How the Brain Learns - Pt 1
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The key here is understanding how the brain learns new movement patterns. You will struggle to improve your golf swing if you don't first understand how your brain learns.
- The brain learns new patterns in small chunks, one at a time
- Repetition reinforces new neural pathways
- Like any new skill, you have to start slow
- Going out and hitting balls at full speed will NOT reinforce newly learned patterns
One of the first terms that you want to become familiar with as you're trying to learn the golf swing or rebuild the golf swing that you already have, is a term called neuromuscular reeducation.
Basically, what this is is your brain or your nervous system has pathways already developed that you've trained it to do over time.
That help you perform movements more efficiently.
These pathways are not necessarily, from your brain's perspective, wrong or right.
Even though your golf swing may be terrible.
And you may, as David Faraday once quoted, look like an octopus falling out of a tree, that pathway to your brain is all it knows.
Your nervous system created that pathway because you trained it to do those movements, whether you meant to or not.
Each time that you repeat that faulty movement or that bad golf swing, your brain is reinforcing that pathway to make it more efficient.
This process is called myelination or myelinization.
And basically what it means is that these pathways are built up of neurons.
And these neurons, as you continue to repeat something over and over, become thicker and thicker with myelin.
That basically is like an insulator and allows these electrical signals to travel faster.
So, the more you repeat something, the more efficient you become at it.
Right or wrong, whether it's a good movement or a bad movement, your brain doesn't understand the difference.
And so over time, this is why it becomes so hard to learn new movements in the golf swing.
Because you've repeated these things literally thousands and thousands of times.
Every faulty movement that you've made in your golf swing, your brain has learned each time and tried to reinforce that.
And it's a.
It's a complicated process.
It takes a little bit of time to to rebuild these, to build these pathways, but it does happen every time you swing a golf club.
So what we have to do is we have to break down those pathways and build new ones.
When we're trying to build correct movement patterns, and that is the process of neuromuscular re-education.
Basically, we are taking you your nervous system and giving it new information so that it creates new pathways.
So that over time, those movements, the correct movements, become more efficient.
And that's very, very, it's a very specific process and it's a very important one for you to understand what is actually going on and how it happens.
Because so many golfers get frustrated that they don't make changes in their golf swing.
When what they're doing is they're actually going against the way that their brain actually learns.
There is a very specific way that this happens, and it's you.
You need to have all the pieces of the puzzle, and so that's what we're going to talk about.
This, this slide is, of course, called How the Brain learns.
So one important thing that is missed by a lot of golf instructors is a lot of the better golf instructors out there.
Know how to know to tell you what they want you to do.
They they know it is, they know exactly what they're asking you to do, but the problem is, they don't know how to tell you how to do it.
So for instance a golf instructor might tell you I want you to turn your shoulders 90 degrees to the to the target at the top of your backswing well okay but how do you want me to do that we've talked about do you want me to push my left shoulder under my chin do you want me to pull my right shoulder back do you want me to use my obliques do you want me to use my arms and sling them around my body how do you want me to to do that motion and that's where the rotary swing is different we get very specific in the exact muscles that are designed to create those movements and so that is the first thing that you need to understand is that you need to appeal to all your senses when you're trying to rebuild these pathways and you need to understand the how versus just the what so the what is important that's the intellectual knowledge of what it is you need to do in the golf swing the club needs to be in this position or your body needs to be here your joints need to be aligned this way but the catch is your brain needs to know how to do it and because again each time you do it incorrectly even though the club may be in the position that that might be right the body could be in a terrible position and you're going to keep repeating that pattern over and over until you learn how to move your body correctly because that's all we're doing everything in the golf swing is related to how your muscles fire that's it that's the only way that golf club moves is when your muscles contract and so you need to understand how to contract those muscles which muscles to contract and when to do it and that's basically what the rotor swing is is done is it's given you this platform for understanding how to move the golf club not just what to do with it so once you understand that the next thing you need to understand is that learning is a biological process learning the golf swing the way that it's been taught for the past 50 60 years as you've seen with the handicap staying the same for as long as they have is completely ineffective 110 percent going and taking a golf lesson and getting a couple tips and you going out on your own hitting balls at full speed on the range trying to groove that pattern is ineffective that is not the way that your brain learns your brain does not learn at 100 miles an hour it learns very very slowly imagine the first time you ever sat down at the piano all those keys there and you're taught you're told to to play a song or taught to play a song at the first time you play it you're going to hunt and peck your way through it very very very slowly until you that pathway becomes reinforced enough that your brain can fire those electrical signals very quickly and communicate with the rest of your nervous system get these muscles to fire and contract in the way that we need them to so that the song comes out the way that it needs to in the right where have we seen this before well we have to we have to use the the classic movie the classic movie example karate kid because that's exactly what mr miyagi had daniel larusso doing during the movie the first karate kid when he goes out and he has him waxing the cars and waxing the and sanding the deck and painting the fence and painting the house all he was trying to do was teach him very simple movement patterns slowly through repetition and by doing that each time he did it incorrectly corrected him and made him do those movements exactly the way that he wanted to do that now at the end of this whole process of course they they have their great standoff where the karate kid's all upset that he's just sitting there doing all this housework around for mr miyagi not learning any karate and then of course they go through the little sparring match and daniel larusso realizes wow i really did learn something and there was at the end there was no other way i could have learned this i couldn't have learned to fend off mr miyagi throwing punches and kicks at me had we tried to do it this way had he just started throwing kicks and teaching it and me trying to do it at full speed i had to learn over time because those my that myelinization doesn't happen in five seconds it takes two days to as many as a couple weeks for that biological process to occur for the myelin to be wrapped around the neuron for that to pathway to start to become more efficient so in other words with every time you go out and work on your golf swing and let's say you spend an hour hitting balls you didn't technically learn or you didn't reach build a pathway to have that reinforced over a long period of time in that one session it takes repeated sessions and it takes time a couple days to a couple weeks for that pathway to start to be reinforced and it's that's a little bit different for everybody whether it's a couple days or a couple weeks but the fact of the matter is it's a biological change that's happening in your brain and you need those repetitions to master these tasks so the first thing you need to take out of this is that a whether or not you become a great golfer is dependent on two things one the quality of the information that you're receiving in other words whether or not the instruction that you're receiving from your instructor is the right information and b it you need to understand that it is a change that's going to take time and repetition there's no way around it whether or not you become a great golfer is not determined whether or not you have some god-given talent it is a matter of whether or not you're willing to put in the time to rebuild proper pathways proper movement patterns and research has shown it's about three to five thousand reps to master a movement pattern that doesn't mean you can't repeat it after doing it 50 times but in order for it to become automatic and fully grooved it's three to five thousand repetitions and there's just no way around this so if you want to master the takeaway you need to a have the right information on how to perform the takeaway and b you need to put in three to five thousand quality reps of doing that movement correctly before it will ever be grooved now three to five thousand reps again is is for it to be mastered the number that you want to take out of this session right now is that it's a hundred reps for a pathway to even be created now think about that if you're out hitting balls and let's say you hit a hundred balls and you're doing it at full speed and you're trying to learn a new thing a new movement let's say you're working on the takeaway and you're working on the shoulder blade glide that we talk about on the website do you think that you're going to do that exactly correctly a hundred times when you're trying to focus on making contact hitting the ball at the target all those things of course not but now and more importantly it's going to take more time to hit those hundred balls than it would to take five minutes or 15 minutes away from that and try to do the hundred reps away from the ball so the thing you need to understand here is that in each lesson that i give we try to get whatever movement pattern that we're working on for that session we try to at least get a hundred reps if it's a new pattern because i don't want the student to come back tomorrow or go work on his own the next day and not have had any pathway created because he's going to go back and start all over again he may intellectually know exactly what i told him but his body his nervous system hasn't built the pathway for his muscles to be able to repeat that sequence that's the key is that you need at least a hundred reps in a in that session for the pathway to be created so that's always my goal in a lesson is to get a hundred reps in doing it flawlessly doing it perfectly so that the brain at least has a chance tomorrow to try and continue to rebuild that path or to build upon that pathway so a hundred reps is the goal in any session that you're doing a hundred perfect reps doing it exactly the way that you want to so that your brain is learning the right information because again it can interpret i don't want to learn that but i do want to learn that it doesn't know right or wrong it simply does whatever you tell it to do and it builds those pathways whether they're right or wrong so you need to understand that learning is a biological process that when you're learning a new trait in the golf swing you're re-educating your nervous system it takes time for everybody even tiger woods has to go through the exact same learning pathway that you do and a good little refresher might be to go back and watch the karate kid and watch how those movements that he has him doing are very very simple at first he needs to learn the very basic movements which is the same in the golf swing the takeaway the setup the grip you need to learn all those basic movements before you combine them at speed and combine them in more complex distracting situations like the golf course so take some time to understand that the reason you haven't gotten better at golf is not because you don't have talent or that you that you're never going to be a good golfer the reason that you haven't gotten better at golf is a probably that you didn't receive the right information b it wasn't communicated to you in the right way in other words you you had the what of what you wanted to do or what your golf instructor wants you to do but he didn't give you the how on how to do it and c you didn't have a learning program that was built around how your brain actually learns did your instructor give you a program that says look in this lesson we're going to try to get 100 reps on this one specific movement pattern over the next month we're going to try to get those 3 000 reps in and then we're going to work on to the next thing in reality you can't avoid that that is how your brain learns that's how everybody's brain learns and that's what you need to walk away from with this slide today
Mark
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
John
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Brendan
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Brendan
Nicholas
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Beat
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
al
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
R.J. (Certified RST Instructor)
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
R.J. (Certified RST Instructor)
Bernd
R.J. (Certified RST Instructor)