M. Stephenson
04-19-2005, 05:38 AM
Here are a few snippets from a Wall Street Journal article entitled "How Science Can Improve Your Golf Game". I think that they have a direct relationship to playing guitar.
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I have thought that visualizing a few notes ahead of where you are helped to play better. This was also considered good Aikido technique - look at where you are going, not where you are. Seems that there is validity to this:
...during the downswing, the experts stabilized their line of sight at the place where the club head would be at the "time of address," or just before it struck the ball. Right before the actual impact, "they shifted their line of sight to a position about four centimeters [two inches] from the ball in the targeted direction," says Mr. Naito.
So, at the moment of impact, only beginners had their eye on the ball. The experts, in contrast, seemed to rely on a mental image of the ball, and used their peripheral vision to see both the club head and the ball -- without committing the putting no-no of moving their head.
While the beginners sank a woeful 29% of their putts, the experts sank almost all of them. That, say the scientists, largely reflects where the experts' eyes were. "If they did not fixate on the ball, golfers would be able to achieve higher accuracy," concluded the scientists, whose research was published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills last August.
This next little bit is about practice and the need to allow the brain time to assimilate the information. To me this supports the idea that the larger more variety of scales, excersises and pieces, the better one gets. It also explains why it is not necessary to spend endless hours practicing scales:
HOW TO PRACTICE
Prof. Christina of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, has one word for duffers who regularly go out to the driving range with a bucket of balls and hit driver after driver after driver. That word is...stop.
Or at least, pause.
Satisfying as it is to feel that you're really tagging it and getting into a groove by driving dozens of balls or sinking scores of putts without a break, new research by Prof. Christina shows that it's unlikely to help you much on an actual course.
"If you practice with periodic rests, you'll have more success than if you practice for hours on end in what's called 'massed practice,' " says Teresa Dail of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical University, Greensboro, who worked with Prof. Christina on the research effort.
The two scientists had groups of raw beginners practice 12-foot putts. Half the group practiced 60 putts a day on each of four days, while half hit 240 in a row in a single marathon session.
"We had a great learning curve," says Prof. Dail. "Everyone started out terrible and wound up OK." There was no difference between the two groups after one day of practice. But after seven and 28 days, the people who had spread their practice over four days were sinking more putts and getting their misses closer to the hole. In the scientists' scoring system, players got no points for sinking a putt and points equal to the distance the ball stopped from the hole when they missed. The group that spread out their practice averaged 37 points on their 60 12-foot putts, compared with 45 for the players who practiced without a break, the scientists reported last June in the journal Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport.
That fits with what scientists are learning about how movements become encoded in our brains. When we execute a particular series of muscle movements, nerve cells in our brain, known as neurons, fire off electrical impulses. If you practice a movement again and again, your brain releases chemicals that build up the connections between the neurons involved in the movement -- which increases the likelihood that they'll consistently fire in the right sequence and with the right timing. In other words, practice gets your brain accustomed to making the proper motions.
But, says Prof. Dail, "the brain requires a consolidation period" in order to strengthen those neural connections, which are known as synapses. It takes some time -- even overnight -- for the brain chemicals to alter the synapses in an enduring way.
"If you practice 50 putts in a row, you'll get pretty good and feel pretty good," she adds. "But that's misleading: If you do the same thing over and over without a break, your brain can't encode the sequence of movements as well as it can in distributed practice, where you have periodic rests."
Even better: vary the length of the putts you practice. "Loads of research," she says, "shows that's a more effective way to practice than doing the same putt over and over."
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I have thought that visualizing a few notes ahead of where you are helped to play better. This was also considered good Aikido technique - look at where you are going, not where you are. Seems that there is validity to this:
...during the downswing, the experts stabilized their line of sight at the place where the club head would be at the "time of address," or just before it struck the ball. Right before the actual impact, "they shifted their line of sight to a position about four centimeters [two inches] from the ball in the targeted direction," says Mr. Naito.
So, at the moment of impact, only beginners had their eye on the ball. The experts, in contrast, seemed to rely on a mental image of the ball, and used their peripheral vision to see both the club head and the ball -- without committing the putting no-no of moving their head.
While the beginners sank a woeful 29% of their putts, the experts sank almost all of them. That, say the scientists, largely reflects where the experts' eyes were. "If they did not fixate on the ball, golfers would be able to achieve higher accuracy," concluded the scientists, whose research was published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills last August.
This next little bit is about practice and the need to allow the brain time to assimilate the information. To me this supports the idea that the larger more variety of scales, excersises and pieces, the better one gets. It also explains why it is not necessary to spend endless hours practicing scales:
HOW TO PRACTICE
Prof. Christina of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, has one word for duffers who regularly go out to the driving range with a bucket of balls and hit driver after driver after driver. That word is...stop.
Or at least, pause.
Satisfying as it is to feel that you're really tagging it and getting into a groove by driving dozens of balls or sinking scores of putts without a break, new research by Prof. Christina shows that it's unlikely to help you much on an actual course.
"If you practice with periodic rests, you'll have more success than if you practice for hours on end in what's called 'massed practice,' " says Teresa Dail of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical University, Greensboro, who worked with Prof. Christina on the research effort.
The two scientists had groups of raw beginners practice 12-foot putts. Half the group practiced 60 putts a day on each of four days, while half hit 240 in a row in a single marathon session.
"We had a great learning curve," says Prof. Dail. "Everyone started out terrible and wound up OK." There was no difference between the two groups after one day of practice. But after seven and 28 days, the people who had spread their practice over four days were sinking more putts and getting their misses closer to the hole. In the scientists' scoring system, players got no points for sinking a putt and points equal to the distance the ball stopped from the hole when they missed. The group that spread out their practice averaged 37 points on their 60 12-foot putts, compared with 45 for the players who practiced without a break, the scientists reported last June in the journal Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport.
That fits with what scientists are learning about how movements become encoded in our brains. When we execute a particular series of muscle movements, nerve cells in our brain, known as neurons, fire off electrical impulses. If you practice a movement again and again, your brain releases chemicals that build up the connections between the neurons involved in the movement -- which increases the likelihood that they'll consistently fire in the right sequence and with the right timing. In other words, practice gets your brain accustomed to making the proper motions.
But, says Prof. Dail, "the brain requires a consolidation period" in order to strengthen those neural connections, which are known as synapses. It takes some time -- even overnight -- for the brain chemicals to alter the synapses in an enduring way.
"If you practice 50 putts in a row, you'll get pretty good and feel pretty good," she adds. "But that's misleading: If you do the same thing over and over without a break, your brain can't encode the sequence of movements as well as it can in distributed practice, where you have periodic rests."
Even better: vary the length of the putts you practice. "Loads of research," she says, "shows that's a more effective way to practice than doing the same putt over and over."