Clear Thinking

 

🧠 The Core Principle: Actions are Driven by Anticipated Sensory Effects

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Tiger Woods said it best, “When my feel intersects with what is real, that is when some pretty good magic starts to happen.” The purpose of KinetIQ is to help you develop your personal blueprint using data, neuro-motor control principles, and physics. 

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NeuroMAPping is the process of identifying, visualizing, and strengthening connections between the brain’s neural pathways and the physical and cognitive actions involved in the golf swing. It’s used in neuroscience, rehabilitation, sports training, and skill acquisition to help the brain create more efficient “maps or directions” for movement and thought, driven by the anticipation of patterns based on data.

 

I want to outline these concepts to give you a basic understanding of how the system works and how it will influence your practice. Your proprioception, your sense of feel, drives everything you do. Learning new motor skills or habits can be challenging. Traditional golf instruction is often based on how to directions. Unfortunately, this approach can lead to frustration and confusion. We don’t move because of muscle commands or instructions — we move because we anticipate what a movement will feel and mentally look like. Based on neuroscience and motor control principles derived from the Theory of Event Coding (Hommel, 2001, 2013) and the  Ideomotor Theory (James, 1890 & Greenwald, 1970),our controlled actions are selected by imagining and predicting their sensory outcomes.

 

To hit a particular golf shot, you base your upcoming swing on what you anticipate it will feel like, originating from previous swing experiences. If you tend to slice, and now you are trying to hit a draw, to swing in-to-out, you have a limited chance of reproducing a new motion if you’ve never done it before and don’t know the feeling of how to do it. Through drills and practice, you can change your motion, which will feel different than your old swing, and use that information to build a new NeuroMAP. The next time you go to hit a draw, you will already know what that feels like and can initiate the movement based on your anticipated feel. 

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• Ideomotor Theory proposes that:

  • “An action is initiated by the mental representation of its intended sensory consequences.”

  • That means we don’t move because we plan muscle contractions — we move because we imagine the outcome (the feel, look, or sound) we want to produce.

• The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) proposes that:

  • “Perceived events and planned actions are represented in a common format — as feature codes in a shared representational medium.”

  • That means the brain does not store perceptions and movements separately.

  • Instead, it encodes them both as bundles of features (color, shape, timing, force, direction, sound, etc.) in the same cognitive space.

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When you prepare to swing, you’re not consciously programming each joint or muscle. If you are trying to follow instructions on how to do it, your feel for the swing will be reduced. This is why the best players have employed external focus of control, visualization, and other non-information-processing techniques. You’re activating the sensory image of a solid strike — the click of impact, the flight of the ball, the feel through your hands — and that mental image automatically triggers the motor patterns needed to produce it. In elite golf, this manifests as the “feel of the shot” before execution — a predictive sensory state that precedes motion. This explains why elite performers often describe their best swings as effortless or thoughtless — ideomotor control has fully taken over. Over time, merely thinking of that sensation primes your neuromotor system to reproduce it — even without swinging. Rory McIlroy rarely takes practice swings on the putting green before attempting the putt. 

 

 

🧩 Developing Your Initial Straight Ball Flight with NeuroMAP integration - Accuracy

We learn the golf swing by combining the body's dynamics with the feel of the motion. When a similar situation occurs (e.g., same target and lie), the brain reactivates your Dynamic Link Library, your golfing memory file, automatically cueing the corresponding NeuroMAP and expected sensations. Based on TEC, both processes rely on the same neural feature codes. So, the feel of the swing and impact, and the NeuroMAP that caused it are not separate—they are two sides of the exact swing representation. Through repeated, deliberate, or focused practice of expected and actual mechanics, your swing stabilizes, the most reliable NeuroMAP is achieved, and you see improvement. 

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Here is an initial step-by-step process for developing your straight-ball flight NeuroMAP. It does require the use of a launch monitor that can measure the club’s trajectory into the ball and, preferably, the dynamic face angle of the club. We will use this approach throughout your entire golf bag.

1. Start with your sand – or gap – wedge. 

2. Pick out a target 20 yards away.

3. Start hitting pitch shots and track club trajectory and clubface angle.

   1. The swing path needs to be within ±3 ° of your target.

   2. The clubface angle must be within 2° of your path.

4. How many shots go straight?

5. What is your dispersion ellipse?

6. Track your perceptions:

   1. Every golf swing needs to be linked to its  (visual, auditory, proprioceptive). 

   2. What did the swing feel like?

   3. Quick & Jerky or Smooth

   4. Too far or short

   5. Offline right or left

7. Over repeated golf swings, these links form a strong relationship:

   1. We want to match the shot outcome with your FEEL and SWING to.

   2. Through repetitive block practice, a NeuroMAP is developed for the shot.

   3. Performing a movement predicts a certain sensation.

   4. Imagining that sensation can be the movement.

8. Once you know the best shot, we want to store and retrieve that experience.

9. To act, the brain retrieves previously formed event files matching the intended outcome.

10. The goal (desired sensory state) serves as a retrieval cue.

11. Execution is achieved by activating the shared perceptual-motor codes in the event file.

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Example: When you intend to hit a low punch shot:

• You activate the event file that matches “low trajectory” features — forward shaft lean, abbreviated follow-through, firm feel.

• This reactivation automatically replays the coordinated motor pattern.

 

That’s why the intention or image of the shot is so powerful — it directly triggers the appropriate sensory–motor feel and movement pattern.

 

Realistic Expectations -  Understanding Your Shot Consistency 

Normal distribution of strokes-gain ball striking.

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Robots do make mistakes, and we are not robots.  Golf Laboratories’ robot doesn’t make a hole in holes on every swing. The idea of playing golf without mishitting the ball is impossible. Based on your skill level, your ball striking will follow a normally distributed pattern of poor, ok, good, great, and excellent shots. This holds for tour players and amateur golfers. Tour players hit poor golf shots; most of the time, we don’t see those on TV. Based on the stroke-gained distribution, you will see that tour players hit the same percentage of poor shots as they do great shots. It is just that there +/- 1’s are better than ours. Amateurs make higher numbers more often. Let’s look at a hypothetical shot distribution representing tour players. You can use this information to gain insight into your skill level. 

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The best way to determine your consistency profile is to get on a launch monitor and hit 10 balls with each club. Do not have a specific target in mind, other than as straight as you can. Track each club’s dispersion. You can do this manually or use applications such as Noonan AI Caddie, Decade Golf, or a third-party app of your choice.  Your shot dispersion is a combination of swing consistency and accuracy.

 

The following shot distribution patterns are made from sample data of tour players and synthesized to represent the population of tour players. Looking at the driver, tour players will miss a 40-yard-wide fairway. They will miss greens and miss putts, too. This means we will miss shots too. However, if you’ve never measured your shot distribution pattern, how can you get mad at mishitting a shot x number of feet offline? These patterns are a starting point for developing your KinetIQ Golf Game. Once you know your tendencies, you can apply your pattern on the golf course. This will help you realign your target away from trouble, ensuring your misses remain playable. Reducing the big number is a great way to lower your scores.

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