The CSGA Links Volume 5 Issue 2 June 2017 | Page 14

PSYCHOLOGY The Brain Game By Dr. Josh Brant, Clinical Psychologist and Sports Performance Coach Purposeless Practice The Greatest Obstacle to your Development as a Golfer “Why don’t the skills I practice off the course translate to my on course play?” This statement, or some form of it, is a common lament from golfers, and points to one of the biggest problems in the sport; golfers don’t know how to practice. The main problem, as I see it, is that the skills most golfers are practicing are not the same skills that are needed to be successful on the course. As the saying goes, “practice makes perfect”; the more you practice a skill, the more proficient you get at it. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a skill as “a learned power of doing something competently”, then theoretically, any learned behavior will be strengthen the more we repeat it. It is this basic principle of repetition that drives golfers to spend countless hours honing their skills with the hope that it will lead to lower scores. But what if we’ve been doing it all wrong? What if those co