Of all the many skills you need to have to be good at golf, few are as important as a good swing. And the main aspects of a good swing are repeatability and power. Let us analyse these terms to find out how one might go about improving them.

Proprioception

Being able to precisely repeat one swing after another is essential to improving your game; without this, correction of faults and improvement are difficult indeed. What does this mean, though, exactly? The main aspect of repeatability is a combined physical and mental sense called proprioception, often called the ‘sixth sense’ by anatomists. This sense is the awareness of the parts of our body in time and space; together with the middle ear, proprioception tells us in minute detail what is going on in our body at any given time in terms of patterns of tension, and changes to this base state over any given time gives us our sense of movement and our memory of the feeling of movements.

When we replay a golf swing in our mind to assess its effectiveness, it is proprioception we rely on to tell us whether we hooked or sliced the shot, and tells us where in the chain of muscles (and movements) the problem originated. This sense has been heavily researched over recent years by neurobiologists the world over for what it can tell us about how we remember and experience certain aspects of being alive, and consciousness itself. As far as golf is concerned however, all we need to know is that this sixth sense can be enhanced enormously using simple techniques. Proprioception relies on receptors in the muscle spindles and tendons. Richly supplied with nerves, these organs tell the brain what states are being experienced. But to tell it in this conventional way is to miss a most important point: the brain doesn’t exist only in your head; it is in fact diffused throughout the body via its nervous system.

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