The Consistency of Golf: Understanding and Controlling Your Variables, A Medical Viewpoint

By Dr. Robert B. Bates and Heather Bates

This book explains the current medical literature, in layman's terms, concerning the execution of precise, consistent motor function and control. It allows the reader to implement many strategies to attain more consistent control and learn how to handle and fix problems that they have in their game of golf. There are 25 chapters, each designed to teach a valuable lesson concerning the major variables that occur on the golf course.
This text will make sense of the reasons why a shot feels correct or does not and how one can develop more and more understandable consistent behavior. The text covers all of the known topics necessary to gain tremendous control in every aspect of the game of golf.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543916133

Book preview

The Consistency Of Golf:

Understanding & Controlling Your Variables

A Medical Viewpoint

Dr. Robert B. Bates

Numerous tips, based on current medical research, that will immediately take shots off your game.

The Consistency Of Golf:

Understanding & Controlling Your Variables

A Medical Viewpoint

Copyright © 2017 Dr. Robert B. Bates

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-54391-613-3

Preface

You are about to begin a journey that will transform your game of golf and make you a much more consistent golfer.

The newest medical research is allowing us to understand exactly how you can be efficient and repetitive in motor activities by better understanding brain function.

Your brain creates maps of many different body parts with reference frames to know your position in your environment. These maps are called somatotopic maps and you form them for your head, head on neck, neck on body, hands, feet and internal structures like blood vessels etc. You literally have maps for everything and that is how your body can regulate movement of you in space and of internal movements like blood flows etc.

Your inner ear (vestibular system) gives information to the brain about movement of your heads angular and translational velocities. Your skin, muscles, tendons, ligaments and joint receptors (somatosensory system) give information to your brain about body movements. Your eyes give information to your brain about your movement in your environment. This information is integrated by your brain and creates an accurate awareness of you and your body parts in your environment as well as the dynamic changes of you in your environment. This information is critical to internal and external body function. The more accurate information your brain receives, the more accurate you can move in your environment.

Any aberration of the incoming information or incorrect processing of the information creates a mismatch of your balance, vision, position in space and your space around you. We now understand these systems well enough to correct some of the mismatch and therefore create more accurate awareness and subsequent function. These are exciting times in functional neurology!

The information in this book will give you the best possible chance of creating accurate motor function in your environment. Golf is a game that anyone can play. I have treated patients from the ages of 6 to 96 that have played the game of golf. However, to be a good golfer is entirely a different matter. Golf is one of the sports that you can begin playing immediately, even though at a very poor level, and continue to excel with practice and commitment. This is untrue for many other sports, where you have to have a certain basic skill to play the game.

For instance, you cannot play hockey unless you learn how to skate and perform some other basic skills. You cannot play tennis unless you can hit the ball and return it to some degree. Golf, however, is a game that almost anyone can muster the limited skill necessary to hit a stationary ball on the ground, no matter how many times it takes to get to the hole.

Golf is a game that depends upon your individual skill. You are playing against yourself, even though your score determines whether you beat an opponent. You, therefore, are under control, and there is very little luck involved, other than some minimal weather considerations. The final outcome, therefore, is relative to your particular degree of skill and execution of the game. There are very few factors altering the end result that you are not in control of.

Simply put, playing golf is to hit the ball which propels it to a location dependent upon how it is struck. There is no other magical consideration, and it can be broken down into a game of pure Newtonian physics. If the club head hits the ball properly at the correct speed without producing spin vertically or horizontally, the ball will go straight to its desired location. Why, then, are there not more professional golfers that play a consistent game? That is what this book will attempt to explain in considerable detail. There are a significant number of variables which alter consistency of the game that you can control if given the understanding.

We have all hit the ball with precision, sending the ball exactly where we wanted it and imagined it to go. We seem to know immediately when striking the ball if it felt right. This feedback tells us that our predicted motor command (efferent copy) was accurate or not. This allows us to learn. Our brain is always calculating how accurate our activity was in relation to the efferent copy or preprogrammed motor command. We have also hit the ball knowing immediately, before seeing its path, that it was a horrible shot. Why was the efferent copy incorrect? Wouldn’t it be marvelous to understand as many of the variables as possible and to increase the consistency of your motor commands? We will see that there are many factors that can be controlled to help increase your consistency.

We would like our swing to be as accurate as possible, and the only way that this can happen is if we can reproduce a swing over and over again, knowing its potential outcome (creating efferent copy that is accurate). We would like our swing to be precise, like a long-barreled rifle, using a precision made bullet containing the exact amount of firing power with each shot. If we can produce a consistent swing, we will not only play a much better game of golf, but enjoy it much more as well.

By reading this book, you will understand that it is impossible for you to have the swing of Jack Nicholas or Arnold Palmer or any other professional golfer. You are a unique person in mind and body unlike anyone else and this creates the golfer that you are and will be. It is a mistake to try to copy the swing of someone else who has many variables that are different than yours. This is not to say that you cannot be a professional golfer, but only that you will have your own mental and physical mechanism and you cannot completely emulate another golfers style. Your nervous system is different than anyone else’s and your ability to learn movement patterns is specific to you. Your body proportions are your own with a difference in weight to height ratios and lengths of bones, and therefore lever arms. Your muscle strength and flexibility, speed of muscle contraction and endurance are your own. Your response to temperature changes, stress response, vision, upper neck function, posture, inner ear mechanism, and many other factors are specific to you. You must, therefore, develop your own style, and that is what this book will allow you to do.

This book is not designed to go through the various idiosyncrasies of making different shots and specifics of any individual professional player. We will cover the basics which I feel are important and give you further knowledge to allow you to make your own personal variables work for you. We do not want you to try to emulate or copy any professional player, since this will have a detrimental effect to your overall game. You can prove this to yourself by looking at the different professional players and finding quite a variety of technique depending upon what has worked best for their individual body type and functional ability.

After covering the basics, which are fairly standard and outlined in many other textbooks, we will move into other subtleties that will change your game. Most importantly, is the fact that you must have the best possible eyesight, balance and a nervous system leading to the creation of exacting body and environmental maps. Secondary to your map formation are all of the variables that are dependent on, or secondary to, your body maps (where you are in your environment). Variables covered are; mind/body connection, visualization and imagery, nutrition, strength and endurance, warm-up, cool-down, stretching, stress, balance, inner ear, eye and upper neck integration, brain health, anchoring, multiple sensory deficit, mental attitude, postural distortion, nervous system learning and other factors.

You must have a basic knowledge of muscle systems, skeletal systems and the nervous system to fully understand, appreciate, and utilize what will be explained in the following chapters.

A quick look at the title of each of the chapters may not seem immediately relevant although you will very quickly understand the importance of all of these. The entire purpose of this book is to increase the consistency and, therefore, a more positive result of your golf game. Anything that can alter consistency will be covered in this book. I can assure you that it will change your game and all other movement you perform, for the better.

Authors Biography

Dr. Robert Bates was born in Clinton Massachusetts on November 13, 1956. He attended Clinton Junior Senior high school from 1970 until 1974 where he graduated near the top of his class. Dr. Bates attended Clark University in Worcester Massachusetts from 1974 until 1978 graduating as a biology major in the premed program. He then worked full-time in his family’s construction business while saving money to return to advanced educational training. In 1985 Dr. Bates graduated magna cum laude from Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He then began training in the chiropractic neurology diplomate program and received his Chiropractic Diplomate in Neurology in 1989. Dr. Bates has continually attended classes in rehabilitation, functional neurology, post-concussive diagnosis and treatment, vestibular rehabilitation, cervical acceleration deceleration trauma, physical therapy, nutrition and many other subjects. Dr. Bates has written hundreds of articles, three books and made numerous educational videos. Dr. Bates has also lectured on many topics over his 31 years of practice.

Dr. Bates has four children and lives in Hubbardston, Ma. He enjoys many types of outdoor activities including kayaking, hockey, swimming, skiing, hiking, biking, and spends a good amount of time in the summer on his boat traveling to destinations around southern Massachusetts including the Elizabeth Islands, Martha’s Vineyard, Block Island and Nantucket.

Dr. Bates has continuously evolved in his ability to diagnose and treat patients for central and peripheral type injury. He has been involved in the study of brain function for many years and has a good understanding of the topics discussed in this manuscript.

Table of Contents

Preface

Authors Biography

History Of Golf

The Basic Fundamentals

Somatotopic Maps And Reference Frames

Balance

Brain Health And Compensation

Motor Control

Personal, Peripersonal And Extrapersonal Space

Nervous System Learning

Motor Systems And Muscular Balance

Strength And Endurance

Flexibility, Warmup, Cool-Down, And Stretch

Golfing After Fifty

Body Type And Your Swing

Vision

Inner Ear Mechanism

Neck Reflexes

Visualization

Pre-Shot Routine (Anchoring)

Mental Attitude (Confidence And Concentration)

What Is Stress, And How To Reduce It

Nutrition

Postural Distortion

External Environment

The Importance Of Exercise

Stretches

Putting It All Together

chapter ONE

History Of Golf

Even though this book is concerned with the consistency of your game, I feel that it is important to understand the history of golf since it has been such a popular and consistent sport since the 14th or 15th century. Most historians believe that golf began in the Netherlands since the word kolf means club and apparently golf was a derivation of kolf. However, the Romans played a game with a bent stick and a ball made of feathers that was quite similar to the game of present-day golf.

The present-day game of golf was devised by the Scottish people in the 14th or 15th century. In fact, the game became so popular throughout Scotland that the Scottish Parliament in 1457 passed a law prohibiting certain games including golf. These laws were passed because apparently the people were playing golf and other sports instead of practicing archery which was a military necessity at the time.

Most of these laws were ignored and early in the 16th century, King James IV began playing golf himself. His granddaughter, Mary, who became Mary, Queen of Scots, was educated in France and began playing the game there. The word caddy or caddie was a term derived from cadets, which was the name given to the young men who attended to Mary, Queen of Scots in France. The term caddie was a derivation used in Scotland and England after the original word cadets was used in France.

James VI of Scotland created attention to the game of golf as did James I of England and his son Charles I. In the 1700’s, the first golf associations were formed, including the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744, the Saint Andrew’s Society of Golfers in 1755, and the Royal Black Heath in 1776. The Saint Andrew’s Society of Golfers changed its name in 1834 to its present name,

Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Saint Andrew’s. Golf was introduced to England in 1608.

The first golf clubs formed outside of England were the Calcutta golf club of East India in 1829, and the Royal Bombay club in 1842.

On this continent, the first golf club was formed in Canada and called the Royal Montreal Golf Club founded in 1873. There is some minimal evidence that golf was played in the Americas during the colonial period, but there is no documented proof of this. However, in 1888, the Saint Andrew’s Golf Club of Yonkers, New York, was formed. It is believed that the Saint Andrew’s Golf Club of Yonkers, New York, is the oldest continuously existing golf club in the United States.

By the 1920’s, the popularity of golf in the United States and Great Britain was tremendous. With the advent of television, golf became an even more popular sport.

Statistics presently show that there are over 15,372 golf courses in the united states alone, down from a high of 16,052 in 2000. Worldwide, there are over 34,000 golf courses. In the US there are over 29,000,000 golfers who play golf at least once a year. There are approximately 8000 public, 1000 resort, 4300 semi-private and 200 military courses.

Golf has become very popular in other parts of the world, and especially in Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Africa.

The ball was originally made of feathers that were tightly packed together in a leather cover. In approximately 1850, a ball made of gutta-percha came into use. Gutta-percha is a milky liquid obtained from Malaysian trees that hardens after being boiled and cooled. In approximately 1901, a ball with a rubber core enclosed in gutta-percha similar to the ball in use today was developed. The uneven surface on the golf balls is used to stabilize the flight. Golf balls weigh no more than 1.62 ounces in the United States, and have a diameter no less than 1.68 inches.

Over the years we have seen various types of clubs being developed relative to the materials available. Today we have titanium and other materials that are used to create a highly efficient club allowing the driving distances to become incredible.

chapter TWO

The Basic Fundamentals

There are five basic fundamentals. If there is a change in any one of the fundamentals your game will change. The five basic fundamentals are:

Grip

stance

Posture

Ball position

Swing

We will cover the basic fundamentals briefly, since the major impetus of this book is to discuss the many subtle factors you may not be aware of. However, it never hurts to review the basic fundamentals. I would suggest that if you do have a problem with fundamentals, you take a couple of lessons from a qualified instructor with whom you have a good rapport. You should acquire enough information from experts to be sure that your fundamentals are sound before reinforcing them to become a learned motor response. (covered later) It is very difficult and time consuming to try to alter and re-learn motor responses as we will see.

We will be covering many subtle variables in the following chapters that are not considered basic fundamentals. If basic fundamentals are not sound and consistent then following information cannot be consistent either.

THE GRIP

It is a basic premise that within reason there are many types of grip that work well. Some golfers interlock the pointer and pinkies. Other golfers overlap the pinky to the second and third digits; and still others do not overlap or interlock at all. Since all hands are of different dimensions, including finger length and width as well as strength, you must find the grip that is comfortable and gives you the best consistency. It would be wise to get a professional’s opinion since you will save yourself a lot of time with experienced advice of where to start. The most important fact about grip is that it must be consistent. That is, it must never change. Since the grip is the only connection of your body to the golf club it must be consistent or no matter what else you do, you will never have a consistent game.

The most important fact to understand about grip is that the more sensory information you gain from your grip the better control you will have. That is to say, that the more sensory receptors that are activated and travel into your central nervous system, the more precise the motor activity coming out will be. Our motor systems run on sensory information going in and not on motor alone coming out.

There are two secondary concerns having to do with grip. The first is that when you hold a golf club in your hands your personal space increases which alters your brains creation of your environmental mapping. If you alter the way you hold the club then it alters your personal space and changes the consistency of your environmental mapping that your brain has created. When you’re received mapping of your environment is altered then all of the function in your environment is altered. The second concern is the fact that at times you will have to change your grip for special shots and this takes practice so that your brain has learned that this altered sensory information creates an altered response.

There is great diversity in the use of weak or strong grips. These terms are used to describe the amount of rotation of your hands on the golf club, and this depends upon the size and structure of the hands and wrists, as well as the mobility or flexibility of the wrists, forearms and other structures.

The V formed between the thumb and first finger of both hands should point toward the right shoulder for most body types. This, again, may be somewhat variable but is usually the case. Your hands, when gripping the club, should be secure but not overly tight since you want your arms to be relaxed. If you grip too tightly with your hands, you will have a central nervous system overflow of grip strength which creates tightness in the lower arm muscles and will prevent a fluid swing. This explains why the ball goes farther than you think it should have when you are relaxed versus when you hold on tightly and expect more. You think that you put more force into the swing but the club head speed was reduced by holding to tightly and stiffening your lower arms.

Some general, acceptable information concerning grip should be that the left hand should feel comfortable when you place it on the club. Usually this means that the thumb of the left hand is slightly to the right of center of the most vertical part of handle. The thumb of your right hand should rest just left of center so that it does not control the club. When you place the right hand on the club with the thumb slightly left of center and to your desired locking interrelationship with the left hand, it should feel firm and comfortable. The type of grip that you decide to be consistent with must remain the same. This is why you should get as much information about grip style from a couple of professionals so that you can begin to get use to one grip and not have to change it, which will alter your entire game. Your hands must work together as a single unit, and therefore must feel comfortable through the entire backswing and fore swing without any discomfort. If any discomfort arises, it will decrease the usable information which must be sent from the hands to the central nervous system, as we will see in further chapters.

THE STANCE

Stance is one of the critical basic fundamentals. You must backswing the club away from the ball and return it to the ball with precision and consistency. If the stance is not proper, then it is literally impossible to hit the ball correctly. You will not hit