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This story should begin with an apology to Scottie Scheffler for suggesting anything in my tortured version of golf resembles his experience.
Yet if we can agree all golfers deal with their version of pressure, what Scheffler might have felt over a four-footer in a Travelers playoff on Monday isn't so different from what I confronted on the final hole of a match two days later.
The common denominator is how simple tasks become more complicated when factoring in the context. Scheffler missed his birdie putt to lose his playoff to Viktor Hovland, rolling the ball over the left edge with too much pace. I made a mess of the 18th hole of a match in our Golf Digest Match Play, all starting with a miserable drive.
To be clear, golfers hit bad shots all the time with nothing on the line, me especially. But mine also was a bit of a choke, and in those moments, the science points to different reasons. Specifically, a 2001 study by Sian Beilock and Thomas H. Carr says pressure makes us more aware of motions that normally come naturally. A good way to think about this: imagine you’re throwing a ball of paper into a trash can. The vast majority of the time we don’t think about our technique. But imagine someone said there was $1,000 on the line if you make or miss. Now you’re thinking about your technique more than you ever have, and you feel more rigid as a result. This might explain why I chunked a simple wedge late in my match. It’s the type of shot even a mid-handicapper like me can usually expect to hit solid. But in a big moment, I left it 20 yards short.
“Choking can occur when people think too much about activities that are usually automatic. This is called, ‘paralysis by analysis,’” Beilock wrote in her follow-up book, Choke. “By contrast, people also choke when they are not devoting enough attention to what they are doing and rely on simple or incorrect routines.”
As Beilock notes, pressure can also produce the opposite problem. Instead of too much attention on a task, you don’t give enough, and that leads to bad decisions or neglecting an important part of your routine. Here's the cruel part: the solutions for managing pressure — breathing techniques, self-distancing, taking more club — are exactly what you're least likely to remember when the pressure hits.
Given all that, one solution in particular takes on heightened importance. A proven way to better handle pressure is to try to replicate the sensation in practice so you know what to expect. “Even practicing under mild levels of stress can prevent you from choking when high levels of stress come around,” Beilock wrote.
This connects to a theme I keep coming back to, including in my recent Mind Games video about effective practice. The video says one of the flaws with the way many of us work on our games is we do so in environments that don’t feel like a real golf round. When you only practice hitting shots without a consequence, you’re less likely to know how you’ll respond when feeling the heat. Turns out even I need more of this as well.
“The average golfer needs to put himself in a situation in a practice environment so that he could start to understand his tendencies,” the performance coach Jason Goldsmith told me. “So then they can say, ‘Oh, OK, this is what it feels like when I start to get under the gun. How am I going to react?’”
Have a topic you want me to explore? Send me an email at [email protected] with your feedback.
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Yet if we can agree all golfers deal with their version of pressure, what Scheffler might have felt over a four-footer in a Travelers playoff on Monday isn't so different from what I confronted on the final hole of a match two days later.
The common denominator is how simple tasks become more complicated when factoring in the context. Scheffler missed his birdie putt to lose his playoff to Viktor Hovland, rolling the ball over the left edge with too much pace. I made a mess of the 18th hole of a match in our Golf Digest Match Play, all starting with a miserable drive.
To be clear, golfers hit bad shots all the time with nothing on the line, me especially. But mine also was a bit of a choke, and in those moments, the science points to different reasons. Specifically, a 2001 study by Sian Beilock and Thomas H. Carr says pressure makes us more aware of motions that normally come naturally. A good way to think about this: imagine you’re throwing a ball of paper into a trash can. The vast majority of the time we don’t think about our technique. But imagine someone said there was $1,000 on the line if you make or miss. Now you’re thinking about your technique more than you ever have, and you feel more rigid as a result. This might explain why I chunked a simple wedge late in my match. It’s the type of shot even a mid-handicapper like me can usually expect to hit solid. But in a big moment, I left it 20 yards short.
“Choking can occur when people think too much about activities that are usually automatic. This is called, ‘paralysis by analysis,’” Beilock wrote in her follow-up book, Choke. “By contrast, people also choke when they are not devoting enough attention to what they are doing and rely on simple or incorrect routines.”
As Beilock notes, pressure can also produce the opposite problem. Instead of too much attention on a task, you don’t give enough, and that leads to bad decisions or neglecting an important part of your routine. Here's the cruel part: the solutions for managing pressure — breathing techniques, self-distancing, taking more club — are exactly what you're least likely to remember when the pressure hits.
Given all that, one solution in particular takes on heightened importance. A proven way to better handle pressure is to try to replicate the sensation in practice so you know what to expect. “Even practicing under mild levels of stress can prevent you from choking when high levels of stress come around,” Beilock wrote.
This connects to a theme I keep coming back to, including in my recent Mind Games video about effective practice. The video says one of the flaws with the way many of us work on our games is we do so in environments that don’t feel like a real golf round. When you only practice hitting shots without a consequence, you’re less likely to know how you’ll respond when feeling the heat. Turns out even I need more of this as well.
“The average golfer needs to put himself in a situation in a practice environment so that he could start to understand his tendencies,” the performance coach Jason Goldsmith told me. “So then they can say, ‘Oh, OK, this is what it feels like when I start to get under the gun. How am I going to react?’”
Have a topic you want me to explore? Send me an email at [email protected] with your feedback.
Continue reading...
