Friday, June 29, 2007

Golf has the Same Disease as Tennis

Chuck Evans writes in WorldGolf.com:

Currently there is a lot of publicity about a "new" golf swing of the future. This swing is being touted as the "fix-all" for every golfer.

Golfers will buy into anything that they think may improve their game no matter how ludicris it may be. We are all looking to play better golf, hit more consistent shots, make more putts, and the search for this elusive "Holy Grail" will never end.

As a survivor of a terminal case of technique obsession, I can say that there is more to this trivial pursuit of perfect form than those infected with this disease will admit.

It isn't born of a desire to make more shots. It's born of a desire to make more impressive shots. It's about looking good out there.

Admit it: you want people to say, "Oooh, look what a pretty forehand she has!"

Because, in this world where appearances/perceptions are all that count, form has become an end in itself, rather than but a means to an end.

Which is why players obsessed with form hate pushers. Pushers are a dose of Reality Therapy. They don't play the Vanity Game. They play THE game, the game of tennis, and they play it straight - to the score. Players obsessed with form think that's unfair.

Well, it is, but that ain't the pusher's fault. The player obsessed with form is the one putting himself at a disadvantage.

This is why shot selection is often lousy. Hey, if a dink is what's called for, just dink. But those obsessed with form compulsively choose a better looking shot instead and often pay the price for folly.

I was amused to read that Evans approached IBM and MIT with an idea to create a human robot-making machine. It would send electrical stimuli through electrodes targeting each muscle so that a software program could take over your body and MAKE it swing the right way.

Can you imagine that? Just going along for the ride while a machine moves your body through the motions of a perfect Roger Federer forehand? Rather like a controlled epileptic seizure moving the parts of your body around. Cool, eh?

What fun, right?

The experts at IBM and MIT assured him that computer science is nowhere near the technology it would take to execute the human body in a golf swing.

Why? Because there are more than 600 muscles in the body, which would each have to get their own special set of timed and coordinated signals at a rate of hundreds or thousands per second. This means that there are many thousands of commands sent to each muscle (e.g., the triceps) and its opposer (in this case the biceps) adjusting its degree of contraction or relaxation constantly throughout the swing. And these commands must all be in sync with all the other myriad commands going to the other muscles.

I'm sorry, but it will be a long time before we have computers that even come close the unconscious coordinating center of the human brain (the cerebellum) at issuing the myriad timed and coordinated muscle commands that move us.

Yes, we have robots, but that's why robots move like robots.

Hey, but wouldn't it be cool to teach toddlers how to walk this way? Why stop there? Why not have our human robot-making machine control their mouth muscles to teach them how to talk this way?

I hope that was a bridge too far for you.

The very idea that we could someday learn any physical action this way, let alone one as complex as a tennis or golf stroke, exposes a fundamental flaw in the underlying principles of tennis and golf instruction. We DON'T learn how to do physical things that way.

The first time you pick up a tennis racket and go to hit a forehand, you form the intent to hit your forehand by imagining yourself hitting one. (You have watched others hit forehands, and you want to imitate what they do.) The IMAGE in that split-second of imagining throws the unconscious coordinating centers of your brain into action. You have never hit a forehand before, so it throws together all it has learned so far about how to turn, how to step, and how to swing at something...and throws together the rough draft of a PROGRAM for executing a forehand.

Then it notes the results and goes into debug mode. The more forehands you see and hit, the more information it gathers about hitting a forehand and the more your forehand program gets debugged and polished.

This process explains why children start out so uncoordinated that they can hardly hit their mouth with a glass but a few years later are running and jumping on a playground with excellent coordination.

These unconscious centers of the brain that learn physical things don't understand verbal instructions. So, you can't teach children to walk by telling them to remember to pronate when they take a step.

In fact, when you consciously try to force your movement into a certain pattern by thinking of verbal instructions while you hit, you just interfere and bollix up the natural process. You are also concentrating on what you're thinking instead of on what you're seeing, hearing, and feeling. So you actually slow down the learning process.

Everyone has had this happen. For example, let's say you consciously try to move your point of contact out farther in front of you. The harder you try to do that, the more impossible it becomes. The next thing you know, your whole swing has gone south on you and your point of contact is farther back than it was before!

So, quit it already. Shut your mind up. It's a distraction that destroys your feel. By trying to force your form to fit a preconceived mold, you are fouling up the brain's program of commands. For every good habit you may be forming, you are forming three bad habits at the same time. It will take you weeks or months to learn what you could have learned in a day or two by experimenting and discovering by FEEL.

Our ability to learn by thinking on verbal instructions is very limited and usually works best when the instruction is just a tip. For example, to teach a beginner to follow-through on a forehand groundstroke, you ask him to catch the racket in his left hand over his left shoulder. You give him just that one thing to think about for a few minutes, so his brain discovers that following-through is a good idea. Then you get him back to not thinking about form.

Unfortunately, most tennis players have a habit of thinking about form constantly. No wonder there's no room in their thoughts for smart strategy and tactics.

And the unconscious coordinating centers of the brain won't learn from any human robot-making machine either.

Why? Because that motherboard in your skull is programmed by software that learns. The learning is in the memory. And no, memory isn't in your muscles: it's in your brain. The memory is in the synapses between brain cells. The connections must actually change and ramify. You know, gray matter. The chemical transmitters stored at these connections must change and increase to the proper level for transmission to occur at the low threshold that allows spontaneity.

The human robot-making machine would not cause any such changes in the brain. In other words, it doesn't program the brain. It just comes between the brain and the body to execute the muscles for the brain.

That doesn't teach you a thing. Unhook all the electrodes and that "perfect swing" is gone.

At best, you might gain the perception of how a proper stroke should feel, but even that isn't guaranteed. I don't think anyone knows for sure how your kinesthetic perceptions would be affected by remote control of your body.

Consider how similarly we all walk. No one gave us any verbal instructions. No one gives a whit about his or her walking form. We all just discovered the best way to do it on our own. No two of us have the same walk, but everyone's walk falls within the parameters for guidelines of efficient and balanced walking.

I guarantee that if people were taught how to walk the way they're taught how to play tennis and golf, we'd have people stumbling clumsily all over creation.

Besides, the quest for the Holy Grail of "perfect form" is a wild goose chase. It makes form an end in itself, instead of a means to an end. It's an obsession with the pure mechanics of tennis, oblivious to the art of playing GAME of tennis. Which is where the fun is.

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