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Debunking the Persistent Myth of Muscle Memory in Golf

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Muscle Memory in Golf

When I first began teaching golf more than 25 years ago I used to have a saying.  “The art of teaching golf is finding 20 different ways to say the same thing.”  About ten years into my career I had altered that saying to 100 different ways, and with a quarter-century under my belt I now often find myself saying it’s 1000 different ways.  The point is, as a golf instructor, even though we all have a common goal (to help people learn, improve, and enjoy the game more) we should never stop seeking to learn new ways to do just that.

So in the interest of that, one of the things I try to do is attend as many different events as I can where other instructors gather to share information.  In January, I did just that, attending the Northern California PGA’s 19th Annual Player & Teacher Development Forum in Sacramento.  This is an event I annually look forward to as it is not only a two-day forum where some of the best golf instructors in the world give presentations, but it is simultaneously a gathering for a couple of hundred of the most passionate and dedicated teachers of the game on the West Coast.  This year’s slate of speakers did not disappoint, highlighted by PGA Member Martin Chuck the founder of TourStriker, PGA Member Jim Hackenberg the Founder of Orange Whip Trainers, PGA Member & Golf Digest Columnist Josh Zander, Dr. Robert Bjork of UCLA, Claude Harmon III (Son of Butch) and instructor to numerous tour players including Ernie Els, Brooks Koepka, Trevor Immelman, Yani Tseng, and many others as well as PGA Hall of Famer Michael Hebron, one of my original mentors.  While it was a veritable who’s who of golf instruction these days, and I thoroughly enjoyed all the speakers and picked up some great tidbits of information along the way, it was likely the least well-known name whom I found to be the most fascinating:  Dr. Robert Bjork.

One of the things that I work on with my competitive students is establishing practice routines that help them to address weaknesses in their game and turn them into strengths.  What Dr. Bjork, and his near 30-year body of research on the human brain and how people learn, essentially told us was…well…that the majority of us in the golf industry (and most other sports), including all those high-falutin’ named individuals we’d all just convened from around the country to listen to, have no idea what we’re talking about…O.K., O.K., that may be a bit of an exaggeration, because Mr. Hebron, PGA Tour Mental Game Coach Dr. Glen Albaugh, myself, and small handful of other instructors who have been privy to some of the research Dr. Bjork and his colleagues have done have been adopting practices and practice regimens that draw on their enlightening conclusions.  Unfortunately, at this point, we are far outside the norm.

Now it would take a lengthy discussion to really shed light on all the fascinating research, so in the interest of expediency I will touch on just one aspect of it for now, and it isn’t good news for all you range rats out there beating your brains out on the practice tee day after day in search of the perfect swing.  Block practice (hitting the same club repeatedly while trying to perfect your swing) is just about the least effective way to improve.  Random, or inter-leaving practice (switching clubs, targets, distances, shot types, shot shapes, etc.) as much as possible and continually has by far more impact on your sustained improvement and the retention of skills.  I know terms like block practice and random practice may be foreign concepts to some of you, but there is one term that is so pervasive out there on the driving ranges of the world that shouldn’t be:  Muscle Memory.  I know, I know, grooving that 7-Iron and the allure of perpetual repetition as the path to mastery is so generally accepted that you likely believe it near blasphemy for me to suggest otherwise, but it’s true.  And at least part of what makes it so hard for many of us to abandon the myth of muscle memory is that it’s likely lead a great many of us to spend more than a handful of the precious hours we have on this planet whaling away at bucket after bucket of balls in search of it.  So let me give you both the good and bad news.

The good news is, now that you know that science doesn’t support the myth of muscle memory, you can stop beating your brains out and start having more fun.  When I was younger, I was never much for logging the endless hours on the driving range grooving that perfect swing that I thought you needed to if you wanted to be successful.  It was just too boring, and I really just wanted to play or have contests with my buddies, but there were a lot of years where I sort of mentally beat myself up and blamed disappointments in my own playing career for not having the discipline to do exactly that.  Now that the scientific research supports the idea of the randomness of play as a better practice model I not only encourage that notion with my own students to a degree, but I don’t feel quite so bad about not logging my requisite 10,000 hours of practice (since immortalized by the research of Dr. Anders Ericcson) on the practice tee trying to groove a mechanically repetitive swing.

And the bad news…Well, for starters, I know most of you don’t believe me, because in further studies by Dr. Bjork, even when people are told that more than 90% of people studied improve faster and have better retention as a result of random practice, over 90% of the people surveyed still cling to the efficacy of block practice for themselves and chose it first.  I guess we all want to feel special, and I suppose that convincing ourselves we are among the less than 10% of outliers who actually benefit from mind-numbing repetition is one way we can do that.  And the other bad news?  Even though myself and a growing handful of other instructors are changing the ways in which we help people learn the game, I unfortunately can’t help you get those lost hours back!


Cover Photo via Flickr

Mike Dowd is a graduate of California State University of Sacramento who joined the P.G.A. at the age of 20, wanting a head start on a career in golf; a career path that had been a goal of his since first picking up a golf club at the age of seven. Mike has been teaching golf professionally for 25 years, was elected a P.G.A. Class A Member in 1997, is a member of the N.C.P.G.A Board of Directors, was the recipient of the P.G.A.'s Bill Strausbaugh Award in 2013, is the current Growth of the Game Committee Chair, and since 2001 he has been Head P.G.A. Professional at Oakdale Golf & Country Club, in Oakdale California. Mike has mentored students who have played collegiately at USC, UOP, USF, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Davis, University of Hawaii, Missouri Valley State, C.S.U. Sacramento, Stanislaus, and Chico as well as both men’s and ladies professional tours. Mike’s focus is on being a whole game coach, spending at least as much time and energy working with students on the mental side of golf as on swing mechanics. In his spare time Mike enjoys writing articles for various publications is the author of multiple golf instruction books. Find out more at MikeDowdAuthor.com.

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