Swing Thoughts When Golfing

One day, out of the blue, my college golf coach brought us into a classroom on the 4th floor. We never met on the 4th floor before. He stood at the chalkboard and drew a flight of stairs, a bunch of steps. He added a stick figure at the top of the stairs. Then he said, "please write down, in great detail, how exactly you would walk down a long flight of stairs, in enough detail to train someone who never walked down a flight of stairs". He added, "I want to know about knee movement, weight transfer, where the arms are in relation to the body, swinging forward and back or not, where your eyes are looking, if your head is bent over looking down or not, etc".

Though the team was perplexed, everyone proceeded to write down the required movements, in detail, then each person presented their summary of "instructions" for comment. Some argued that A happens before B, D before B, etc. There was some intensity as people felt strongly about their "method". Some guys had sketches and diagrams for knee movements and even went so far as to demonstrate their precise movements.

Then the coach said, "Ok, Dave, come with me". Dave and Coach left the room and after about two minutes or so the Coach came back into the room without Dave. Then the coach called another guy and they left, then Coach came back without him too. Then the Coach called me. I'm thinking "maybe the guys who didn't come back were cut from the team?". The coach took me to the top of the stairs down the hall from the room and said, "Ok, I want you to walk down this flight of stairs based upon the detailed instructions you presented, and don't hold onto the railing because you should be an expert at this".

Guess what? After the third step, I grabbed the railing! The Coach laughed and said, "you too!!". Then he said, "get out to the field with the other guys".

He gathered us on the range and said "your golf swing takes about as long as moving down the first step or two of the stairwell for which all of you experts panicked and grabbed the railing". He added "who here was comfortable trying to think of every move to walk down those stairs?" Nobody raised their hand. Then he said, "Ok, while many things we do require some form of thought, we can't possibly think of every single detail required in a golf swing. If you do, your brain will grab that railing during your swing". "You guys cannot have more than one or two thoughts".

The moral of the story was to stop over-thinking while playing golf and narrow down a series of movements into one or two condensed thoughts.