I attended an excellent golf instructors conference last week in Dallas,TX. Mark Sweeney Founder of AimPoint Technologies was a featured speaker. He did an outstanding job showing participants that there is a "way" to teach golfers to accurately predict how putts will break - exciting stuff!

Sweeney is a keen golfer who was frustrated with his ineptitude with reading greens. His instructor told him that the only way to become better at reading greens is by "trial and error" and "experience". Sweeney didn't buy into this - instead he studied how balls break and why - the result is AimPoint - a company focused on the science of predictive putt technology, green reading instruction and player performance. You have likely seen AimPoint on golf telecasts -the Emmy-winning and patented AimPoint technology which can accurately predict optimum putting parameters and putt trajectories from any point on a green to any other point. This technology has been used regularly on the Golf Channel since 2007 and won the George Wensel Award for Technical Achievement at the 2007 Sports Emmy Awards.

Mark Sweeney teaches his highly effective green-reading method to professional, amateur, and junior golfers. Sweeney teaches that we must stop relying on our eyes and experience to read greens. Instead we must learn to determine the true slope on the green with our feet and then calculate how the ball will roll and break towards the hole given the speed of the green, the severity of the slope and the starting position of the ball in relation to the slope. It may at first sound complicated - it's not. Sweeney's AimPoint method can be learned in a few hours. Golfers gain confidence - stop "guessing"- and perform better.

I can't wait to study with Mark Sweeney to become an AimPoint Certified Instructor. It will be fun to share this with students in 2011!

Here's some excellent information on event preparation courtesy of Dr. Deborah Graham and Jon Stabler from GolfPsych - check out golfpsych.com - all of their training, tools and resources are fantastic. Use this information to your advantage. Keep building Champion habits.

Do you program yourself for success or failure before competition?

The average golfer has no programming system for preparing for competition. They entertain any thoughts and conversations that come along.
Their thoughts could be of how they played in this tournament last time, good or bad. They might think about their chances and using logic determine that they have a great chance or no chance based on their skills, recent practice (or the good score in their practice round) and recent competitions, creating expectations. Expectations of Outcome are Not Good.

Before the round, the expectations can raise arousal and make you more concerned with your outcomes. As you play you will constantly consider how things are matching those expectations and react acccordingly. This usually triggers emotions and raises arousal, hurting your play.

Others will talk about how things may go and what you have to do, what score, how many putts, who will be watching, results of winning, etc. They can pull you into outcome thinking and raise expectations or put pressure on you for performance. Reporters are notorious for doing this, as are some parents and other players, caddies and spouses, some coaches too.

If you are unaware of the real impact on your game of these average thoughts and comments and you let yourself entertain them, then you are unlikely to play well in the tournament.

If you spend much thought imagining scenarios where you fail or win, then you are programming yourself with those scenarios and your outcomes will suffer. "But, But I thought you were supposed to picture success?"

Picturing success and imagining what it will be like to accept the trophy and prize money are great for overall motivation, but they cannot go on the course and they are dangerous to performance the night before and on the course because they will raise your arousal and reduce your golf abilities. They will keep you focussed on your outcomes and your chances of winning as you play.

Some players have read or heard mental gurus expound on the following generally accepted concepts and may say to themselves tomorrow or on tournament day "I will play one shot at a time, I will be patient, I will do really good routines, I will manage my emotions", etc. Nice thoughts but unlikely to get you very far.

Stay clear of average thinking and performance purgatory.

You can do a lot better than this before the round and therefore during the round. We call it Programming Champion Thoughts and Attitude.

Programming: The night before your round, (you could do this every night of the days before the tournament), find some quiet place and time when you will ot be interrupted. Shortly before you go to sleep is ideal, but anytime is good. You could do this several times a day.

Sit down in a comfortable position. Laying down is not recommended because you may go to sleep.

Begin breathing slowly, 5 seconds inhale, pause, then 5 seconds exhale. Focus on controlling the air and breathe abdominally. That is, as you inhale your stomach expands. Your chest should not rise. As you exhale, your stomach should move in, your chest should not fall. Modify the speed to go as slow as you can without having to take a catch-up breath. With practice you will be able to go slower and slower. This is great for lowering arousal.

It does not matter whether you breathe through your mouth or nose. We like equal time in and out.

Feel yourself get really relaxed. Facial tension should be the last to go. Everything soft and warm. No tension.

Now recall a round where you played really well, maybe best ever. Remember what it was like on the course. How you were feeling and thinking during the round. This will include things like fun, patient, calm, confident, great focus, peaceful, competitive, great tempo, great touch and feel, good green reading, committed, didn't know score, un-troubled, un-distracted, good visual steps, etc. Really live it in your mind.

Do not include the parts about winning or adding up your score or the applause afterwards when you got your trophy.

Once you are there and feeling these things, imagine tomorrow's round. Imagine yourself on the course feeling and thinking the same way as you did that great day. See yourself playing well, in the moment, patient, etc. Then play some of the shots you will face, according to your game plan.

Imagine doing a full and excellent mental routine including hitting the ball and watching it fly, feeling it through the air, landing and finishing. Do this in real time, not rushed or quickly. It should take the same amount of time to imagine it as to play it for real. Fully engage your mind in doing these steps as vividly as you can. See good results. Feel good ball striking.

If you have been following my sequence of preparation steps, then you have a detailed game plan for this competition. Pick some of the toughest shots you will face tomorrow. Play those and imagine good shots. Enjoy them vividly.

Play from 6 to 10 shots like this. It is not necessary to play every shot, although Jack Nicklaus said he did. We know this is mentally tiring.

This Programming should take 15 to 20 minutes. Longer is OK but not more beneficial. Doing it with full engagement mentally is the key.

If you are distracted or other thoughts keep intruding, then you are not relaxed enough. If you have had caffeine or sugar or other stimulants and they are still affecting you, this will be harder to do.

This is all about emphasizing the mental process of playing and the Champion attitude of focussing on the process and letting go of the outcomes of your shots and your round. Focus on your mental goals for the round and make them the most important thing when you are playing. Your score and your swing are not fully in your control. Your mental game is.

Programming your Champion Mental Attitude the night before will make you much more likely to operate with this attitude in the competition. It is real, effective practice for thinking like a champion.

Now it is up to you to do it. Good Luck!

Two pals of mine - Eric Alpenfels - Director of Instruction at Pinehurst and Dr. Bob Christina have written an excellent book entitled: "Instinct Putting". I highly recommend it - there is a lot of great information to digest and new possibilities to consider. See the article below by Bill Pennington from the NY Times.

The Key to Improved Putting Could Be Staring Right at the Hole
By BILL PENNINGTON


Dr.Bob Christina, a golf researcher, and Eric Alpenfels, a golf teacher, have found that golfers tend to putt better when they look at the hole, not the ball.

When you’re about to stroke a putt, do you stare down at the ball?

Of course you do.

If you play basketball, when you are about to take a shot, do you look at the ball in your hands?

Of course not.

On Par
If you play baseball or softball and have to throw to first base, do you look at the ball in your hand as you’re throwing it?

No, you look at the first baseman.

If you are playing darts, do you stare at the dart in your hand? Or do you look at the bull’s-eye?

O.K., so you know where this is going. Why do almost all golfers look at the ball when they putt instead of looking at the hole?

If you were handed a golf ball and told to roll it into the hole, you would look at the hole, not the ball, right? Why is the act of putting any different?

The usual response is that to look away would cause a mis-hit, or worse, a whiff.

But what if there was proof that people putted better, even significantly better, when they looked at the hole — the target — instead of the ball? What if some of the best golf teachers in the land recommended this method? What if it was by far the easiest way to alleviate the yips and also a cure for chronically poor putting from long distances?

Would you try it?

Chances are you may still think it sounds daffy and you would be embarrassed to try it in front of your friends. Right, as if it’s not already embarrassing enough to three-putt four times in one round. And does anyone really need to remind you that putting can account for about 40 percent of the strokes in an average round?

“About 99 percent of my students putt better looking at the hole,” said Dana Rader, one of Golf Digest’s top 50 instructors, who runs a golf academy in Charlotte, N.C. “I make all my students try it, and they are amazed. When you look away from the target and stand over the ball for too long, your brain actually loses its memory of how hard to hit the ball. And sometimes where to hit it, too.”

Because putting prowess may be the most elusive of golf’s skills, people have been experimenting with various putting techniques for centuries. But in the last eight years, the effectiveness of looking at the hole while putting has been researched and painstakingly analyzed by Eric Alpenfels, another top-rated instructor and the director of the Pinehurst Golf Academy, and Bob Christina, the dean emeritus of the School of Health and Human Performance at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

In 2002, at the behest of Golf Magazine, Alpenfels and Christina conducted a field test using 40 golfers with a range of handicaps.

In an interview this month, Alpenfels and Christina said they had thought that people who looked at the hole would putt worse.

“These were people who spent 20 or 25 years looking at the ball,” Christina said. “We gave them 45 minutes of practice looking at the hole and then started charting and measuring the results. I expected a negative effect.”

Instead, golfers of all handicaps putted more effectively. From long distances, golfers looking at the hole hit the ball 24 percent closer. More short putts went in as well, though the improvement was less pronounced.

If Alpenfels and Christina weren’t convinced at first, they were after they did additional testing over several years. Two years ago, Alpenfels and Christina wrote a book, “Instinct Putting,” that summarized their findings and gave a detailed plan of how to convert to what remains an unorthodox approach.

Alpenfels and Christina each emphasized that it didn’t take much practice to learn to putt better their way. Christina estimated that golfers would see improvement in 45 minutes and added, “If they practice more, they will improve more.”

Among other findings, Alpenfels and Christina observed that golfers who looked at the hole kept a steadier posture during their stroke. In other words, they were less likely to move their heads, perhaps the most common putting mistake. In addition, people who looked at the hole were less likely to decelerate the putter head before impact — the other major putting mistake.

The scientific explanation of why it is more effective to look at the target is that the brain more successfully interacts with the muscles of the shoulders, arms and hands with a continuous flow of visual information (i.e., the brain knows where the hole is because you are looking at it). But the second you take your eyes off the target, the brain has to interact with the muscles based on its memory of where the hole is.

Some basic athletic intuition comes into play as well when you are looking at the target.

As for the fear of missing the ball with the putter head, it doesn’t happen, especially with practice. (I’ve tried it.) If anything, it’s a mental relief not to be tensely staring down, transfixed by ball and putter.

But don’t take my word for it. Lots of top teachers advocate the method. Even in the ultracompetitive golf-instruction market, there has been little or no criticism of Alpenfels’s and Christina’s conclusions. I polled 10 of Golf Digest’s top 20 golf teachers, and each said he believed in the method’s merits, especially for very poor putters.

“As a method, it might just be gaining acceptance,” said Jim Suttie, a top-10-rated teacher. “In the future, I think you’ll see more people doing it.”

So why haven’t some top touring professionals looked at the hole instead of the ball?

Some pros have tried it, even in competition, most notably Johnny Miller. But that’s going back a lot of years. Top pros probably don’t try it for the same reason that most recreational golfers haven’t tried it.

“It is a real leap of faith to look away from the ball,” Alpenfels said. “It’s also relinquishing control of the putter head, and that scares people. But when people try it, the result is positive. But it’s hard to pull the trigger and try it under the pressure of high-level competition.”

I would agree, but most recreational players aren’t under that much pressure and yet we still can’t putt. Could we really do that much worse?

An hour of practice looking at the target and a leap of faith on the golf course could change the most daunting part of the game for millions of golfers.

You don’t even have to change your putting stroke. All you have to do is look away from it. The hole isn’t moving and neither is the ball. How hard can it be?