Practice makes Perfect, NOT!

As in all sports, if you want to be better at what you are doing, you practice. Among professional tour golfers, they are practicing, on average, 10 hours per day, 6 days a week, including weight training, cardio workouts, and flexibility training, with their range works and practice rounds.

I know you’ve heard the saying “practice makes perfect,” but does it really? To keep things short and simple, the answer is NO. What practice does is make things permanent, and this is reflected in the following:

“You can shoot eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, all you become is good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” NBA Legend Michael Jordan

From my early experience of hitting baskets after baskets of balls down the golf range and getting nowhere fast in my game improvement, and doing loads of research as well as being taught by great instructors, I became a firm believer of:

“Proper Practice makes Perfect and Permanent”

At Tailored Swing, I have and forever will emphasize on individualism, a major philosophy in my golf coaching, and that every golfer should take the above quote and makes it his/her own, as in what is “Proper” and what is “Perfect”.

The key to a proper practice is to strive for excellence, whereas excellence is perfection at its core for the individual. Perfection would be “I want to be free from all of my flaws and never mess up.” But how can one be free from his/her flaws if one of the flaws is, for example, a physical limitation. It just cannot be done. What we are striking for is excellence, and this would be “I’m going to work on doing this task in the best possible way, to the best of my ability, with the best information I have until I become extremely good at it.”

Initially, your brain is being mindful in guiding your swing, and the more you practice the right way, the more you are creating muscle memory. Over time, your brain and body would understand the swing sequence, and your nervous system would reacts more quickly as the pathways are grooved. The more this happens, the better you become at the task at hand and the more natural it all becomes to you.