Oyvind Hafslund is a Norwegian golfer I met a 5 years ago. He emailed me after having looked at my original YouTube video; “Easiest swing in golf”. We first met on Skype and did very soon discover that our life paths and mind sets had a lot of similarities. The two main key issues being a genuine curiosity and a shared ethos of looking outside the box. After our first Skype, he decided to visit me at “Manston Golf Club”. We spent three whole days together, discussing golf and life, 3 days that turned out to be a crossroad in my life.
I have decided to include a conversation I had with Oyvind in this book, as his thoughts and reflections on human biology and life has helped me to better understand why I have instinctively built my coaching on certain aspects of movements and motions. Oyvind is a Naturopathic Doctor, Physiotherapist and author of the book “The Biological Domino Effect” with the subtitle “What we repeat- we will be”. The last statement can easily be recognized in our beloved game of golf.
The conversation
BS: “Oyvind, you emailed me after having looked at my original YouTube-video “Easiest swing in golf”. What made you decide to email me?”
OH: “I can answer that in one single word; energy. It was astonishing to see how you were able to transfer energy into the ball with seemingly no effort. The reason I came across your video was because I searched “effortless golf swing” on YouTube. I came across your video and it was almost hilarious. I thought, “What?”. My brain was hardly believing what I was seeing. It looked so easy. I had never seen a golfer hitting a ball with that ease and effortlessness. Being a proactive person, I emailed you at once. That is how it all started”.
BS:“I remember your email. It was something in what you wrote about yourself and your thoughts about golf and life that made me very curious. We had a long Skype session just a few days later and that chat was the start on a very exciting journey. I have decided to have this conversation today because I would very much like to include your thoughts on golf in the light of biology in my book, as this is something I have never found in books or articles”.
OH: “I am delighted to have someone being curious about my thoughts about golf in a biological aspect. I would like to begin with the word paradox”.
BS: “What do you mean by that?”.
OH: “Golf is in many ways a paradox”.
BS: “Now you are cryptic”.
OH: “It may sound cryptic, but it is a simple explanation. The big paradox is what most golfers know, but struggle to achieve; less is more”.
BS: “He, he. Now we are talking. If we want to kill the ball to add distance, we are killing our game. It is about transformation of energy and not about strength”.
OH: “Exactly and even knowing this fact, we all struggle to live it. The second paradox, as I see it, is that the movements in a golf swing does not consist of natural movements. They are unnatural”.
BS: “What do you mean by unnatural movements?”.
OH: “If you give a beginner a club, it may even be a person that are good in many different sports and ask this person to hit a ball without giving any advice at all, nothing will resemble a golf swing. The person will find everything unfamiliar and awkward. Just think about how to grip the club. The person has never in his/her life hold any tool in a grip like we are taught to do in golf. This creates what?”
BS: “Tension!”
OH: “Bingo! If we dive into the field of human biology and golf, tension will be one big part of it. Tension is a killer in golf, everybody knows this. Just by pointing at one single part of the game, the grip, the word tension pops up. Interesting, isn´t? If we now take a step further and look at what happens next in a golf lesson for beginners. What do we see?”
BS: “Then the person is taught how to take address position, which again is something totally unfamiliar and strange, right?”
OH: “Without any doubts. Now, everything feels awkward. The grip is awkward, the position of the body is awkward and the perfect tension builder”.
BS: “Then you are told to stand completely still and be relaxed!”
OH: “Right. It is time for Mr. Bean show. From a biological standpoint, this is a sure way to get into stress, known as “The Fight -Flight”-mode. I will briefly give you some biological facts. Stress is created by the Sympathetic-Nervous-System. The word that is easily recognized by all golfers here is nervousness. In biology we do have a lot of loops, what I call a Domino effect. One part of a cycle initiate and increases another part and this again increase the first one. A very simple loop is that “Tension creates nervousness, nervousness increases the tension”. Every golfer or other sportsmen knows this”.
BS: “So, you and I are bridging neuroscience & biology to golf”.
OH: “You may say that. The reason I contacted you was because it looked like you had understood golf and biology. Your way of teaching seemed to be very much focused on effortless, which is the opposite of tension”.
BS: “That is right. My main goal in my teaching is to help golfers get rid of tension. You said that energy was a key word looking at my original video. Could you add the next two key words from a biological perspective?”.
OH: “Yes, the words will be stress and anxiety”.
BS: “Excuse me for being too eager, but could you give me one word as a key to get rid of stress and anxiety?”
OH: “Motion is the word. Life is motion, evolution is motion, golf is motion”.
BS: “I agree. Can you take this into human biology?”:
OH: “It may be surprising, but the next word that can be added is survival”.
BS: “Hold on a second! Most golfers say they do it for pure pleasure!”.
OH: “Yes, in some way, that is true, but their body have not understood that it is just for pleasure. It is their brain that are speaking, not their body”.
BS: “Are you suggesting that their mind think they are doing it just for pleasure, but their body does not understand this?”.
OH: “Yes. Some of your readers may think that I take golf too seriously, but this is how our biological system acts. It is not a conscious thought that triggers our survival system, it is an automatic stress reaction that triggers an automatic survival reaction”.
BS: “So, if we look at it from this angle, we may say that every golfer´s biological body takes it too seriously?”.
OH: “Yes, and this is pure science. One of the most amazing parts in our biology is the field of neuroscience, which is the science about the nervous system. This leads us to two well-known words in the world of golf, nervousness, and stress. Your first book had the title “Positive Impact Golf”. On the front page we can read “Danse du Golf” movement. Here we meet the key word; movement, which is motion. Motion is an important part of energy flow. Standing still is not what creates energy flow. Standing still creates the opposite and leads to tension. The fascinating fact is that science tells us that motion counteracts stress and tension. We may even say, if we look at it from a biological side, that standing still, being in a frozen position, could be called “Negative Impact Golf”,. Tension is a biological reaction that is coming from the well-known stress response; “Fight – flight”. In medicine this is an activation of what is called “The Sympathetic Nervous System”.
BS: “What is the biological expression of the opposite of “Fight-Flight?”.
OH: “Good question. It is called “Rest and digest” and this is a biological reaction from “The Parasympathetic Nervous System”. Everybody´s life is a danse between “Fight-Flight” and “Rest and digest”. The big question is how often and how easily we get in a “Fight- Flight” mode and how often and how easy we get into a relaxed “Rest and digest” mode?”.
BS: “My readers would most probably think that it is not a good idea to get into the “Rest and digest” mode when playing golf”.
OH: “….and they are completely right.”
BS: “Then we have a problem”.
OH: “It may absolutely look like we have a problem, but the risk of being too relaxed out on the golf course, is not what we need to address. The key is to know how to handle stress”.
BS: ”It sounds that we now are moving over to the mental part of the game?”
OH: “The mental side is a big part of this, as we need to understand how to be able to handle stress. What I want to add is an understanding from a physical-biological side”.
BS: “I don`t think I understand.”
OH: “What I want to bring up is how science confirms the importance of movements and motions if we want to take down tension, nervousness and the stress”.
BS: “Like finding a physical trigger when starting your back swing? Waggling for example?”.
OH: “Yes. That is an example of how motion takes down tension. I will introduce and add another general way of taking down the stress, which is purely physical and backed by science”.
BS: “Can´t wait to hear about this”.
OH: “We then need to go back to our nervous system and the different modes. “Fight – Flight” and “Rest – Digest” are well-known. Most people do not know that we have two more nervous-system-modes we may go into. One has been known for a long time and is called “The Freeze Mode” and is the ultimate primitive counter reaction to be super-stressed and in panic. The second one is the one you will love to hear about; “The moving forward mode”.
BS: “I have never heard about this mode, but I like it already”.
OH: “I can understand that you love it, as you have intuitively understood it for a long time. What I am doing now is to explain from a biological angle, why your teaching method have had such success for many of your students”.
BS: “Moving is for sure a key in my teaching”.
OH: “Moving forward is the opposite of standing still and will counteract stress and tension. Science have now showed that moving forward is calming down the control center of the brain. This center is called amygdala and is a part of our brain that performs a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making and emotional responses such as anxiety, fears and aggression. Scientists have found that amygdala calms down when our eyes move from side to side”.
BS: “So, if you keep your head still and fix your eyes on the ball, you’re in dead trouble!”.
OH: “You are at least doing the exact opposite. The researchers have done tests that showed that moving your eyes from side to side, even when sitting down, calms our stress center down”.
BS: “Wow!”
OH: “Experiments demonstrate that it is difficult to be afraid when you’re moving forward”.
BS: “Very interesting. When you ask golfers like me how I would like to play golf I would say that I would love to play golf without anxiety and stress. After what you’ve said, I now think I can, but I’ve always walked up to the ball and had a pre-shot routine which involved some standing still. I must say, though, that in the last couple of years, I have taken the example of Lee Trevino and done my best to walk up, take no practice swing and go ahead and hit the ball as quickly as possible. I believe I heard Trevino once say that he did so, as to hit the shot before the gremlins got to him”.
OH: “I believe you are right about that”.
BS: “What you have just said, epitomizes what I think when I watch golfers. Soo few of them have a nice rhythmical and effortless golf swing. The vast majority, unlike how they are in everyday life, getting a golf club in their hands, they suddenly look awkward and even disjointed. It is fascinating to get a biological explanation about what is happening inside our body and it would be even better to use this insight to find new ways of handling tress and tension out on the course. Can I take up your point about the golf swing being a paradox. Are people’s ability to move naturally being negatively impacted by too much technical teachings?”
OH: “Yes, absolutely. I will give you an example of how to apply “The moving forward mode” and through this hopefully make people be conscious about the difference of being in that mode and “The freeze mode”.
BS: “Feel free!”
OH: “Feel free” is actually the words. Imagine an experiment where we choose 10 golfers whose their own chosen belief is that they are lousy putters. We ask them to tell us what they know about putting, gently guiding them into their habitual mental state. We now ask them to make 5 putts from 10 yards so they can demonstrate their technique. We then ask them to hit the same 5 putts again, only this time, asking them to start a few yards behind the ball, then walk up and hit the ball without ever standing completely still over the ball”.
BS: “I have actually done this many times and the results are nearly always better. I often suggest that golfers try to putt as if it’s the first time they’ve ever held a putter. I ask them to grip it as they would do naturally. No rules. The results are amazing”.
OH: “It is the same in the world of professional golfers and I always did wonder
reading Ben Hogan’s different writings and found out that he never talks about putting”.
BS: “…and putting is nearly half of the game”.
OH: “Have you ever seen him putting?”
BS: “I’m not sure that I have, other than the odd putt here and there”.
OH: “He stands over the ball for a very long time. It looks as if he’s never going to start the backswing”.
BS: “This incredible natural golfer lost his natural sense of moving?”
OH: “That may absolutely be the case. We will never have a proof, but we may assume that this is the explanation. Little wonder he never spoke about it in his books. I think this is super interesting. For me, I believe that putting was Hogan’s ghost. He actually suggested that putting strokes should not count as much as all other shots”.
BS: “Little wonder then that he never spoke about it. The question is, how far can you take this idea of movement? I believe that golfers will be astounded by how well they can do it when they execute it as their body wants it to be done”.
OH: “As with everything else, it is an individual answer to this. I am sure though, that being conscious about what is happening biologically will give everybody an opportunity to experiment for themselves and be able to break some bad habits and patterns”.
BS: “I have to challenge you for a moment. The lateral movements of the eyes seem to be contradictory to the “Quiet Eye-technique”?
Here you may explain this technique in a text box.
OH: “Good point. Yes, it may seem to be contradictory, but is not. The “Quiet Eye-technique” is a biological mode where the body has taken over everything and the mind has let loose. The result is a state where the mind and body are in total trust. The basketball player that again and again scores a three pointer has no doubt. He or she is just executing the shot in a state where the body is in total trust. In trust you get access to your inner magical sense of what is the right thing to do. Science show that those who scores the most in basket, handball etc. also goes most easily into this mode”.
BS: “Let go, just be!”.
OH: “Yes, exactly, and moving is let go. The word controlis now calling for our attention. Time is playing a role when it comes to the issue of control. It seems to be dangerous to have too much time if we want to execute well. One good example of this is the footballers that scores the most goals are not at all the best penalty kickers. It is one obvious explanation; they have a gifted talent of just doing it. Having a lot of time before taking a penalty is not their best side. The control center comes into play and this center is in the brain, not in the body”.
BS: “This is exactly what happens on the golf course, thoughts about technique floods back in as control seems to be required”.
OH: “Here we come to another part of what is happening biologically when we play golf, and it has to do with our hands”.
BS: “Our hands?”.
OH: Yes. You get a club in your hands. This is a signal to our nervous system. What is the signal?”
BS: “It’s a signal that our hands have the control”.
OH: “Touché! What parts of the body are we told that are the most important parts about in a golf swing?”.
BS: “The lower body”.
OH: “Exactly and here is where “La Danse du Golf” makes a difference. In your teaching you change the focus to the feet and takes the focus away from the hands. If we want a golf swing to be like a natural dance, this is an important part. Not many people are dancing with their hands”.
BS: “The subtitle of your book is “What we repeat- we will be”. In life we get the experience, again and again, that our hands are our best tools to be able to control”.
OH: “I am really impressed of your analysis. It is spot on. In neuroscience we talk about the 5 senses and the importance of these senses. Most people believe that the biggest and most important sense is the vison. It is not. It is touch and balance. If we don’t have the ability to a naturally sense of touch and balance, we will have difficulties to adapt to the terrain. This is called proprioception. Golfers today have started to use this fascinating biological sense to be able to read the break in a putt. We are of course now talking about “The AimPoint” technique”. What is happening, is that they are using the proprioceptive sensitivity to read the break. The reason is that we cannot trust our vision as the surroundings tricks us. We all are victims of this visual illusion. We may say that this natural visual illusion makes us all having “Green-dyslexia”.
BS: “This is for sure absolutely true. The method was firstly invented to teach children a simple method of how to read the green and it turned out that the method is very accurate”.
OH: “Interesting. Going back the issue of control. If we tighten up our fingers holding a club, we give our brain a neurological signal; fingers are in control! Big mistake. Tightening the fingers, makes the hands more tense, tense hands start a Domino effect to the lower arm, upper arm, shoulders, neck etc. If we can have a relaxed grip and relaxed wrists, it will be much easier to start the back swing with some other parts of the body. The most natural then is the feet, isn´t it?”.
BF: “Then we can have a Domino effect from the feet and upwards”.
OH: “Yes, and then suddenly you may find your own natural wrist lag, not a tense one”:
BS: “Exactly. Lag is something that should happen, but it’s very difficult to create it without increasing tension. If you create it consciously you end up with a disaster and the lag may even be focus of your swing. I wrote about this in my book. I had been a very straight driver until I was encouraged to develop the ‘late hit,’ now called lag, and created so much of it that I was late on every shot. I was regularly missing fairways by 30 or 40 yards to the right”.
OH: “With the late hit, your wrists were tense”.
BS: “Yes. I got to the stage where I never released the club at all. Never!”
OH: “Your wrists were in control! This guides us to the importance of finding your own natural grip.Every top player has his or her own grip. Trying to copy tour players is grip is crazy”.
BS: “I couldn’t agree more. They are a completely different animal. It is unbelievable to me that teachers still use them in any valid way as a template for the average golfer and especially to older players like me”.
OH: “Just going back to the essence of our discussion; moving, movements and natural flow.One day I had been training chipping for 2 hours. It had been inconsistency as always. 20 of my balls were lying around on the area and to finish off I chipped them towards my bag with just one hand. I did hit them from wherever lay they had, literally walking and hitting at the same time. They all landed within a range of 1/2 -3 yards of my bag!”.
BS: “All nicely struck?”
OH: “Yes, and all with that sound of very good ball contact. It was so natural, no thought at all about technique, just a relaxed one-handed movement. Chipping and landing that close to the pin would be fine for me 7 days a week. From this observation I started to experiment on the course. I made 2 observations; if I could kind of be in motion, have relaxed hand and wrist, my chipping was way better. I started playing like that. I believe you can imagine the comments I got. They were asking what the hell I was doing. From time to time, the result was a disaster. The reason for the bad shots was me being too conscious about what I did, which created enough tension to ruin the shot. Everybody in the flight did of course think that this was a silly way to do it and I can understand their conclusion. When I started to be to conscious an anticipation sneaked in, which led me into a mental state, instead of being in the right state of mind”.
BS: “The reaction from your golf mates tells us a lot about how easy it is to create tension and start to doubt ourselves.”
OH: “Of course. Confidence has huge part in every aspect of life. If we play with someone whose chipping is not good, it will be just fun to show them that a one-handed-chip done in a “I just don´t care mode”, will work quite well. It will most probably be impressing. If we, on the contrary, are playing with someone who is an excellent chipper, it will look silly to chip like this. I do not say that one-handed chipping is the preferable way, it is just to be able to break some rules and be able to take away tension”.
BS: “As always, you have to accept that sometimes it won’t work”.
OH: “Yes, absolutely. The key with this way of chipping or putting is to experience what happens if we let the body do what it knows”.
BS: “Would you say, then, that you let yourself go into “state of mind” which breaks the old “mind state”?”
OH: “Yes, that’s a way to explain it”.
BS: “You still need to find the key to switch the mind off, though”.
OH: “Yes, of course. When doing this we must be conscious about what we are doing and why we are doing it. The goal with everything we are talking about now is to be able to find the corridor or the bridge that leads us from thinking to just doing”.
BS: “Are you talking about the Z-words now? “Being in the Zone” or even “Zen-golf”?”.
OH: “Not exactly, it’s more about how we can get rid of tension and from this have moments of experience being in the zone. I will rather introduce another zone, than the “Zen-Zone”, which I call “The Belief Zone”. If we believe fully in something, we have a state of mind that is in trust. Life is a constant dance of being in trust and belief or in doubt. Some people are mostly in doubt and some people are mostly in trust and belief. The difference of the quality of life is immense”.
BS: “I did not write about this in “Positive Impact Golf”, but I would put doubt as a very close run second to tension as the golfer’s main enemy. How can you play well when you doubt yourself?
OH: “It’s impossible”.
BS: “Someone has said that “The longest walk-in-life is from the range to the first tee”.
OH: “Exactly. We have all experienced how our belief on the range, disappears more and more approaching the first tee”.
BS: “When I first started playing tournaments, I was fine until I hit my first bad shot, after which I would regularly collapse. You can imagine how that provoked a lot of doubt. In fact, the only certainty was what would happen when that bad shot came along. My belief was brittle”.
OH: “Most golfers have the same experience. The key is to accept, forget and then being able to use the bridge that leads from doubt to belief. Before I forget, some of your readers may see the paradox that the walk from the range to the first tee may lead us from belief to doubt, as we have just said that moving forward takes down the anxiety”.
BS: “That must have something to do with gremlins.”
OH: “Bingo.It has to do with what has been stored in our memory bank. I call the gremlins “bugs”. These “bugs” are old bad experiences that are stored in our unconscious level. If we have not being able to get rid of them through mental-emotional work, they are just waiting to be triggered. For some of us, bad experiences out on the golf course, have been close to be called traumas. This may sound exaggerated, but it is not. When these bugs emerge, they are often stronger and more intense than the effect of moving forwards. In addition, they become bigger and bigger as we are going into the not moving/standing still mode”.
BS: “I believe what you say about traumas.We can even see this in professional players. I am convinced that the 12th. hole on Augusta has created traumas in certain players”.
OH: “1986Greg Norman, 2016 Jordan Spieth, 2019 Fransesco Molinari, 2020 Tiger Woods and not to forget the worst collapse of all, Tom Weiskopf 1980. This last fellow finished with 13 shots before he managed to get the ball into the hole”.
BS: ”….and then playing the same hole the following year and knowing that the spectators remember what happened makes it even worse.”
OH: “Yes, it is of course an incredible mental challenge to be conscious abut that. They are all human beings, having a nervous system, even if it is of course very individual how reactive our nervous system is. What we can do for ourselves is to be curious on our own nervous system and learn how we can handle it better and better. This demands a certain degree of consciousness and awareness”.
BS: “Agree.”
OH: “May I ask you a question?”.
BS: “Feel free”.
OH: “You are as curious as always, but it seems to me that you are even more curious than ever. How can be?”.
BS: “You are right. I am more curious as ever. It would be easy to relax and drift off into peaceful retirement, but I still want to know more. I am still not satisfied that I have the full picture and I am more convinced than ever that golf teaching is not making the game easier for most players. You could say that my legacy is not yet completed. This is also the reason I appreciate so much our relationship and discussions. Having the opportunity to look at golf in a new way, even after nearly 50 years of teaching is fantastic. Thanks to you and your biological approach of how to understand the world of golfers”.
OH: “Are senior golfers your specialty now?”
BS: “Yes. Seniors must learn to use their life experience and wisdom to change the way they look at the game. They must adapt their swing to the changes in their bodies and now I can add an extended understanding through your way of explaining it”.
OH: “I am delighted to see your curiosity, see you being enthusiastic, stimulated and even see your vitality”.
BS: “You are right, it is a gift.The fact that it is even stronger than before, being 69 years old, is very much thanks to you.What comes to my mind in this moment, is that you are very much like the developmental biologist Dr Bruce Lipton, who wrote the famous book ‘The Biology of Belief’. I am tempted to make a play on words here. He is talking about that biology is governed by belief and how biology influences our whole being. You are certainly pointing out the same, but I would like to say that your approach to life and golf is “The Belief in biology”.
OH: “He, he. That’s a good one and is the essence of my book. If we want to optimize our life, we must live like our biology wants us to live it. It is simple logic”.
BS: “This leads me into how my body has reacted to your medical advice. I am 5 years older as I was when we met, and I feel at least 5 years younger today than 5 years ago. That makes a difference of 10 years!”.
OH: “Congratulations. Age is just a number. You have done great job. Not many people believe that it is possible to grow older and feel younger and stronger, but it is absolutely possible”.
BS “I can still remember the moment you told me to “break the feast” and not having focus on the breakfast. Suddenly I understood that most people are in a biological “mode of feast” all the time, eating to satiety 3 times a day, not giving the body a possibility to go into survival and repair mode. Giving my body a break of 12-14 hours between my evening meal and breakfast the following day has done wonders. I seem to be eating the same amount of food but losing weight and I’m giving my body more time to finish my digestion”.
OH: “Exactly, you are giving your detox system time to finish its night shift job before giving it more food to break down. If we could have cloned you, 5 years ago and called you Brian 1 and Brian 2. Letting Brian 1 continue the same old well-known path, with same old habits, you would most probably have had more and more physical problems. Brian 2 managed to shift path and the result is that you are older, feeling younger and stronger”.
BS: “I can tell you exactly how Brian 1 would have been. Lots of colds, sore throats, flues and weakened immune system and I would probably have developed more and more cancer. I will give my readers more detail on this topic elsewhere in my book”.
OH: “..and the Brian1-brain would have become foggier, with less clarity of thought and decreased powers of concentration. If we could have studied those two “Brians” after ten years, it would have been impossible to think of them as having the same age. Brian 1 would be unrecognizable, but the new Brian 2 would look quite the same”.
BS: “That comparison is very useful as it is easy to forget what it was like, whereas this helps to reinforce just how much the progress is down to you, having opened my mind to new ways of living. I owe you a big public thank!”.
OH: “The cloning metaphor is something I have given many of my clients, trying to make them conscious about that we all have a choice. The goal is to make people conscious about the possibilities and to inspire and motivate them for changes. The big challenge for everybody is to be able to break old bad habits”.
BS: “Exactly the same as in golf”.
OH: “Exactly the same as in golf. That is the perfect summary of it all. It is all about understanding, challenging and then doing. In my book I have written about
the truth in the quote from Henrik Ibsen´s famous lyric Peer Gynt;
“To think it, wish it, even want it — but do it! No, that I cannot understand”
Most people will easily recognize this statement in their own life. I have rewritten this into
To think is easy.
To want it is easy.
To live it is the challenge!
There are two keys if we want to be successful in the process of changing habits
“Daily awareness is fundamental and daily execution and action are the winners”
If we want to climb “The mountain of change” these are the fundamentals, and we must understand that
“No one can climb it for us”