7. If you are finding the game difficult, it may just be you’re attempting the impossible

A friend of mine recently told me a fascinating bit of information about the legendary Swedish Tennis star, Bjorn Borg. Someone it seems had taken the time to record all his training details and then studied all of his Wimbledon finals and came up with this incredible statistic. For every point he played in all of his 5 finals, he had put in 46 minutes of practise. This chronological foundation he laid down made him believe in himself when it came to the big points.

This kind of statistic is consistent with all the top performers in any sport. World class Marathon runners build up their mileage to well in excess of a 100 miles a week for several weeks prior to a World championship, anything less than this mileage would mean they will not feature on the big day. Gary Player estimated he had hit his 1,000,000 practise shot sometime in the late 70s.This commitment to the game yielded 9 major titles and a further 150 tournament victories world-wide. Tiger Woods has been swinging a golf club since a toddler and we can only speculate as to how many shots he has dispatched down the range in his quest for immortality.

There are many more devoted practise ground disciples around like Vijay Singh and Nick Faldo but strange as it may seem, there is a growing number of players who would rather go out and play a few holes instead hitting 2 or 3 balls in the process. They have done the graft that all top players have to do to reach a high level. But now, unlike tennis players or marathon runners who have to keep up a high level of cardio- vascular fitness, golfers only need a certain amount of physical conditioning which they achieve by walking round the course.

For the golfer, mental training now becomes the priority in order to put the “swing muscle memory” to work on the golf course where it matters. This is now the determining factor between success and failure. If they only play twice a week because they miss the cut, then maybe swing training becomes more applicable.

Before you go out and start sending bucket after bucket of balls down the local range hour after hour, please bear in mind that you must apply quality principles to make the sessions worthwhile. Trying harder with an idea that is wrong will leave you with “deep rooted” wrong muscle memory. It is often the case that if someone is finding the game difficult, it may just be they are attempting the impossible.

Tony Robbins the top American peak performance “Guru” says that, “Repetition is the mother of skill”. That is absolutely correct as long as they are quality repetitions.
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