Golf Mental Game - Rehearsing Replaying

Rehearsing and replaying are major skills for your golf mental game.

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Your golf mental game uses rehearsal as an essential component as does any elite sport.

It is amazing how many golfers don't do even any form of this skill.

There is much more to it than meets the eye - literally.

I will run you through some of the essential components of this skill to make it most effective for you.

But, if all you do is just visualise yourself doing your golf shot well before you physically do it you will help yourself no end. At least include that bare minimum within your repertoire.

Here are some of the refinements:

It is much more important 'HOW' you visualise your shot than what you actually visualise. Some golfers will be unwittingly setting themselves up for a bad shot even though they are seeing it performed perfectly before hand.

How can this be so?

It is because they are visualising from a state of mind of nervousness, fear, certainty of another poor shot, hope, trepidation and so on. Any of these sound familiar to you?

Later in this series we will cover more on how you control this but we will look at the essential first elements now.

Go to a successful reference first.

Before you set up your visualising routine, go to a time - hopefully recently - when you performed your best golf shot. Be sure you are doing 'horses for courses' here. If you are setting up a drive go to a time when you really nailed one as opposed to a putt.

As you do this, eyes closed is often best at this point, get very specific detail.

What time of day was it? Who else was there? Where were they standing? What color clothes were you wearing? How close are the tress? Anything else about the specific golf course that can put you right there as if it was happening now?

The reason we include this, in your golf mental game, is it gives your brain much more clarity as to how to visualise this event.

If you find it hard to visualise these aspects, come back later on and try again. It is amazing how quickly your brain learns how to do this easily. It is a natural quality we have as humans.

Note a couple of the following extremely important distinctions:

As you pay attention to these images how big is the picture? How close is it to you - near or far away? How bright is it? How colorful?

As well as this, can you note any feeling in the body - perhaps around the shoulders, solar plexus, chest area - even the grip on the club. How would you describe this sensation - is it a sense of warmth, tingling, vibration? Note these so you can reproduce them (it) later at will.

These might sound like strange questions but try this test. In your mind, go to a brilliant golf shot you have done recently (or at least one of your better ones) then go to a bad shot. Note which image is brighter, which is bigger, which is closer, which has more color? There will be a difference.

This is massively important. In terms of your golf mental game, if you are visualising a great shot but the picture is dark, clouded, dim, small and far away, like perhaps your poor shot version, you are really telling your brain - "I want to stuff this shot up, make it so!!" Ouch! Not what we want.

I have known Olympic athletes to sabotage themselves through ignorance of this distinction.

Winning Mental Game Habits

This is like a secret code between you and your brain. Find out how you reference your version of a good shot and only ever use this. Even when you are away from the course.

No more lazy or inefficient visualising with your golf game. Only ever use the "good" code you have discovered with the above experiments.

Next major major point: Never, ever re-visualise a bad or misdirected shot. You are only grooving it in as a habit.

Be honest, how many times have you been guilty of that one. I know some golfers who spend more time on going over and reliving their mistakes than actually playing the real game. Not a good strategy.

At this stage you are well set up to set up well your next golf shot.

If you haven't been doing this it can be transformational, but stay tuned, we have only just scratched the surface even for this first aspect of good golf mental skills.

Next we want to look at how you use the two types of visualising as well as 'role models' to enhance this even more.

Return to Golf Mental Game home page.

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