How do I play relaxed golf guest blog by Brian Sparks

In France a few years ago, a doctor had a coaching session with me and, two days later, I met him outside the clubhouse after he had just played 9 holes. After saying hello, he immediately asked me a question. “Brian, are you a professeur of golf or a professeur of relaxation?”

This guy was very tense, stiff and static so the lesson had focused on helping him to understand the limitations he was putting on his swing by applying the 3DDs as was so often the case in France. It was interesting and instructive for me to hear his summary of the benefits of the lesson. The most important thing he had taken from the session was to be more relaxed.

How many golfers play a relaxed game of golf? Isn’t that what most people play the game for, to have some fun in their leisure time playing a game they love?

Well, from what I’ve seen over the many years I’ve watched and studied golfers around the world it’s exactly the opposite. Instead of using golf as a relaxing antidote to the tensions and pressures of life, people often develop their golf to become yet another source of stress.

As a PIG coach you will understand this scenario only too well: the feet rooted to the ground, the head fixed, the arms held rigidly straight and the hands gripping the club excessively hard in order to gain maximum control of the club. By helping golfers to understand and feel the negative consequences of this way of swinging a club you will already help them to make great progress towards a relaxed game. Even more, encouraging them to go to extremes of movement and relaxation can provide them with surprising insights in that letting go of imagined control can actually lead to more control and sometimes more distance.

Here are a few more ideas to help you in this process.

1. Nearly all meditation sessions such as Yoga commence with a couple of deep breaths. Breathing is the first piece of the jigsaw of a relaxed body. Oxygen flows through the blood stream to our hearts and brains and we immediately feel more relaxed.

The wrong type of concentration or, indeed, too much concentration can easily turn into tension. As Tim Gallwey wrote in his first book, The Inner Game of Tennis, trying hard is a questionable virtue for exactly that reason; it tends to limit our breathing and intake of oxygen.

Our muscles also benefit from the oxygen that helps them to relax. To be effective, a golf swing or any throwing action requires your muscles to be relaxed, long and  elastic. When they are tight and short the brain recognizes the limitation put on them and reacts by increasing effort.

This is the major explanation for our students telling us that they hit the ball as far if not further when they reduce effort levels. Additionally, they feel less tired after a round of golf and seniors, in particular, find their golfing lives extended (for which they will love their PIG coach!).

So, taking a couple of deep breaths before each shot is a simple way of helping any golfer perform better, be that on a drive or a putt. The brain is also a muscle and will benefit from being more physically relaxed. Science is beginning to show that a tense brain produces the emotion that we are doing something difficult whereas a relaxed brain sends the message that we are doing something easy, irrespective of the task in hand.

If you look at a torso from shoulders to hips there are 3 levels of breathing;

1. Low in the abdomen
2. Middle in the diaphragm 3. High in the upper chest

3. Relates to thinking so when your breathing is shallow and you are thinking a lot this is where it will be coming from. It will not produce high levels of oxygen intake.

2. Will be better than 3 but still nowhere near the maximum possible levels available to you.

1. Filling this are of your body first will allow you to go on in one breath to fill 2 then 3 for total intake efficiency.

Optimum breathing proceeds in 3 parts:

1. a)  Start each breath by imaging a vertical pump in your stomach that can expand upwards and downwards. The first action is to expand this pump in a downward direction, as this will open the bottom of your breathing apparatus.

2. b)  Allow your diaphragm to expand as if the upward motion of the pump is now engaged.

3. c)  Let the air into your chest until it starts to open up your shoulders

I once suffered badly from stress when I took over the management of a club in France. I was under great pressure to rewrite all the club literature, revamp the entire running of the club, arrange marketing and promotion of membership, interview new staff and still do my coaching. I worked so hard and so fast that I literally had no time to breathe. I had such a  bad headache that I thought I was developing a brain tumour. As soon as I started my breathing exercises it disappeared.

As many great golfers do, notably Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, shaking your arms, shoulders and hands as part of your re-shot routine helps to rid yourself of tension.

1. Whilst addressing the ball, keep moving, stay in motion. It is far more difficult to start the backswing from a completely static, stationary and frozen address position. Personally, I like to feel that my motor is already turning and that all I have to do is let the clutch slip and away I go. (Slipping the clutch is the English way of describing how to pull away in a car that has a manual gearbox).

2. Hold a club at the butt end with your thumb and index finger, about a foot (30cms) off the ground. Set it in motion with your other hand so that it swings like a pendulum. It will move in a very rhythmic way, slowing down at each extremity of its arc before accelerating naturally as it swings back down. Once it has moved through a couple of arcs, start moving your feet in time with the movement of the club keeping a close synchronisation between you and the club.

   Now accelerate the movement until the speed gets so great that the synchronicity completely disappears. This is what happens when you swing too quickly especially in the transition at the end of the backswing and start of the downswing.

3. Try hitting some shots with the softest possible grip and with the softest, arms you can manage (even let your arms bend excessively) just to see and feel what happens. In the first instance, try this with some short shots before going to a longer club.

4. To help golfers to feel the consequences of tension try this out with them:
   Ask them to hold a 7-iron or similar club out in front of them at chest height and to grip it as tightly as they possibly can. At the same time, ask them to hold their arms as straight and as rigidly as possible. Now tap a golf ball on the face of their club.

   Now do the same again asking them to grip the club as softly as they can without dropping the club. Add that you want their arms and shoulders to be as relaxed as possible also. Now tap the ball on the face again.

   Some people get it straight away as they feel the ball more softly and hear the sound change. Others take a bit longer but the effect on them is that they now have a specific reason to let go of debilitating tension and some understanding of how tension affects ball striking and feel.

   This exercise is called ‘FEELX.’ 

   PIG coaches regularly help golfers to strike the ball more sweetly by helping them to reduce tension. This is another area where they will gain great satisfaction and confidence in their own ability.

   As identified in the Postive Impact Golf book, Tension is the golfer’s number 1 enemy!