For most of us, the
conscious mind is only capable of dealing with one thing at a time. We call this
concentration. When we hit a poor shot, we often blame our inability to concentrate.
Consider an alternative, the problem may not have been that we didn't concentrate, but
rather, we probably concentrated on the wrong thing, a golf swing thought, instead of the target. When I was in school, I read several studies on how the body learns athletic motions. I have also observed the same phenomena while working on my own swing and from observing my students and other golfers as they attempt to learn new motions. What I have observed, and what the studies
mentioned, is that it takes a certain amount of time for the body to learn a simple motion, much longer than most of you would imagine.
I therefore recommend for my students, and for you as well, to practice a new motion for at least three to four weeks (if practicing regularly) before moving on to something new. If you do any less, you run the risk of not learning the motion, or you may only partially learn it, depending on how often and over how long of a time span you practice.
For definition purposes, learning occurs when a conscious effort to put the body in a particular position or to move it in a certain way is transformed from a conscious action to an automatic action, requiring no thought.
Many of you
would call a learned motion "muscle memory," and I do too, just for the sake of
simplicity. For all intents and purposes, it's as if the muscles do have a mind of their
own, they can perform amazingly complex motions without a person having to think about it.