‘I can’t make the change’. ‘I can’t hole a putt for love nor money’. ‘I can’t hit the ball like I used to’. There are very good reasons for using the word ‘can’t’ and the majority of them initiate from the brain!
Our brain rules our body. Whatever our brain tells our body to do, it does it. The problems come when our brain doesn’t like something we’ve been asked to do. For example, grip changes are always difficult. If I thought a player had a weak grip which was causing the club face to open, I would try and manoeuvre the hands over to the right of the handle to make a stronger position, squaring or even closing the face slightly. However, our brain could reject the idea of changing the position of the hands. The brain can sense the hands have changed position and therefore we tell ourselves it’s uncomfortable because it is out of the ordinary, we’re out of our comfort zone as it’s a feeling we’re not used to. As a result, the hands and wrists stiffen and the brain rejects the idea of the new grip, forcing the hands back to their original position because the brain has said ‘I can’t get into this new position’!
I can bet your bottom dollar that if you stood up straight, let your arms hang down and I asked you to turn your hands to the right you could easily do it. So why doesn’t the same happen when you’re holding a golf club in your hands? It feels like we’re squeezing the living daylights out of the club!
Purely because it feels out of the ordinary and we convince ourselves that this isn’t the correct way because it doesn’t ‘feel’ right. It doesn’t matter if you’re paying £500 for a lesson with one of the worlds best instructors to tell us this information, we won’t do it if we don’t feel it’s right. The only way to convince yourself is to hit balls and hit balls well. And then still even taking it onto the course we find tricky and keep saying to ourselves we can’t do this because we want the safety net of comfort behind us which means going back to the old way of doing things and getting the same old results.