Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: I'm Kurt Bonham from Atlanta, Georgia and I play at
Eagles Landing. Welcome to Golf Smarter.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: I'm joe Yorke from Panavitu Beach, Florida. I play golf
at Marsh Landing Country Club and this is Golf Smarter
number ten fourteen.
Speaker 1: So I talked about this in my book where in
my opinion, the reason golf in general, but putting in
particular is the hardest target sport in the world is
because your eyes are not on it. In what other
sport are you trying to be so accurate, Like it's
a four and a half inch target, but you're not
looking at it. That means that your brain needs space
that when it looks back down at the ball after
your last look at the hole or whatever your target is,
it needs low frequency, it needs space, It needs less
traffic to be able to remember where the ball is
going to go because you're not looking at it. Wait
times in golf is one of the largest untapped opportunity.
Why are you looking at somebody else? It's of no
value to you. But if you want a higher outcome,
if you want a better motor output out of yourself,
you've got to use your weight times as a countdown
to your preshiat routine.
Speaker 2: Use the waittime during year round for the greatest opportunity
for increased success with Doctor Izzy Justice. This is Golf Smarter,
sharing stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to
help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf
Smarter podcast, Doctor Justice.
Speaker 1: Hey Fank, it's so nice to be back. Thanks for
having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you for coming back. I haven't talked to you
since twenty twenty two when we talked about Jyra Golf.
I think we should start with you telling us what
it is that you do and how it relates to golf.
Let's get the base understanding here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Well, I've said this on your show before,
and I've said it on other shows. But you know,
this is very forrest gumpy, and I'm kind of making
it up as I go along, and strange things happen
at sort of every turn, and you know, the discovery
and the exploration of what is happening in the human
brain is still relatively new. If you look at all
of the things that just from a human experience perspective.
We're trying to understand how we travel, our diets, you know,
our sleep patterns, all these things, technology a lot of
that allow us to work and function, communicate. I mean,
all these things we've made significant advances on, but we're
still fred believe it or not. I don't care what
people believe in in terms of when life started. But
we're still literally learn to understand what's happening in the brain.
And just to close the thought there, you know, it's
been very hard to study the brain, honestly because number one,
there's electricity in the brain. So what like, what are
you looking at when you look at the brain. It's
not like the heart or the liver. W you know,
you can see things coming in and see things going out,
and how do you measure electricity and what you know,
how do you interpret what it is that you're actually
looking at. And then lastly, you know, I have unintentionally
sort of drawn this, you know, gap between clinical view
of the brain versus functional view and think of clinical
as you know, probably ninety five percent of all the
work that's done on the human brain and the human
experience is on the clinical side. I have all Zheimer's,
have dementia, I have epilepsy. Something's wrong, and therefore there's
a reason for me to go look and find what's
wrong and then find a cure for it. That's not
what I do or what I've been doing. I've been
on the functional side, which is we're just trying to
make a putt. I'm just trying to make a free throw.
I'm just trying to respond to an email. Like what
goes on in the human brain when we're just trying
to be functional, when we're just trying to remember our
best inventory of skills and past experiences and what we
want to do. And so it's been an amazing discovery
journey and I've just learned so much myself, and you know,
I put it all together in this new book and
or at least as far as as as I've learned
thus far.
Speaker 2: What is your doctorate in? Are you a medical doctor?
Are you an academic doctor? Let's understand that you started
cutting up heads.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great, great question. No, I am not a medical doctor,
never claimed to be one. I didn't even stay at
a holiday in express last night.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: No, So you know my doctor has is in human performance,
and I got it back in two thousand and seven,
and it was still almost ten years before the technology
was even invented. And I remember reading a paper. It
was a soft peer review paper that I was reading,
and this person talked about, you know, wirelessly looking at
an epileptic patient to see, you know, are there any
motor functions or patterns that lead up to a seizure.
And so that was the context of this technology where
somebody could stand six twelve feet away look at a
human brain while something is going on. And this ability
to do it wirelessly is the game changer because we've
been able to look at the brain, but typically it's
using an MRI machine or and you have to stand
very still, you have to be horizontal, you can't even move,
so there's no functional work that you can really measure
or track if you're you know, using traditional methods. So
when I could expose to that technology, I quickly pivoted
and said, all right, you know what is going on
in the human brain for example, you know when someone
makes a free throw or makes a pot is there
a certain pattern What's going on in the brain when
someone misses a free throw or a potter? And I'm
just using two examples, is there a pattern there? And
lo and behold, I discovered along with you know, other
studies that were done long before I came along, that there,
in fact, is a state in the human brain that
you know from an electric perspective, because electricity is the
language of the human brain. Electricity is the language of
motor function and fred if you think about it, it
has to be electricity. It cannot be anything else. It
can't be light, it can't be gravity, because just think
about it. What else is so fast that it can
allow us to protect ourselves. If I am walking and
I see a lion, do I not need that visual
input of the line to go to my brain and
within a half a second turn around and start running
as fast as I can. So there has to be
you know, a top of a gas a modality that
can work very quickly. And in the human experience, electricity
other than light, is like the fast the second fastest mode.
So electricity really is the language of the brain. It
really is the language of mode of function. And so
studying it and saying, okay, how do you get the
brain to a state when it can use that electricity
at an optimal perspective? And by optimal. I mean two things, Fred.
One is you can access your inventory. So if you
tell me Fred, for example, oh, I've been putting for
playing golf for twenty years. Great, and I will ask you, okay,
all those shots you've hit, all the putts that you
made in a tournament or non tournament, where's that inventory.
It's not on a Google drive, but it's on some
hard drive in your brain along with you know, dozens
and thousands and millions of other data points about your life.
So you need access to it when you're about to
make up put you know, the factory setting of the
brain is your brain to retrieve your last worst one
because it wants to predict, It wants to protect you
from making the same mistake. Now, if that's a factory
setting of your brain to remind you of your worst
pot when you're trying to make a pot, right, should
you not have the ability to say, oh, let me
change that factory setting and let me access that inventory.
So when the frequency, when the electricity generally speaking in
the brain is low, it's vibrating at a low frequency,
how access goes up because it just isn't enough. There
isn't a lot of traffic And the second magical thing,
and both in sports as well as life, that happens
when electricity is low in your brain is that it
amplifies sensory input. As human beings, we don't have five
hundred and fifty. We have five senses, right, that's not
a lot. But you know, there is an airport in
our brain where it's called the sensory cortex where all
of that sensory input goes, and it's always there, even
when we're sleeping. It's there. But a lot of times
that input is not processed by the brain because there's
just so much other noise. So, for example, Fred, if
you had a really really crazy day at work, you know,
just a lot of stuff going on. You get in
your car and you're driving home at the end of
your day at five o'clock or whatever time it is,
and you put some music on. The odds are by
the time that you get home whatever it is, thirty
minutes later that you're able to recall the music that
was playing is almost a zero. But it was playing.
The auditory input was there, but there was so much
other noise in your brain. So by bringing that frequency down,
you know, it allows us to for example, feel the
grip pressure, feel the weight of the putter head, see
the target, see how you want the bar to roll
or where the ball you want the ball to start,
and where you want to finish it. So those two
magical things access to your inventory and just an applification
of sensory It would happen when that frequency is low
around ten to fifteen herts in your brain. So that's
why I call it chasing ten hurts because that magic number,
chasing ten herts is in life. That's what we're doing.
We're always doing something to allow us to get to
a point where we can enjoy a moment or be
the best version of ourself in each moment. And ironically
it's not a secret, Like how many people have told you, oh,
I was the best version of myself when I was
angry and agitated, Yet everybody says, oh, when it's calm
and relaxed and focused and slow. Well, those are all,
you know, lay labels that we're using to describe that stage.
So we're beginning to de mystify how this brain works.
And for a golfer, you don't have to be in
that magical ten hurts for five hours. It's just fifteen minutes.
I mean that's the amount of time in totality that
you're hitting a golf shot. So it's a reasonable ask
to say, hey, can you be in that state for
fifteen minutes, non contiguously over five hours, that's doable.
Speaker 2: When you talk about electricity, my lay brain goes to
charging my phone, goes to turning on a light, thinking Edison,
thinking Tesla, And I don't mean the car. I mean
Nikolay Tesla, the real inventor of right of this stuff.
Are we talking about the same electricity here when you
keep talking about that with our brain.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is literally the same electricity, real electricity. Oh yeah, absolutely,
we even measure it using the same units of hurts,
and absolutely it's the same electricity. And again, if you
think of electricity on your phone or any type of
a device or coming into a house, sure you know
the power of it is that it does have this
this this charge to it that allows you to transfer
energy if you would, And we need that, We need
that same energy for us to you know, function, especially
motor function. I mean our ability as living creatures to
move is central to our survival. That movement has to
happen at an accelerated pace. I must be able to
see something and say, oh, there's a big gully here,
I'm about to step into it, let me stop walking.
Or there's a snake walking by, let me jump over it.
You know. So, for example, let's say that right now,
as you're speaking, something over your right shoulder is itching you,
and suddenly you feel like it's biting you. Well, very quickly, yeah,
well very prickly. You'll take your left hand, you'll go
to that spot. You'll you'll itch it, you'll scratch it,
you'll you'll shoot it away. But just think about that moment.
How did your hand know where to go? How did
you find that exact spot to scratch? How did it
know when to stop scratching?
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the question is why does my brain
distract me away from what's going on that I need
to like focus on a little dot my on my shoulder,
because you know, you and I are looking at each
other right now while were doing this recording, and the
thing that's just made me hate doing is watching back.
It's like all these things ticks and movements and scratches
and things that I have while I'm having a conversation
with someone. So it's you know, is that part of
the electricity that distracts me away from it as well?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So look, the average human being, a male, you know,
like five eight, one hundred and fifty five pounds, has
anywhere between I don't know, thirty to thirty five miles
miles of nerves in their body. Every part of your
physical body, your anatomy is in constant communication with your brain.
You need to know if something' is itching you, if
it's getting too cold or too hot, or or uncomfortable
or all those kinds of things. And so part of
our distraction is that when we you know, when all
this information is going to the brain, we lose focus
of what's happening now. I don't know if that's the
bigger distraction. I think the bigger distraction is the world
that we found ourselves in, where our devices now are
giving us so much stimuli. Our brains are not designed.
We talked about this three years ago, but our brains
are not designed to consume this much volume of stimulation.
So if I see even a ten second video, for example,
I mean my brain has to interpret that, and it's
interpreting that using lots of parts of our brain and
so you know, our hippocampus, for example, is our memory.
It gives context to what's going on. It alerts us
that's nice, that's not nice, I'm angry, that's that's that
makes me feel good. It you know, produces all of
these you know, neurotransmitters and homones and and chemicals that
are going on in the brain. So it's becoming I've
said this, it's we're living a time reread now where
I don't think it's ever been easier to be physically healthy.
Like we can track so many buyer markers, our nutrition.
There's so much high quality information of what we need
to do to be physically healthy. Yet I don't believe
in the history of our existence that it's ever been
harder to be mentally healthy, just because there's so much garbage.
There's so much stimulation in our brains that it's, you know,
all of our good you know, values like empathy and
compassion and kindness and listening skills, they're all getting compromised,
not because we've suddenly become bad people or but because
our brain is competing. It's competing between being present and
noticing a frown on someone's face and say, oh, you okay,
versus replaying the ten things that you have to do
as soon as you get done with the conversation or
before or after or tomorrow or yesterday. So in non
reactionary sports like golf, oh my goodness, it's even a
bigger challenge, rightow.
Speaker 2: So is your expertise and your thesis for your PhD
was the brain in athletics in sports?
Speaker 1: No no, no, no, no no no. So all that
came just in the last ten years you so think of.
So around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen is when I started
to look into the brain, right, So this was almost
ten years after I'd already got my doctorate. So this
was new technology. The reason I did not get my
doctorate in neuroscience is because almost all of the programs,
matter of fact, even today, are clinically based. I'm looking
at serotonin levels to reduce stress or you know, to
you know, almost every malaise about the brain is a
target for a drug, right, And so a lot of
these doctoral programs are funded by pharmaceutical companies and research
and grants. They're designed to come up with some cure.
And that's good, that's not a bad thing. I'm not
judging that. But again, where is the money to be
made by teaching someone how to get to ten herts
without using anything? Like if I just taught you a neurohak,
you know, like what we did last time. You know,
for example, we can do one right now. So let's
just do one right now. I want you to count.
Don't start until I say go right. I want you
to count from one to ten as fast as you can,
and then do a pop and then go from ten
to nine as slow as you can.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, one to three, four, five, six, seventy nine, ten, ten,
nine eight seven six five four three two one.
Speaker 1: There you go. That is a neurohak. If I were
to ask you how you felt going from one to ten,
you'd say something like very fast, very agitated. But how
did you feel like going from ten to nine slowly?
Speaker 2: Well, you made it easier. I'm looking right into your eyes.
It was it definitely. I felt as I got lower,
I definitely felt calmer.
Speaker 1: There you go. So that label that you just gave calmer,
you are describing a low frequency. Now did you need
any medication for that? You buy any drugs?
Speaker 2: No, not in the last minutes or so. But I'm
highly medicated.
Speaker 1: That's okay, no, But my point is that studying the
brain and coming up with these non evasive techniques, and
you know, our answers used to do something like that,
breathing techniques and those kinds of things. But technology now
allows us to look into the brain and say, okay,
how can you get somebody to that magical ten hurts
using other forms? And you can by trial and error,
like that technique that I just did with you, that
ten fast and ten slow, that wasn't random. We did
thousands and thousands of these scans to see, okay, which
ones allow most people to get to that ten hertz
and you'll be in that calm state, not permanently for
the rest of the day, but at least for the
next few minutes. And again in that calm state, two
magical things are going to happen. Number One, your ability
to access your own inventory brain functionality. Remember an article
that you read, a video that you saw, a conversation
that you had. Make your conversation richer, make you human
experience richer by you know, inventoring what's in your brain.
And the second thing, like I said, is just amplification
of your senses. After you did that slow, countdown, and
you ate something, I guarantee you taste more of it
because that traffic is gone. So this model, I think
is a model that I am advocating, is that all
the traditional wellness techniques like yoga and meditation and mindfulness
and working out and cooking and going for a walk
and listening to music. These are wonderful things to do
and people should do them and I do them every day,
but they're not things that you can do on the go.
So you know, it's it's our mental wellness is based
on how can we fix things as they're happening. So
I call it when the brain spikes. So, for example,
if I started yelling at you right now, if I said,
oh my god, Fred, you're one of the worst people
I've ever met. This is horrible blah blah blah, And
obviously I'm joking here, But if I meant that and
you were like, oh my god, this is going awful
in that moment, in that unpredicted moment of stress, you
could do that count up and countdown and your response
to my unfair characterization of what's happening would be better.
You would have a response before, but you would say, ah,
let me say this, let me say that, let me
do it in this way. So this sort of fix
it as you go model is what we as human
beings need, but in golf it's also something that we
can do. I don't have to be perfect three minutes
before I make a putt, but if I'm ten seconds
before making a putt and I can feel my brain saying,
don't leave it short, don't need it too hard. Oh
I just missed the last one I got to make this.
That's a clue that Oh my gosh, now my frequency
is higher. So in that moment, what options do you have?
What options does the golf I have? Ye? I mean
you could say, start your routine again, but how many
times are you going to do that? Right? So these
neural hacks, these techniques of getting that frequency down, not permanently,
but long enough to execute the next thirty sixty ninety
three four minutes to the best of your ability, is
really the key, both on the golf course for athletic performance,
but also in life.
Speaker 2: Playing golf gives us a great opportunity between shots to
utilize these neural hacks. Is that a way to focus
on this, is that a way to take advantage.
Speaker 1: Of this absolutely. So let me dig into something that
I talked about quite a good bit in this new book.
So as you know I have. This book came out
back in May. The name of the book is Your Brains.
Your Brain Swings Every Club. But I have a whole
chapter on wait times. So for example, if you're on
the putting green and you're playing with a foursome or
a twosome, you know, and you're waiting for your turn
to put, the overwhelming majority of golfers are going to
watch the other player putt. And I will tell you
that that is garbage input for your brain. Of what
value is that information to you? You know, you're watching
someone go through their routine. You're you're judging them, you're
analyzing them. You know. Now, unless that put is identical
to your line, you know, we're just, without even thinking
about it, looking at somebody else that time. If you
repurposed it and did not look at the at your
fellow competitor, and use these nerraks so that by the
time that you started your routine, that electricity was as
low as possible, right, give you a chance. So I
talked about this in my Burke where in my opinion.
The reason golf in general, but putting in particular is
the hardest, the hardest target sport in the world is
because your eyes are not on it. Like in what
other sport are you trying to be so accurate? Like
it's a four and a half inch target, but you're
not looking at it. That means that your brain needs
space that when it looks back down at the ball
after your last look at the hole or whatever your
target is, it needs low frequency, it needs space, It
needs less traffic to be able to remember where the
ball is going to go because you're not looking at it.
So wait times in golf is one of the largest
untapped opportunities. You know, is why you're looking at somebody
else swing a club. It's of no value to you
now if you're playing casually and you're making fun of
somebody else with your buddies and drinking, you know by
all means. But if you want a higher outcome, if
you want a better motor output out of yourself, you've
got to use your way times as a countdown to
your preshot routine and get that electricity down. Get it
down by using techniques like the one that I just
showed you.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, that is really remarkable stuff. I'm gonna
go on to a different because I've been listening to
this podcast lately and I'm just absolutely curious about this.
If this has crossed your path with the electricity in
the brain telepathy, Yeah, I don't know if you've heard
about this podcast called the Telepathy Tapes or if you
listen to it.
Speaker 1: I have not, but I have a general sense of it.
Speaker 2: No, check into it. It's absolutely fascinating. It's a woman
who's a documentary filmmaker and she has kind of discovered
and getting confirmation over and over and over again and
surprising everyone that did it that nonverbal autistic people communicate
through telepathy not only to each other, but to people
that are close to them like their parents, and the
parents were all, you know, they wouldn't admit it to anybody.
It's like, I, you know, I can't tell anyone that
this is going on, but I really think my child
is reading my mind and then they're hearing other people
going through the same thing. And I'm just curious where
the electricity might be. If you know anything, I'm way
off on this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is a topic that is a little
bit outside of my area.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. No, no, no, no no, but I highly recommend
to everyone check out the telepathy tape.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah no. But what I will tell you
is that you know, well over ninety percent of how
our brain interprets communication from another human being is nonverbal.
To begin with, it's not verbal. Our eyes are constantly
scanning literally every feature in somebody else's face, especially chest
and above, but the whole body. Our auditory input is
constantly scanning your tone, your volume, your enunciation, all those
kinds of things, because it wants to give meaning and
context whether it's something is a threat or not. So
our sensory cortex in the human brain is literally right
next to the hippocampus, which is our hard drive. In
other words, the input that we're getting, you know, the
nonverbal input, is right next to the place where the
inventory is there for us to make sense of it.
So if you want to understand something and you say, oh,
let me go google this, So you got to Google
and you type it in, well, Google's got to go
and search all the web to do give you a
good answer as to what it is. This means our
brain does something very similar only Obviously we don't go
to the Internet, and we don't go to Google, but
we're going to our hard drive, right, So I think
they're phenomenon out there that we don't understand, so we
give it a label that we use. But electricity needs
a electricity. I mean, my first undergraduate degree is in physics.
I understand how electricity enforced works, but it needs a
medium to travel. Electricity cannot travel sort of wirelessly. You know,
it's got to be some type of a medium. And
so what we interpret as oh, I can I know
what they're thinking. But the reason that thought comes into
our head is because you know, we've taken all of
these nonverbal cues. We've made sense of it because of
patterns and those kinds of things. My mother, for example,
in my own house. She passed away few years ago,
but my mother was ninety percent deaf. She was completely
deaf in one ear and she was almost almost almost
completely deaf on the other ear, and so she couldn't
hear us. And back then, hearing aids we're not that
good either. So and she wasn't born deaf, she became
deaf as an adult. But her ability to look at
us and you know, without hearing, communicating completely understand how
we felt, how we thought we were, you know, was stunning,
Like it was amazing how she would she was so accurate.
But that's because as a mom, that inventory that she
had for each one of her seven kids was so high.
I mean, she basically has been looking at us since
our first breath. Right, So that's what I mean is that,
you know, someone could call that, oh, well, she has telepathy.
I would say, I don't know. I don't think it's that.
I think it's more that these kinds of people, all
their sensory input is so high. They're observing every inch
of a non verbal input into their brain and they
can ascribe a good inventory to it and make sense
of it. And so it feels like, oh my gosh,
I know what they're saying, I know how they're feeling.
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, well, yeah, I don't want to go down
that path because I'm through your curveball that you weren't
here to discuss, and so I apologize about that. But
so you've written nine books now, three of them are
about golf. Why the passion that we all share and
the fascination of golf For your work.
Speaker 1: Oh what a great question. Oh what a delightful question.
Thank you, Fred. You know, if you I work with
athletes and coaches in many sports, and almost to a person,
the coach or the athlete will say their sport is
a perfect for life. And I think golf is probably
one of the more accurate metaphors of life. You know,
first of all, it's a five hour round of golf,
so it's an endurance sport, kind of like life is.
It's a long time to be out there, and you
have highs and lows in golf, and you know, you
have time in between, and just like life's events and experiences.
But it's the ultimate battle between you and you, right,
I mean, no one's playing defense against you, which is
also life, you know, like it's really a battle of
what's happening in my life and how can I navigate
this challenge or this situation to the best of my ability.
And because golf is a stationary sport, right, I mean
I'm standing over a putt, over a drive, over a wedge,
you know, it's a lot easier to study it. I've
studied basketball players, lacrosse players, soccer players. There's a lot
of movement going on over there. So they're more difficult
to study. You know, I have a son that plays
junior golf and as a dad, he's in college now.
But as a dad, as you know, I don't know
if you're a dad, Fred, but you know, we are
the worst coach that kids are not going to listen
to us, you know. So I had to figure out
a lot of backdoor ways to understand my son, to
figure out ways to help him. And you know, I
am fascinated that in golf. You know, nobody seems to
be talking about the fact that what really makes golf
hard at the end of the day, in my opinion,
is that it is a target sport where your eyes
are not on the target. That means the role of
the brain is off the charts. Your brain has to
have space to recall the target. It has to take
very good targets that cannot be lost. There's a big
difference when you say, oh, it's a left cup pot
versus Oh, it's going to go over that little white
blade of grass right over there. Those are two targets,
but in the brain they could not be more different.
I've measured them both. One is going to play much
longer in your brain, you know, the one way you
describe the blade of grass and it's going to go
over where the other is much more of a technical
It's a six thirty pot or a left cup pot.
They're both targets, but one is significantly better than the other.
And my definition of better is your brain can remember
it while not looking at it.
Speaker 2: A lot of people think, a lot of golfers think
that the more I practice, the better I'm going to perform.
And I'm curious what your research suggests about the quality
of practice versus the quantity of it, especially from the neuroperspective.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, what a great question. And this has
been one of the surprises for me really. Oh yeah, yeah.
And it pains me to say this because it is
such it goes against almost everything that we have been taught,
which is, you know, practice makes perfect, The more practice,
the better I get. And you know, especially since two
thousands since COVID fred, honestly, the number of calls and
text messages that I've gotten in coaches and athletes from
every sport that are telling me explicitly, you know, hey, doc,
like you know, it used to be when we had
a good practice, we had a good game, not all
the time, but most of the time, there doesn't seem
to be any correlation at this point between the amount
of time that you're practicing versus the outcome. Even at
the tour level. You know, people will be at home
one week and say, oh, I had played really good,
I had good practices in They go next week to
the tournament and they're missing the cut. And so what's
really happening is what I talked about earlier, which is
that you know, there's a there's something called coating. Encoding,
in my opinion, is or should be the most important
part about practice. So just give me a minute here,
let me walk you through this logic. Sure, let's say
that you hit one hundred balls right now. I will
tell you where is that inventory all those balls that
you just hit, the puts that you made, or the
chips that you made. And I'll tell you that all
of that inventory, the value of hitting one hundred balls
is going to one place, and only one place in
the entire universe, and that's your brain. It's not going
to your muscles, because muscles have no memory. It's going
to your brain. So if I had a great practice,
right and let's say from ten o'clock in the morning
until twelve noon, I have two wonderful hours of practice.
If I don't go through a process after that practice
called encoding to make sure that that inventory is number
one stored in my brain in such a manner that
I can retrieve it. In my opinion, the purpose of
practice should be I'm creating an inventory that I can
access in competition. What else would you practice?
Speaker 2: Right? So how do we do that?
Speaker 1: Right? So that's called encoding. And so immediately after practice,
you know, because if at twelve o'clock I'm done, I
will tell you that whether or not those two hours
of practice gets stored in your brain or not is
highly dependent on what happens to you between twelve o'clock
and the time that you go to bed. So, for example,
if at two o'clock you get a text message from
your girlfriend or your boyfriend that says I want to
break up, all of that inventory is gone. Right. So,
and unfortunately we live now at a point where the
only time that the brain is processing the inventory of
the day is when it's sleeping. So I tell people,
when you get done with practice, your practice is not over.
You should not consider your practice over until you have
recorded what it is that you've done, use a selfie video,
write it down, and then bring it back up in
the last thirty minutes before you go to bed. Take
that inventory and move it back up on the very
top of the list that you want your brain to
store at night. Let me go back to the definition
of practice. The purpose of practice should be that when
I'm in competition, I can recall what I did. If
you have a great practice, no matter how many balls
you hit, and you go to competition and you don't
remember what you did yesterday or last week, what was
the value of that practice?
Speaker 2: None?
Speaker 1: So encoding, which I talk about at length. There's a
whole chapter about this, is that practice without encoding is. Unfortunately,
it's just one of the things where you say, oh,
I practiced for the sake of saying I practice, but
not for the value.
Speaker 2: And so the teachers that talk about muscle memory pounding
it into you fallacy.
Speaker 1: No such thing. Unfortunately. Now, I think that their intentions
are good. The more you practice, you're actually building up
a lot of inventory. But it's a very very inefficient
way to build the kind of inventory that you want
to retrieve in competition. So I think coaches say those things, Hey,
practice practice practice because you know, it's more of a
work ethic type of a thing. So practice practice practice
because teams right now are practicing better than they ever have,
but they're still underperforming. I don't know if, like I said,
in the last five years, the variance between someone's good
and someone's bad is getting bigger, it's not getting smaller.
On any given day, a golfer can shoot a seventy
two and you know an eighty two. You know, and
that's because you know when they go play, you know,
depending on what's happened to them. Because our brains are
very fluid, we're human beings. We are processing so many
things about life. If I didn't sleep very well, if
I didn't eat very well, if I have a little
bit of a scratch, I'm not pinky finger on my back,
my brain is going to be distracted in those moments.
I'm going to need access to all the things that
I've done in my practice. So I don't think that
they're these coaches that say practice practice, practice and muscle memory.
I don't think their intentions are bad. In fact, I
think the intentions are very good, sure, but they're missing
the point that you know, the memory is not created
in the muscles. And think of a quadriplegic, right, a
quad polegic. Their brain works fine and their body works fine,
but there's a spinal injury, so there's no transfer of
that electricity, so they can't move anything. Otherwise, the muscles
would just move themselves. They wouldn't need the brain to say, oh,
grab that cup of coffee or move or walk right right.
So muscles are at the mercy of the brain. The
brain is the quarterback of life. And so you know,
I think that so much practice could be so much
more efficient if coaches and athletes learned how to encode
and build these angrams and grams are these wonderful memories
that you can easily access.
Speaker 2: So muscle memory is a myth. Are are there other
myths that you need to debunk for the recreational golfer
to get out of their minds so they don't a
big block. One of my favorites is people like, oh,
I had a great warm up session on the range
and then I played terrible golf. You know, it's like
one doesn't have to with the other.
Speaker 1: Right. I will tell you the biggest myth that I
am trying very hard to debunk, and that is small
target small myths. That is a myth. And so the
way that the brain works, it doesn't matter whether the
target is small or big. It matters whether the target
is rememberable. Is does the target stand out enough? In
my head? Is say enough of a contrast? So you know,
small target, small mess has a nice little cadence to it.
It sounds good, but you know, small targets are also
easier to forget, especially if they're far away. Right. So
what I tell teach people is that a target that
stands out is the best target because your brain will
remember it more. If it's a color contrast or a
shape contrast, or something about it is odd. Those are
the best targets. Now, there's no rhyme to it. Odd target,
small mess, like it doesn't rhyme as well as a
small mess. Sure, I find people looking looking and finding
something small on a tree leaf and then they look
back down at the ball. You can't remember that.
Speaker 2: So this is when you're addressing the ball. This is
when you're at the ball. You look out to the fairway,
the green, whatever you're looking at. You know, it's like doctor,
doctor Joe parent recently told us that, you know, the
idea of aim to a spot, shoot to an area.
I think I got that right from him. So you
know he's getting away from the small target small miss concept.
But you know it's like find a small target, but
you be happy with an area, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I would I would phrase that differently. I
would say, look, golf has played over six hundred acres
or however many acres. It's not like basketball. It's just
on one court or a soccer field or a baseball field.
So the ability to look out there in nature and
find good targets is a wonderful task, and we have
to do that. In the fallargets are going to be
different than the spring. You know, if it's cloudy, your
target's going to be different because certain things you know
from the sun's reflection. So I try to teach people
like enjoy the process of looking from a tea box
to the fairway or the fairway to the green or
on the green, of searching, lose your eyes and say, okay,
what can I find over here? Because your ability to
find good, holdable targets is really the key. And I
don't know whether I care whether it's a big or small,
or you know, a general area. Just find something that
is contrasting enough that your brain can remember. I will
say this again. I'll say this again. Forgive me, Fred,
Please forgive me.
Speaker 2: Not a problem.
Speaker 1: What makes goff the most difficult target sport of all
is that your eyes are not on the target. They're
down at the ball, right, So we have to give
the brain something out there that it can recall. And
when people have a good target playing in their brain,
I find something magical happens. I find that suddenly they
have the most amazing tempo. They may not hit perfect shots,
but their dispersion becomes a lot smaller.
Speaker 2: Well, they may not get the best results exactly, but
you're swinging the feel of it. That what you're trying
to accomplish in the contact of the ball, But afterwards.
Speaker 1: It's that's the power of these targets. There's a chapter
in the book where I talk about grid neurons, the
person that discovered it won a Nobel Prize for it,
and what she essentially discovered. And we can do this
very quickly. Right, So let me ask you a question. Okay, ready,
how far how far are you from? Go ahead.
Speaker 2: From? And now I have to ask you from what?
Speaker 1: Okay? All right, now let me ask you another question. Okay,
how far are you from New York City?
Speaker 2: Thousands of miles?
Speaker 1: Okay? And where are you right now?
Speaker 2: Northern California?
Speaker 1: Okay? Perfect? Now, think of the difference between those two questions.
The first one, I said, how far are you from?
And I didn't give you a destination? And you're like,
what's it talking about? Where do I go? Up? Down?
But as soon as I said new York City, did
you not draw a line kind of going east and
kind of doing that?
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Exactly. Those are great neurons. Great neurons were activated. Great
is a destination. It creates a scale in your brain,
and scale is what creates sequencing because the whole purpose
of motor sequencing is to create force. The reason I
go back is so that I can generate amount of
force to apply it to a ball to send it
to a destination. So this is why targets are so
important involved because number one, you're not looking at it.
Whereas if I'm Steph Curry and I'm shooting a basket,
the basket is right there, I see it. You know,
if I have a soccer ball in front of me,
I see the ball. I can quickly in my peripheral
vision see generally where the ball is going to go.
Not so in golf. This is why the role of
the brain is so important in golf is because we've
got to create the state where there's space in the
brain to recall that grit neuron, that target, which then
is the glue to your motor sequencing.
Speaker 2: Fascinating. This has been so interesting and really helpful, Doctor Justice.
Please tell us the name of the new book and
the other golf books that you have.
Speaker 1: Wonderful, Thank you again for having me.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: The name of the book is called Your Brain Swings
Every Club. It's available on Amazon. There's an ebook. There's
also an audiobook, so however you like to consume information.
There have been lots of people that I collaborate with.
I have chapters where other coaches have participated in. Now
Brad Faxon was kind enough to write the forward to
the book. I have so much respect for him and
so many other people. So it's a collaborative work and
it was a privilege to sort of write it with
all of these people. The other two golf books are
Golf EQ and and Jerra Gough this book is relatively short,
and that was intentional. I didn't want to put a
lot of you know, uh stuff out there. I want
to kind of get to the point very quickly, and
really my goal was to give people a language to
understand the electricity in the brain and the role that
it plays in motor function and life.
Speaker 2: And websites. How do we find you online to learn more?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, Jira goof at g y r a golf
dot com is the website. But you know, if you
just gurgle me my social media handles, I have a
guy that does that for me. I'm too old, unfortunately,
but you know at easy Justice or doctor Easy Justice.
I have a lot of good content out there, but
so please follow me. I was trying to put something good,
good out there.
Speaker 2: Great and it's eyes easy why easy Justice, like you
would think j U s t I ce Doctor Justice.
This has been fascinating. I loved it. Really glad that
you shared this with us and with other podcasters. I'm
not so happy about that, but I'm not going to
ask for an exclusive.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Fred. You've been awesome. You're awesome the last time.
You're awesome. Now. Congratulations by the way, on passing a
thousand episodes, and thank you for all that you do
to bring all these wonderful people together and share information
and knowledge for your fans.