Feldenkrais And Golf: Can You Find Your Authentic Golf Swing?
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Is there such a thing as an “authentic golf swing?” Do you have a swing, unique to you and used only by you, where you are most deeply and intimately connected to yourself? A swing where you have not only the most power and accuracy, but also where you feel the best? Where you feel the most connected and alive?
It’s an interesting idea. An idea that I am familiar with through my self-application of awareness and movement sessions based on the work of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais. We tend to adopt a number of less-than-optimal habits in our everyday movement. Very often, in fact, most often, we move with too much effort. We habitually overuse our muscles and use too many muscles as we navigate through our environment. Moshe Feldenkrais used to refer to this as enacting “parasitic movements”:
“Efficient movement or performance of any sort is achieved by weeding out, and eliminating, parasitic superfluous exertion.” (1)
The number of potential parasitic movements is astronomical and I will not attempt to categorize them here. But as an example, consider someone who habitually grips the club too tightly. The extra strength on the grip is wasted energy as it does not help them to swing the club. Or think of someone who clenches his teeth or makes a grimace when swinging. Do those extra movements help the person to have a better swing, or are they just background “noise” that gets in the way of the perfect swing? I propose it is the latter.
But here is the problem: Telling someone to relax their grip or let go of their jaw as they swing, rarely works. Think about it. How many times have you heard someone tell a child to “stand up straight” or to “stop slouching.” Does it work? Never. It cannot work. The process of moving is not a conscious process. We can initiate movement, yes. But the act of coordinating and controlling the 100’s of muscles and bones related to a complex movement cannot be done just by thinking about the movement.
Why would a golf swing be any different? One of the keys – as I hope you will feel in my golf swing mp3’s – is to break up your habitual movement patterns by use of new sensory-motor patterns. That is, you experience key elements of your swing in radial new ways. Ways that bring awareness not only to “you” but also to those deeper parts of your nervous system and brain, those evolutionarily older structures, that help you to breathe and eat and hear and move, without the need for you to be consciously involved.
Am I making sense here? Or does it sound like a bunch of hocus pocus?
Whatever your initial feelings are, keep them. I’m not going to try to convince you of anything. I’m going to give you some free mp3 downloads so that you can try the new experiences on for yourself.
cheers for now – Ryan
(1) Learning To Learn: A manual to help you get the best results from the Awareness Through Movement lessons
