Golf Is A Mental Game?! The Return of Our Golf Sensei Jamie Zimron

0:01 Hi. This is Larry Fleck from Indianapolis, Indiana, and I play golf at Winding River Golf Course. This is golf Smarter. Golf Smarter number four hundred and sixty seven published on December sixteen, twenty fourteen. Welcome to golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets old. Our interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations like this that are no longer available in any podcast app to me. If you look on TV or you go to a tournament, you watch the pros and tour pros. Probably the biggest difference between the professionals and the amateurs is their balance.

0:51 And balance is what contains the energy so that you can deliver it all into the golf ball so that the golf ball gets maximum distance and optimal accuracy. Balance is critical to that when people are like lifting off the ball, you know, swaying off the ball and lifting up through it and falling back after they try to muscle it and they recoil and it kicks them back and their ball's not going. That's because they don't have that musculature and that awareness and that ability to be so balanced. And one of the most beautiful things about the touring pros, male and female, is their balance. Golf is a mental game. The return of our golf sense Ay Jamie Zimron.

1:34 This is Golf. Smarter, sharing tips and insights from golfers and golf professionals. To help lower your score. It's worked for your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter podcast. Jamie. Thank you, Fred, it's been too long. I'm so happy to be talking with you and your listeners. Yes, and we are glad to have you back. I am shocked. I was looking through the spreadsheet on the show shows and here we are at an episode four hundred and sixty seven and you haven't been on since twenty eleven. I'm shocked that the last episode was to eighty. Nine with you. That is too long, absolutely, But to.

2:15 Our members who are going back and listening, if you miss Jamie in the past and you need some help on your game, go back to episodes one, thirty three, two, twenty five, to twenty six and to eighty nine and you can hear previous conversations with Jamie. But don't go anywhere yet because now we're going to start another one. How are you. What have you been up to in the last three years? Oh my gosh. He's been doing a lot of Kei golf ki golfing, and I've also been doing a lot of Kei business trainings and working on peak performance with people in athletes, lead athletes, ordinary folks, and business leaders, all kinds of people.

2:58 So been carrying the teachings far and wide, shall we say, around the world, around the country and world. That's amazing. Now let's go back and talk about kii. Since it's been a long time and we're going to be introducing you to a lot of people for the first time, let's explain what ki golf is and how it's transformed and evolved into ki business. Very good. Well, Kii is made up of two characters or kanji they call them in Japanese and Chinese. One is the first. One is Kei. Well, it's Chi and Chinese, and that simply means life energy. It's something that's in every one of us. It's what the world is made of. It's in us, it's around us. And when we can become more masterful in using our energy.

3:42 We tend to be able to get it into golf all better or whatever we're doing and make it fly. So that's key. And then you've got i ai, which actually means love, and love is understood as in a practical way, harmony, unity, oneness, when things are all synchronized, gelling working together. So KII is this power of unified life energy, the key I way. So it's a key way of hitting a golf ball, it's the KEYI way of really doing anything well. And your background is not just. Well, let's go into what your background is in regards to golf and then we'll let it evolve into the ikdo and everything else.

4:26 Let's give us more background there. Well, I started playing golf when I was seven years old in Wisconsin because my parents started playing, and I was really a natural. I just sort of, you know, would swing the club and chase the ball and it was all good. Was this is way back when when there weren't all the great junior golf programs that exists today. So I was kind of a natural, and I was shooting in the eighties. I think by the time I was ten, and my very first golf tournament I played. I had just turned thirteen and it was the Wisconsin State Junior Championship. It was a Green Bay, Oneida country Club, and I went and you had to shoot a metal round and then play match play. So I qualified for the championship division. I made it to the semi finals, and I remember I was three down with four to go to the seventeen year old and I just made three birdies in a bar and beat her.

5:16 Then we had a. Thirty six hole final and I beat the seventeen year old to become the Wisconsin State Junior Champion, which I went on to do a number of times. And then I played nationally. My cohort is people well known people like Amy Alcott, Hollis Stacey who are in the Hall of Fame now LPJA Hall of Fame. And I was actually ranked in the top ten nationally as a junior with them. Wow. So I had a stellar junior golf career. And this was way again, way back when, and it was kind of a choice. I got accepted to school at Stanford University from. Wisconsin, California calling at. California called well it was also Stanford or the tour and at that time. It was just before Title nine kicked in, which gave equal funding to girls athletics, and so I didn't have a golf scholarship and I went to Stanford hardly played golf. We didn't have a lot of much of a golf team at the time, if you can imagine, and yes, you know, it.

6:17 Was like Stanford Tour. I went to Stanford and didn't even have golf scholarship, even though I was ranked nationally. I'm curious about the conversation that you were having with your folks about I'm thinking about going on the tour but I was accepted to Stanford. What their response was to that. It wasn't a big conversation. It was a short conversation, right. Let me guess it was, no, you're going to Stanford exactly. Yeah, But in lieu of golf, what happened is to go. On with my background. When I was sophomore junior year, I was just twenty twenty one years old, I started to practice iikedo, which is a martial art. At Stanford.

6:58 It was offered for a pe crew and a friend told me about it. And aikedo is KEII way. It's a beautiful martial art, which I really didn't appreciate what I was really getting into at the time, but I went to class and I instantly fell in love with it. As it happened, it was quite the heyday of aikdo at Stanford and in the Bay Area. At that time, aikito was just coming into the States from Japan. It's a Japanese martial art and it's a transformative martial art. It's known as the martial art of peace. It differs from karate and kind of combat of arts in that. The idea is not I win, you lose. I'm okay, you're not. The idea is here's an attack, and how can we move with it in such a way that we can blend and harmonize, use that energy, go with the flow to sort of simplify it, and then make some circular movements that are able to neutralize the problem, take the attacker down, but without having to hurt them. So I'm okay and you're okay. It's got a win win kind of philosophy, this harmonious resolution of conflict.

8:06 And the other part that is very. Directly applicable in the key way is to use our life energy to use this internal breath, natural inborn power that we have in our body, mind, emotion, spirit, rather than just trying to use brute muscle force. So is it like I'm okay, you're okay, but you'd know that I just kicked your butt. Yeah, that's true too. Well, and that's because there is a tremendous level of power. You're okay, I'm better. In a certain way. I guess you could say that. Yeah.

8:49 So then then after Stanford and now you're getting ikeito and you're still playing golf after Stanford, did you, like, was the tour still calling in the back of your head or how did you get to teaching? Well, what happened is that's a good question. What happened is. That I just got headlong one hundred thousand percent into Aikdo and I earned my first degree black belt, and some women asked me to teach. I was barely twenty five, but I opened my own Aikdo dojo or martial arts school in San Francisco when I was just twenty five. So I started teaching, and it was originally called the Women's Aikdo School of San Francisco. It evolved into the Ikdo Art Center of San Francisco with programs for you know.

9:36 Mixed men, women, kids. And meanwhile, I did my master's work in clinical psychology, and I also studied a lot of bodywork, fitness anatomy, so you know, massage, therapy, all this kind of stuff. And I've always been involved in the mind body interaction and the mind body realm so and then I went on to become fair involved in both creating and instructing at National Women's Martial Arts Federation, Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists. I co founded the Association of Women Martial Arts Instructors many things, and have taught very much in the aikido world.

10:19 We introduced Aikdo. To the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty seven when Garbacheff came in, and I started teaching. In the Middle East in the early nineties, and I've been. Using aikto as a vehicle, Ikto training a vehicle to get Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews together in the Middle East. It's really powerful stuff. So you know, I've been so kind of like age twenty to forty without telling hold I am. I wasn't golfing a whole lot except when I would see my parents and I would always go out and shoo in the seventies, even without playing, and I noticed that I was actually improving at golf from doing so much aikdo and body mind psychology, fitness mastery stuff.

11:07 How sure you weren't doing better at golf because you were away from it and you weren't really invested. I mean, I know that if I take a couple of weeks off, I get nervous, like, oh boy, I better just keep my expectations low and I'll, you know, and then just I have a great round, you know. You know, when I don't have any pressure on myself too, I got to do better because I'm playing so often. And then then you know, but then when you're away from it, you come back, it's like, oh, whatever happens is great, and. You yeah, well you know it. With some of sum I would say, and in certain ways I would say that I was very a stress less golf you know, I wasn't worrying about it and trying or competing or anything like that. So in that way, I could just go out and have a good time.

11:48 On the other hand, I really did notice during that period that the focus the fitness, the centering, the balance and flow that I was getting from iqto it was directly translating into my golf and so even without practicing, I was doing well. But I also noticed that I was sort of rusty, that it really does take some more practice and play than I was doing to really. Be you know, really be good. Yeah, but I was. But I was impressed at how well I was maintained and even improving without hardly playing or practicing right on the basis of of iketo practice. The balance and flow. Now, is this.

12:30 A psychological boost for you in your golf game? You know, we're going to keep it back to golf. But did the psychology the mindset of iketo help your golf game or was there the physical element to you talked about balance and flow. Well, it's both, and that's why I keep saying mind body. It's funny people say, oh, you know, golf, it's all between your ears, it's all a mental game. Well, there's a lot of scenarios, and. I'm a psychologist, so I'm all for it. On the other hand, you can stand there and stare at the golf ball from your head and it's not going anywhere. So it's not all a mental game. In fact, I have a nice article it's on my website called golf is a mental game? Question mark? Is it really?

13:11 Yeah? So then it's a physical game. The thing is that golf is mostly taught is a physical game. Here's the techniques. Here's where your STANCHI R posture, put your hands here, do this, release them there, da da da, all these little things that you're supposed to like piece together like beads on a string, and it's all going to add up to a good swing. And also equipment, as if if you just drop another four or five hundred dollars on these great clubs or drivers, something you're going to do better. So golf is so much taught as a physical game, and the focus on mechanics and technique, well that's not really working that great for everybody either. So there must be something about this interface, this joined integrated interaction, holistic right of the mind and body working together that is important to create more success in golf and golf instruction, golf learning and playing better golf.

14:04 So that's the part that I think. I've certainly been trying to lead the way, and there are some others trying to lead the way in that realm. So that everybody could play better. It's it's like, you know, you can go off to a therapist or whatever, do some hypnotherapy. You may or may not play better, right, You may or may not do any better if you've got these new clubs. But when you have a certain amount of self mastery and you actually understand stability, centeredness, relaxed, flowing power, how to focus your mind, how to have your mind be able to tell your right elbow to drop into the slot right now while you're right knees kicking. In most of us, most players, and most average golfers don't have that kind of mind body connection that they can even utilize even just physical instruction, because they don't really know where their body parts are that well, wow.

14:56 Yeah, it's really it's neat. Yeah, you know. The other part of the physical that's going on these days is golf fitness. I mean, I'm a huge support of golf fitness. I've designed, as you and those who've heard some of the previous podcasts know, golf bliss balance length and integrate stretch strength, and so I've designed a whole golf fitness program. I'm all about golf fitness. On the other hand, just more physical fitness or going to the gym or getting a little stronger, that's not necessarily going to improve your play either. So that you have the kind of self control of your mind, of your muscles, of your swing, of being in different situations that you need to actually play with confidence and consistency and repeatability, so that you'll actually be a better golfer.

15:45 If I am going to the gym on a semi regular basis and and I'm going there with the thought of this is going to not only keep my heart pumping, but it's also going to improve my golf game. Should focus more on strength or flexibility. Oh, isn't that a good question? Well, the good news of the bad news. My usual answer is, guess what. It's both all of the above. And its I mean, there's individuals who they have strength, so they need a little more flexibility. There's some people who are. Or maybe a little more on the flexible or even gum beside, and they could do a little more strength.

16:29 But you know, I think in general we need. To have a good balance, a good dose, in a good ratio of both strength and flexibility because they're both important. And the strength part has to do I think a lot with lower body and core strength so that you have stability. You have yeah, so you have the stability and you have. The actual shall we say, muscle power to control the club and to really put some power into the shot. On the other hand, the flexibility and the relaxation is important because you've got to be able to have spinal rotation. You really need to be able to extend on your back swing and extend your arms and through on the forward swing so that you have a maximum with arc.

17:16 And then the relaxation to develop club head speed and the flow, the delivery of energy and a flowing way to the golf ball. Even more flexibility in your wrists. Sam Sneed said, your wrists should be oily. Most people have never even heard of a rist exercise. These are things we have an ike goo and we actually need more flexibility in our wrists, while we have more strength in some of the muscles of our forearms and also our abdomen and our core. So again, and these aren't things that you have to be a tour player with an entourage to develop. I've actually, in my golf fitness program made a very accessible golf program that works on all those areas balance, length and integrate, stretch strength, and so we're working on stretching and strengthening, so we have the integration, we have the length, the extension, the turning ability, that sort of thing, and that way we can and it's all using your golf club, so that your average player can do a golf warm up routine, can do a golf fitness and a golf swing development routine, even every day of the week at home, in your office, in your yard, in the park.

18:27 Not to mention, of course, the driving range and the golf course. But these are the things that anybody can do without having to be an elite or tour player, and without having to pay a lot of money or have some kind of entourage. Right, this is natural to all of us. We're just all human beings with a body to mind, and that's how it works. We've had a listener on actually recently who's a workout fanatic and has just become this incredible body and he says it helps his game, but you know, he's he's spending a lot of time at the gym on a regular basis. But if we don't have that kind of time if we, you know, don't have that discipline. When we're talking about strength, there are elements of you know, the arms, the wrists, the you know, the shoulders, biceps, triceps, but then you have the core and then you have lower body strength, calves, knees, hips. Is there a place to focus or is this all over the place? Is this weight bearing training for strength training or is it machine strength training?

19:39 It would help. Mind this one because I'm a swimmer, so yeah, stay away from machines. I just swim, which to me gives me strength and flexibility. So well, I'm glad you asked this question too, Fred, because it's reminded me of a story when I first was creating my Kia Golf instructional series and we were filming it out in mesk Nevada, Las Vegas area, and this was some years ago, and the producers of this had heard about a guy at a Butch Harmon golf gym. And this is when Butch was still Tiger's coach in Las Vegas, and there was this guy who was certified in Butch Harmon and fitness and they wanted me to meet him because I had this fitness program that we were filming. So off we went in Las Vegas to this gym and this big, tall, buff bodybuilder guy with all these like twenty thousand dollars machines was running the golf fitness program and so I.

20:36 Was he was in charge his place. So I got on all of his his machines and know, I'm in good shape, and I did all of his stuff on his machines, which was challenging, but you know, I could do it all. And then I was like, okay. Well then they all looked at me and went, it's you know, it's the girls turn, right, it's your turn. So I said, I don't know a girl they're dealing with, that's right. And so I gave him a golf club. And I had a golf club. Each had a six seven iron. And my program is called make your Golf Club your Health Club. All my exercises use a golf club. And we did the first exercise, which actually is a whole nervous system tune up.

21:21 It stretches your. Spine, your hamstrings, your lats, It gets your breathing, pumps energy through your body all in one exercise and loosened your neck, loosens your shoulders, it's a great first exercise, and then you do repetitions of the exercise ten up to twenty five. To do one hundred of them, I'm telling you that'll give you a lot of fitness. So anyways, I just got. Him in position and I think we did fifteen or twenty reps. This big, tall muscle builder was sweating and grunting and like, oh man, he was struggling. Well, that was the first one. Then we went through maybe half dozen of my exercises that, by the way, actually lead into and build your golf swing. Hardly hang with my exercises, and.

22:04 This is after being on all of his difficult expenses machines. I've never forgotten that story. And I've worked with a lot of people. I've worked with some tpis and Titleist Performance Training and much to my shock, and I mean, it's a great program TPI, but I've had some instructors and TPI not actually know certain positions of the golf swing that they need to be into and not be able to have the flexibility to get there. Wow. For example, a full follow through and turn your heel and be up on your toe on your right toe with your heel fully turned, which has turned your hips and your spine full rotation through and strong and tall on your left leg and a good balance finished position.

22:48 They didn't know that position that. Well and couldn't even get to it, and these guys were instructors. So once again, this is stuff that everybody can develop. It's really not that hard and there are pretty easy ways to develop it in terms of strength building strength, imagine doing just a leg lift. For example, Let's say in one hand, you've got your your seven iron and you're leaning on it. You've got your left hand on top of the seven iron for balance, and you're standing there and then you lift your right leg. Okay, so now you're gonna do leg lifts. You're gonna keep your. Right knee locked, and then you're gonna lift from your hip and you're using the pelvic support muscles, hip flexers, low back, and so imagine doing ten leg lifts. You're lifting up against psi pounds per square inch of pressure.

23:38 So to lift up, you're already like lifting weights, and it's all internal strengthening of the big and little muscles in your whole hip, lower back, sacral complex. To do those leg lifts, do ten of them? Do twenty of them. Try doing one hundred of them. You will feel like you've just been lifting weights. But it's safe and you're in control role of how many repetitions you do, so you don't overdo. You're not lifting weights that might tear a muscle, but you're getting weightlifting because you're going up against PSI. Wow, awesome, thank you, that's interesting, and yeah, thank you. And it's free, you know, well the price of a lesson or of a DVD. But I mean, seriously, you're in power. You can do that. You can do that yourself.

24:21 And when you strengthen those muscles, all of a sudden you're standing there. You take your stance. You want to talk about good posture, athletic address of the ball. You've got the muscles, power in your musculature to actually stand in a good athletic stance to be able to swing a golf club, wind up and deliver seventy eighty one hundred miles an hour of energy flow into a golf ball and actually have the stability to contain that. And hold that and have balance. To me, if you look on TV or you go to a tournament, you watch the pros and tour pros. Probably the biggest difference between the professional and the amateurs is their balance. And balance is what contains the energy so that you can deliver it all into the golf ball, so the golf ball gets maximum distance and maximum accuracy, optimal accuracy.

25:15 Balance is critical to that. When people are like lifting off the ball, you know, swaying off the ball and lifting up through it and falling back after they try to muscle it and they recoil and it kicks them back and their ball's not going. That's because they don't have those that musculature and that awareness and that ability to be so balanced. And one of the. Most beautiful things about the touring pros, male and female is their balance. That's one of the things that I struggle with a lot. I know that when I step up, especially t shots, when I need to tell myself keep your balance. You don't need to swing hard, you know, because I seem to people like, oh, you really swung out of your shoes on that one.

26:03 I didn't I swing easy. I just fell over because I have no balance. By the way, episode number two twenty five of Golf Smarter, it was make your golf club your health club. We use that. So, taking your lead on that, I think that this episode will be called golf is a mental game question mark based on your blog. I hope you don't mind doing that. Good. So on the balance, I want to focus on the last five minutes here on the balance element of that is the balance come from the upper body or the lower body? No, it is founded in the lower body. And we could talk for a long time about the importance of the lower body and the golf swing.

26:45 Well, then wait before you go on with the answer. Can we do a part two of this conversation. Oh, we absolutely can. It's one of my favorite topics and I will share the secret of the back knee with everybody. Okay, So the prior to. This, it's just it's really pretty interesting, and I actually go through this in my DVD series. We go through all the sports. I do this in my seminars with people. If you throw a baseball, if you hit a home run, if you throw a football, a quarterback throw in a football, if you do a forehand in tennis, a backhand in tennis. Those start in the feet. If you watch a basketball player, they kind of go down first before they come up, before they do a jump. Shot, they go down into their legs and feet, their knees.

27:31 Then all the. Energy comes back up through their body and that's what we call the base and the core, and then their upper body shoulders, elbows, hands are soft and relaxed and deliver that energy and softly deliver the ball. But golf, unlike all these other sports, is you know, you stand there and it's almost like people put their focus on the golf ball. They can see their arms and they're tighten their hands on the club, so they're. All in their upper body. And then they're even taught unfortunately mostly by male pros who have strong upper bodies. Take the club away with your shoulders, with your hands, and they're all worrying about their shoulder turn rather than thinking about how like every other sport, things originate in the feet, and the feet go up through the knees to the hips, and then then comes the upper body on top of that. So we need to follow every other sport and we don't.

28:32 And quite honestly, a beautiful quote to what everybody's appetite for the next episode, and it's from Jack Nicholas, who is a pretty darn good golfer, and his quote is golf is played between the arches. Of your feet. Wow. Yeah, So that's straight. From Jack Nicholas, and I loved it when I found that quote. I was reading in some golf magazine from a decade ago, and I. Was at a club somewhere. I literally ripped that page out of that old golf magazine because it had a picture of Jack rolling his feet and everything and talking about it. Because I teach working from the end steps up and working from the ground up. Look at the football players, I mean, all their drills their lower body.

29:16 Every sport is lower body. And here when I teach ki. Golf, most people, I joke, they practically kiss my feet because they never heard and they have not been taught about using their lower body and how to why it's important, and how to do it. I called the mechanics for the magic. So I would be very happy to talk about use of the lower body and how that's important, and how it relates then to the connected, proper, relaxed, flowing use of the upper body rather than just you know, my shoulder turn and not turning my shoulders enough. That's where so many people are stuck, and they've missed so much, and they are not following the natural order things which every other sport does.

30:01 I think we should take a clue. Okay, well I think we should do that in the next episode. That sounds like fun. That's that's perfect. Thank you. Why don't you give us a little hint. You alluded to a DVD series and other things that you have available on your website. What do you got this holiday season for the golf Smarter audience. Well, we are having a holiday special on my Evergreen Kii Golf Instructural series. It's got three DVDs. One is called The Universal Principles for Success, the next one is Golf Bliss, the golf fitness program make your golf Club your health club. And the other is called the Kii Golf Katas. Which is patterning your golf swing using kind of martial arts principles, but patterning your golf swing so you have repeatability, accuracy, correct movement, and all these principles are incorporated into those exercises.

30:51 So there's three DVDs, a companion manual, a pocket guide that's all in that series, and that's going to be on a major holiday discount. I'll be on It's on my website, and I have a Bliss Fitness which isn't necessarily golf related, but all the Bliss Fitness original core workout exercises DVD and a really cool trainer, this balance forward that weaves in these principles. That people really love. So that's available on my. Website, and I'm going to be running a holiday special of some virtual golf lessons that we can do via Skype wow, and people can find all that on my website. And if you want to do an in person lesson, that's great too.

31:32 I'm located in. The Bay Area and I also travel a lot, so I sometimes arrive to many locales and we can get together. It is there a way for the golf Smarter community to let you know that they heard about this on golf Smarter when they make a purchase, And is there any or is this the holiday special part of what the discount is for the audience. I'll tell you what we will do the tech end of that today or tomorrow weekend, and we will let people be able to indicate that they've heard through golf Smarter. And my website is you can get to my website same website one of two ways Kei goolf dot com k i AI golf dot com or the kei Way dot com t h E k I A I w A Y the kiway dot com and the stores on there and all the information. They can also call our direct line which is seven six zero four nine two four six five three four nine two Golf.

32:37 Oh well, that's perfect, awesome. It is so great to have you back on the show. You are such a wealth of amazing information that fits right into my approach to golf instruction. I am so glad to talk to you again and have you back and looking forward to have you on part two of this conversation as we start the tenth year of Golf Smarter wonderful. I'm looking forward to it too, and I got to give you a big congratulations in Mazel tov. Ten years as a great milestone. I've been doing wonderful service for the golf world.