I just got these in the mail today, and put one up on either end of my living room, pulled out my putter, and started firing away. I had a set of the other ones, which lay flat, and look sort of like a green flower opened up on the ground. But the little "petals," or leaves, sometimes deflected a close putt, and you'd have to chalk it up as a miss, even though on a real hole it would have gone in. These might do the same thing, but maybe not as much. But these seem to flatten out well enough when the ball rolls over it, so that it won't deflect too many away from going in. I think I've got the idea now of how to do it, and did sink the last four in a row, so I feel like I've graduated, and have a better idea of what I'm doing. What's kind of funny is actually following through, and performing, or executing, the steps we come up with in our mind to make it happen. But it's just very easy to resort back to the old ways, or not do the new things we dream up, which when we do, actually work. I can't wait until spring so I can get out on the course and apply my new techniques and reap the rewards. I was already at least a decent putter, but just like all other aspects of our game, it's hard to explain, even to yourself, everything you do to hit it the way you want to, even when we can do it. Most people, when it comes to any aspect of the golf swing, from hitting the driver to any kind of fairway iron, even to putting - have no idea of precisely what they are doing, and couldn't explain any of it to you - they just do it. And that's not a put-down: It's just a fact. Maybe one person in a thousand can describe in detail exactly what he does in his swing. I know I couldn't. I never tried to explain what I was doing, because I never felt any need to. And therein lies the heart of the problem: The problem is, if you can't describe what you do, your subconscious mind really doesn't know precisely what you do, and you could very easily forget it - if you believe that or not. Almost everything we do, especially in the golf swing, is instinctive. Instinct is a wonderful thing, but it can abandon us at any time, and if we don't have what we want to do engraved on our subconscious mind, we're lost, and don't have a clue. And so you need to understand the mechanics of what you're doing, even just for yourself. However, it's not easy to do. You must dissect, or investigate, or try to deconstruct your swing, so that you can explain precisely what your arms, for example, are doing, and the sequence of movement, and actually describe what you physically do in your swing. Most people couldn't do this in a million years - and I was one of them. Every part of our body is doing something, every time we do anything, and to try to figure out exactly what we do is the hardest part of understanding our golf swing. But even if we don't get it all precisely right, just a general explanation of what we do should be enough for our mind to fill in the blanks to get the job done. You can buy a book, and there are thousands of them out there about the golf swing, but the best and most effective method is just trial and error. Try this, and try that, to see what effect it has on the ball, until you find something that makes the ball do what you want it to do. But the big caveat is to explain to yourself exactly what you did, and what that caused the ball to do. And do it on every movement you try, as soon as you observe what effect it has on the ball. The golf swing is sort of like backing up a semi: You do things the reverse of what you might think. If you play pool, you have a better idea of putting "English" on the ball, because the same thing happens in golf as in pool. If it involves a ball, it's all about which direction to make the ball spin. Now, of course, we can't reverse the spin on the ball in mid-flight; but what we can do is control the tilt of the axis, and this can have the net effect of reversing the spin. If we "flip" the axis, we can change the spin from backward (backspin) to forward, or overspin. This means many more yards on the ground, or a longer total yardage on our shot. The ball always spins: The big question is, "Which way is it spinning?" Even if we had a miniature space craft that would allow us to ride beside the ball as it sails through the air, we wouldn't be able to determine which way the ball was spinning. But we can easily do it, even from the ground, just by observing which way it turns, or curves, in the air. And we control this, in the milli-second's time that the clubface makes contact with the ball. That's why your swing is so important: Your swing plane, inside-outside, follow-through - all of this controls what the ball does. And it all happens in a fraction of a second, as you hit the ball to send it into the air. All we can do is try to control the tilt on the ball, and thus, the direction of the spin. There are things we can do, when we learn how to do them, which result in magical results on the course. It's called "managing your subconscious mind," and you could liken it to a little brother, whom you love, but who occasionally needs a little prompting to make him do what he should do. That's where learning precisely what you do in your swing comes in. You can make certain things happen, but you have to learn how to do it. It's not enough just to do something until you have mastered it, you must also remember it, and the only way to do that is to talk to yourself. That's right - just talk to yourself, as if you were tutoring another person, and explaining to him what you have learned, as you learn it, even though you are actually learning it yourself through trial and error. Have you ever forgotten something, and weren't able to remember precisely what you did? That's because you did it, but you didn't record it in your conscious mind, or spell it out, step-by-step, and your subconscious mind never knew about it, and consequently, you don't remember it. You only remember something if it was recorded in your subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind learns everything from the conscious mind. If the conscious mind was not aware, or was never informed, of something you did, you can't expect your subconscious mind to know about it. Even when we try many different things to learn how to do something, and finally do succeed in finding something that works, if we never actually go through a thought process of what it was that we did, in the physical mechanics of it all, our conscious mind was never made aware of it, because we did it silently - behind the back of our conscious mind, so to speak. If we could watch ourselves, we wouldn't have any problem, because our subconscious mind would remember everything we saw. But if we just do something, and our conscious mind is not informed - either visually or verbally (even just through thought) it will not know what you did. And so, as you learn something, just silently think what each movement you did was, by mentally talking your way through it. (I took it back only about waist high, and kept my head steady, and pulled through with my left arm, and powered through with my right arm, while I rolled my hands to the left, with the face being perfectly squared to the ball at impact, and finished with my hands high in the air, and came around behind my head, etc. etc. etc.) Sounds crazy, but that's the only way I know to explain what actually happened to me. I never thought of it as being important to be able to explain what you do in the golf swing, until I launched into a big effort to teach myself how to lose my slice, when I didn't know anything whatsoever about the swing. I applied myself to it for many months, and did finally achieve some success, not only in losing my slice, but even learning to hit a draw. But I never bothered to try to remember the particular mechanics of any of it. It never even occurred to me to imagine that I wouldn't remember everything I did to learn to hit a draw; I
