Mastering Golf's Mental Game: Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performanc

Description: Mastering Golf's Mental Game by Matthew Rudy, Michael Lardon Golfers are forever tinkering with their game, from the basic components of their serving, to their putting, to their mental approach to the game. Almost every professional now uses a golf psychologist, like Bob Rotella, whose books have sold nearly 500,000 copies. Michael Lardon is the new breed in golf psychology. While many golf strategies try to get players to eliminate thinking from their approach, Lardon believes that the entire mind, body, and spirit must be embraced. He perfected a multi-step kind of checklist that he believes golfers should employ as a means to eliminating overthinking and succumbing to pressure. This simple step was used by Lardons star client Phil Mickelson when he won the British Open in 2013. Mickelson, who called the process Golfs Mental Scorecard, will write the foreword for this book.Mastering Golfs Mental Game will be filled with stories of golfers gone awry and golfers who have gained confidence through this process, as well as other great "rules" that Lardon shares with his clients. A must-have for all weekend golfers, this is the kind of information that can sell forever. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Notes High-profile golf psychologist Dr. Michael Lardon offers the mental approach hes devised to the game, which helped Phil Mickelson win The Open in 2013. Author Biography Dr. MIKE LARDON received a psychology degree with honors from Stanford University and his medical degree from the University of Texas. He then completed a psychiatric residency and subsequent fellowship in psychopharmacology and psychobiology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). During this time he worked with and caddied for his brother, Brad Lardon, in the finals of the PGA Tour Qualifying School. In 1995, Dr. Lardon won the Judd Research Award at UCSD for brain research on athletic peak performance. Dr. Lardon often collaborates with Dr. Eric Heiden, the 1980 five-time Olympic gold medalist and United States Olympic Speedskating Team physician. In addition, Dr. Lardon works with a variety of Olympic, National Football League, Major League Baseball, and PGA Tour athletes. He is currently an associate clinical professor of medicine at UCSD, and his private practice is located in San Diego. Dr. Lardon is frequently interviewed by major sports publications such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN magazine, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Golf Week, Golf Magazine, and Golf World. Promotional "Headline" Dr. Michael Lardon is golfs hottest psychologist, having devised a mental approach to the game that helped Phil Mickelson win the British Open in 2013. That plan is detailed here, with a book that can follow in the footsteps of Harvey Penicks Little Red Book and Bob Rotellas Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect . Excerpt from Book CHAPTER 1 The Anatomy of Performance What is it that separates a PGA Tour player from an amateur who plays once a week? It sounds like a silly question with easy, obvious -answers. Talent. Practice. Single-minded dedication. Access to first-class instruction. All true, but secondary to the real point. What if I told you that one of the main traits that separates tour players from you and me on the golf course--and world-beaters like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson from the "rank-and-file" players on the Tour--has nothing to do with physical talent or beating thousands of balls on the range? Ive spent my career studying human performance, both in the lab and out in the world. My job is figuring out what makes people perform to the best of their abilities and clearing the roadblocks that stand in their way. The real geniuses in sports--people like Michael Jordan in basketball, Serena Williams in tennis, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, and Tiger Woods in golf--unquestionably have incredible physical talent. But what really separates those giants from the rest is not their ability to manipulate a ball or their body in a certain way. Its their ability to manipulate time. Youve probably heard athletes and announcers talk about how the game "slowed down" for them. Quarterbacks talk about the key moment when the scene from behind the offensive line wasnt total chaos but a chessboard, with the pieces moving in a choreographed dance. Baseball hitters talk about seeing pitches come in slow and fat--just waiting to be hit. To those of us watching the action as spectators, time obviously doesnt actually slow down and wait for these players to do their thing. It just seems like it does for them. I know something about this from firsthand experience. Ive played table tennis at a relatively high level for a number of years, and as a teenager I was ranked among the top handful of players in the United States. Still, there was a tier of players above me who were significantly better. At sixteen years old, I was playing one of them--six-time U.S. Open champion Dal-Joon Lee--when I found that place where the ball slows down, at least for a short time. Watch a YouTube video of a match between two skilled table tennis players and youll see that its truly one of the fastest ball sports in the world. Players are hitting the ball in excess of 80 miles per hour across a table that is only nine feet long. It doesnt seem possible that the players can even react to whats happening. But for the first hour of that match against Dal-Joon Lee, I was. I was connected to the ball. I could see it coming from every angle, and I was blocking and smashing it almost at will. I was ahead two sets and 13-7 in the third when a comment from one of my friends in the crowd--something to the effect that this would be the biggest upset in the sport at that time--broke the trance I was in, and I ended up losing. For that short time, I had been in The Zone. Table tennis was a challenging career path for a teenager in New York in those days, and after competing in the German professional league for a year and a half, I moved on to the premed program at Stanford. One of my earliest lab partners in organic -chemistry was Eric Heiden, who had just finished winning all five of the individual speed skating gold medals at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. We became great friends, and it would fascinate me to hear him talk about his biggest races as if he had skated them in an empty rink, with nobody watching. Everything slowed down--even his pulse. In one special class that Stanford convened for students with high-level athletic experience, Eric described how he was able to visualize every single stride he was about to make before his gold medal 5,000-meter race, and how he stumbled over a rut in the ice halfway through his 1,500-meter final but recovered in time to take another gold. Eric was the first person ever to win five individual gold medals in one Olympics--swimmer Michael Phelps matched him in 2008--and the very definition of this incredible mental acumen Ive been describing. As I made my way through my academic career at Stanford and the University of Texas and moved on to my internship in internal medicine at UCLA, my fascination with this kind of "timeless time" that great athletes would experience continued. It seemed that when a competitor was in the right state of consciousness, he or she could sample time in smaller and smaller increments. If you think of a fastball coming out of a pitchers hand at 98 miles per hour, a hitter who is struggling might see that ball as a single frame. A photograph. But a locked-in Miguel Cabrera sees the ball as a movie--with thousands of frames. And when hes locked in like that, the movie slows down to the point where he can see the individual stitches on the ball, just as it slows down for a PGA Tour player when he can actually feel the position of the clubface at impact while the head is moving at 125 miles per hour. I wanted to figure out what made the great ones like Eric--or Dal-Joon Lee--able to essentially live in The Zone, while other competitors could only visit it on occasion. Was it something inherently different in their makeup--like the physical difference between a six-foot-two point guard and a seven-foot-one center? Did their minds work differently? And, most importantly, was it something an athlete could make happen more frequently through -training? The answer surprised me, and Im sure it will surprise you too. To figure it out, I engineered a study--which earned a grant from the United States Tennis -Association--that measured the way different groups of athletes responded to light while under hypnosis. I based it on a technique developed by Dr. David Spiegel, a prominent psychiatrist at Stanford. Without getting too technical, Dr. Spiegel measured the changes in brain-processing speed on an EEG machine while people were under hypnosis--something extremely valuable in the study of disorders like Alzheimers and Parkinsons diseases and ADD. In my study, I used Dr. Spiegels techniques on different groups of athletes, from world-class to competitive amateur triathletes to average "weekend warriors." I predicted that the study would show that those in the world-class group--which included my friend Eric Heiden, tennis player Roz Fairbanks, eight-time Ironman Triathlon champion Paula Newby-Fraser, Olympic miler Steve Scott, and gold-medal gymnast Peter Vidmar--would show that they received information more quickly than the average person and then processed it more quickly as well. In other words, their mental machine was in higher tune than those of us mortals. But in reality my original prediction--that the signals would get there faster and stronger--didnt hold true. There is a correlation between being in top physical shape and processing information more quickly and efficiently. But the true world-class athletes didnt automatically process information any more quickly or efficiently than the group of fit amateur triathletes. What they did do, however, was show the ability to consistently and consciously put themselves in a trancelike state that enhances performance. Simply put, the study seemed to indicate that peak athletic performance is more about state--the competitors level of consciousness and ability to handle a given situation--than it is about trait, or some innate physical or mental wiring. In other words, you can learn to find The Zone. Thats something with huge implications in the world of peak performance. Youve probably heard of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwells runaway bestseller about the subject of human excellence. In it he advances Dr. K. Anders Ericssons theory that a virtuoso in a given discipline--whether its a sport, music, or surgery--has to devote ten thousand hours of directed practice to master the discipline. We could argue about whether or not thats true, but I think the ten-thousand-hour theory misses the bigger point. Dont get me wrong. Practice is certainly important. Its seductive to think that spending ten thousand hours--or five hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, for ten years--can overcome a real or perceived shortfall in actual physical talent. It might, to a degree, but theres no free ride. You do have to understand and improve the physical elements of any discipline to be good at it. But its how and what you practice that is fundamental to improvement. You have to practice intelligently, creatively--and over the entire spectrum of the body and mind. Its cliche, but your mind really is a muscle, and like all muscles it needs to be exercised to perform at its best. Without understanding this fundamental concept, you will get only so far--literally and figuratively--with practice alone. Ive been affiliated with the U.S. Olympic Training Center outside San Diego for almost twenty years and whats not missing over there is talent. The Olympic trials are filled with the most talented people youre ever going to find--in any discipline. They all have it, and theyve all spent ten thousand hours practicing. I even saw it with my brother. In 1991, Brad qualified for the PGA Tour for the first time on his second try at qualifying school. I was in the middle of a research fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, and Brad asked me to come and caddie for him at the season-opening Sony Ope Details ISBN0553417916 Author Michael Lardon Pages 224 Year 2014 ISBN-10 0553417916 ISBN-13 9780553417913 Format Hardcover Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc Subtitle Your Ultimate Guide to Better On-Course Performance and Lower Scores Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Illustrations 25 charts and diagrams Media Book DEWEY 796.352 Short Title MASTERING GOLFS MENTAL GAME Language English Audience General/Trade Publication Date 2014-09-16 UK Release Date 2014-09-16 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:141706681;

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