So you’ve made it to the practice tee…or the putting green…or the short game area. You’ve got a bucket full of balls, and a head full of good intentions.
You’re no Tiger Woods (as your coach has told you endlessly), so there are a few areas of your games that you want to work on, and you’ve got a few drills and a few YouTube videos in mind.
So what do you do?
Strap in for the brain bit
As we’ve gone through this one of the keys to learning appears to be applying cognitive strain - make a task sufficiently difficult to force your brain to engage and form the pathways you need to lock in learning over the long-term.
A great way of doing this is by interleaving tasks. Check out this video, which explains things nicely.
So don’t cram in the same information over and over again. Try a couple of times, then stop, do something else and come back to it later.
Interleaving golf practice
A great way of doing this is by picking out a few areas which you want to work on in your session (preferably very different things like chipping driving and putting), and interleaving them.
Try each task a couple of times. Concentrate really hard on what you are trying to achieve with each shot, and reflect on whether or not you achieved it. After a couple of reps, move onto a totally different task. Rinse and repeat.
Check out this short video which explains things nicely.
You can easily build up to an effective training session in which you can cover lots of you ‘work-on’ areas, without ever getting bogged down in hundreds of reps.
Variability built-in
Even better, golfBeta comes with this kind of interleaving built-in.
Unless you tell it not to, every session will mix up the tasks so you never practice the same thing for too long without a change.
It’s never been so easy to create effective training sessions that follow the science to help you to improve.