Deb Dutta

I love playing golf! I also like watching golf pros competing against each other at the highest level of the game. Recently, my eyes were trained on the TPC Sawgrass tournament in Florida, one of the biggies in the US PGA circuit. Aaron Baddeley is a talented Australian who has been in the PGA circuit for a while – he was about to tee off on the 119 metre island green on the 17th. As Aaron completed his pre shot routine (a set of activities that every Pro goes through to get themselves into the groove ahead of a shot), I saw him close his eyes – for a good ten seconds. The commentator and I blurted out together – “he is visualizing the shot”. Unless Aaron was dozing off (which he obviously was not) I am quite sure that the commentator and I were both right!

Photo credit belongs to professional coach Gail Vilcu

I have written in the past about the power of visualization, the exercise of ‘mentally’ viewing an action before it is ‘physically’ executed. When done with sincerity, the human nervous and muscular systems prepare themselves by firing precisely in a similar manner to what they do when the ‘physical action’ actually happens. Medical tests were conducted on Olympic athletes where they were asked to run races in their minds by visualizing themselves doing so. While they sat absolutely stationary, it was incredible that the same nerve cells and muscular tissues fired up that would have if they were actually running the race!

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