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Golf is a sport where the professionals make it look like the easiest game in the world, and the amateurs make it look impossible. One thing all professionals have in common is where they focus their attention during the golf swing. In this class, attention refers to the amount of consciousness or awareness we direct toward a task. This boils down to what we are or aren’t thinking about. When hitting a golf ball, the attentional focus is labeled as narrow external. This means the focus is on a singular object in the environment - i.e. the golf ball sitting on the tee. The really good golfers, like Tiger Woods himself, have trained themselves to be able to allocate their attention to the golf ball, even when crowds filled with thousands of people line the sides of the fairways, tee boxes, and greens. With the golf swing, we have to look at the role of attention during movement production. It was determined through experimentation that more attention is given to the movement task than external stimulus. This can be described as the attentional workload of the primary task.

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Bilateral transfer can occur in both one and two-handed sports. With golf, the right and left hand are connected, but they have different actions and motions throughout the swing. The feet in the golf stance also act differently. In professional golf, there are some situations where the golfer is pinned up on the wrong side of the tree, only offering them an opposite-handed shot. Time and again, the professionals expertly perform this shot in pressure situations. This always made me wonder why it was possible to hit such a good shot from the “wrong” side of the ball. It wasn’t until this class that it clicked for me. The experiment where we learned about bilateral transfer allowed me to fully understand this phenomenon. Practicing right-handed will improve your ability to perform the same skill as left-handed. This is the perfect reason for why these professionals can make an opposite handed shot look so simple.

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Today in lecture, we learned about the benefits of mental practice. For starters, mental practice plays two roles The first being that it improves the acquisition of motor skills. The second is that it aids in performing a well-learned skill. Tiger Woods is known around the world to be one of the clutchest putters in golf. There are many instances where he had a tricky putt…and sunk it. One study published by Hird in 1991 showed that mental practice promotes better performance than no practice. This could be related to the beginning of Tiger’s golf career when he was learning a new skill like putting. Mental practice also aids in performing a well-learned skill. This is what the picture depicts. When professional golfers have a put, they visualize how the ball is going to roll on the green and kinesthetically sense how far back and forth to move the putter to putt the ball the right distance. When you look down at the ball, you cannot directly see the hole - especially for putts from longer distances. Tiger was quoted saying he takes mental “pictures” of the hole. This allows him to picture the slopes of the green and where the hole location is while he is standing over the ball. A study by Gross in 1986 found that people with high visual and kinesthetic imagery ability perform complex arm movements the best. Maybe this could be the reason for why Tiger made so many clutch putts throughout his career.

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When it comes to practicing a sport, especially golf, what is the best way to utilize your time with a club in your hand? I believe that it is random practice. Random practice can be defined as switching between the different skills in a random order such that the order is unpredictable to the athlete. To make it truly random, you could have a coach pick out the order to practice different skills. In golf, random practice can be seen in Tiger’s 9-window drill. First, we’ll start off with explaining the drill. The 9-window drill consists of a low, normal, and high shot mixed in with a draw, straight, or fade shot. When you combine the three skills of each of the dimensions, you get 9 windows. In addition to the 9 windows, the club being used can change. In a round of golf, it is extremely rare that you will hit the same shot, under the same conditions, with the same club twice in a row. For that reason, blocked practice does not seem like it would be very beneficial to the player. Random practice will not allow you to acquire a skill faster, however, retention and skill transfer are higher in random practice than blocked practice. Transfer of skill in golf can be seen when you shots for a hole consist of a normal drawing driver, followed by a low fading 3-iron, and finished up with a simple putt. Retention of the skill is when you have to hit the same shot as before. This could be the case if you were to play another normal drawing driver on the preceding hole. A situation where blocked practice might be beneficial is with people that are new to golf. This would allow these individuals to acquire the skill (the golf swing) faster than if random practice was implemented.