Conditioned Reflex Therapy by Andrew Salter

Author:Andrew Salter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786783431
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Case 30

I have included the following case in this chapter because although it is somewhat different, it really belongs here after all. A champion golfer once consulted me. “I have stopped having fun with golf,” he said, “and have started to dislike it. Something has to be done. I don’t want to play a better game. I simply want to play at my best more often.” Golf had originally been a hobby, but it had now become a business. One or two extra strokes could mean the three-thousand-dollar difference between first and second prize.

We discussed golf for several sessions. The body, I explained, has a positional sense, which is as much a sense as sight or smell. Awareness of the position of head and body is regulated by the inner ear, and knowledge of the position of the limbs is mediated by nerve endings buried in the muscles, joints, and tendons.

The positional sense cannot be improved one iota by practice, and the great majority of golfers are doomed to be duffers, no matter how much time they waste trying to improve their game. The ability of a golf champion is based on an inborn gift, and he knows—rather, he feels— with great precision how hard to hit the ball and where to aim it, and he readjusts his stroke accordingly. The less he uses his brain, the better he plays. His best game of golf is his easiest. I continued, “All this talk about correct stance is nonsense. One individual may find his muscle tension distributed better when he has one stance, and somebody else may find that another stance gives a better starting position. ... How’s your home life?”

“Well,” he said.

“Well, what?” He didn’t want to discuss his family, and I couldn’t persuade him to. “Very well,” I said. “I can only help people as much as they permit themselves to be helped.”

On our fourth session we went out to a golf course, and applied some of my principles to the game. Tournament golfers on a new course should practice as little as possible before teeing off. They should just get the vague feel of the grass and then stop. If they over-practice their first stroke, which is usually a long hard drive, their muscular adjustments get off edge for the strokes to follow. Watchmakers know this well. They repair all of their clocks on one day of the week. If they were to intersperse some watches with the clocks, they would keep on breaking delicate parts until their fingers had become readjusted to the lighter muscular tension necessary.

“Use as few clubs as possible, because you need different muscle adjustments for different clubs, no matter how carefully balanced they may be. Changing muscle adjustments as you change clubs will cost you strokes.”

Next, through the methods I explained in Chapter 7, I taught him how to relax. He learned this easily, probably because professional athletes have well-traveled pathways between their brain and their body muscles.

“During a tournament,” I said, “relax before each stroke, and then hit the ball.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.