The Art of Clubface Control
Below is a lesson from the Mind Caddie app following a recent podcast between Karl Morris and Trevor Jones about the value and importance of attention.
Listen or read the lesson below.
As a podcast guest of mine, trevor Jones, said a while ago, attention is the currency of performance, and I really do agree with him that, not only from a golfing perspective but a life perspective. Whatever we decide to pay attention to will come to life, and that will be either enhance or diminish our experience of life. And when you look at it with golf this day and age, we are almost at war with our attention.
Really, because there is so much stimulus, there's so much information, there's so many people competing for our valuable attention. Think of what happens every time you switch your phone on, and all the alerts and messages, all the people attempting to grab your attention with the latest hit on social media, something, a prompt for you to buy, something that you believe, something that they believe that you will want or need or desire.
So attention is constantly being pulled around from place to place. And then when we come to play the game of golf, then we're actually required to go back in time in a way when actually the game brings us back to a requirement to pay attention to what we're actually doing, as obvious as that sounds Now, of all of the things that you could be paying attention to in terms of developing your golf.
One of the simplest things to consider is what is going to have the biggest impact and return in terms of skill development, and that would clearly be the time when the golf balls is supplied with information to produce the shot Impact. What is the biggest factor at impact is the direction the clubface is pointing, the clubface orientation. Now, I honestly believe that the vast majority of people who are with us here on the mind caddy would dramatically stupendously, if that's not too big a word improve the quality of their golf if they paid more attention and became more aware of the clubface.
Because if you can become aware of the clubface I mean genuinely aware there's a big difference between having a conceptual understanding of where the clubface should be and an actual and awareness of where it is. If you can become aware of that clubface, you can influence the clubface, and if you can influence the clubface, you can influence your shots.
One suggestion that I would have to begin to develop this is just make a commitment that, as part of your training, as part of your practice and even out on the golf course, you can do this, because you might find it a very useful place to put your attention when you're actually out playing is to develop up some awareness skills around that clubface, even hitting some shots in the garden. Just go and make some swings back yard, the garden, on a mat in your net, if you've got one at home and just place your attention on the clubface and see if you can keep your attention there all the way through the swing.
Now it's an awful lot more difficult than it sounds because, a your attention jumps around and, b the speed of the club obviously increases. So start small. Start small with some short swings and see if you can really stay with that clubface and then, certainly at the range, begin to play around with how you can influence that clubface. My recommendation would be always start with the clubface square of its address, but then make some swings where you deliberately open the face a little bit during the swing and you'll get the printout. If that's the case, then if you produce a shot that curves to the right, clearly you've kept that clubface open.
Do the same thing with shots orientate the clubface a little bit closed, point it to the left, see if the golf ball goes to the left.
But I think the overall message is, of all the things that you could be paying attention to and we tend to get drawn into lots of different body parts and moves that we're supposed to make just by simply becoming aware, by placing your attention on the club face, becoming more attuned to the club face, then you're gonna have so much more influence over your shots and when you're out on the golf course, to me, having an explanation as why the golf ball does what it does is a way to keep the mind relatively calm, instead of when the ball goes offline, instead of always thinking that something dramatic has changed in your golf swing, which it won't have done. I promise you it won't have done.
Golf swings don't change that much, even if we try to change them. What will have happened is the club face orientation. If you've hit shots that you don't like, it will be down to that.
We've seen it on track man so many times that people make swings and they don't think the consistent swings or the actual path of the swing is very consistent, but it's the face orientation that moves around. So just take this idea of the crucial nature of attention but then, by placing your attention on that club face, become far more in tune with that.
The more in tune you are with that club face, the more control you'll have over the golf ball. And clearly, the more control you'll have over the golf ball, the more that's gonna influence your scores and, potentially, your enjoyment of the game itself. So work with attention, work with the club face and just see the difference that that makes.
