I read a fascinating research paper a few weeks ago about external vs. internal focus in learning motor skills, especially related to golf. It goes right to the core of what you need to think you’re doing when you are taught something, learning it by yourself, or even practicing something you already know how to do.
The difference between internal and external focus is simple. Internal focus involves instructions for moving body parts--what you need to do. External focus, in golf, revolves around what the club needs to do. Then you do what ever you have to to get that result. (The ghost of Ernest Jones is nodding his head.)
Subjects who had never hit a golf ball before were taught grip, stance, and posture for a pitch shot. Then the subjects were split into two groups.
The internal focus group (IFG) was taught how their arms move, bend, and straighten at various points in the swing. The external focus group (EFG) was taught how the club swings like a pendulum. When swinging the club they were to “focus on the weight of the clubhead, the straight-line direction of the clubhead path, and the acceleration of the clubhead moving toward the bottom of the arc.”
After practicing what they were taught, all subjects hit blocks of ten golf balls each to a target 50 feet away. Outcomes were measured by how close the ball landed to the center of the target.
The results were that the (EGF) performed significantly better than (IFG). As the trials proceeded, both groups improved, but the IFG never caught up to the EFG. The EFG recorded good scores more frequently, and lower scores less frequently, than the IFG.
What does this mean for you? Everything. It means you’ll learn faster when you practice like this--working on what the club is supposed to do, not what you’re supposed to do. It means when you play, if there is a swing thought in your head (which I don’t recommend at all), it needs to be about what the club is doing and not about you.
Although I appreciate the central philosophy of this, the fact is the club is an inert object. It does nothing without the purposeful actions (force, work, acceleration, etc.) of the individual. The club has no direction, no prediction or expectation. It is an inanimate object just sitting on the ground until we provide some action to it. HOW we apply the action is what the golf swing is all about. There are millions of ways to swing a golf club. Unfortunately, there are some principals that through years of research and observation produce the desired effect in the most efficient manor. 'just swinging the club' is too simplified and simply not practical for the average human.
ReplyDeleteblueghost: Please read the research paper if you haven't already. It studied thinking about how the body is supposed to move vs. how the club is supposed to move. Nowhere is it said, "Just swing the club." An example Vivien Saunders uses is a fork. True, the fork just sits there until we pick it up, but what we want to do with the FORK (external focus) guides how our body moves. It is not the case that we pick up food from our plate by thinking about what we do with our hand and arm (internal focus) with a fork attached.
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