight distribution, slight forward press, tempo, etc.). Perhaps what Faxon does not explicitly recognize is that there are very specific visual cues that accompany excellent targeting -- and not just "lining up the logo" -- and these cues are generally the same for all golfers facing the same putt. These visual cues can be isolated and identified and named, can be taught specifically, and can be learned and relied upon by all golfers. So can the processes of body and eye movement and visual attention that generate these cues. So targeting and stroke movement cues are visual, proprioceptive, vestibular, and kinesthetic. All of these processes are essentially the same for all adult, non-disadvantaged golfers, although the specific mix and emphasis of cues will vary from golfer to golfer due to individual developmental histories, training, and cognitive-emotional structures. Bobby Locke was emphasizing a better set of targeting and movement cues than almost all other golfers on the green, notwithstanding the seeming oddity or idiosyncracy of his "stroke technique."
With respect to your final question:
"Are there probably psychological techniques by which you can get rid of old patterns? " --
Sure there are. One is some form of self-hypnosis combined with a key (such as touching your hat's bill or your hip). Another is some form of "operant conditioning" relying upon the reward-punishment system in the brain to suppress bad behavior and reward good behavior. In general, though, the best approach is to instill the preferred new behavior in a packaging of cognitive and emotional understanding as to why it is better. A positive always works better than a negative in reaching a positive goal.
Cheers!
geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone http://puttingzone.com
Golf's most advanced putting instruction.
(If you only had gone into public in 97 already. I probably wouldn't have ruined my putting with the use of the putting track and a whole bunch of mechanical thoughts-by the way,Pelz idea of "straight all the time" is only achievable with a special setup. I wrote an article on this on " http//forum.webmart.de/wmmsg.cfm?id=497810&sr=1&a=1&d=180&t=867989 " -unfortunately its written in German. )
But let's get back to the original subject of the thread. I think now I understood most of what you wrote.
You say that valuation can be overcome by certain attitudes and techniques. How do you want to achieve this exactly?
In point No 4 you write about certain visual cues wich are basically the same for everybody. What are they?How can I check myself while putting?
To control emotions in putting, there are a number of useful attitudes. One is to be a little "hard" or "tough" so you don't really care if the round gets spoiled. This is anti-frustration, which is not the same as not caring about the round going well. You can care a lot about doing well, without getting upset if you don't. Bad or spoiled shots are water off your back -- nothing to worry about, and not something that diminishes your sense of comfort with your abilities to perform at a very high level. You just keep going forward relentlessly, going for excellence with every shot and every next shot.
A second attitude is that no one putt makes or breaks the round, and the round's score accumulates shot by shot from beginning to end. This helps relieve pressure on putts late in the round, and so help you do better. It also helps alleviate frustration.
A third attitude, to put it crudely for lack of a better term, is something akin to "contemptuousness." You simply ARE better than others, even if you may not be showing it right this moment. It's there inside, waiting for you if you want to dig for it. This attitude is a little tricky, since you really aren't a jerk. It's just something of a persona that grows on you like a mold. When you walk onto a green, there's no one else there as good as you are -- not that you care or are interested in comparing yourself to others -- it's just a comfort. The green is YOUR turf. It's all about you and the green and the putt. There is not anyone else in the situation. When it comes to match play or close competition in the final round, this attitude morphs into aggression -- the kind that makes you watch someone stick an approach within five feet, so you stick your approach to three feet. It's not really contemptuousness, but it is something that looks and perhaps feels like a supreme isolation.
Another attitude is that the best way to respond to pressure is to stick with what you know best -- how to get the ball in the hole. There are certain things you do to give your putt the best chance, and under pressure you want to think only about doing the routine job you know you have to do to get the ball in the hole with the fewest strokes.
Then there are some physical techniques, like deep relaxtion breathing, self-hypnosis and relaxation cues, and visual attention control that are useful for keeping an emotional equillibrium.
The control of thinking is mostly about scheduling your thinking so that it's done at a certain point in the routine. Thereafter, you don't want to continue thinking, and instead want to focus on perception and movement. Another technique is to regard thinking as a randomly generated busyness of the brain for the sake of busyness. Purposive thinking is one thing, but most thinking is just random firing of neurons just for the sake of firing. Emotional pressure can juice up the random thinking and make it very intrusive. Here again, the basic idea of sticking with what you know works and doing the necessary steps in the routine tends to suppress random thinking.
As to the cues that are commonly available:
First, there are the body cues of how your setup feels -- how wide the stance, how bent the torso, how inclined the face, how secure the balance distributed on the feet. These cues ought to be the same for the same golfer day after day. Then there are the visual cues and how they get generated -- the look of the surface at the hole, the slope or contour of the green, the apparent speed of the grass from color and thickness and length of the grass, the perpendicularity of the putterface behind the ball, the centering of the sweetspot behind one and only one spot at the back of the ball, the visual appearance of the ball in the field of view looking down, the apparent squareness of the setup, cues of the line on the ground, and many other targeting and setup visual cues. These visual cues aren't very different from golfer to golfer. In a ten foot putt, examined from beside the ball, the cup has an angular width and oval shape that appears practically the same for all normal golfers. The apparent size of this hole or oval shape, versus what you KNOW is the real size from sticking your hand down inside the hole to retrieve your ball, tells the golfer a great deal about the distance and the required stroke speed. This is the same for all golfers. When bent at address and looking to the side along the ground to this oval, the oval has a long axis that "fits" the final slope of the green as the putt's path reaches the lip of the cup or oval. By looking at this final slope and the oval shape, any golfer can see the point where the ball should ideally enter the cup and what part of the grass within the last foot of the putt the ball will have to roll over for this to happen. There are a number of similar visual cues for everyone.
Some important visual targeting cues include seeing how the oval shape of the cup "tilts" with respect to a vertical reference such as a shaft suspended straight down. This is not plumb bobbing, but an accurate sense of the slope right at the hole. Another is using the shaft as a visual ruler to "connect" the ball and the target visually, so the ruler indicates spots behind and in front of the ball to aid squaring the putter or establishing the startline of the putt. Another visual cue is to realize that the ball see from behind, looking down the line, appears like a circle or disk sitting up edgewise on the green. As such, the point on the ball that you will want to contact with the putterface in the stroke is the "bullseye" center of this circle. This center helps you walk into the putt and recover your line when squaring the putterface behind the ball centering the sweetspot on this very spot on the back of the ball. You can "check" or "monitor" your at-address targeting by using a straight gaze, knowing the "horizon line" across your two eyes (eye corner, pupil, nose, pupil, eye corner) and knowing the "aim spot" in your dominant eye. Once you know these cues, you can tell whether your aim spot is directed at the ball, and whether your horizon line matches or coincides with the startline of the putt on the ground. You can also check whether the eye line is perpendicular to the putterface, the same way the putt line needs to be, and whether the eye line splits the ball from front to rear thru the middle. When looking from the ball to the target, you start the head turn so that the eye line moves in plane and the aim spot is carried straight along a line on the ground. You can check whether the rear eye's field of view is covering the same patch of the earth in the same orientation that was just covered by the front eye's field of view. When the head turn delivers the aim spot to the target, you can check to see that the aim spot in fact is centered on the target, plus whether the two fields of view are in plane. Looking back from the target to the ball with a reverse head turn, you can observe whether the head turn brings the two eyes back in a straight line, and whether this line comes back to the front of the ball, on the same line you looked along from ball to target. You can "watch" the stillness of your field of view to monitor whether your eyes are quiet and your head still during the putt. There are similar physical body cues for this process of targeting as well, and you can make sure these body movements and positions are the way they should be. For example, in a good head turn, the top of the head stays in one place and the chin stays one constant distance from the shoulderframe at all times.
As you can see, there are a great many visual and body cues in putting. Whatever technique the golfer is using, if he uses it consistently, can be described by body and eye movements and positions, and the cues that accompany these movements and positions would be just about the same for any golfer using the same technique in the same situation. Really great putting is a project of mastering these cues with an effective technique, plus mental and emotional control.
In this sense, everyone has two eyes, two hands, two legs and feet, one putter, and one ball. The cues that are available during putting movements and positions for perceptions and stroke can be described and studied and taught and learned. They are the heart and soul of putting by instinct.
More later.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone http://puttingzone.com
Golf's most advanced putting instruction.
Some other types of cues are balance cues from the head, and reestablishing balance cues after head motion.
The "aim spot" is that point in the appearance of the visual field for your dominant eye thru which your line of sight is pointed by your gaze.
Each eye has its own visual field, which you may examine by closing the other eye. The filed is bounded by the features of your face -- the eyebrow, the nose, the cheek. The field appears in the shape of a lopsided egg, with the fat part off the outside corner of your eye socket.
If you direct your gaze straight out of your face, ahead and directly away from the plane of your face, the line of sight passes thru this visual field in one and only one spot. If you wore glasses and looked straight ahead, the aim spot would be approximately one inch inside the bridge of your nose. You could use a marker to "paint" this spot red on the lens of the glasses, so that anything you gazed straight out of your face at would be targeted by this red spot. If you stand with good erecvt posture in front of a mirror and look directly at the pupil in your dominant eye, wearing these glasses, the red dot would exactly cover the mirror pupil.
If you direct your gaze down your cheeks, however, the line of sight of this gaze direction will NOT pass thru the red dot and your "aim spot" will then by lower on the lens. Only a straight-ahead level gaze directly out of the face sends the line of sight thru this red aim spot.
You can see more about this in my tips "Gaze Dead Straight for Dead Aim," "Putt Out Your Eyes," and "Salkute the Dawn," all accessible from my Home page, http://puttingzone.com.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone
Golf's most advanced putting instruction.
Geoff, Enjoying your repsonses to learning motor skills. "Digging it out of the dirt" may have worked for Mr. Hogan, but I don't think it helps the rest of us make swing changes. If I could ask a question on the use of self-hypnosis in learning/changing the motor skill in term of the full swing. It seems most "mental game" books advocate self-hypnosis and relaxation techniques for "mental behavior" rather than physical skills. The self-hypnosis is aimed at calming, relaxing, focusing, entering the zone,quieting the mind, focusing on the process not the outcome, confidence, preshot routine, anger, frustration, staying in the present,etc.(did I leave out any buzz words?). I have not seen self-hypnosis directed at say increasing clubhead lag, eliminating clubhead throw away, flat left wrist at impact,etc. Any guidance on how to apply in the case of motor skills? I have considered some of the following: using progressive relaxation techniques, then reading a written script of what I want to do in the swing, or watching a video of my last lesson. Using a hypnotherapist to read me a swing script seems to be over kill. No wonder it takes a 11 man team to wind up Ty Tyron. I definitely feel there is postive aspect to quieting the critical, thinking, perfectionest, conscious mind and allowing the subconscious mind to learn the desired new motor skill. At least I tell myself that so I don't feel guilty about not having time to hit 500 balls aday. Thanks as always for the direction and guidance. DPS