[Mike O]

CHAPTER 1
Note: Understand this section in the context that the Golfing Machine is a great tool for learning and understanding important aspects of the Golf Movement to integrate.

INTEGRATION
"Complete integration your ultimate goal"

What Is Integration?
Complete integration is every aspect of the movement working in harmony with every other aspect, forming one complete harmonious whole. The underlying principles are the same for all humans (generally all humans have two arms and two legs, etc.), which means that all great golf movements look similar. However, the specific identity of every individual is different i.e. body type, age, strength, flexibility, psychological makeup etc. This creates and allows for many variations in the final look of the integrated movement. The long-range goal of complete integration (i.e. the "perfect movement"), as seen in the best players in the world, is a constant, never changing goal. Complete integration is your long-range goal!
The act of integrating your movement is an ongoing process. Psychologically, it nourishes and builds self-confidence when you can slowly achieve your long-range goal. This happens when every integration (i.e. change or addition) is seen as moving closer to a more complete integration of all the possible variables involved. It is the concentration on and the working toward the goal of complete integration that provides the most satisfying results for the individual player.

This is crucial - your goal is to integrate your movement! Your ball flight will improve as you integrate your movement!

When asking players what their long-range goal is, you might hear such answers as keeping their movement smooth, not rushing, or keeping their head still. Having those ideas as a long-range goal severely limits the ability of the golfer to improve their movement on the long term because those ideas are aspects of the movement and not an all- encompassing principle. Without the proper long-range goal, the golfer will not build their movement efficiently and will not see the success that they desire.


How To Integrate
The essential psychological characteristic for being able to integrate is a constant awareness. Awareness is an active state of consciousness; it does not happen automatically, but takes a deliberate and focused effort. The golfer’s mind must be aware of what is happening in the movement. This is a constant process of assessing one's movement visually and kinesthetically (feel) and finding areas in the movement that need improvement.
Entwined within and crucial to this process of awareness is the knowledge of a proper golf movement. Increasing your knowledge of the principles and specifics involved in an integrated golf movement is an important function of improvement. Comparing your movement with the ideal means you must understand the nature of the ideal movement. This is accomplished by reading and studying all the available information pertaining to the golf movement.
To assess your current movement visually, you observe many professional golfers, ignoring the differences and noticing the similarities in their movements. By comparing those similarities or principles to your own movement, you can quickly see what aspect of the movement needs to be improved.
Once a movement problem is identified via the process above then there are two specific ways to integrate. The first way is by moving the hands and club in a different direction or manner thereby causing a change in your movement. The direction the hands move influences many things including shoulder turn. For example, if you pick the hands up steeply in front of yourself, you would not have a very full shoulder turn. If you wanted a fuller shoulder turn, you would take the hands and club back lower, longer and more inside the target line causing more shoulder turn on the backward movement.
In contrast, there are certain movements that are not directly influenced by the movement of the hands (movements that are already automatized into the movement). For example, if a player automatically exaggerated the movement of the left knee prematurely at the beginning of the movement (takeaway) then a different direction of the hands would not influence the left knee motion or prevent the knee from moving as much. The player would notice that the knee movement is not integrated by looking at professional golfers versus photographs of their movement. Then, to change the movement the golfer would still focus on moving their hands and the club—but their secondary awareness would focus on limiting the exaggerated knee movement (more later on this subject).

Focusing On Movement Improvement—Integration
Versus
Short Term Ball Flight Improvement—Ball-Flight
A focus on integration means the player is primarily concerned about their movement, not the ball flight. In direct contrast, the most common pragmatic method used today is guiding your improvement by focusing on how well you hit the golf ball. The goal of seeing immediate ball flight improvement as a mandatory requirement for any movement change is an equation for disintegration with no hope for long-range success.
There is no planning, no thinking ahead, and no building on previous improvements when one merely focuses on how well a change affects the immediate ball flight. This pragmatic approach is much like how a 4-year-old would approach putting a puzzle together. The child randomly attempts to attach separate pieces together until finding a match—not a very efficient method.



In contrast, the adult in the same situation would not begin by attempting to put pieces together but instead by planning out and organizing: First, the adult would turn over all of the pieces, then they would begin to put together puzzle pieces into groups of the same color and/or pieces with straight edges. Next, the adult would begin putting certain areas of the puzzle together, finally filling in the missing sections. Notice, the adult would not be concerned about getting immediate results by fitting pieces together. The same principle that holds true in integrating a puzzle is true for integrating the golf movement.
Focusing on the immediate ball flight requires that you not make any fundamental change in your movement. Making fundamental changes to your movement would require time for all the associated movements to adapt to the major change. Typically, making a fundamental movement change would not allow for immediate ball flight improvement. Most golfers change their movements to adapt to their fundamental flaws, instead of changing their fundamentals and having their movement adapt.
For example—take a beginning player who is athletically gifted and scores in the low 100's. This player is erratic and inconsistent but has tremendous power when he does hit the ball well. This player (in addition to other problems) has a very unintegrated grip, and the right hand nearly comes off the club, allowing for a very long backward movement of the club. One of the great enjoyments of this player's game is that he can at times hit the ball a very long way. But this player needs to improve his grip, throughout the swing, in order to become a better player. This would shorten the player’s backward movement of the club and change the movement in many different ways. The immediate ball flight results may not be any better; the player may even lose significant distance on their best-struck shots. Many players, at this prospect, would not change their grip and therefore not see any long-term movement or ball flight improvement.
For movement improvement that will benefit you long term, focus primarily on the movement. The ball flight is taken into account but is only secondary to the movement. The proper ball flight does not necessarily correlate to a proper movement. For example, take a right-handed golfer who has a severe closed stance (aimed to the right of the target). Yet, that player is generally hitting the ball towards the target due to compensations made during the golf movement. Noticing that professional golfers either have a square stance or open stance, the player should square up their stance. Without any other corrections (besides the square stance) the golfer’s ball flight would now moving well left of the target. If the player is primarily using ball flight to determine proper technique, they will quickly go back to their old stance, preventing long- range improvement.
One might not believe in or have the patience for this long-term approach merely by reading it out of a book. But if the player, over many years, has made day-to-day corrections based on immediate ball flight with no long-term improvement, it becomes clear that the proper focus is on movement improvement.

Integration Versus Feel
Much like the player who is primarily concerned with the immediate ball flight when integrating a new addition to the movement, many players let the immediate feel, impact whether they continue with a change in their movement. If the change feels uncomfortable then they do not continue with the new movement.
When integrating, the player must be acutely aware of any new addition to the movement by way of visual observation via video or photos and not solely rely on feel. The golfer must believe strongly in what they are integrating due to visual comparison to the ideal movement. That belief and confidence in the new change allows the player to continue with the uncomfortable feeling until it becomes normal. Feel is relative to the player’s existing movement. If having a poor movement feels comfortable, then changing that movement for the better surely will feel different and uncomfortable on the short-term.
Changes that improve movement can cause “unbelievable” and “weird feels”. Don't let “Mr. Feel” mislead you on the way to the perfect movement because he will certainly try.

“Mr. Feel”

Besides perceiving a new feel as uncomfortable or awkward, there is another interpretation and misunderstanding of feel that prevents a player from staying with a proper change/integration. The feel is interpreted and translated into a visual equivalent. In essence, the player takes the feel as given or true information. If the movement feels extremely upright, it must look extremely upright. Even though the movement is only slightly more upright, the player translates the feel to a visual equivalent that corresponds to an extremely upright plane, a plane angle so upright, the player perceives it to be incorrect. This improper interpretation of feel will prevent a golfer from making major or minor integrations to their movement.

When To Integrate
When to integrate will vary with every player and every situation. However, there are some guidelines the player will use when integrating different joint motions and changes into their movement.
You should integrate a new movement when you completely believe in the change. After looking for an area in your movement that is un-integrated, you will find something so obvious that it hits you like a ton of bricks. If you do not have this type of experience, keep being aware of the movement and look for areas of improvement but don't make random changes based on immediate ball flight. Just keep playing the golf game with your existing movement even if the results are below your goals or expectations. Have patience and avoid making changes frequently. It is not beneficial psychologically or physically to make constant changes that are flawed.
Generally, a player will want to work on one aspect of the movement at a time, definitely no more than two. In regards to any particular change, wait until the change is automatic and does not require any conscious monitoring. Not only will the new portion of the movement become automatic, but it will completely blend into the player’s overall movement. After the new addition has become integrated and automatic, the player stays aware of any other changes in the movement that might be warranted in order to keep improving.
For the most part, once a change to the movement is made, the individual can feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment while taking the time to ingrain the specific and/or overall feel of the movement. However, at anytime, the player can look for other aspects of the movement that are not integrated and integrate them into the movement. The time involved to integrate a new addition can vary from one month to twelve months or longer. The player realizes that ball striking and scoring will only improve with a constant, slow, gradual improvement of the movement. Usually, the player believes every new integration is the one that will take them to the next level, even though, in actuality the progress of improvement seems to blend together at a much slower pace.

Conscious And Subconscious Integrations
Only two types of integration take place - conscious and subconscious.
Conscious integration is a deliberate change made to produce a better movement. Subconscious integrations are automatic adaptations resulting from conscious changes and usually occur without the player’s knowledge; in essence, the mind tries to integrate and produce economy of motion automatically, subconsciously integrating to the conscious thought the player is focusing on. The concept of subconscious integration is important to understand in order to have the patience and confidence to give your movement time to adjust when making a conscious change.
There are two different aspects of subconscious integration. First, on the wider level, a player can have the goal of hitting the ball at a specific target, and the body will slowly adjust over time. If the target is always specific and the player has a strong desire to achieve the result, the body will make adjustments in order to accomplish the goal. Unfortunately, as we have already mentioned, the automatic adjustments might be compensations based on fundamental faults.
Second, when making conscious changes, realize that subconscious changes are also taking place in order to adapt and integrate with the conscious change. These subconscious changes take time to complete. Give your integrations (i.e. movement changes) time to "mature" before going to a new change. One to twelve months should not be an unusual time to allow for a fundamental, conscious change to become completely integrated. Completely integrated in this context means all of the subconscious changes have taken place to adapt to the conscious change.


What To Integrate
Physically, the golfer works on the most fundamental problem within their movement. If the player were a machine, there would be no need for compromise. A physical machine is simply rebuilt to correct a fundamental problem. But much like the compromises that have to be made due to economic factors when rebuilding a machine, similar compromises are made in building a movement, taking into account psychological and emotional factors. The player must understand that the largest problem is not always the first problem to be worked on.
Psychologically, the degree of your knowledge determines what you consider the most fundamental change to make. A player must understand and believe in any change that is made, so the degree of their knowledge can or will limit what integrations are made.
Emotionally, the player still needs to strike the ball to some degree when making a change. Even for long-term success, a player would not accept a change that caused them to miss the ball. Therefore, depending on the expectations of the player, some limitations, on what can be changed are made in order for the player to keep enough hope and positive attitude to remain integrating the new change. Since the length of time involved integrating movements can be long, and positive results in ball flight may not appear initially, it is crucial that one remain positive about the long-term results in order to continue with the new change.
These psychological and emotional factors do not change the end result but merely the sequence and order of the changes made on the road to complete integration. For example, you may not be able to change a fundamental problem initially but after making other minor changes, you could comfortably make that change.

Roadblocks To Integration
Besides the problems previously discussed, e.g., focusing on immediate ball-flight improvement, misunderstanding feel etc., the following are other roadblocks to integration.
When a player wants improvement too quickly, they make changes too hastily causing them to tear down their movement instead of integrating and building a movement. Be patient when integrating and only make appropriate changes when you absolutely believe they are correct.
The fallacy of the perfect correction prevents players from making a correct integration. Good players learn an important aspect of integration: when a change is made, other parts of the movement take time to accommodate and integrate with the new change. A new addition may create “problems” on the short-term.
For example, if you were off-balance when adapting a new movement, you should still work on the new movement. You would not want to assume a perfect correction and give up on the new change because it "causes" an off balance movement. Thinking short- term and having a lack of understanding of the integrative process prevent most people from pursuing long-term integration. Stay with the change and give it a chance. Much like your first step into the ocean, if you make your judgment from the first reaction you would get right out, but when you understand that over time you will become accustomed to the water temperature you have the opportunity to enjoy it.
Much the same process happens as the beginner advances to being an experienced player—a process of understanding the nature of movement. This book's major focus is identifying and laying out the knowledge to allow interested players a chance to reduce the time it takes to go through the learning process.

Mike O.