Content uploaded by Paul J. McCarthy
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Paul J. McCarthy on Aug 05, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
The Successful Golfer: Practical Fixes for the Mental Game of Golf
Abstract
You do not have to play many rounds of golf to understand how much of the game is played in the mind. Different courses, conditions, and shot requirements all present unique challenges that need focus and mental strength from the winning player. In turn, moving from the practice range onto the golf course can often magically produce drops in concentration, increased frustration, and unexpected self-doubt: drives go wayward, three foot putts get missed, and water features seem to become magnets.
The Successful Golfer is designed to help address 50 of the most common faults that players experience and which hold them back. These include: hitting the self-destruct button when winning, nervousness on the first tee, lost confidence, failing to practise as you play, losing focus off poor drives, and many more. Each fault is remedied with a clear practical fix. You will learn to develop effective practice plans, build a dependable pre-shot routine, cope with the pressures of competitive golf, and deal with distractions.
In the second part of the book, lessons from 30 fascinating research studies on golf are presented to help keep you ahead of the field. They include research on putting, practice, choking, and overthinking. In the third and final part of the book, clear instructions are provided on developing a number of highly effective techniques that can be used across a wide variety of situations. These include: pre-shot routines, breathing exercises, goal setting, and how best to practice.
... Indeed, paying attention to task-irrelevant cues has been noted as a potential reason for choking, namely, inferior performance in pressure situations (Baumeister & Showers, 1986). Consequently, golfers are often recommended to practice with distractions-as Tiger Woods (2001) famously didto be able to deal with such disturbances (e.g., Baumann, 2014;McCarthy & Jones, 2013). However, research exploring the impact of distractions in motor contexts is scarce (Szalma & Hancock, 2011). ...
... As previously mentioned, there seems to exist a popular consensus that distractions are detrimental to motor performance (Jeon et al., 2014). This belief appears to be particularly prevalent in certain sports, such as golf (e.g., McCarthy & Jones, 2013). Our findings challenge this notion, and our study may be of interest to athletes performing in distracting environments. ...
Although auditory distractions are prevalent and often seen as a threat to performance, relatively few studies have explored distraction effects in an applied sport context. This field experiment examined expert golfers' (n = 36) competitive performance in a normal and a distracting condition. The results displayed similar performance in the two conditions. Participants' responses to a post-competition questionnaire generally suggested that they found auditory distractions below moderately disturbing and detrimental to their performance. Overall, our results contradict the popular consensus that distractions are disturbing and detrimental in motor performance contexts.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.