Guest post: Alexander Technique and Golf
A Poised Golfer Is A Happy Golfer by Roy Palmer
Top golfers can make it look so easy. With effortless ease they can hit a ball well over 300 yards time and time again. So why do the rest of us fail to hit this distance on a regular basis? And why does it seem to take so much effort to do so? I believe it comes down to using the wrong kind of effort from trying too hard.
In my role as a teacher of The Alexander Technique, the world-renowned movement system, I’ve worked with almost one hundred golfers and found many unknowingly interfere with their technique. This usually involves unnecessary actions during their preparation, such as clenching the jaw, stiffening the neck and raising the shoulders. Our neck muscles play a vital role in coordinating all our muscles as part of their function in our head and neck righting reflexes. Undue tension in the jaw, neck or shoulders has a similar effect to applying the brake before driving away from the lights.
Yet it only takes a tiny amount of inappropriate activity in one seemingly insignificant muscle to upset your coordination and timing. Unfortunately, the majority of us simply don’t have the degree of sensitivity or self-awareness to notice these actions and small differences from one shot to the next. If you have the habit of tightening your grip on the club handle, this can also cause your neck and jaw muscles to tighten. It’s probably not on your list of things to do, but I see many golfers doing it.
On Monday you may tighten slightly with no noticeable effect on the shot, whereas on Tuesday you may do it a fraction more and see the ball go wayward. If you’re not aware that you’re doing this in the first place, it becomes an unknown variable in your technique and leads to an inconsistency with no obvious cause. More importantly, if you don’t know you’re doing it, you can’t control it. And of you can’t control it, your efforts to execute the perfect swing, chip shot or putt are undermined. You may think you’re doing exactly what your coach or text book are suggesting but in reality there may be any number of other actions you’re unknowingly bringing to your shot. This complicates your golf as whilst you’re trying to do one thing your body may be doing something else.
So how can you improve your coordination? Well it’s not something you can do directly as good coordination requires us to do less and thus prevent interference with our natural reflexes. The answer is to promote poise which means using the most appropriate effort for every given task. To be poised you need to relax and allow your own innate reflexes control your muscles; a bit like a puppet whose strings can let go a little. If you’ve had the experience of hitting the ball further than your average distance whilst it felt effortless, this was because you were poised, better coordinated and therefore able to let your muscles to do exactly what was necessary – no more, no less. We need to practice in order to become poised by trying less and less to hit the ball hard. Try a few shots on the driving range and see how much effort you can take out of the shot to let your club do the work. Check to see if you’re clenching your jaw or lifting your shoulders to prepare. If you can stop doing what you think is necessary, relax and let it flow you may be surprised to see how far you can hit it.
I have more tips on my website at www.play-better-golf.com and in my forthcoming book due out in February 2010 called Golf Sense: Practical Tips On How To Play Golf In The Zone (FrontRunner Publications).