Sports Vision Casebook - Putting Part 3

The other aspects of putting are reading the greens and visualisation. It’s much easier to judge the distance of a putt accurately from the side rather than from behind, but you can also get a good judgement by walking the distance.

Judging the slope of the greens is also aided by using proprioceptive information from your feet. If you stand with your feet pointing uphill, the further back towards your heels that you can feel the weight, the steeper the putt. If you are standing upright and you feel the weight on your heels, that means a slope of about 4%; if the weight is on your toes, it’s about a 1% slope.

To get the aiming point, I like the method shown here: http://puttingzone.com/MyTips/spider.html
For the strength of the putt, you should aim for a point about 9 inches behind the hole on the path you’ve decided.

Some people use visualisation to judge the line of the putt. One technique is to imagine that the hole of full of water which starts to overflow. You just have to note the path of the water, and this will be the path for your ball in reverse.

When Tiger Woods was a toddler, his father Earl had him put a ball in his right hand and roll it to a hole. Then he had Tiger close his eyes and roll it into the hole again. He asked Tiger what he had “seen” after he had closed his eyes. Tiger replied that he had seen a “picture” of the hole. Earl told him to always “putt to that picture” before he struck the ball, creating a picture in his head of where he wanted the ball to go.  So Tiger’s focus wouldn’t be on the mechanics of the shot, but simply what needed to be done to the best he can visualise. Once he was comfortable with the instant pre-play in his mind’s eye, he’d play the shot.

Jack Nicklaus cited visualisation as the number one secret to his success, and even visualised every shot during practice: “First, I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I see the ball going there: its path, trajectory and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality”.

Everyone will have their own type of imagery that works best for them, but it all comes down to creating some kind of pathway in your head, and then you just have to try and get the ball to follow that pathway.

Talking to the two pro golfers that I’ve seen recently, I got the impression that visualisation was an area they could improve. With practice, it’s possible to make it almost as realistic as the physical act of putting itself.

David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - Paralysis by Analysis

Take something you do every day without thinking about it – brushing your teeth, for instance, Next time you brush your teeth try and think about the precise movements that you are making with your hand. If you manage to keep this up for a while, you’ll find that brushing your teeth is no longer the simple process that it was on the previous occasion. If you start thinking about the mechanics of a routine process that we normally do sub-consciously, the result is that our performance deteriorates: “paralysis by analysis”. This is particularly common in sport: when something goes wrong, it’s very tempting to start analysing the mechanics of what happened, with the result that a blip becomes a catastrophe. Jackson & Beilock (2008) asked skilled soccer players to dribble the ball through a series of pylons while paying attention to the side of their foot that most recently contacted the ball. Their performance was worse in terms of being slower and having more errors compared with when they were given no instructions. Similar results have been found in baseball where skilled university-level players were asked to perform a hitting task. They heard a randomly presented noise and were told to indicate whether their bat was moving up or down at the instant they heard the noise. Biomechanical swing analysis revealed that the resultant deterioration in performance was at least in part due to a disruption in the sequencing and timing of the components of their swing. The more complex the skill, the greater is likely to be the loss of performance when the player concentrates on the step-by-step components of that skill (Masters et al 1993). It’s also more likely to occur in a high pressure situation, such as hitting a golf putt to win a golf championship (Masters et al, 1993). And it’s golf, and in particular Tiger Woods, that has given us an example of how paralysis by analysis can be overcome. Tiger’s father Earl taught him to putt when he was just a toddler. He told him to rotate his head and really look at the hole, then come back to the ball. He repeated this two or three times until he built up a picture in his head. All he had to do now was to “putt to the picture”. In other words you want to tell your subconscious brain, in as much detail as possible, exactly what you want it to do. But don’t tell it how to do it. David Donner