Pay Attention to Tension.
Did you know your body can give you signals when your brain is not ready to help you trigger your best shots?
Your best shots happen when your mind, your body and your emotions are all on the same page and working together.
You will feel calm, focused, relaxed and have a high degree of trust that you can execute the challenge in front of you.
Recognizing this optimum mental state is critical because all of your physical movements are triggered in your mind.
If you haven't done a lot of mental game training it can be difficult to recognize when your mind is in the right state to trigger your best physical patterns and minimize the effect of negative emotions.
Exercises like meditation, focused breathing or presence work relative to golf... can give you the tools to recognize the optimum state and help you access your best shots.
Your body also gives you signals to help you recognize when your mental state/focus is less than ideal.
There are four helpful signals your body will give you:
Tension
Heart rate
Breathing
Eye Focus
Tension level increases.
Your key is to figure out where that tension increase happens in your body. The most common culprits are your hands, your jaw, your neck and shoulders and your feet. The smaller, fast twitch muscle groups are more prone to increased tension when your mind is not in the right state.
Heart rate increases.
As perceived pressure increases and your tension level increases so does your heart rate. If you feel your heart is beating significantly faster than normal... there's a pretty good chance your brain is not quite in the right state.
Breathing gets more shallow.
This is tied to your heart rate and tension. As your heart rate increases and your muscular tension increases... your breathing tends to get quicker and shallower.
Eye focus narrows.
As you move from a calm, focused and confident mental state towards fight/flight/ freeze... Your eye focus goes from a wide open scan to a very narrow range of focus.
All of these physiological signals are normal responses to perceived stress.
The key is recognizing them so that you can take steps to reset your mental state and access your best physical pattern.
Stay tuned to find out what steps might work best for you!
