Perfect Practice: The Key To Muscle Memory

Have you ever hit a perfect shot? Can you recall what you were thinking?

Most of my students answer “yes” to the first question and “I don’t recall” to the second. These answers tell me that the student has developed enough muscle memory to abandon swing mechanics for one-and-a-half seconds and just hit the damn ball!

Every golfer, at every skill level, has hit shots that felt effortless – both physically and mentally. Our goal is to help you discover the formula to re-create those perfect shots.

Are you familiar with the axiom “only perfect practice makes perfect”? The logic is infallible, but how does simply acknowledging the concept help you improve?

Let’s suppose the average large bucket consists of eighty balls. How many of those would be perfect shots? Would twenty be reasonable? If one quarter of the shots are perfect, seventy-five percent are varying degrees of “misses”. In the final analysis, you are actually rehearsing your mistakes.

The next logical step, would be trying to correct faulty swing mechanics.

After hitting a dozen shots, you’re convinced the problem is fixed. Striding to the first tee with complete confidence, you take one or two practice swings, run through your mental checklist and… slice the shot out-of-bounds.

Does this sound familiar?

Developing effective muscle memory is a three stage process. Depending on your progression, you will either struggle to break ninety or allow your muscle memory to take over and easily score in the low eighties. Let’s have a look at the first stage.

Stage One: stop practicing. The “only perfect practice makes perfect” axiom makes no reference to actually hitting balls on the practice range. The first step is feeling the essential positions found in every consistent swing, without concern for results.

How can we insure perfect practice? It’s the same process you followed when learning how to drive a car.

There are four essential positions found in every effective golf swing. In stage one, you want to rehearse these positions in slow motion for two minutes every day until they begin to feel natural. The process may take anywhere from two weeks to a month. The secret, is making this daily rehearsal a habit.

Just a caveat; it’s not enough to understand the positions. You have to acquire a feel in order to move beyond swing mechanics.

In the next article, we look at the four key positions found in every effective swing. These positions are the essential causes underlying every result.The more you rehearse these essential positions, the sooner you develop optimum muscle memory and play better with less effort.

Thanks for reading!