Meraviglioso

I'm sure there are some fellow golfers out there. I have to admit it has been years since I have played. About a year ago though my dad came over for a visit and brought my sons their own golf sets as a birthday gift. I was showing one of my sons some of the basics on how to hold the club and swing. It was the first time I had swung a club in very many years and I swear to you I sent that ball sailing, I still had it, muscle memory.

I was looking up this article for someone else but thought it would be interesting to a lot of people. It is quite long and a bit technical at times but if you read it thinking about alcoholism/addiction/getting sober there are a lot of parallels. In fact, alcoholism is brought up in the article!

So remember as we approach the holidays and maybe are attending parties or cooking big meals- events which in the past would be accompanied by a drink in our hands- it is time to reinvent our swings and that is not always easy. Not easy, but also relatively simple. It just requires learning new habits. It seems wild to think about but you actually CAN cook Christmas dinner without a glass of wine! You can do Christmas brunch without a mimosa. You can go to a holiday party without drinking. You can stay in for a quiet night on new year's eve instead of going out.

In my case I am going to need to work on the fact that I can be nervous or irritated or angry and just go through it without drinking. Sometimes the extended family of my ex really rubs me the wrong way.


Tiger Woods reinvents his golf swing for the third time in his career - ESPN The Magazine

OpenTuning

Thanks for the post, an interesting metaphor. I've often thought it don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing

Meraviglioso

Here is the part where they mention alcoholism for anyone who doesn't want to wade through a long article about golf swings



AMONG THE SCORES of clichés golf has spawned is the classic, attributed to Nicklaus, that the game is 10 percent physical and 90 percent mental. But this tidy truism hardly comes close to describing golf's savage cognitive dissonances, of which the swing change is the ultimate. A psychologist would say that a swing change, whether a simple grip adjustment or a massive shift in the backswing, is a process of habit development and habit suppression. Golf psychologist Gio Valiante likens the latter to going to AA: 20 years after quitting, recovering alcoholics know the merest swig could trigger their old ways. A biomechanics Ph.D. would say that a swing change means adjusting your motor program. A neurologist would say it involves the wrapping, or thickening, of something called myelin -- a fat compound that insulates neural pathways in the brain. "Muscle memory" is the colloquialism for all these things. The ultimate goal is to make the new swing as automatic an act as possible. "Advanced performers are unconsciously competent," says Bob Rotella, psychologist to many golf greats. "But any time you make a change, you kind of go back to being a beginner." In the midst of a swing change, a player's arousal levels are high: The brain is busy. Only when those levels are calmed -- and the player finds that he's swinging freely without pondering the positions of his body parts -- is the change said to have clicked.

OpenTuning

So arousal levels are high when people change how they're swinging.

There's a pun in there somewhere, if only I could find it.

Meraviglioso

oh dear!

SusanE

I play. Have you ever read Laura Baugh's memoir, "Out of the Rough?" Strong woman but alcohol really beat her down until she finally recovered.

Soberpotamus

Fly N Buy

When in doubt, I putt. When I've had enough I pick up my ball........I've used up all my mulligans.

I can put my shoes in the oven but that don't make em biscuits.......Change is an inside job, try as I might to have a different swing I had to have a different swingee controlling the club!

Thanks for the thread

firstymer

When I last took a golf lesson, the instructor talked about how difficult it is to change a swing that has been wrong for so long. He referred to it as working through the "scar tissue". It is why young, inexperienced golfers are easier to teach than older, "scarred" players like me. And it might explain why quitting alcohol after so many years is so difficult. So much scar tissue.....