Perfect pitching: the Brain Fix

Perfect pitching: the Brain Fix
By T.J. Tomasi
Last week I outlined howmy student Paul fixed his pitching by adjusting his spine position, and his technique ­improved dramatically. But ­fixing the swing wasn’t the end of the story because even though Paul could now pitch the ball in practice, he still couldn’t pitch the ball very well on the golf course. There was one more fix to be performed — the brain fix.Paul runs a building renovation business, and he deals with all kinds of trouble, be it a balky subcontractor or Chinese drywall. He makes a living avoiding trouble and fixing broken things, and I realized that he carried this Mr. Fix It attitude over to his pitching: He sees trouble everywhere in the form of bunkers, water, mounds and tough pin positions, and his goal, as it is with the balky subcontractors, is to anticipate and avoid the pitfalls. Tied up in notsI dropped a ball into pitching position and asked him to verbalize in detail what was going on in his brain when he hit the pitch. He told me he was trying to hit away from the trouble. He was focused where “not to hit it,” which included (1) not long, (2) not short, (3) not left and (4) not right. In Paul’s way of thinking, there were four bad areas to avoid instead of one good area where he wanted the ball to go.Because he was overwhelmed by this 4-to-1 negative ratio, he had no target on his screen. Swing-wise he was a schizophrenic, torn apart by competing “nots,” a guarantee that his pitches lack the Big C — Commitment. Nots are not good in a target game.The brain fix was two-fold. I advised Paul to:1. Stop with the nots and focus on the target. Golf is not like renovating a building. You don’t have to solve every problem; allyou have to solve is one problem: Point A (ball) to Point B (target). 2. To generate commitment, we practiced pitch after pitch using his rehearsal swing to produce the “trace” — the general feel of the swing needed to hit to Point B.Paul now makes a rehearsal swing free of individual swing thoughts, then goes immediately to the ball and guided by the lingering memory trace, he makes exactly the same swing.Once he learned to surrender to the trace, his pitching on the course matched his pitching in practice.