Putting Under Pressure

Why do I crumble under pressure? Why do other golfers choke despite having years of experience? What could have prevented this from happening?

No matter how experienced you are, when playing golf under stressful conditions you may end up crumbing under the pressure placed on you, such as when your whole family has come to watch you to see if you're the expert putter you constantly claim to be.

Why do some people choke?

To understand how performance can breakdown under pressure, we must understand how we develop our skills. When we first start, everything is new to us and we've often experienced training that consisted of being told "grip the club in this way, make sure to hit the ball here, have your feet shoulder width apart, and the list goes on...and on...and on... This process involves a lot of mental effort being used to understand what and how we are supposed to perform the movement. This stage of learning results in us creating theories and step-by-step plans on how to perform. As we gain expertise, this information and performing the movement becomes more automatic where we unconsciously think about what we're doing and simply just perform. This is where everyone wants to be!

What has this got to do with choking?

Interestingly, some people are more likely to revert back to using more mental effort to perform the movement step-by-step even though they normally automatically perform it! This is known as reinvesting and is done in situations we give a lot of meaning to and view as stressful. You'd think being able to think step-by-step would mean we'd be more able to fix any potential issues with our performance, but that is wrong! We essentially go from a smooooooth movement to a more R. I. G. I. D. one, ultimately linked to inferior golf performance. Note that not everyone who has experience playing golf is likely to crumble under pressure! Like I said before, some people are more likely to reinvest than others, making them more vulnerable to the effects of pressure and stress.

But thankfully there's some practical advice that can come from this. This all stems from altering how we practice so we learn less from the standard step-by-step approach and learn using less mental effort.

Using the example of putting, there are multiple ways to do this:

You can learn to putt while completing a second task. Strange, I know! Previous research has found playing an audio track where novice golfers putted and identified whether they heard a high- or low-pitched tone on the audio track helped to reduce the mental resources used to attend to task instructions; allowing them to unconsciously learn how to perform the movement. This resulted in the golfers maintaining an improved putting performance after 72 hours of not performing.
Start learning to putt from distances close to the hole then slowly progress further away from the hole (e.g., 25cm away from the hole to 200cm). This means the number of errors made at the start are lower than if you started further away, and the progressive nature of this form of learning allows the performer to increase the putting difficulty over time. As the learner you are less able to create rules of how you should be putting, so knowledge using this is acquired more unconsciously and leads to more automatic performance; especially in times of stress.
Finally, the use of metaphors to describe how to perform a movement has been shown to help with performing under stress. It was first used in table tennis. Players were told to imagine they are making the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle (the net and table created the right angle) using the table tennis paddle. This was shown to not only improve shot accuracy, but helped performers maintain superior performance in stressful conditions. More importantly for you readers, the use of analogies was found to improve putting performance in golfers and protected them from anxiety's detrimental effects (the same can't be said for those who learned using more explicit instructions).

For example, an analogy for grip used in golf research was to grip the club and imagine the handle is an open tube of toothpaste between your hands and the contents must not be pushed out

An important side note is using these forms of learning may seem like your performance progress is slower than conventional training methods, however in the long run your performance is more likely to be protected against the detrimental impact of pressure.

Take home messages:

People who tend to reinvest in using step-by-step approaches to their movements are more likely to crumble under pressure.
Change your practice so you’re less consciously aware of how you’re performing the skill to protect against the negative impact of pressure and reduce the ability to reinvest.

Article by Edgar Chekera