Fluid Motion Factor
By Steven Yellin
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As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with one question in sports: how is intention transformed into execution. You want to hit a forehand passing shot down the line, you want to sink a free-throw, you want to flop a wedge over a bunker. What are the mechanics of transformation, on the most fundamental level, that allow this to occur? A story from ancient India that may shed some light on this. A young seeker of Truth asked an enlightened sage where the intelligence of a tree comes from. The sage asked the student to fetch a banyan seed and he did as requested. The sage asked him to cut the seed open. When the student did this, the sage asked him what he saw. The student said the seed was hollow and he saw nothing. And the sage said, 'from this nothingness, all the intelligence of the tree emerges and the giant tree is grown'. Great performances seems to emerge from nothingness in sports as well. Speith: 'my mind goes blank and I get in the zone'. Tiger: 'there have been key shots where I took the club out of the bag and I didn't remember anything until the ball landed on the green'. Bubba, three years ago when he won the Masters: 'I don't remember anything about the last four holes'. All banyan quotes. Great ones do less and less until it feels like they are doing just about nothing out there.

On more than one occasion, professional golfers have told me that there are always a couple of weeks during the year where their swing is working very well and they just wait for that time to cash in. I don't accept the underlying premise of that statement. Here is why. Imagine a golf tournament where everyone can hit a second ball if they don't like their first one. No one would dominate on tour. Any tour. And the reason why no one would not dominate is on the second shot, most golfers would get into that same space they get into during that two week stretch, where they were swinging very well. Muscle memory does not break down. What breaks down is the ability to access muscle memory. But it's a very slippery road to access what you already own. That is why many golfers can only access that for a limited period of time during the year. It doesn't have to be like that. For sure, it doesn't have to be like that.
 -----Steven Yellin, Fluid Motion Coach at David Ledbetter Golf Academy

Fluid Motion Factor

Typical scenario: you hit it well on the range but can't find that swing on the course. Don't be a prisoner of the by-product, the swing. It's like a venus-fly trap. It's exhausting...mentally and physically. You will get sucked into a complexity that is almost never-ending. You will be chasing an elusive shadow. The fact is that muscle memory does not significantly break down on a daily basis. The implications for golfers are enormous. Once a motion has been grooved, which means it can be repeated on the range over and over, that motion can't break down...what breaks down is the circuitry that produces the motion. So when you miss a shot, of course something happened in the swing that produced the miss. That is rather obvious. The question is why did it happen. That's the real question. Answering that question could be career-changing.