At the heart of golfBeta is a desire to understand and articulate how the majority of golfer practice is broken. Short-termism is prevalent; quick fixes desirable; distraction eminent.
My journey to understand the science behind a better way to practice has led me to learn to code and build this little app.
At its center is the power of forgetting. Here comes the science bit…keep up!
Forgetting something helps to remember it!
A facile and ridiculously simplistic summary of a complex topic, but it is in essence true. When you learn a new motor pattern, it tends to get stored into short-term memory which has low capacity, and after a while, things start to get bumped out in favor or more recent activities, and the pattern is forgotten.
But, as the memory fades, there is an opportunity. The mere act of trying to remember the pattern has a magical effect - it strengthens the memory and starts to build a connection in long-term storage, which has almost endless capacity and perfect recall.
What is this sorcery?
Well, the secret sauce is in trying to remember something which you have nearly forgotten. This puts your brain under cognitive strain - working it hard to recall the pattern. As it struggles to remember, the brain reinforces the neural pathways required to retrieve the memory with a strange substance called myelin; effectively turning the dial-up connection into a fiber-optic information super-highway.
So while the recall effect may diminish, and short-term performance may suffer - long-term storage is induced, real learning is happening, and results over the long term will be significantly better than they otherwise would have been.
Don’t take my word for it; listen to Dr. Robert Bjork.
So the key is to get into a frequent cycle of forgetting/retrieval. Try something out, then just as you are getting good at it...stop. Do something else for a while. Sleep on it. Then come back to it, and try again. It will be difficult, and you may not even perform as well as before, but you can be safe in knowing that you’re on the right track to locking in long-term improvements.
Spacing and variability
This is where golfBeta can help.
Some great ways of “helping you to forget” are:
- Spacing your practice sessions out - as the saying goes, “a little, and often”
- Taking more time between reps; effectively adding space
- Mixing up your practice sessions so they have a range of tasks, thereby adding some spacing between reps for any given task (“variability”)
And wouldn’t you know it, golfBeta has these features baked right in!
When you start a session with one click, the algorithm pre-plans every shot so that you never hit more than two shots from the same task consecutively.
For the golf nerds (like me), you can even plan out every shot yourself, altering consecutive reps depending on how comfortable you are with each task.
Making a big deal out of spacing and variability
So this, in part, is why golfBeta makes such a big deal out of spacing and variability - it helps to forget, and it requires us to remember.
I’ve found this little saying to be incredibly useful in my golf practice (and beyond…in the real world).
golfBeta bakes in spacing and variability to all of your training sessions…automatically.