How The Brain Learns The Golf Swing

The short explanation is two paragraphs long. Your brain is helping you to learn all motor skills when you are a teenager and younger, but it does not do this for you as an adult. If you play a lot of golf as a kid, your brain will use a muscle assignment synthesizer to make you use the appropriate muscles to swing the club. You can even play five different sports as a kid, and you can learn them all well. This is your brain helping you to learn and not the result of someone else teaching you. When you are about age 22, the brain will stop helping you to learn these sports movements. At this age, the brain will also switch its priorities from learning motor skills to THINKING AND REASONING. When this switch takes place, your brain is no longer using the synthesizer to make muscle assignments for you. The lack of this synthesizer is what makes learning anything in the golf swing, difficult to learn as an adult. The older you get, after this synthesizer switch is off, the more difficult it is to learn anything in the golf swing.

If you do not play any sports as a kid, by the time you reach 10-12 years of age, your brain will make this switch to reasoning and thinking as the new priority. As a result of the child NOT playing any sports or learning any gross motor skills, the brain basically turns the child into a nerd. When that transition happens, the child that has not been playing any sports loses the ability to learn motor skills just from playing them. The brain gives you more thinking and reasoning power, but it takes away the use of the muscle assignment synthesizer. There are always exceptions to this rule. This does not mean that it is impossible to learn the golf swing well as an adult. It just means that your brain is not wired to learn it as easily as a teenager would learn it. This is a short explanation. If you want your children to be able to play golf well in their adult years, you need to introduce them to the game no later than in their early teens. The full explanation of how your brain learns motor skills is very complicated. If you are interested in the details about this subject, keep reading. If you did not play golf as a teenager, this full explanation will eliminate a lot of the frustration from diligently working on your game and not experiencing much improvement.

Some people have determined that the swing that you develop from playing a lot of golf as a teenager comes from you being a NATURAL ATHLETE. This is correct, partially. It is a natural process that happens just from playing. The connotation here is that certain people are born with this talent and others are not born with it. This is wrong on many levels. I call the swing that we learn just from playing, without instruction, the DEFAULT SWING. This notion of natural talent has empowered some athletes and at the same time, it has devalued other athletes because they feel that they don’t have that natural talent. I will use the British term here just because it seems less crass. “Bollocks”. It is time to dispel this and other myths about learning motor skills.

Most golfers are taught to think that if they hit enough golf balls and take enough lessons, their brain will eventually learn what they want it to learn, and this movement can be repeated just by swinging the club. This is not an accurate statement. A lot of adult golfers are hitting a lot of balls and still not learning the golf swing like a teenager would. Hitting lots of balls does make your hand-eye coordination better, but it does very little for learning motor memory if you are starting to play golf at the age of 40. The brain does not allow you to learn new motor skills, at 40, in the same manner, that it did when you were 10.

Gross motor skills are the things that your brain learns to do from repetitive movement using large and small muscles such as learning to run or learning to swing a golf club. Fine motor skills are things that your brain learns to do from using small muscles in the hands like typing, playing the guitar, and knitting. If a teenager is trying to learn the golf swing, the brain will use a combination of gross and fine motor skills. If an adult, who is over 40, and did not play much golf as a teenager, is trying to learn the golf swing, this will be seen from the brain’s perspective as a gross motor skill.

When an adult swings a golf club, they are primarily using large muscles to swing the club. When a teenager is swinging a golf club, the brain is using big and small muscles to swing the club even though these small muscles are larger than the muscles in the hands and fingers. This is one of the reasons that it is more difficult to learn golf as an adult than it is to learn it as a teenager.

When you perform any previously learned motor skill, your brain is retrieving stored information that it has already learned. This information is stored in the brain and not in the muscles. When you start to perform that learned skill, the brain retrieves that information to make all the necessary muscles move without you having to think about all the muscles that are being used. This learned program also makes specific muscles fire in the order or sequence necessary to perform that motor skill effortlessly, consistently, and with power.

Some of our other gross motor skills are walking, throwing a baseball, and swinging a baseball bat. Gross and fine motor skills are not learned in the same manner at different ages. Fine motor skills can be learned easier as an adult, than learning how to swing a golf club. You can learn how to play the guitar like Eddie Van Halen when you are 50, easier than taking up golf at the same age and being able to shoot par.

You start to learn motor skills when you start to crawl. By the time you are in your late teens, your learning capacity for motor skills is at its peak. But just because you can learn motor skills at this age, does not automatically mean that everything you do repetitively is going to be stored in motor memory. This motor memory learning process does not apply to someone that plays golf only a few times as a child. You must get the brain’s attention to make this happen. You need to do this a lot to the point that the brain is losing energy from you hitting balls. If you hit a lot of balls at a range two or three times a week, as a teenager, this really gets the brain’s attention.

The part of your brain that manages your vital organs, takes notice of the overuse of thinking and muscle movement. From that part of your brain, this is an energy drain. In most cases, your brain uses up more energy than any other part of your body including your muscles. To save energy, your brain will start to learn all these muscle movements.

As a teenager or younger, when you start to swing a golf club regularly and repeat the swing over and over, you must use the thinking part of the brain to do this. This is done by the frontal lobes, and this part of the brain is an initiator of movement, and it also controls coordination and timing. This is just the beginning part of the process because the thinking part of the brain cannot help you duplicate the swing because it has no ability to store motor memory.

Something else starts to happen when you hit a lot of balls as a teenager. When you start to swing the club repeatedly, your brain will search in motor memory to see if there is something like this movement. If there is nothing resembling this movement stored in motor memory, then the brain will turn on the synthesizer. This is another tool for saving energy. When you are a teenager or younger, your brain uses a synthesizer especially for learning motor skills. The thinking part of the brain must initiate the primary movements of swinging the club. At this age, you are not thinking of all the dozens of muscles that are used to perform the swing. The thinking and reasoning part of the brain has interpreted your intent because it sees you trying to hit a ball over and over. Because of the energy drain, this causes a muscle assignment synthesizer to be turned on to help you learn the golf swing by making your movements more efficient.

The synthesizer figures out the best muscles to use and the best order that they should be fired in to allow you to have a sequentially powerful swing. This synthesizer will create neural connections (synapses) to small muscles that have never been used before. These are muscles that the teenage golfer does not even know he has. When you start to do repetitive movements, your brain functions like your Genie. Your wish is its command. This is your brain processing demand information and making muscle assignments for you to have the most powerful swing possible.

The synthesizer does not alert the reasoning part of the brain of what it is doing. This is how a natural athlete evolves in all sports as a teenager or younger. This process has nothing to do with inherited talent. There is no such thing as inherited talent. You can inherit body types, but that does not come with talent. Talent must be developed. If you have ADD as a child, this is a bonus. This additional energy gives the child more time to learn the golf swing because he feels like he must do something with all this energy. Your brain learns to perform the golf swing for you, and it stores all the details of how to repeat this movement. Your brain does this so it can save energy and multitask. Retrieving this motor skill uses less energy than having to think about what you are supposed to be doing in the golf swing. Even as you are retrieving the stored motor memory, your brain is performing thousands of other demands that you have unconsciously burdened it with.

One part of your brain is used to initiate movement. Another part of the brain is helping to synthesize muscle assignment. Another part of the brain is processing this information and finally, it is stored in motor memory in a different part of the brain. Ideally, after you have hit balls or played a round of golf, it is a good idea to not do any other motor memory movements for about four hours. This allows the motor memory learning process to be solidified easier. This is called motor memory facilitation.

There is something else that that helps to move this learning process along as a teenager. If the child can see a good golf swing that is performed repetitively by someone else, his brain will use this information to help in the learning process. Unfortunately, your brain does not reveal to you exactly what or how it is doing this. If you play a lot of golf as a teenager, it is easy to perform these movements and have a good swing. But, if that same golfer learned to play golf well as a teenager grows up, he or she has a problem. Because his or her brain learned this swing organically, it does not mean that he or she knows how to instruct an adult golfer how to learn to play in the same manner. Just because you can play well, does not automatically mean that you know how to instruct someone else to do what you can do, especially if your student is an adult golfer. This is how the different parts of the brain help you to learn the swing as a teenager. Again, I call the swing learned as a teenager the DEFAULT SWING.

If you are healthy, the default swing is the swing that everyone learns from playing a lot of golf at an early age. This swing is really evident when you are watching a high school golf team practice on a driving range. You can also see this swing in most of the PGA golfers on tour. Some pro golfers have a swing that does not look like this default swing because they have had an outside influence to shape their swing. The good thing is that as a teenager, you can learn any swing you want. The negative thing is that a swing that is manufactured by an instructor is not necessarily the best swing to have when it comes to power and efficiency. No one individual can help you to develop a swing that is as efficient, thoughtless, and powerful as your own brain.

At about the age of 19, the boy’s brain flips another switch and the body secretes an extremely high level of testosterone so that he will be motivated to procreate. After a couple of years of high testosterone levels, your bones solidify and a different switch comes on that says that you need to develop other tools to survive and take care of your offspring. The brain stops synthesizing muscle assignment and you start to develop a higher level of thinking and reasoning. Now your brain stops helping you to learn motor skills and it starts to increase your reasoning and thinking capacity.

This transition usually happens around the age of 22. This is when this ability to learn motor skills just by playing golf starts to dissipate. It is extremely ironic that at about the same time that you get out of college, your ability to reason and absorb information increases dramatically. The ability to reason is one of the worst possible things that could happen to a golfer for swinging a golf club without thinking. But, from the perspective of the brain, it has given you the time to learn how to hunt and kill food. Now, it is time to develop other skills mentally to aid in your survival.

The loss of this synthesizer, more than anything else, makes the learning of new motor skills progressively more difficult. The older you get after your bones solidify, the more time it will take you to learn any golf swing. As an adult, you have to go back to using the thinking part of the brain to initiate the muscles to make the swing. Most adults that have taken the game up later in life, are using the thinking part of the brain to swing the golf club the majority of the time.

The initiator, or thinking part of the brain does not have the ability to repeat the swing consistently from one swing to another. This is why most golfers who take up the game later in life cannot get their brain to learn the default swing as easily as someone who started to play in their teens. If you continue to play sports from the time you are young until you are about 22, it can be easier for you to learn any motor skill at a later age but this is not guaranteed. Just because you were good at learning many other sports as a teenager, does not mean that you will be able to learn golf with the same proficiency and speed.

As an adult, your brain is very efficient at using old stored information about motor skills. If you have learned to play another sport as a teenager that is similar to the golf swing such as baseball, this can cause problems. As soon as you grip the golf club and start to take it back, your brain will retrieve the baseball motor skill and use as much of this as it can to help you to swing the golf club. This is your brain being efficient. This is why adult golfers that have played a lot of baseball as teens, have a lot of baseball in their golf swing.

For the average person at the age of 35, if you have not played any sports as a teenager, it will take you 6 times longer to learn to play golf as it did when you were 14. A teenager’s learning switch is wide open when he hits balls at a driving range. But an adult golfer’s learning switch is not on at all. For every large bucket of balls a teenager hits, you will have to hit about 6 buckets of balls, just to get the brain to turn on the learning switch at the same level as a teenager. On top of that, your motor memory does not store any information on you hitting all those balls until that learning switch comes on.

Hitting all those balls does help you develop hand-eye coordination but that is not the same as motor memory storage. At age 40 it will take you at least 10 times longer to learn to play golf as it does a teenager. The older you get the more time you will have to spend hitting balls just to get your brain to turn on the motor memory switch. No one has the time or energy to learn to play golf like this. There are always some exceptions to the rule.

Every once in a while, an adult golfer will hit a drive that goes about 40-50 yards farther than their average drive. This is you letting go of your concepts of what you think you should do and allowing the brain to show you a piece of the DEFAULT SWING that you would have developed if you had played a lot of golf as a teen. This spike in distance is only a glimpse of the default swing. For 99% of us adult golfers, we don’t have a clue as to what we did to create that long drive.

If you started to play golf after the age of 40 and older, your swing is not going to look like golfers who started to play golf when they were young, even if you own a Golf Swing Emulator. There are many things that influence what your swing looks like as an adult. The teens had extra help from the synthesizer in the brain to learn the new swing easily. Lack of flexibility plays a big role in how well you can swing a golf club. You cannot repeat a swing using the thinking part of your brain. The small muscles used in a good golf swing, make up about half of the muscles that a teenager uses to hit the ball. It is very difficult as an adult, to get most of the small muscles to contract in order to hit a ball, in the same manner as a teenager would. The adult can’t use these muscles because they have not developed the neural connections in the brain to make those muscles work that would have been obtained by learning this as a teenager.

Even as an adult, the wiring is still in your brain to make these small muscles work. But without having this wiring connected, you cannot access all the necessary muscles that create that smooth and fluid golf swing. As an adult, if you spend a lot of time in a gym lifting heavy weights, this also makes your swing look very disjointed because the gym equipment only develops large muscles.

Is there hope to be a better player if you are not a teenager? Yes, but to have the best swing available to you that is consistent and powerful, you must be able to do several things. You must be able to get the motor memory learning switch to come back on. You must be able to get the brain to use small muscles while that switch is still on and you must be able to retrieve information that is stored in motor memory and not rely on thinking about swing mechanics. There are always exceptions to any rule. Some golfers just need a little bit of the right help, which is not always easy to identify. I encourage you to try as many things as possible to get to this type of game. If nothing else works, call me, and let’s talk about using the Long Ball Trainer to create this swing for you. A very few golfers, only need to use this trainer once to get what they are looking for. Until you get on this machine, you are not going to know if you are one of those guys or not.

The best game of golf you will ever play will come from not having too many swing thoughts. If you are an older golfer, you are going to have to learn the swing from a different perspective. You would have to be a little crazy to believe all the things that you have already read about the Long Ball Trainer. You would have to be even crazier to NOT investigate this yourself. If you can come to me, I will give you a free demonstration on the trainer and you can see and FEEL for yourself what this trainer can do for you. This is for golfers that know they can play better golf consistently with a little of the right help. Everyone that does 15 repetitions on the Long Ball Trainer will feel an immediate improvement in their swing, even a pro golfer. No two golfers will have the same experience or feeling after they have used the trainer because everyone has a different physical history. This works much better with the more aggressive guys that are always trying to get to their own best game.