Mastering Golf's Mental Game: Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performance and Lower Scores - Hardcover

Lardon, Michael; Rudy, Matthew

 
9780553417913: Mastering Golf's Mental Game: Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performance and Lower Scores
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553417916 ISBN 13: 9780553417913
Verlag: Crown Archetype, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Perfect your mental approach to your game

To be a golfer is to tinker—with everything from equipment to grip to swing. But one thing most players don’t give enough attention to is the mental game. Psychologists aren’t a new phenomenon in golf, but Dr. Michael Lardon is a different breed of performance coach. Instead of sending his players into a losing battle against emotion, indecision, and fear on the golf course, he shows them how to organize their thoughts and use them for maximum performance. His step-by-step Pre-Shot Pyramid provides any player with the ideal blueprint for shot setup. And his revolutionary Mental Scorecard will give you the tools to accurately measure what you really do on the golf course and how to make real, permanent improvements.
          You will learn the same techniques that Dr. Lardon shares with Phil Mickelson and dozens of other tour players, including the tools that helped Mickelson right himself after the 2012 U.S. Open to win the British Open a month later with a historic final round. Mastering Golf’s Mental Game will change the way you think about golf, and is a must-read for any player serious about shooting better scores and getting more enjoyment out of the game.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DR. MICHAEL T. LARDON is an associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego and a consulting psychiatrist to the United States Olympic teams at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. His clients have won major championships, Olympic gold medals, Super Bowls, and World Series titles. He lives with his wife and three children outside San Diego.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1

The Anatomy of Performance

What is it that separates a PGA Tour player from an amateur who plays once a week?

It sounds like a silly question with easy, obvious -answers.

Talent.

Practice.

Single-minded dedication.

Access to first-class instruction.

All true, but secondary to the real point.

What if I told you that one of the main traits that separates tour players from you and me on the golf course--and world-beaters like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson from the "rank-and-file" players on the Tour--has nothing to do with physical talent or beating thousands of balls on the range?

I've spent my career studying human performance, both in the lab and out in the world. My job is figuring out what makes people perform to the best of their abilities and clearing the roadblocks that stand in their way.

The real geniuses in sports--people like Michael Jordan in basketball, Serena Williams in tennis, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, and Tiger Woods in golf--unquestionably have incredible physical talent. But what really separates those giants from the rest is not their ability to manipulate a ball or their body in a certain way.

It's their ability to manipulate time.

You've probably heard athletes and announcers talk about how the game "slowed down" for them. Quarterbacks talk about the key moment when the scene from behind the offensive line wasn't total chaos but a chessboard, with the pieces moving in a choreographed dance. Baseball hitters talk about seeing pitches come in slow and fat--just waiting to be hit.

To those of us watching the action as spectators, time obviously doesn't actually slow down and wait for these players to do their thing.

It just seems like it does for them.

I know something about this from firsthand experience. I've played table tennis at a relatively high level for a number of years, and as a teenager I was ranked among the top handful of players in the United States. Still, there was a tier of players above me who were significantly better. At sixteen years old, I was playing one of them--six-time U.S. Open champion Dal-Joon Lee--when I found that place where the ball slows down, at least for a short time.

Watch a YouTube video of a match between two skilled table tennis players and you'll see that it's truly one of the fastest ball sports in the world. Players are hitting the ball in excess of 80 miles per hour across a table that is only nine feet long. It doesn't seem possible that the players can even react to what's happening.

But for the first hour of that match against Dal-Joon Lee, I was. I was connected to the ball. I could see it coming from every angle, and I was blocking and smashing it almost at will. I was ahead two sets and 13-7 in the third when a comment from one of my friends in the crowd--something to the effect that this would be the biggest upset in the sport at that time--broke the trance I was in, and I ended up losing.

For that short time, I had been in The Zone.

Table tennis was a challenging career path for a teenager in New York in those days, and after competing in the German professional league for a year and a half, I moved on to the premed program at Stanford. One of my earliest lab partners in organic -chemistry was Eric Heiden, who had just finished winning all five of the individual speed skating gold medals at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. We became great friends, and it would fascinate me to hear him talk about his biggest races as if he had skated them in an empty rink, with nobody watching. Everything slowed down--even his pulse.

In one special class that Stanford convened for students with high-level athletic experience, Eric described how he was able to visualize every single stride he was about to make before his gold medal 5,000-meter race, and how he stumbled over a rut in the ice halfway through his 1,500-meter final but recovered in time to take another gold. Eric was the first person ever to win five individual gold medals in one Olympics--swimmer Michael Phelps matched him in 2008--and the very definition of this incredible mental acumen I've been describing.

As I made my way through my academic career at Stanford and the University of Texas and moved on to my internship in internal medicine at UCLA, my fascination with this kind of "timeless time" that great athletes would experience continued. It seemed that when a competitor was in the right state of consciousness, he or she could sample time in smaller and smaller increments. If you think of a fastball coming out of a pitcher's hand at 98 miles per hour, a hitter who is struggling might see that ball as a single frame. A photograph. But a locked-in Miguel Cabrera sees the ball as a movie--with thousands of frames. And when he's locked in like that, the movie slows down to the point where he can see the individual stitches on the ball, just as it slows down for a PGA Tour player when he can actually feel the position of the clubface at impact while the head is moving at 125 miles per hour.

I wanted to figure out what made the great ones like Eric--or Dal-Joon Lee--able to essentially live in The Zone, while other competitors could only visit it on occasion. Was it something inherently different in their makeup--like the physical difference between a six-foot-two point guard and a seven-foot-one center? Did their minds work differently?

And, most importantly, was it something an athlete could make happen more frequently through -training?

The answer surprised me, and I'm sure it will surprise you too.

To figure it out, I engineered a study--which earned a grant from the United States Tennis -Association--that measured the way different groups of athletes responded to light while under hypnosis. I based it on a technique developed by Dr. David Spiegel, a prominent psychiatrist at Stanford. Without getting too technical, Dr. Spiegel measured the changes in brain-processing speed on an EEG machine while people were under hypnosis--something extremely valuable in the study of disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and ADD.

In my study, I used Dr. Spiegel's techniques on different groups of athletes, from world-class to competitive amateur triathletes to average "weekend warriors." I predicted that the study would show that those in the world-class group--which included my friend Eric Heiden, tennis player Roz Fairbanks, eight-time Ironman Triathlon champion Paula Newby-Fraser, Olympic miler Steve Scott, and gold-medal gymnast Peter Vidmar--would show that they received information more quickly than the average person and then processed it more quickly as well. In other words, their mental machine was in higher tune than those of us mortals.

But in reality my original prediction--that the signals would get there faster and stronger--didn't hold true. There is a correlation between being in top physical shape and processing information more quickly and efficiently. But the true world-class athletes didn't automatically process information any more quickly or efficiently than the group of fit amateur triathletes.

What they did do, however, was show the ability to consistently and consciously put themselves in a trancelike state that enhances performance. Simply put, the study seemed to indicate that peak athletic performance is more about state--the competitor's level of consciousness and ability to handle a given situation--than it is about trait, or some innate physical or mental wiring.

In other words, you can learn to find The Zone.

That's something with huge implications in the world of peak performance.

You've probably heard of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's runaway bestseller about the subject of human excellence. In it he advances Dr. K. Anders Ericsson's...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown Archetype
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553417916
ISBN 13 
9780553417913
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
CROWN
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/

Avda. Diagonal 640 planta 4 A
Barcelona
Barcelona
8017
Spanien