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By Sandy Dunlop — Better Game Golf
Every golfer has a round inside them waiting to get out. But here is the problem nobody talks about honestly: the feeling you rely on to build your swing is lying to you. Your golf proprioception swing feedback system is calibrated to your existing habits, not to correct positions. What feels right is wrong. What is wrong feels right. This is called faulty sensory perception, and it is not a mental weakness or a lack of effort. It is simply how the nervous system works. The good news is that video bypasses this problem entirely. Paired with the right method, a $30 tripod and your smartphone become the most honest coach you have ever had.
Your proprioceptive sense comes from stretch receptors throughout the body. These organs send constant feedback to the brain about where your limbs are, how your joints are moving, and what feels balanced or not. The problem is not that proprioception is broken. The problem is that it is doing exactly what it is designed to do... reporting what is familiar, not what is correct.
When you have swung a club ten thousand times with a particular pattern, the brain has mapped that pattern. It has filed it, reinforced it, and made it automatic. The brain stores these movements in what are called brain maps. And when you step onto the first tee, the brain does not reach for what is optimal. It reaches for what it knows. What it is comfortable with. What it has done before.
This is what I mean when I say the proprioceptive sense tells you what it is comfortable with, which is what it is already doing. The familiar feels correct even when it is measurably not. That is faulty sensory perception in action, and it is why golfers can spend years convinced they are making a change, while video evidence shows the same old movement repeating itself perfectly, round after round.
This is also why simply being told a tip and then trying to feel your way into it rarely works. You are using a broken feedback system to verify a change that the system does not want to recognise. The feeling of "that was better" often means nothing more than "that felt familiar."
There is a second layer to this problem, and it is rooted in how the nervous system is fundamentally wired. Our nervous system is set up to give us a good enough result. It is called satisficing. The brain's primary evolutionary job is not excellence. It is survival. It is getting by. Getting the ball roughly down the fairway roughly often enough to keep playing is satisficing. Hitting it with the precision, consistency, and composure that represents your genuine potential is optimising. And the nervous system is not naturally geared for that.
Being better than you ever thought you could be is not satisficing. It is a deliberate act against the grain of your own biology. That is not pessimism. That is an honest starting point. Because once you accept that the system is working against you, you stop blaming yourself for not feeling the change, and you start looking for external feedback that overrides the system.
The instinct to revert under pressure is not weakness. It is the brain doing precisely what brains do: under stress, it selects what it knows best. Understanding this is what separates a genuine improvement framework from another round of tips that never stick. You can explore how sitting, walking, and breathing in everyday life shapes these habits further in my article Why Your Golf Posture Is Built Before You Step on the Course.
The method I use is not complicated, but it is rigorous. It is basic scientific method applied to your golf. You plan to do something. You have a hypothesis. You do it. Then you see what you have done, you review it, and what you learn from the review you bring back into your next plan. Plan. Do. Review. Plan. Do. Review.
That cycle should never end, no matter what heights you reach. The moment you stop reviewing, you stop learning. The moment you stop planning consciously, you hand control back to the brain maps and the habitual patterns. This is not just good practice for beginners. It is how every serious improvement happens at every level of the game. The best players in the world use this process, even when they do not call it by that name.
What makes this method different from just practising more is the commitment to honest feedback. The plan stage means setting a specific intention, not a vague wish. The do stage means executing with full attention. And the review stage means looking at what actually happened, not what felt like it happened. That last step is where most golfers fall down, because the review they do is based entirely on feeling. And feeling, as I have just outlined, is not a reliable witness.
Here is my first investment recommendation: 25 euro or $30. Go out and buy a nice tripod on which to stick your smartphone with its video facility, and video yourself. This is not a sophisticated ask. It is a deeply practical one.
What you will find, very often, can be quite shocking, because the proprioceptive sense is faulty. You cannot rely on your body to tell you what is happening. You need to see what you are doing. FM Alexander himself made huge use of mirrors for exactly this reason. He found that even the thought of going on stage caused his head and neck to tense and shrink into his shoulders, and he could only discover this by watching himself from the outside. We have something even more powerful available to us today, and it costs thirty dollars.
Video not only your full swing with the woods and irons, but also your chipping, putting, bunker shots. Get factual feedback about what you are actually doing. Not what it felt like. Not what you hoped. What is actually there on the screen. The use of video is often brutal, but it is correct. And that combination of brutality and correctness is exactly what the plan-do-review cycle needs to function.
(Try: Video Review Drill — available in the Training section of the app)
When I talk about inhibition in the context of golf proprioception and swing change, I do not mean hesitation or timidity. I mean something very specific. Inhibition means you need to stop doing certain things that are not serving you well. Habitual ways of moving. Habitual ways of thinking. Habitual ways of reacting, particularly under pressure.
"I am not making this movement" is an inhibiting thought. And that is a critical core part of this approach.
What this looks like in practice is a moment of pause before the movement begins. A conscious decision not to do the old thing, rather than a straining effort to do the new thing. Most golfers try to force a change by adding something. A new position, a new feeling, a new cue. But that new thing is being layered on top of an uninterrupted habitual pattern. The habit has not been stopped. It has just been argued with. Inhibition stops the habit first, creating a space in which something genuinely different can happen.
This is drawn directly from the Initial Alexander Technique, specifically from the work of Jeando Masaero and Penelope Easten, and it is one of the reasons why this approach is so different from a tips-based model. You are not fixing a fault. You are interrupting a pattern. That interruption is where change begins. If you want to understand how fear-based patterns layer on top of physical habits and make all of this harder, my article on fear-based swing patterns goes into the nervous system detail behind that.
Once inhibition has created the pause, you give directions. And here is the key thing that most golfers miss: one direction is never enough.
The golf swing involves, at each stage, different parts of the body moving in different directions simultaneously. The legs and knees stabilise while the hips move in one direction, the thighs might be moving in another, and the rib cage is rotating as you twist. You need the antagonistic pulls, the stretching, the lengthening, and the broadening of the muscles and fascia around the joints, to free the body up. This is new to many people. They are used to trying to implement one tip. But the means of delivering on the one tip is typically more than one direction.
Being able to learn to give more than one direction at the same time is a core component that makes this approach so effective and so special. This is what I call Conscious Guidance and Control (CG&C). The mind is not absent during the movement. It is actively directing multiple streams of intention simultaneously, in partnership with the body.
If you want the fuller picture of how these antagonistic pulls operate structurally, I laid out the tent, bow and arrow, and murmuration metaphors in What a Tent, a Bow and Arrow, and a Murmuration Reveal About Your Golf Swing. The directions framework makes much more sense once you see the biomechanical picture those metaphors describe.
(Try: Inhibition and Direction Practice — available in the Training section of the app)
The end goal of all of this is not to be consciously giving inhibition and directions every time you stand over the ball on the course. When you are out there performing, you do need to have moved beyond this. But if you are endeavouring to change your habits of integrated movement to a more optimal model, you do need to learn and apply inhibition, multiple directions at the same time, and go over it again and again until the new model becomes the new habitual.
That last phrase matters enormously: the new model becomes the new habitual. You are not trying to override your habits every single swing forever. You are replacing one set of brain maps with another. The plan-do-review cycle, combined with honest video feedback, combined with inhibition and direction, is the mechanism through which that replacement happens. It is slow. It is sometimes uncomfortable. But it works in a way that tips never can, because it goes to the root.
The coach who helped Nick Faldo through his major changes was of the view that the average golfer was unable to change these deeply rooted habits of movement. In Better Game Golf, I challenge that directly and say it is possible. But you need to be willing to look at some of the wider dimensions of movement: the movements of the body and mind in everyday life. How you sit, how you walk, how you bend, how you breathe, how you twist in everyday life will be how you do it on the golf course.
For the full story of what Faldo's rebuild actually cost him mentally, and what it can teach every golfer willing to take a similar path, read Nick Faldo's Two Years in the Dark: The Mental Side of a Total Rebuild.
Understanding what you are working against is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to take the process seriously. You are working against satisficing. You are working with habits that are largely unconscious and that you do not really know what they are. You are working with a proprioceptive sense that is faulty because it rewards the familiar and the comfortable.
In short, as I put it bluntly in The Golfing Bodymind: you do not know what you are doing, and every instinct in your body-mind is not to change it anyway. That is the real starting point.
But the method exists precisely to deal with this. Plan. Do. Review. Video as your honest mirror. Inhibition to stop the old pattern. Direction to guide the new one. Repeated until the new becomes natural, and is one that you now have recourse to under pressure rather than reverting to what you are comfortable with and what you once did.
You can explore all the mental game articles in the Better Game Golf library to see how these principles connect across every part of your game.
Proprioception is your body's internal sense of itself: where your limbs are, how your joints are moving, and what feels balanced or strained. It comes from stretch receptors throughout the body that send constant signals to the brain. In golf, this is the sense you are relying on every time you try to "feel" whether your swing was right or not.
The problem is that proprioception is not calibrated to correct positions. It is calibrated to familiar ones. If you have been swinging with a particular fault for ten years, that fault feels right. The brain has mapped it, stored it, and made it automatic. When you try to change it, the new correct position will feel wrong, awkward, even broken. This is faulty sensory perception, and it is why relying on feel alone as a method of improvement almost never works. The feedback system itself is giving you inaccurate information. Video is the tool that overrides this by showing you what is actually happening, not what the proprioceptive sense reports.
Because video bypasses the proprioceptive feedback loop entirely. When you watch yourself on film, you are getting objective external information that is independent of what your body told you the movement felt like. FM Alexander made huge use of mirrors for exactly this reason: he discovered that what he thought he was doing and what he was actually doing were completely different things. We have the same tool available today in every pocket, and it costs thirty dollars to set up properly with a tripod.
The use of video is often brutal, but it is correct. That combination matters. Feeling gives you comfort. Video gives you truth. And in the plan-do-review cycle, the review stage is only useful if it is based on what actually happened. A review based purely on feeling is a review based on the very system that is lying to you.
Inhibition, in my approach, is drawn from the Initial Alexander Technique. It is not hesitation or tentativeness. It is a very specific act: the conscious decision to stop a habitual pattern before it begins. "I am not making this movement" is an inhibiting thought, and it is a critical core part of this approach.
Most golfers try to change their swing by adding something new on top of the old pattern. But the old pattern is still running underneath, uninterrupted. Inhibition addresses this by creating a pause, a gap, in which the old habit is not automatically triggered. That gap is where the new direction has space to enter. Without inhibition, directions are just instructions being shouted over the top of a movement that is already happening. With inhibition, you stop the habit first, and then give the new direction into genuine space. It is harder than it sounds, but it is the actual mechanism of change.
Because the golf swing involves different parts of the body moving in different directions simultaneously. At any given stage of the swing, the legs are stabilising, the hips are moving one way, the thighs another, and the rib cage is rotating as you twist. These are antagonistic pulls. You need the stretching, the lengthening, and the broadening of the muscles and fascia around the joints to free the body up.
This is what I call Conscious Guidance and Control, or CG&C. One tip addresses one variable in isolation. But the body is not a collection of isolated variables. It is an integrated whole, and it can only be changed as a whole. The means of delivering on the one tip is typically more than one direction, because the movement itself requires more than one thing to happen at once. Learning to give multiple directions simultaneously is what makes this approach so effective, and so different from the standard tip-and-try model that most golfers have been trapped in for years.
This is almost always the first question people ask, and I understand why. When you are out there performing, you do need to have moved beyond this. The goal is not to stand over every shot consciously running through a list of directions. The goal is to use this process during practice and change work, so that the new model becomes the new habitual, and is one that you have recourse to under pressure rather than reverting to what you once did.
Inhibition and direction are practice tools for building new brain maps. Once those maps are built, the movement can become automatic again, but now it is the right movement that is automatic. Think of it like learning any new physical skill: the conscious stage comes first, then repetition, then natural execution. The proprioceptive sense will eventually calibrate to the new pattern. But it cannot calibrate to something it has never been shown clearly, which is why video and the plan-do-review cycle have to come first.
This is something I feel very strongly about. How you sit, how you walk, how you bend, how you breathe, how you twist in everyday life will be how you do it on the golf course. The habitual ways of moving that show up in your swing did not arrive from nowhere. They are the same patterns you use to pick up a bag, sit at a desk, or reach for something on a shelf.
This is why I talk about the body-mind as a whole integrated system. You cannot separate the golf swing from the person swinging it. If the person moves with habitual tension or collapse in daily life, those same patterns will appear on the first tee. The deeply rooted habits of movement that are less than optimal, what I call satisficing, run through everything. Changing your golf swing without looking at how you move the rest of the time is like trying to fix one room in a house while ignoring structural problems in the foundations. The work has to go wider than the range.
There is no single honest answer to this, because it depends on how deeply rooted the habit is, how consistently the plan-do-review cycle is applied, and whether the golfer is doing the wider work on their movement in everyday life. What I can say is that this is a process that should never end, no matter what heights you achieve. That process of continuous learning needs to keep carrying on.
What I have seen with golfers is that the shock of honest video feedback is often the turning point. When someone sees clearly, for the first time, the gap between what they felt they were doing and what they were actually doing, something shifts. The proprioceptive sense cannot be fully trusted again in the old way, which is exactly the point. That healthy scepticism towards feeling, combined with regular video review and the application of inhibition and direction, begins to build new brain maps over time. Progress is rarely linear, and there will be periods that feel like things are falling apart. That is part of the process, not a sign it is failing. Start your free trial and let the AI caddie walk you through applying this on your next round.
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