THE PRACTICE RANGE at a professional tournament is a fascinating place to watch the best players in the world work on their games. On a Monday before the tournament, players tend to be pretty relaxed, joking with one another as they go through their routines. Tuesdays are generally calm, too. By Wednesday, you can see the players starting to get a little edgy. On Thursday, the start of the tournament, they’re certifiably antsy. Our colleague David Leadbetter describes the players he coaches on “a scale of relaxation” during tournament week. During the early practice days, he tries to help them get to what he calls a state of “feel” in which they’re comfortable. “Players take in information differently,” he explains. “With some players I might say very little: ‘That swing looks good, aim a little over to the right there. Perfect.’ I might tell another player: ‘Listen, you took about five seconds more than you normally do on those last few shots.’ Often players aren’t aware of shifts in their routines that can be very subtle; the wind might be blowing in a direction that he doesn’t like, or there’s a pin position on a certain hole she knows will make her uncomfortable. If you watch the pros practice, you can see whether they’re trying to hone an aspect of technique or grooving a sense of rhythm or balance.”
The 2015 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wisconsin, was a particularly interesting place to watch different players’ practice routines. At the range on Thursday morning, Rory McIlroy, the World No. 1 player at the time, was hitting ball after ball with his driver. Rory was returning from a five-week layoff after rupturing ligaments in his ankle while playing soccer. You could tell his practice involved testing the stability of that ankle. Next to Rory on the range was the 30-year-old Scotsman Russell Knox, whom we coach. Russell was doing something so unusual in his warm-up that spectators started gathering behind him to watch. First he hit a series of balls with his feet close together. Next he raised his left foot off the ground behind him and, while standing on his right leg, hit a series of balls one-handed with just his left arm. Afterward, he switched sides, standing on his left leg and hitting balls with only his right arm. The coordination and control he had over his body were impressive. “At first I was self-conscious because my warm-up is so different from everybody else’s,” Russell laughs. “Guys would walk by me and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ After a while, I just learned to answer very politely, ‘Mind your own business.’ ”
Russell was warming up with his VISION54 “BTT skills”—exercises that activate a player’s balance, tempo, and tension awareness. Being able to feel balance, tempo, and tension is key to a golfer’s inner awareness—and we think this is crucial to the fundamentals of golf. First and foremost, balance, tempo, and tension are key elements of a good swing. What Russell was doing on the range was activating his athleticism and creating confidence. Understanding that his body changed from day to day, he was using the exercises to “dial in” what felt right that day.
Balance, tempo, and tension exercises will help you coordinate the proper sequence of your swing. Your grip pressure, balance, and the tempo of your backswing and forward swing must function together to deliver the club to the ball. Balance, tempo, and tension are sensory-based stimuli; that is, they are noncognitive, and focusing on them will help move you to the right or unconscious side of your brain (the side that produces the most efficient athletic movement) as you prepare to hit. Just as important, when you encounter pressure or stress on the golf course, accessing awareness of your balance, tempo, and tension levels—even stepping to the side and taking one swing with your feet together—can help reset your best physical, mental, and emotional states.
But let’s back up. Russell first contacted us in 2009 for help with his game. At the time, he was playing on the mini-tours, trying to climb his way up to the Web.com Tour, which is the top developmental tour for the PGA Tour. We could see that Russell had great natural talent, but he was getting in his own way. “Everybody always talks about the swing in golf—that if you have a nice swing, you’re automatically going to be good,” Russell says. “Well, I had a good swing, but I was doing everything else horribly. I would get way too upset and angry if things didn’t go my way on the course or if I hit poor shots. I would let one bad shot carry over to the next hole, and the next hole, and before you knew it, I had wasted three or four holes. Pia and Lynn helped me think about other aspects of the game besides the swing. I woke up to the importance of my attitude, my body language, my balance, tempo, and tension, and my pre- and post-shot reactions. I quickly understood that they were often more important than the shot itself.”
Russell worked on his balance, swing tempo, and tension for a few weeks. “I saw immediate results,” he says. “It’s so simple. When I focused on them, I wasn’t overthinking my shots or getting anxious or upset.” His game felt so good, he took a gamble and decided to skip the mini-tour circuit and try to compete in the higher-level Web.com Tour tournaments. Russell’s first attempt was a Monday qualifier for the Fresh Express Classic in San Francisco; he finished birdie-eagle to make the main draw. He went on to finish second in the tournament, which earned him full status on the Web.com Tour for the rest of 2011. Two months later, he won his first Web.com tournament, finishing the year 12th on the money list, which gave him conditional status on the PGA Tour. Russell spent 2013 playing PGA Tour and Web.com events. At the Web.com Tour’s Boise Open that year, he shot 59 in the second round, joining Annika Sorenstam as one of fewer than 20 players who have shot that score in competition.
Russell qualified for full PGA Tour exemption in 2014. One of the privileges that came with his PGA Tour card was membership at TPC Sawgrass, which is near his home in Jacksonville, Florida. Russell was excited. His neighbor Vijay Singh practiced at TPC Sawgrass. Russell started practicing with Vijay. As most people know, Vijay is famous for hitting thousands and thousands of balls on the practice range. Unfortunately, Russell started hitting too many balls and became overly fixated on his swing technique. His game fell apart, which is when he came back to us for additional coaching. Rather than focus on the quantity of balls hit, we turned his attention back to his balance, tempo, and tension. Soon he was in his groove again. “A lot of people think golf is all about the swing mechanics,” says Russell. “But one of the biggest causes of bad shots is tension. When I go out with my buddies and I have no real tension in my body, I’ll rarely hit a terrible shot. But in a tournament, when you’re nervous and tight, it’s amazing how you can hit a pretty awful shot. So I work a lot now on making tension-free swings in practice.”
Balance, too, has become central to Russell’s play. “I figure if I can complete my swing and stay in balance, the chance of hitting a good shot goes up significantly. I work on balance almost more than anything else. If I’m at home, I’ll hit shots standing on one leg and hit shots with my eyes closed, just to set the feeling of my body in balance.”
In May 2015, Russell’s longtime swing teacher, Mike Flemming, died just before the Players Championship. Mike had been Russell’s coach at the University of Jacksonville, and the loss was huge. He made the decision not to hire a new swing coach and to concentrate on using balance, tempo, and tension skills to manage his game, along with a few pre-swing check-ups such as posture and alignment. It wasn’t an easy decision to make on the PGA Tour, where every player seems to have a personal swing coach and support team. Russell was clear about his decision, and why it would work. He was also confident he would succeed. “I’m never going to be the longest hitter,” he told us, “but I could be the straightest driver of the ball the Tour has ever seen. I’m going to use my BTT skills to bring out the best in my own game—the Russell game.”
In golf, the primary goal is to create and maintain a performance state in which you can play your best game. BTT is the bridge—an essential integration of your physical and technical skills. Each time you play, you must match your technical swing feels to your body, or physical state, for that day. Some days your body is tight, and other days it’s more relaxed. Some days you feel sluggish, and other days you’re amped up. These states are never fixed. Balance changes from shot to shot, hour to hour, day to day. Swing tempo changes with pressure or fatigue—or because of a tight lie or deep rough. Likewise, tension can show up in your shoulders or in your grip pressure, even in your jaw. We like to use the metaphor of “fresh produce” to describe these things: Lettuce and delicate vegetables go stale quickly, sometimes even before you have a chance to use them. Balance, tempo, and tension are the same. Your balance can be excellent in the morning, and off in the afternoon. Your tension level can be relaxed, but three holes later, your shoulders have tightened up. The human skills of balance, tempo, and tension awareness are the ability to listen and fine-tune these states accordingly.
BALANCE IS THE FIRST of the three elements we ask players to focus on. Humans access balance in our bodies in three ways: through our eyes, through the fluid in our ears, and through the proprioceptors or sensors in our body that give us information about where our limbs are in space. Our friend and colleague Greg Rose is co-founder of the Titleist Performance Institute in California, where he uses science-based conditioning to help players improve their performance. Greg explains that proprioception is the body’s internal GPS system that allows us to navigate across any terrain and remain upright. Our proprioceptors are a highly sophisticated network of sensory receptors located in our muscles and joints that enable us to detect the basic motions and positional changes in our limbs and body during a golf swing. Being able to react and adjust to those motions and forces is critical to a consistent swing. Proprioceptors help us maintain a stable base, even if the factors involved in each shot are forever changing.
Simply put, proprioceptors are the keys to balance. They occur throughout your body, but you have an especially large number of them in your feet. If you are going to maintain good balance, your proprioceptors must be engaged—that is, turned on. This happens most effectively through movement or pressure changes. One of the easiest ways to train your proprioceptive system, Rose says, is to walk, hit balls, or practice barefoot. Going barefoot helps increase movement in the foot and ankle, and therefore helps stimulate the proprioceptors. If you take off your shoes and swing barefoot, you’ll more clearly sense whether your weight is on the balls of your feet. Many of the players we coach have gained a better sense of balance, feel, tempo, and timing simply by hitting balls barefoot (though wearing just socks or standing on a towel works, too). We also encourage players to heighten their proprioceptive awareness by hitting with their feet together, on one foot, or with their eyes closed. Several of them even warm up before tournament rounds this way!
TEMPO IS ANOTHER KEY to good play. Swing tempo gives the player the ability to create the proper kinematic sequence, which is the natural motion the human body goes through in swinging a golf club. In the kinematic sequence of hitting a golf ball, your lower body moves first, followed by your upper body, then your arms, and finally your hands. The important thing is to know what sequence you have when you hit the ball well. The swings of golf’s best ball-strikers might look entirely different (golf analyst David Feherty has described Jim Furyk’s swing as looking like “an octopus falling out of a tree”), but what they have in common is an almost identical sequence that produces optimal impact as the club meets the ball.
This is why it’s so important to develop body awareness. Some days you might be more energetic and alert, and so you’re swinging at a faster speed to achieve optimal sequencing. Other days you might feel more tired or sluggish, and so you might need to slow down your tempo a notch to attain your best sequence. By practicing swinging the club and hitting the ball with different tempos—from 20 percent of your normal swing speed to 100 percent—you’ll get better at making your swing and club work together. By learning to swing and putt with different tempos, you’ll also learn to give yourself a variety of different shots. You might be able to hit a soft flop shot around the green much more effectively with a slower tempo. And likewise, if you’re putting on very fast greens, you might choose to slow your putting tempo to 60 percent. If you’re in very thick rough, you might increase your swing tempo. Practicing this variation will allow you to master these shots during a round.
A few summers ago, we spent a fascinating day coaching a group of golfers at Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton, New York. We asked them what kinds of misses they tended to hit. Jeff Goldberger, a 1-handicap, told us that when he misses a shot, he tends to hit a toe-iron or a toe-hook drive.
Lynn asked him, “Do you know what’s technically causing you to do that?”
Jeff said, “Sure. On the drive, my hands are outracing my body. And my swing plane is off.”
“So you’re saying your swing is out of sequence,” Lynn responded.
We suggested that Jeff try hitting shots at 75 percent and at 50 percent of his normal tempo. At 75 percent of his normal tempo, Jeff hit his shots as purely as he’d ever hit them. He realized that when he gets tense, his swing speeds up. By consciously slowing his swing, he counteracted his tendency to get too quick and returned his swing to optimal tempo in the particular situation.
“I see,” Jeff said to us with a bit of wonder. “If I begin toe-hooking my shots, I know now that I can slow my swing tempo and that will reestablish proper sequence. That’s pretty simple.”
As we’ve mentioned, optimal performance comes when a player engages more of his or her right brain, the automatic, sensory-motor lobe. For a cerebral player like Jeff, focusing on balance, tempo, or tension releases his left brain and activates his right brain, allowing him to produce the shot he wants without cognitive interference.
Kevin Streelman, one of the PGA Tour pros we coach, is another highly analytic player—and one of the first on tour to use TrackMan to evaluate his swing. “I suffer from what I call the Duke Disease,” Kevin admits with a laugh. “I went to Duke University, and I have a tendency to default to the rational, technical side of the game. I tend to lean on instructors quite a bit, too, and I don’t necessarily look to myself. I began searching for another perspective because I got tired of doing video analysis and the same three-foot drills every day.”
Kevin came to us in 2005, and we started working on his human skills, including balance, tempo, and tension. One day we were on TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium course with him. We came to the 17th hole, which is a 332-yard drivable par-4 hole. We asked Kevin to hit a drive with his usual tempo. The ball stopped short of the green. We asked him to dial his tempo back to 80 percent. He hit a second ball, and it rolled over the green. Like Jeff Goldberger, he was amazed that slower tempo often corrects faulty sequencing. In his case, it delivered more distance. Which is why learning awareness and experimenting on the course in the context of the game is so important.
THE THIRD COMPONENT of the physical swing is tension. If somewhere in your swing you’ve created unwanted tension, it will interfere with your technique. For example, changing your grip pressure during the swing has a direct influence on what the clubface does. Change in grip pressure can make you hit wild shots.
Similarly, if you get tight in your shoulders, your backswing will shorten and all kinds of things can happen. This is why it’s important to become aware of how your body is reacting to different situations on the course. Awareness enables you to check your tension level—whether it’s your grip pressure, or upper body or shoulder tension. Then you can make adjustments as needed.
J.C. Anderson is a PGA professional who lives in St. Louis, where he teaches tour players as well as top amateur and high school golfers. J.C. told us, “There were times in the past that I would stand on the range with one of my players and be amazed at how beautifully he was hitting the ball. Then he would go out and shoot 85 in a tournament. I would scratch my head and think, How do you hit the ball that well and still score an 85? After working with VISION54, I know the answer. He may be relaxed on the range, but then he gets into competition and he tenses up. Tension ruins technique. For me, tension awareness, whether in your shoulders, arms, or grip, has become the key in my teaching and in my own play.”
J.C. began using balance, tempo, and tension awareness in his own game after he attended a VISION54 program in December 2012. A month later he decided to play the PGA Winter Series in Florida. “I was pretty rusty at the first event because I hadn’t had a chance to practice,” he says. “My first tournament was the Senior Stroke Play Championship. All I focused on was my balance, tension, and tempo, particularly the tension in my shoulders and arms. I told myself before each shot: Noodle arms, J.C. Noodle arms. It worked! I won the tournament. Next thing you know, I won the PGA Cup and qualified for the PGA Championship that year. It was amazing.”
Another story about tension awareness comes from our student Ken Kennedy, who is an architect in New York City and has played since he was a boy growing up in Australia. Ken was once a single-digit handicap; now he’s 62 years old and has a busy career. Because he plays infrequently, his game was erratic. One day we did a few balance, tempo, and tension exercises with Ken before his round. For the first time, he noticed that he tended to tighten his grip on certain shots, particularly his drives, which used to slice or hook. He focused on relaxing his grip, and suddenly his shots were going long and straight, completely under his control. He told us the next time he played he shot 82—his best score in years.
We’ve become almost religious in our belief in the power of balance, tempo, and tension awareness. Especially for golfers who don’t have much time to practice, these BTT skills can help you on almost every shot.
One of our favorite BTT stories goes back to Russell Knox. At the end of 2015, he was playing in a European Tour event in Malaysia. At the time, Russell hadn’t won a PGA Tour event, and wasn’t in the field for the upcoming WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai. But when another player dropped out of the WGC field, Russell suddenly got into the tournament from seventh reserve and third alternate.
Russell and his wife, Andrea, hurried over to the Chinese consulate and got visas. Unfortunately, his caddie had flown back to the U.S. with Russell’s clubs, so he arrived at the tournament with nothing but the clothes on his back. He borrowed clubs for his practice rounds, and Andrea caddied for him until his caddie could fly to Shanghai. Even with these stressful conditions, Russell, a master of variability, stayed calm. During all four rounds, he focused solely on his balance, tempo, and tension. “It was a great week for me,” he says. “When I made the turn on the back nine in the final round, I said to my caddie, ‘I need to play great to win, but it doesn’t need to be perfect.’ Staying with my BTT was key to hitting the shots I needed.”
Russell ended up beating Kevin Kisner by two strokes in the final round for his first PGA Tour win. He became the only Scotsman ever to win a WGC event, and his ranking rose to No. 31 in the world, the first time he had broken into the top 50. The coolest thing was that the win earned him a spot in the 2016 Masters at Augusta. Although he missed the cut there, Russell went on to finish among the top 20 at the Players Championship and a few months later won the Travelers Championship for his career-best year. Not a bad season for BTT.
MANY GOLFERS COME TO US for help with their “mental skills.” But afterward, they realize they’ve gained heightened awareness of their bodies and have new tools with which to manage themselves during play. One of our players said to us: “I came to VISION54 to get stronger mentally, and I came away having learned to be more physically aware and able to access my athletic ability.”
Balance, tempo, and tension are what make your swing and stroke functional on the golf course. They make the swing come alive physically, not intellectually. With conditions always changing on the course, it’s the players tuned into their BTT who can manage their swings and make adjustments to keep them fluid.
Play a few holes focusing on your balance; play a few holes focusing on your tempo; then play a few holes focusing on tension. Can you play an entire hole swinging with your feet together on each shot and finish in balance? Can you putt 18 greens on one leg and keep your balance?
A word of caution: When golfers practice BTT awareness on the course, they sometimes have a hard time staying with the exercises. One of the reasons is that while you’re concentrating on the processes, you might lose awareness about the outcome of your shot. This is natural. Focusing on outcome draws you away from being present through your entire swing.
The following questions and explorations will lead you to a better awareness of your body and your swing on the course. When you can play an entire hole swinging with 50 percent tempo, you’ll begin to appreciate how many more options you have for your game.