The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Journey To Excellence
THE ART OF PERFECT PRACTICE
If someone were to design the ideal golfer they would include a number of traits held by nearly all the top players. First would be the ability to hit the ball long and straight. Many things go into playing good golf, but being able to bang the ball a long way down the fairway means you are playing offense instead of defense. Next would come putting. A long drive and a mid-iron to 10 feet only pays off if you can roll in the 10-foot birdie putt at least some of the time; and those four footers for par count just as much. The ideal golfer would play with great tempo and rhythm, allowing them to master all the crafty in-between shots inside 100 yards that scoring requires. Great tempo and rhythm set apart the merely good players from the great.
You’d want all these things—power, touch, and a sense of calm under pressure. But more than anything you’d want a healthy dose of myelin. If you’ve never heard of myelin, you shouldn’t worry. It’s not something you can buy at a pro shop or a drugstore or even read about in a golf magazine. But people who study the brain, and in particular how the brain works as we learn new skills, believe myelin is the magic that enables talent to develop. So what am I talking about? Myelin is a sheath of fatty tissue that coats nerve fibers in the brain. Think of it like rubber insulation surrounding a copper wire. Myelin preserves the strength of electrical impulses that travel along the copper wire, or nerve fiber.
What does this have to do with golf? Or with playing piano or chess or tennis or any other activity that requires a lot of time and patience to master? The general theme is that when we’re trying to do something difficult, like serve a tennis ball or make a good golf swing, the impulses in the brain that control the action are many and varied. The key to making the swing we want is to have the signals “travel at the right speed [and] arrive at the right time,” says Dr. Douglas Fields, one of the world’s leading experts in developmental neurobiology. In other words, if you’re trying to hit a soft 9-iron downwind and your brain sends the signal to hit a regular 9-iron, you’ve just earned yourself a bogey, maybe worse.
And the difference between your brain sending the signals correctly and something going slightly wrong takes place in the time it takes a fly to flap its wings. Now here’s the best part: the interesting thing about myelin is that its insulating qualities improve—it actually gets thicker—the more often the nerves it surrounds are called into action. And the thicker it gets, the more precisely the brain’s signals travel, arriving at their destination at the proper time and in the proper sequence. In other words, the more myelin you have in the right parts of the brain, the better your chances of your soft 9-iron one-hopping to five feet below the hole.
And the most important thing about myelin? The more you practice, the more you get.
Any serious golfer is familiar with practice. It is fair to say that no one has ever achieved any reasonable proficiency in the game without working at it. But there is practice, and there is proper practice. There is going to practice because it’s time to go to practice, and there is going to practice so engaged in what you are doing that nearly every moment is used to further perfect the skills you are trying to master. The old line about practice making perfect is a mistake. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect. And myelin: “What do good athletes do when they train? They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to the myelin on that wire,” says Dr. George Bartzokis, a professor of neurology at UCLA. “They end up, with all the training, with a super-duper wire—lots of bandwidth, a high-speed T-1 line. That’s what makes them different than the rest of us.”
Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University is one of the world’s leading experts on skill acquisition. He has spent most of his academic career studying practice and expert performance across many different activities (sports, music, chess, medicine) to learn why some people learn how to do things better than others and what the best way is to teach them. And while truly talented people can seem magical when compared to ordinary folk—anyone who has seen professional golfers in person usually can’t help but be amazed at how good they are compared to even respectable recreational players—Ericsson says even the very best golfers or musicians can trace their success to deliberate practice aimed at mastering a specific task or groups of tasks.
What is deliberate practice? Ericsson defines it this way: “Being engaged in activities specifically designed to improve performance with full concentration.”
And this is the part that separates those who dream about being a world class competitor in golf or any other sport from those who plan on it: Ericsson’s research shows that it takes about 10 years or more of intense practice and training in a particular area to reach a level where you will be able to compete on a national or international level.
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