The Secret to Playing Golf : Let God Play the Round : Lower Your Handicap by Thinking LESS : Study Shows Over-Concentration has Negative Results

Leave it to the ladies. Hat tip to Martha :-) for alerting me to this topic. Thank you!

We all have heard the well-meaning word that people address to us to help us perform better in school, work and play: "Concentrate!"

But that particular word may in fact well be absolutely the wrong advice, causing potentially more harm than good and leading to an increased mental block that hinders our performance.

Kate Devlin has an article at the Telegraph published earlier this golf season titled Lack of concentration "secret to playing golf", in which she reports on a study suggesting that concentration on golf technique while golfing is the worst thing that a player can do.

The research was conducted in University College, Dublin, by John Toner, who, in our opinion - if our golf handicap in fact does drop because of our implementation of his system of unthinking - is our candidate for the next Nobel Prize. After all, what rare things in life are more important than reducing one's handicap?

Indeed, Toner's Irish work may give us an insight into the famous phrase "the luck of the Irish" by suggesting that luck may inhere in a more relaxed and carefree approach to the things that we do in earnest, relying on our faith that we have learned our lessons well in training and should now simply play the game once we are on the golf course, without focusing unduly on our golf technique, whether swinging or putting.

Our own explanation for this phenomenon is grounded in some basic knowledge we picked up in high school science classes many years ago. The stress of over-concentration restricts natural flow. Relaxation opens the avenues of the extrapyramidal system. Put your game on auto-pilot.

Human movement is guided by two aspects of our brain, something called the pyramidal system (voluntarily controlled movement) and the extra-pyramidal system (automatically controlled movement). We use the extra-pyramidal system, for example, when we ride a bicycle (after we have learned how to do it). We do not think "ride a bike". Rather, our extra-pyramidal system, once it has learned to do so, knows how to ride a bike and automatically takes over this activity, leaving our brain free to do other things while we are gliding down the bike path.

GOLF is the same. If you play golf like you ride a bike - this is the essence of Toner's advice - your handicap will drop, presuming of course that you spend enough time with your golf pro on the practice range to tweak your swing and chipping and putting stroke into top form.

After that, as the religious person might say, let God play the round for you.

P.S.
This may be Tiger's secret. HE isn't playing better than the rest of the field, it's the man who is playing FOR HIM. He just has more of his game on auto-pilot. I say this not myself being a particularly devout person, but I understand the analogy to religious ideas.