A little over a week ago, Stinky Golfer Chris posted about purchasing his first golf gimmick. Chris joked in the headline; “I bought my first golf gimmick…or did I?” – suggesting he wasn’t really sure if he had just bought a gimmick or not.
That’s the thing with gimmicks – you’re never really sure if they will work. Did you just shave strokes off your game or were you just the next sucker? After all, they say there’s one born every minute.
In any event, we posted Chris’ story on all of our social media sites with the caption; “Can this golf gimmick actually work?” That elicited a decent amount of responses, including those who were certain Chris got screwed; and those who were equally certain the product worked. But perhaps the most intriguing answer was: “It will work if you want it to.”
Think about that for a second. “It will work if you want it to.” I don’t know about you, but this provided me one of those “ah-ha!” moments. For me, reading that statement put the whole golf gimmick thing in perspective. Sure, the person who left that comment was probably suggesting mind-over-matter (e.g. if you truly believe something will work, it will).
But beyond convincing yourself that it will work, all the gimmick needs to do is focus you on the task at hand – in this case, improving your golf game. The rest comes down to how much time you want to spend practicing. Let me give you an example: Let’s say you buy a golf gadget that trains you to move the club along the correct swing path. Regardless of what feature the gadget uses to get you on the right path, it inevitably forces you to focus on your swing. And the more you focus, logic dictates the better you will become.
So in this sense, weeks of practicing with any golf gimmick will probably help you be more consistent – but it’s not the gimmick that’s doing the trick, rather it’s the practicing. It makes sense: The more you believe in a product, the more you will practice to get the desired results. But if you suspect you’ve bought a gimmick, you will cease practicing fairly quickly and proclaim the product a bunch of BS.
We can apply this theory to most golf gimmicks: Wanting to believe it works leads to more practice, which ultimately leads to better results. But what about in the case of Stinky Golfer Chris’ gimmick? He purchased one of those hologram balance bracelets…how do you “practice” with that? I guess he would just have to wear it and see if it works. And here again, it may be mind-over-matter: If you believe it works, it will.
So Chris will be wearing his bracelet out on the course in a few weeks to see if he was one of the 525,600 suckers born in 1974. And seeing as I was also born in that year; and seeing as I also purchased one of those bracelets…there may very well be two suckers on the tee that day.
Here’s to impulse decisions and mind-over-matter!
The more I play, the more I am convinced that once you have a fair idea of where the ball is going, it is ALL about trust. Nothing ruins a golfshot like a lack of trust. So if you trust the bracelet, that adds a layer of trust, and that can never hurt. You might need a few more layers, but it is a good foundation.
Interesting thoughts. One caveat: practice only helps if you are practicing the correct technique. So regardless of the fact that if you believe in a gimmick, you will practice more, if said gimmick does not in some fashion get you to practice CORRECTLY, it will not improve your game. You may become more consistent, but more consistently bad is not better.
And just wearing the bracelet out on the golf course doesn’t seem to count for the thought process we are talking about. There is no extra practice involved.
Jason – great comments! It’s true, I was going on the assumption that the gimmick would be designed correctly in the first place (e.g. that it indeed gets you to swing on the correct plane).
As for the bracelet, I mention in the post that you can’t “practice” per say with it, but it would still fall under the thought process of mind-over-matter (it just doesn’t take the extra step of applying the mind-over-matter process to actually practicing more).