A Sub-Conscious Action

“A good golf swing should be performed sub-consciously.” That’s what the authors of the book (and the golf training programme) The Swing Factory argue. And it's not just their belief; many other golf writers and experienced players will tell you the same thing.  

But what do they mean by that? Often we are robbed of the benefit of good advice because we don’t fully understand key terms people use. This is surely a case in point. What does the term “sub-conscious” mean in regard to the golf swing? If we don’t understand that, we won’t understand, let alone come to practice, this important piece of advice.

A conscious activity is one that occurs at the level of our awareness, and usually involves deliberate thought and action on our part. We are aware of what is happening, can understand what is happening, and can even control it to some degree or other. Moving the cup on my desk forward an inch or two, for example, is a deliberate, conscious action. I look at the cup, see where I want to move it to, and then deliberately apply force to it so that it moves to the spot where I want it to go. That is all very conscious, very intentional.

Compare that to the simple act of picking up a fork to eat. When it comes time to eat dinner, we don’t have to think about picking up our eating utensils. It’s something we do reflexively. In most cases we’ve done it for so many years that we don’t even need to look where our knife and fork are. We simply reach out, grasp them, and put them to work without even thinking about it. That’s a sub-conscious action – an action that is taking place without conscious, deliberate thought, action or decision. It’s taking place through motions that are below the level of consciousness. They just happen without us having to think about them.

That’s what people have in mind when they talk about the golf swing becoming a “sub-conscious” action. They are talking about it becoming something so natural, so instinctive, that we don’t have to think about it. We don’t need to remind ourselves to “get our hips out of the way,” or “begin to unwind from the bottom up,” or again, think about “having an even tempo.” It just happens, fluidly, naturally, without any conscious thought on our part. When we reach that state, it’s likely that our golf will become much more consistent.

As desirable as that sounds, how do we get to that point? Again, it’s helpful to think of analogies. How did we reach the point of being able to pick up a knife and fork to eat a meal without thinking about the action consciously? The answer is, by practice. If we could remember way back to when we first began to use a knife and fork, we would remember how clumsy it felt at first, and how our first efforts to put our fork in our mouth took concentration. There were often mistakes along the way, and food smudges on our faces to prove it. But with time – and often not a lot of time – that simple activity became something natural to us. It was awkward at first, and required deliberate action at first; but with time and repeated practice, it became something that was just part of us.

That’s true of any action. For the golf swing to become a sub-conscious action that we perform instinctively, smoothly, repetitively we’ve got to practice it. At first we’ve got to discover where the club should be in different parts of the swing; then we’ve got to place it there (repetitively) in slow motion; and then we’ve got to practice the movement and get the feel of the rhythm by constant practice. In time, we will be able to swing the club in the same way without thinking about it.