If you’re like me you’ve spent countless hours both on the course and at the practice field working on different aspects of your game. I’m an avid disc golfer who was looking to improve his level of play beyond what he now maintains, and set out to focus on building better muscle memory in order to improve my technique and ultimately become more consistent. Well imagine my surprise when I found out there’s no such thing as muscle memory!

Now before you jump out of your chair to prove me wrong, let me explain.  Everyone has heard players from every imaginable sport talk about practicing and working to build muscle memory; that it’s the key to success.  You can see it in many of the “How To” disc golf videos floating around the web today. Turns out however, muscles don’t have the ability to remember anything and anyone can pick up a medical book or go on the web and pull up countless articles and descriptions to back up my statement. There’s no such thing as actual muscle memory. Trust me, I’ve done just that!

So then what are people talking about when the say they’re building ‘muscle memory’?  Building what people consider muscle memory is really training your brain to move your muscles the way you want them to without having to think about it!  It’s subconsciously reacting the same way to accomplish a task every time you do it. An easy example would be that of brushing your teeth. You’ve done it a million times and you do it without the slightest thought of what you’re actually doing.  Without thinking about it you brush your teeth with the same hand, in the same order and for the same length of time each and every time you do it.  The next time you run a brush across your pearly whites, actually think about what you’re doing and see if thinking about what you’re doing doesn’t make it feel awkward for some reason!

So why go to all this trouble to knit pick over terminology? Because it’s more than just a difference in terminology.  In order to reach the level of success you’re hoping for you need to recognize that you’re training your mind rather than your muscles, and that requires a completely different approach.  In order to improve your technique and make that 30-foot putt, you have to start by training the subconscious part of your brain to make that putt. Consider this example.  Have you ever found yourself saying that you practice really well in the open field but just don’t seem to get that to carry over during a round on the course?  If so, it’s because the success or failure of individual shots on the course has more to do with how you see yourself and your abilities in a specific situation than it does with just the natural abilities you displayed on the practice field. 

It’s called your self-image, and self-image is how you see yourself in a specific situation, whether positive or negative, and it’s an accumulation of subconscious images of how you interpret everything that happens to you. I’ve read that many coaches feel that natural talent comprises as little as thirty percent of an athletes ability to succeed; the other seventy percent being made up of that persons positive or negative self image. Dr. Bob Rotella, a noted sports psychologist, states that in his experience when two players of equal talent compete against one another the player with the most self confidence will prevail almost every time. So the question then becomes how to build a positive self-image in order to become a better disc golfer. It can be accomplished by building “mental” muscle memory through training your mind to make that big shot.

The key to understanding your self-confidence on the course is to realize that it’s a product of how you’ve seen yourself in various situations over time, and that you have total control over this aspect of your game!  It’s also important to realize that changing how you view yourself in specific situations will greatly affect how you perform on the disc golf course. Making changes to this part of your game can be done but it won’t be easy and will take time. 

Your subconscious mind dictates how you perceive yourself and the events you experience.  It becomes that little voice you hear in your head that’s constantly talking to you, “helping” you to work through various situations.  The result is that over time that voice tends to guide you in one direction or another based on what it has been repeatedly told. Think of it this way. You’re bombarded daily with millions of thoughts and experiences. Your subconscious mind however, has limited space so it can’t store all the thoughts that pass through it forever.  Therefore you have to decide what stays and what goes. You will ultimately make the decision to view everything you see, hear, taste, smell and touch in either a positive or negative manner.  Over time your subconscious becomes dominated by either positive or negative thoughts, and as new thoughts pass through, it keeps whatever thought or feeling fits with the majority of the others already there.  Since it has limited space, your subconscious mind also has the tendency to replace lesser emotions with stronger, more dominant ones that fit in with the current status quo. 

Your subconscious mind also tends to use this mental image of yourself to dictate your future!  Dr. Rotella speaks of this in his book, “The Golfers Mind: Play To Play Great”, and I can attest to one example he gives.  He states that when you step onto the course you have a predetermined idea of the outcome of your round and your subconscious mind will make that become a reality.  Here’s how it applied to me.  I felt that my game had reached a plateau and that I should’ve been having greater success than I was.  I would have what I considered several sub par rounds in a row, and then one day I would hit the course and start off on fire, hitting every fairway and every putt.  The problems started soon after however, because instead of telling myself “great job on a hot round” or “that’s how well I knew I could play”, I subconsciously started thinking, “hey I don’t normally have this kind of start”.  Each time I threw a great shot I became more nervous thinking about when I would throw a bad shot, until finally I stopped making good shots altogether.  Ultimately my final score was just slightly better than my normal score.  I made the outcome of the round become what I had subconsciously trained myself to see. Remember earlier I said to remember that awkward feeling?  Well, at times a higher level of success can feel awkward because it’s not what we may be accustomed to in certain situations.  I felt awkward about playing at a higher level and subconsciously took myself back to where I felt familiar or comfortable by finishing poorly thus getting back to the status quo. 

So the question then becomes how do I build positive ‘mental’ muscle memory in order to improve my game?  You can follow the same practice and training regimens that you’ve been to this point; this isn’t an article on that part of your game.  My suggestion would be as you follow your normal practice routines to think about the following things:

1. Try to recognize every time your subconscious mind sends you a negative thought about your game.  As they say, the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem!  I was amazed at how often I was letting a negative thought creep into how I saw my game.
2. Replace that thought with a positive one.  Even if that putt misses the basket by two feet. Rather than think only that you missed the shot, find something positive about the shot and think about that. Was it the right height to go in, the right distance, etc.
3. Give yourself credit for doing something right, and do it big!  I play with a guy who every time he makes a good shot he tells himself as much.  Not in an egotistical manner or to put others down, but he’s genuinely happy he did well. I came to recognize that I only showed emotion when I made a bad shot.  My thinking was that I expected to make a good shot so no reason to make a big deal about it, right?  The problem with that strategy is that I was replacing many small positive thoughts in my subconscious mind with bigger negative ones and over time that’s what I had left.
4. Realize you’re going to make bad shots!  Everyone does.  Try to learn something from it but once it’s done forget about it.  If it truly was a bad shot the only thing hanging on to it will do is make you think about it during your next shot and therefore amplifying the problem. Don’t let one bad shot turn into two bad shots.
5. Create a pre-shot routine that helps you get mentally prepared to make a shot.  This will be different for everyone, but should include positive self-talk and visualization of the shot you want to make.
6. Use visualization to help your mind “see” you making the shot successfully. Visualize yourself throwing the shot, visualize the disc following the line you wanted and see it go in the basket or land where you wanted.  Finally, visualize yourself becoming excited about your success.
7. Think only of the next shot.  Don’t think about how many holes are left, shots you missed, whether the hole is a birdie chance, what your score is or how the other guys are playing.  You can’t do anything about those things anyway. The only thing that matters is your next shot.  Develop a “throw and go get it” attitude.  Decide where you want your shot to go and think only of making that happen.  Walking up to the tee thinking of a hole as a birdie or par chance shows you’re thinking about the consequences of your shot rather than actually making the shot.
8. Finally, recognize that success takes more time for some than others, but it can come if you believe it will.  Enjoy your time on the course while you work to reach the goals you’ve set for yourself, and give credit to the players around you for having success.  If you find yourself being angry or wishing other players to play poorly, what you’re really doing is making the decision to take up valuable space in your subconscious mind with negative, unproductive thoughts that’ll take too much time and effort to replace.

Putting this article together has been a way for me to work through some of my own mental disc golf demons and has helped me work towards a more productive practice regime.  It’s also helped me recognize that I wasn’t enjoying playing disc golf like I once did and how that was affecting my game in a negative manner, and helped me see how I was portraying that dissatisfaction to the people I was playing with.  I hope this helps you in some way too. (Revised 1/13/2008)