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