Author: Benjamin

In Jerry's piece from Monday, he built on his earlier descriptions of centering to describe for the first time what centering might look like in the context of golf. Did you notice that nowhere in there did he speak in the language we've gotten so used to seeing when communicating golf instruction? There was no, "Stand with your feet here, put your hands in this position." The instruction for finding the right stance was, "Does the breath flow or do it not?" The instruction for finding the right grip was, "Does the breath flow or does it not?" In many ways, that's all you need to know about the proper stance and the proper grip.

Jerry taught me centering in early September, 2015, and the more I practice the deeper the practice goes.

Here's a list of activities in which I try to practice staying in center:

• All of them.

Which isn't to suggest that I succeed all or even most of the time. I regularly lose center. As often as I am able to remember, I check in via the breath: In my current position, can I bring the breath up smoothly all the way through my body? If not, what kind of adjustments can I make to bring more freedom and flow to the breath?

When I say that I practice centering in every activity I participate in, I mean it. Let's say I'm writing. Maybe I hit a point where the flow of words stops. I get stuck. That's a good time to notice how long it's been since I checked in with the breath. The feedback of what I feel through that practice will tell me something about what's going on with my body and my energy. Often, just taking a moment to re-center will get the words flowing again.

And how does this apply to golf? Golf is an especially difficult activity to stay centered in. Unlike, say, soccer, in which the play flows and flows, in golf, the vast majority of time you are between shots. The mind has plenty of time to start to wander. You start thinking about how you feel about your previous shot, and about your playing partner's previous shot, and what you hope to do with your next shot, and how if you hit the next one well you might be on the green in regulation, which will set you up for a birdie putt, and the next thing you know you are mentally buying everyone beers in the clubhouse after the round, celebrating the best score of your life. Which is to say, you are walking along in a story of your own creation, rather than being actually physically present in the moment. And then when you come up to actually physically hit your shot, is it any wonder that you find yourself scattered, unable to focus, with your mind chattering away?

So what do you do about it? You center.

Your mind has wandered. Okay, fine. Now then: where is the breath? Notice the breath in the body. Can you breathe in such a way that it flows freely through the body?

You can.

As you meet center, the gibbering thoughts begin to fall away. You return to the present moment.

And where else can you hit the ball from, but the present moment?

Now that I am healthy enough again to swing a club fully, I wanted to establish a baseline for my current abilities. I went to the practice range last Saturday with the intent to hit a few balls with every club in the bag, in order to see what I could and could not do.

I started with the putter. They've filled the holes on the putting and chipping greens (winterizing?), so I had to improvise. I keep a loop of cord in my bag to use as a landing target when chipping and putting. I pulled it out and practiced putting into it, starting close and moving further away bit by bit.

I found I was tending to hit a bit long. However, it was kind of hard to judge my attempts as "failures," per se: I was imagining a hole in the middle of the loop, and a lot of the shots I hit through the loop passed right through that imagined hole. It's hard to see a sunk putt as a failure.

I didn't practice beyond medium distance (~15-20 feet) but I was pleased with how I did. My putts tended to be on line and rarely far enough away that I wouldn't expect to sink the come-back putt. When I wasn't on line, it was pretty easy to figure out exactly what I'd done wrong. All in all, I think I've got a good putting base to work with.

Next I practiced a few chips and pitches. My best chips and pitches put my ball within easy one-putt distance. My good chips and pitches leave me a reasonable two-putt. On my bad shots, which comprise about a quarter of my attempts, I either decelerate through the ball and strike it feebly so it dribbles forward only a few feet, or else I top it so it skitters all the way across the green and into the rough on the other side. Thus, my worst shots improve my position not at all. Again, that's very useful to know as a baseline--it's clear what I need to work on.

I also noticed something important about the difference between "best" and "good." Here's what a "good" chip looks like: I visualize the shot I want to hit. I see the landing point of the ball and the roll. I hit the ball. It lands within inches of the target point, but then either rolls too far or not far enough. It's hard to see that as anything less than a very successful shot. My "failure" there is one of imagination, of experience. The distance between that shot and a better one is a better ability to visualize exactly what the ball is going to do once it hits the target point and starts rolling. I don't know a path between where I am and improvement on that front without more experience to point to a more "correct" imagination of what's going to happen.

After chipping, I went to the range. I started with a pitching wedge and moved to longer and longer clubs. Here's what I learned: I can hit a wedge and a nine-iron. Each went straight, on my aimed trajectory, with a nice loft. Though maybe they didn't travel quite as far as I'd like, they were good shots.

Anything longer than a nine-iron I couldn't hit at all. I even offered myself a 100% success rate by defining success simply as making contact (useful for this exercise but not likely to lead to much improvement in my game). Amusingly, I actually didn't manage 100% success by that metric--I took one wild swing and missed the ball entirely. As that was pretty funny, I didn't think of it as too much of a failure--anything that keeps me smiling and laughing in an athletic endeavor I'm happy to define as a kind of success.

My best shots, after the nine-iron, were with my five- and three-woods, which flew straight with good trajectories, but traveled no more than 150 yards. I found the lack of power pretty demoralizing.

I finished by hitting about a dozen shots with driver. The only conclusion I can draw is that I don't know anything about hitting driver.

So as of early November 2015, that describes my baseline abilities. Based on that, I should be able to play a full 18-hole round, score no more than 170, and then throw my clubs into the pond in frustration.

In case anyone thought that Jerry and I had set this project up to be a quick success, now you know better. At my current level, not only do I play poorly, I won't even have fun.

Now it's time to get to work.

We've adequately laid the groundwork to begin to discuss what solid, well-directed golf practice might look like.

I can tell you, first of all, what it doesn't look like: it doesn't look like what so many people do when they go to practice. A lot of people go to the range, get a bucket, plop it down at one of the tees, perhaps do a few desultory stretches, and then pull out their driver and see how far they can hit the ball.

Now, I get the appeal--it's pretty satisfying to see that thing fly 200 or 250 yards. (Not that that happens much for me.) But is this effective practice?

Let's back up, and start by asking, what are you trying to accomplish with your practice session?. This may seem rather obvious, but the design for your session will depend on your answer. If all you care about is hitting your drives as far as possible, then great, grab your driver and whale away. Maybe all you care about is reaching the green in as few shots as possible, but don't care about your ultimate score. In that case, there's no need to practice chipping or putting.

But if, instead, your goal is to play better--and I'll define "play better" as most people would, meaning "shoot a lower score"--then let's never forget: every stroke, no matter how long or how short, counts the same. A 250-yard drive is scored the same as a 20-foot chip or a three-foot putt. What does that mean for the path to improvement?

The general consensus is that the average golfer shoots around 100 for 18 holes. So the average golfer plays an average hole by getting on the green in one over regulation and then two- or three-putting. Let's divide up those 100 shots over an 18-hole round. It might look something like this:

• 14 drives, at most. (If you're hitting driver on the par 3s, you either need a different approach or to find an easier course.)
• A fairway wood or longer iron on most of the par 4s and 5s, totaling 14 shots.
• A shorter iron off the tee on the par 3s and as the third shot on the par 5s, totaling eight shots.
• A chip onto the green on almost every hole (18 shots)
• A total of 46 putts (which equals eight two-putts and ten three-putts).

What does that tell us about our practice sessions? Just follow the math. We should be practicing putting almost as much as everything else put together, and more than three times as much as we practice hitting driver. (46-to-14 is a nearly 3.3-to-1 ratio.) We should be chipping and hitting short irons about twice as much as we hit driver. And longer fairway shots should get about as much attention as our drives.

Yet these ratios don't seem to match how most people practice. Not even close.

If you practice with these numbers in mind, it might not be as thrilling as whacking driver over and over again, but it's likely to have a fairly dramatic impact on your game.

Just because I know how to practice well doesn't mean that I practice well. Let me share a story of a session that was a perfect example. Interestingly, I had a conversation with Jerry before I started my practice session that should have given me the clues I needed to practice well, but I ignored them until it was too late.

It happened about a month ago, during the time I couldn't swing a golf club because of my shoulder. I had to do something to keep sane and active, so I was working on my tennis game.

I was trying to groove my groundstrokes to a new level, so I went and hit against the practice wall at the courts at the Rec Center where Jerry works.

The session went okay for a while. I was practicing my one-handed backhand, trying to hit with consistently good racquet preparation, working to generate reasonable power and, important for my development, topspin. (I tend to be very flat off the backhand side, and if I don't work on this the backhand will always be a struggle.)

I was hitting against the wall and in general I was trying to hit back to myself, shots that would be essentially down the line on court, so as to not have to move too much. I was trying as much as possible to make the need to react and move and set up my feet and center and breathe happen easily, so that I could focus on a good, well-prepared swing with a full swing-path. As the rallies would go on, the power would kind of ramp up, my control would get a little bit less, and I would find myself moving myself side-to-side, which was fun in its own way but ultimately led to more frequent errors. After a while the quality of my rallies started to decline, and I started to get a little frustrated. That was when I thought back to the conversation I'd had with Jerry before I started the session.

He had been talking about his Sunday racquetball game. He told me that during his last practice session he'd been "crushing" the ball (he was unsurprisingly pleased by that), and that during his match on Sunday he had been hitting similarly well--for a while, anyway. All of the sudden his shot quality disappeared and he started missing. For a while he couldn't figure out why and then he realized he was fatigued, so he wasn't getting the same movement and proper set-up and drive from his legs.

And then I was able to reflect that the day before I had played soccer for the first time since I injured myself, and though I was on the field for less than an hour, I hadn't played for three weeks and during that time had exercised very little. As a result, my fitness had dropped off somewhat, and so I was more fatigued than usual given the effort I'd put in. All of which pointed to this conclusion: maybe instead of ignoring it, I should actually feel the fatigue, and then break out of my obsessive must-hit-must-practice tendencies and, hey here's an idea, stop practicing, before the efficacy of the endeavor falls all the way to zero or below.

Makes sense, right?

Except what I did instead was practice serves for the next thirty or forty minutes. Will you be surprised when I tell you that it didn't go well, and I mostly missed and I got really frustrated and, instead of stopping, which is what I should have done, I kept hitting and kept hitting because I stubbornly didn't want to end in a bad string of serves. What finally got through this brick-like skull of mine was the realization that if I'm practicing while deeply fatigued I am essentially practicing to hit the ball badly, and that's not really likely to make me a better tennis player, is it?

In my last piece, I spoke about the techniques I used to practice problem areas in musical pieces I worked on. I closed by mentioning that solving those problems out of context was not the same thing as successfully putting the solution into play. Recontextualizing the solution was a completely different skill. The process I used to achieve that recontextualizing I've chosen to call rehearsal.

Simply trying to plug the problem section back into the piece didn't work. I'd either make mistakes in sections I considered "solved" (especially as the problem section approached) or else all of my practice would fall apart once I got into that section.

Rehearsing entailed properly setting up the section where the challenge lay. I'd go back a certain number of measures before the challenging part and play up until and through that section. I'd aim for a certain momentum before I reached the section in question. Note, by the way, that "momentum" and "tempo" aren't synonyms. Generally I rehearsed at a tempo substantially lower than performance tempo, and often lower than what I had attained as my practice tempo. What I sought was the confidence and smoothness that momentum brings. In essence, the lead-in was almost a ritual to prepare myself for the problem section. Over time, this process brought the problem section back into the rest of the piece. It smoothed out the break between "stuff I can comfortably play" and "stuff I struggle with."

Sometimes at the end of my practice sessions, I'd go back and rehearse pieces that were already solidly in my repertoire. Optimally, I'd play them start to finish, but with the same approach I outlined above, that is, trying to create a certain momentum. These days, I might describe that process by saying that I was practicing grooving success.

And here is where I have to admit that, in music, I neglected that aspect. Practicing problem areas I could handle. Rehearsing the transition into a problem area, sure. But the path into learning to make actual music with my music was a real weakness of mine, if that makes sense. I sought technical perfection and would focus on that. Practice dominated my practice sessions, to the detriment of my pleasure in the endeavor and, ultimately, my greater success. And it's here that I really want to break with the past. Practice and rehearsal are wonderful and necessary, but at some point you have to perform, and at some point you have to play.

In my last piece, I spoke of how my training as a classical musician taught me about good practice skills. Today and in my next couple of pieces, in order to set the stage for a better vocabulary around what effective practice might look like, I want to talk about certain elements of those practice sessions.

I practiced about three hours a day back then. I spent the first hour or so doing warm-ups and drills--picking and finger-pattern exercises on guitar, Hanon exercises on piano, scales and arpeggios on both. I would start slow and slowly increase my speed. It wasn't exactly thrilling work but it served multiple functions. From a long-term perspective, drills serve as the foundation for technique. Smooth, efficient, tension-free playing is the heart of musical technique.

Perhaps less obviously, drills have a short-term function as well: they serve as the foundation for each individual practice session. Drills bring the student into the space of practicing. They don't require utmost concentration, at least at the start of a session when the tempo is slow. As the tempo increases, they require more concentration, which has the effect that concentration naturally deepens as the session goes on. Because drills aren't hard in the sense that practicing pieces is hard, drills serve to groove success.

It's also crucial to mention that drills help develop strength and dexterity in a way that also seeks to avoid injury, which is always an important concern for even a semi-serious musician.

In the second hour, I'd move on to the repertoire I was working on. In general, I would work from the easiest piece to the most difficult. Within each piece, I would put the bulk of my work into the most challenging sections. It's a truism in music that you put the majority of your time practicing your weak spots. Unlike in sports, where people sometimes successfully work around their weaknesses (think of the professional soccer player who's a wizard with one foot and dreadful with the other, or the tennis professional with the rocket serve but an otherwise mediocre game), in music this isn't an option: if you can play 95% of a piece but utterly trainwreck on that last 5%, you can't actually play the piece at all.

The way to practice the really challenging sections involves a lot of energy and deep concentration. First of all, those sections get separated from the rest of the piece, and then within those sections all sorts of techniques are applied to work through their challenges. I'd start by slowing the tempo way down from performance tempo. Maybe I'd practice one hand alone and then the other. I might play the melody alone, then the accompaniment alone. Sometimes, if a section was really giving me trouble, I'd try experimenting with different fingerings. The tactics were myriad.

If I could play a 95% of a piece, I probably spent 50-75% of my time on the other 5%.

Of course, solving the technical problems of a piece entirely out of context isn't the same thing as being able to put that solution successfully into play when the context returns. In exploring that aspect for this piece, I realized it was different enough from what I described so far that it deserves its own name. Instead of "practice," I call it "rehearsing," and I'll talk about rehearsing next week.

Jerry and I have been talking a lot about what differentiates effective practice from ineffective. (As our goal is maximizing potential, we're taking for granted the necessity of practice. It's just not even a question.)

I don't know that I have been very effective at practicing sports. I can be pretty avid about it--even during the layoff from most activities that the separated shoulder forced on me, I was back on the tennis court practicing serves as soon as I could comfortably toss the ball in the air.

There's a tricky aspect to sports practicing, which is that often the goal gets defined around an obvious but perhaps short-sighted understanding of what "success" is. With the tennis serve, for example, on some level any serve that misses the service box, no matter how well hit, is a "bad" serve. It thus becomes easy to focus all practice around "getting the serves in." This seems to define the amateur mindset: among the amateur tennis players I see on the courts around my house, I see a lot of wonky but, in a sense, effective service motions. They get the ball in.

But from the perspective of maximizing potential, this is clearly the wrong approach. In doing that, those players are effectively putting a ceiling on their game. And TTW is all about going right through ceilings.

So then, what might more effective practice look like?

On reflection, I realized that I actually have a pretty good understanding of effective practice, but it's nothing I learned doing sports. I was trained as a classical musician. When I looked at what my practice sessions looked like when I was most active as a musician (back in college and just after), I saw habits that set a strong foundation for success.

We're working now on teasing out how to apply those practice techniques to athletics (and we hope that in the process we'll discover principles that can be applied as general life-skills). In future pieces, we'll describe what we've discovered so far.

In his piece from Monday, Jerry wrote, "We know that exercise can be used as a modality to help people overcome their limitations." I will attest to that. Jerry and I have been working together for a little more than a year now. When we started working together, I was in a pretty dark place, both because of some difficult events in my personal life over the prior year-and-a-half and because of some deeply ingrained negative habits that were getting in my way. Using Jerry's techniques to free up my energy has had a revelatory impact in my life. I'm in a vastly better place than I've been in for many, many years. (I wrote some about that process here. Quick warning: in that piece I was writing for a more personal audience, so there's some, ahem, salty language.)

Training Tiger Woods is an attempt to take those techniques to the next level. As Jerry put it, "TTW is an attempt to create a training program to help people … maximize their potential." I've already seen limitations evaporate. Just how far can we take this?

Our hypothesis is that, by applying the energy awareness that Jerry's techniques make available--by being able to feel the flow of energy in ourselves and see the flow of energy in others--we'll be able to radically increase the speed of improvement. Oh, and this is at least as important: we'll be able to have a lot more fun as well.

TTW came about in part because of how I have been applying Jerry's techniques to the sports I participate in. I'm an avid soccer player, and I've been doing my best to use his techniques on the soccer field since we began working together last fall. However, in that arena I've struggled somewhat to really bring them to fruition. Playing soccer has been a major part of my life since 2001. I have a certain amount of ego invested in the game, and it's something that I've had a lot of time to develop habits around. It requires a lot of conscious energy to change habits, and I've been playing long enough and successfully enough that it's easy for me to fall into them without realizing it.

This spring, I took the techniques to the tennis court, where I found some real success. I hadn't played since before I started working with Jerry, which meant first of all that I could start my explorations on the court from a place of a certain proficiency with the techniques. I also wasn't carrying too much baggage. I played tennis as a kid and showed some recreational-level promise, but quit after not making the eighth-grade team at my middle school. I played a very small handful of times over the years, then came back to the game a couple of autumns ago, but didn't play enough to tie too much of myself to the sport. By having been away from it for so long, I had little ego invested in my relationship to the game, which gave me a lot of space to play with energy techniques.

I started learning some interesting things about myself through the game. I learned about habitual energy responses. I learned about ways in which I'd played out aspects of my personality on the court from a very young age. I learned how other people handled (usually unconsciously) energy dynamics. I even found my way to some understanding about why I'd struggled with choking in the face of an opponent's frustration back when I was a kid. (In short: I didn't want to be disliked.) These are the kinds of things that open to you when you learn to feel what your blocks are.

Then while I was on my roadtrip this summer, my interest in golf resurfaced. As I wrote about previously, I saw highlights (if you can call them that) of Tiger at the U.S. Open and found myself thinking about Jerry's techniques and how much they'd help Tiger. Also, for the first time in years, I hit a few golf balls, which got me thinking about the techniques and how much they might help me.

Here on TTW, I'll be using and writing about TTW techniques in all three sports I've mentioned so far and others as well. (I'm also an avid mountain biker, skier and snowboarder, and I have played with the techniques in all these arenas.) Golf, however, will get special emphasis for the reasons Jerry touched on in his last piece: the way golf is scored gives something of an objective perspective on your performance on any given day. Also, golf is an activity we both participate in and would like to improve at, so in golf we have a unique opportunity for each of us to serve as both student and teacher.

We're early in this process, but I'd say so far the results to our experiment have been very favorable. I've seen improvements in my game, sure, but what's really interesting are the improvements in my ability to feel the game. How do you know when you're hitting the ball well, besides the flight path of the ball? How do you correct your mistakes on your own? You have to learn to feel the swing. It's the only way.

After the U.S. Open, you could just tell that Tiger wasn't likely to make the cut at any of the other Majors either. It's not that he doesn't have the physical game anymore--on any given shot he's still capable of performing at the level of the best in the world. His physical injuries haven't depleted him so much, and golf has not become so totally the playground of the young and powerful that Woods, now 39 and past his physical peak, can no longer compete.

But by the Open, back in June, I'd been working with Jerry long enough to see pretty clearly when a top athlete is or isn't in flow. And let me tell you, just seeing highlights from the Open, it was totally clear that Tiger's energy is totally off, and without a radically different approach to how he approaches the game, it isn't going to get back on. He's rebuilt his swing again and again over the course of his career, a process he's continuing now, but the swing isn't the problem. Indeed, that constant upheaval is one of the clear symptoms of the actual problem. He's off energetically. Until he starts to focus on the problem as an energy problem rather than a physical problem, he won't return to anything like the form that made him so utterly dominant.

Now, I know what Jerry's work with me has done in my life--in rough summary, it's changed everything, and is still changing everything, and my life is vastly better than it was, and I have every reason to believe it will continue to get better. That led me to wonder: what would happen if Jerry could work with Tiger?

I came back from my road trip in early July and I gave Jerry an assignment. "Tiger Woods is going to miss the cut in the British and the PGA and when he does he'll be done for the year. If at that point he isn't utterly in crisis, well, he should be. And I know you could help him. As an exercise, I want you to write a letter to Tiger introducing yourself, offering your services, and telling him you could help him."

Jerry liked the idea. He drafted the letter. Then We tried to imagine what to do next. We could think of some places to send the letter (Tiger's agent seemed the most likely bet) but the likelihood of it getting to Tiger, much less that Tiger would understand that he was holding in his hand the Golden Ticket, seemed pretty small.

The project got us asking some interesting questions, though. Elite athletes clearly have a profound intuitive understanding of energy flow. But all else being equal, do they excel by dint of being genetic outliers, or do they instead meet a potential that's latent in all of us but rarely touched in our lives? We didn't know, and don't know still. But we recognized that most people have vast amounts of unmet potential.

We began to conceptualize a training program that would allow people to develop their potential. And our initial subjects would be--will be--ourselves.

Jerry's been developing techniques over the past 20 years that, in briefest summary, teach what is commonly referred to as flow. As a student of these techniques, I can attest that they have the potential to foster major change in one's life. What we're doing here, though, is a bit more specific. We're aiming to use these techniques in spheres of athletic endeavor in which neither of is an expert, hoping to create something of feedback loop in which we experiment and essentially teach each other.

There's one last thing I should say, and this is very important: We're working in the field of exercise and athletics not to make it the dominant focus of our lives--we're both over 40, and there's no professional sports career out there for either of us. We're working in athletics because it narrows our focus and allows us to play without over-complicating things. Also, athletics allows measurement of improvement that a broader view of life might not. Being able to say, "My life is vastly better," while deeply valuable, is also purely subjective. But you can easily notice that you bench press twice what you used to, or that your average golf score has dropped seven strokes. All of that is useful. But what we're really training to improve is the totality of our lives, and ultimately, by sharing these techniques, the lives of others.