Golf Swing Conditioning and Habit Building - Introduction

Changing or creating habits is not simple or easy. If it were, we would never shank an iron or “peek” at the line before completing our putting stroke, we wouldn’t overeat and would all be thin, and we would all be up early enough to eat a healthy breakfast before work.

The commonly recited 21 day rule for forming or breaking habits is a myth. For most people, breaking and refraining from a bad habit is a lifetime effort, compounded by the fact that our brains form strong associations between activities and their context which never go away. No apparent scientific reason has been established which indicates it should take three weeks to break an old habit or make a new one. Depending on your unique goals, physical, and psychological profile and the activity/habit you which to establish or break, it could take three weeks, it could take five days, or it could take nine months.

Research shows that habits are formed through a process called ‘context-dependent repetition’. For example, imagine that, when you get home each evening, you do a simple exercise. When you first exercise upon getting home, a mental link is formed between the context (getting home) and your response to that context (exercise). Each time you subsequently exercise in response to getting home, this link strengthens, to the point that getting home comes to prompt you to exercise automatically, without giving it much prior thought; a habit has formed.

Habits are mentally efficient: the automation of frequent behaviors allows us to conserve the mental resources that we would otherwise use to monitor and control these behaviors, and deploy them on more difficult or novel tasks. Habits are likely to persist over time; because they are automatic and so do not rely on conscious thought, memory or willpower. We ultimately want to capitalize on this phenomenon of the mental links associated with ‘habits’ in establishing and sustaining our desired behaviors.

If one of your golf game goals is to increase your driving and iron shot distance and accuracy, start with these steps to increase your chances of success:

• Take small steps and build up gradually. Instead of “I’m going to exercise every single day,” start with “I’m going to do some type of simple exercise at least twice a week right when I get home.”
  

• Only try to change one habit at a time. (Instead of “I’m going to quit eating all junk food, start exercising, and go to sleep at 10 p.m. instead of 2 a.m.,” start with “I’m going to walk (weather permitting or do a golf exercise when I get home from work.”)
  

• Write down the habit you want to change, and write down specific plans for achieving that goal. Rather than writing “I will exercise,” write, “I will start walking or doing a simple golf exercise 30 minutes twice a week when I arrive home from work.”
  

• Repeat the behavior you’re aiming for as often as you can. The more a behavior is repeated, the more likely it is that it will become “instinctive.”
  

In the coming weeks, we will outline groups of both general and golf specific movements that you can do to improve your overall golf game and conditioning.