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Routine: How to Build Consistent Performance  Email this Article to a Friend
David F. Wright, Ph.D., PGA The physical and mental things you do prior to every shot make up your preswing routine. Every image, thought and physical behavior you perform during your swing is your inswing routine. Your images, thoughts and comments to yourself or others after your shot is called your postswing routine. You will play your best golf when each phase of your routine (preswing, inswing and postswing) is positive and repeated consistently on every shot you hit. Jack Nicklaus said: "I feel that hitting specific shots-playing the ball to a certain place in a certain way-is 50 percent mental picture, 40 percent setup and 10 percent swing. That’s why setting up takes me so long, why I have to be so deliberate...unless I can set up exactly right in relation to the shot I have pictured, I know I have no chance of executing it as planned." Consistent preswing, inswing and postswing routines require practice on and off the range before you can get them to the golf course. Getting these routines to the course requires patience. Learning takes place in sequenced increments. If I gave you the first verse of a poem on one day and asked you to memorize it, you would return with a well practiced fluid performance the next day. The next day you receive the second verse and so on until you had memorized eight verses independently. On the ninth day I ask you to "blend" the verses and recite the entire poem. You would recite the first verse, hesitate, then recite the second, hesitate etc. Eventually, with repeated practice, you would give me a fluid recitation of the poem with no hesitation. This is how learning occurs. Imagine what your performance would be like if you practiced the verses out of sequence and then tried to blend them in sequence. This is the way many golfers practice on the range. New information is processed first in thought and then applied. With application, for example, doing drills to develop a consistent grip and balanced posture, thought is translated to a physical feeling. Repeated practice in drills leads to an automatic behavior we call a habit. Golf is both science and art. Rehearsal of your mental and physical routines until they become totally automatic is the science of golf. These automatic routines will free your mind so that you can be an artist on the course. You are already an artist from trouble. You see the shot you need to hit, set up and focus on the image or plan. If you are going to learn the "verses" of a routine, both mental and physical, you must repeatedly practice them independently and then practice blending them until they become automatic. Most of you already know that you cannot play well with a thought about either your mental or physical mechanics. Know that you likely will get a temporary deterioration in performance as you begin to blend the sequences in your routine with or without thought. You won’t be able to perform well if you practice with a thought. Focus on eel. This the first step in the transition from science to art.
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