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Hitting the ball thin? Hitting it fat? Not hitting it at all?
Nope, none of these things. The most frustrating thing in golf is hitting your one and only fantastic shot of the year and then duffing the next one. You stare at the ball in despair and shake your head at the club on the ground and woefully moan, "If I can cream it once, why can't I do it again?"
While your playing partners will say it's lack of practise, or you need a lesson, or YOU LIFTED YOUR HEAD, I can tell you it's none of these.
Well, perhaps it's a bit of those but the main reason you can't hit more than one good shot in a row is ... evolution.
That's right, you can blame your inconsistency on evolution.
Research on monkeys (who have pretty much everything in common with golfers) has shown that the nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over.
Variety is not only the spice of life, it's life itself, considering the range of terrors cave woman faced and the choice of actions necessary for survival.
According to researchers, the terror felt when facing a sabre-tooth tiger is the same as when facing a tee-shot beside water.
With the tiger, the cerebellum (one of the brain's oldest structures) took over and cave woman whacked the tiger with a branch and then fled. With the water hazard, golf woman fires five balls into the water, throws her driver into the lake, and flees. (That's the cerebellum—the reptilian brain—taking over again, all these millennia later.)
As there were not only tigers to face but also wolves, bears, mammoths and drunk cavemen, cave woman needed to call upon a variety of responses to survive the day. She figured out the best way to handle each danger and acted accordingly.
Hence, when facing a mammoth, she (and her sisters) would grab their cavemen, shove spears in their hands and be right behind them when they drove the winter's provisions over a cliff.
Golf woman selects the best people for the job, shoves the appropriate keys into their hands and supports them from a safe distance.
So we can see, from millions of years of history, that flexibility of action is the key to better golf. Instead of fighting evolution by trying to find the perfect swing and then repeating it, we need to accept that golf woman (and man) simply aren't set up that way.
You can't swing the same way every time because your brain is incapable of planning the swing the same way more than once.
Practising your swing may make it better, but it'll never make it perfect because the brain is wired for inconsistency.
Researchers have now switched from monkeys to golfers as they want to compare ancient brain activity directly with recent, and golf is the only sport which brings out the cave woman in you.
And also because you'll get no more nervous a nervous-system than that which belongs to a golfer.