LinksPutt Psychology

Phillip, as well as being a professional golfer, is also a qualified sports psychologist having graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with an MSc in sport psychology. Phillip has worked closely with Harold Swash for many years, giving an extra dimension to Harold's Putting School of Excellence, addressing the mental issues of performing and learning any new putting techniques.

Phillip's insights into golf have also been assisted by his personal experiences in the sport. As an amateur, Phillip represented England Schoolboys, captained English Universities and won a Bronze medal in the World Student Games whilst representing Great Britain. Phillip turned professional in 2001 and provides a Sports Psychology consultancy service alongside developing his professional career.

Phillip Kenyon BSc (Hons) MSc
"LinksPutt has certainly helped my putting and many of the students that have attended the Harold Swash Putting School of Excellence"

Phillip Kenyon

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Most sports psychologists would agree that the majority of golfers rarely practice the full range of skills that are required during a round of golf. Instead, they tend to spend a lot of time practicing a specific skill, time after time, in order to build up a repeatable movement pattern. For example, a golfers' typical practice may involve hitting 30 consecutive 7 irons on the range, or holing one 5 foot putt after the other. Such practice is called specific practice, focusing on one particular movement pattern.

Such strategies may be beneficial in the very early stages of learning, when the learner is really getting to grips with the basics of technique, but ultimately such practice will not allow more established players to efficiently transfer their practice to the golf course.

To get the most out of your practice you need to introduce variety into practice. Research has indicated that variable practice conditions are shown to be preferable to constant practice in terms of promoting long term learning (Magill, 2001). Research also suggests that, motor skills practiced using the variability of practice principle, are retained better by the learner and can be adapted to different situations more effectively (Lee, Chamberlin and Hodges, 2001).

According to traditional cognitive models of motor skill learning such as Schmidt's (1975) schema theory, variability in movement and context characteristics is essential to develop a more expansive, generative rule or generalised motor program to cope with a variety of similar but different situations. The presumption is that when variability is introduced into the practice environment the learner has to parameterise the motor program differently from one trial to the next resulting in a more flexible and adaptable movement schema (Schmidt and Lee, 1999). In a similar vein, more recent theorising from the perspective of dynamical systems theory argues that variability in practice and movement provides the learner with a larger 'workspace' and greater opportunity to search and discover the laws that organize information and action (Davids et al., 2001, 2004).

By variety we mean don't get stuck in the rut of practicing the same shot again and again. Variety means mixing your practice up - if you are going to practice your putting, hit putts with different breaks and from different distances. In a round of golf, you never get the same putt twice. You are forced to hit putts that are right to left, left to right, uphill and downhill across a whole range of distances. So in practice you need to be creative and vary the putts you hit as opposed to drilling the same putt time and time again.

From both a sports psychologist and a professional golfer's viewpoint, the first time I saw LinksPutt, what struck me was the opportunity for golfers to add such variability of practice indoors. If you are a keen golfer and want to make sure that your practice is giving you the best chance to transfer your skill learning to the golf course, then LinksPutt is the ideal training aid.

References - Lee, T.D., Chamberlin, C.J., Hodges, N.J. (2001) - Practice, and Magill, R.A. (2001) - Feedback effects, both in: B.Singer, H.Hausenblas & C.Jannelle (Eds.), Handbook of Sport Psychology, 2nd Edition. N.Y.: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 115-143.Top of page <