Working in Movement

How do you improve a skill involving movement, say a tennis or golf swing? It seems pretty basic to me that you'd want to know exactly how to swing the racquet or club to get the result you were after. But in order to change from your current swing to this idea swing, you'd also want to know how exactly you were swinging right now. In other words, knowing both where you are now and where you want to go.

Improve the kinesthetic sense and maybe you're on you way. But how can you improve your kinesthetic sense, you ability to feel what you're doing as you're doing it? I can thing of at least three approaches: kinesthetic, visual and auditory.

Moshe Feldenkrais often said "If you don't know what you're doing, you can't do what you want." His basic approach to improving the ability to sense movement was to develop sensitivity by reducing effort, cleverly using the kinesthetic sense to improve the kinesthetic sense. The usual Feldenkrais approach is to first reduce the demands of gravity (lay yourself down on the floor to other means of support) and observe yourself performing some highly nonhabitual movement. By greatly reducing effort while performing a very precise and specific movement, the Feldenkrais student can begin to notice muscular patterns that interfere with executing the movement easily. One revealed, these interfering patterns can be let go.

Timothy Gallwey offered a different approach in his Inner Game series of books. Still focused on developing awareness what's going on right now, Gallwey offered a way to supplement the kinesthetic sense with the visual one. In other words, you watch the precise behavior of the ball as you're playing. The Inner Game terminology is quite different from that of Feldenkrais, but the idea is roughly similar: you gotta know what you're doing if you want to change it.

Now comes an approach to improving the golf swing that involves the auditory sense. Golfers Find Perfect Swing with Sound describes the a golf club that offers feedback as you swing the club.

The Sonic Golf tool uses motion-detecting sensors and wireless technology to coach its user. When a player swings, sensors located in the shaft send wireless signals to a small base station receiver placed a few feet away.

Not only does the Sonic Golf club let you know how you are swinging, but gives you something to aim for:

As the golfer practices, she adjusts her motion to generate the sound of a perfect swing. That sound is different for each person, but is based on some fundamental data Grober has collected during initial tests with PGA players and coaches.

For example, when professional golfers swing, they generate the loudest, highest-pitched sound right when they contact the ball. They also produce absolute silence at the top of the backswing before making the transition into their downswing.

Conversely, beginning golfers often create a high-pitched sound before or even after they've smacked the ball. And their transitions from backswing to downswing rarely get quiet. By using Grober's device, beginners can do whatever it takes to change their motion to produce the right sound.

An interesting idea. And it seems to work, too. Before marketing the approach to the public (you can imagine the half-hour infomercial on the Golf Channel, can't you?) Grober is testing it with golf pros. And it seems to be working, according to Bill Greenleaf, a PGA Master Professional and director of instruction at the Dunes at Maui Lunai, Hawaii.

"From listening to Sonic Golf's audio feedback, all the students made improvements in their swings in just 20 to 30 minutes ... Some fine tuned and some made dramatic changes that I would not previously have thought possible." [Want to Improve Your Game? Just Listen]

This is not the first I've heard of augmenting proprioception with sound. Noise Improves Balance talks about a seemingly effective approach to improving balance among the elderly using insoles that pipes sound to the bottom of the feet while standing on a platform.