The end of my golf season was a mess. I played poorly when I was away, and then when I got home, I hit the ball … even worse.
My instinct when stuck in this sort of rut has always been to persist further—hit more balls, analyze more swings, search harder for answers wherever I can. But it turns out the calendar is doing me a favor. Sometimes we’re better off just shutting it down.
According to multiple experts, the argument for walking off the driving range, or even stuffing our clubs in a closet for a bit, is not about throwing our hands up and retreating. It’s actually the opposite. If you really love golf and want to get better, time away from the game plays an important role. More than just clearing our heads, in fact, it facilitates learning in ways we don’t realize.
A 2014 Johns Hopkins study found that, compared to groups that worked on a task continuously, participants who took breaks became more efficient upon returning because they decreased “task-irrelevant” forces. In other words, it was the time away that allowed their brains to filter out the parts they didn’t need.
“Practice alone was insufficient,” authors Sarah E. Pekny and Reza Shadmehr write. “Time away from practice was a required element for optimization of effort.”
The golf performance coach Matt Cuccaro, who works with top amateurs and tour players, relates this dynamic to how our brains work to remember specific pieces of information—a date or a name, for instance. The more effort expended in searching for a piece of information, the better your chance of retaining it.
“The real learning is in the recall of information,” Cuccaro says. “So if you almost forget someone's name, the act of struggling to pull that name back into memory is what makes the learning stick even better.”
The late Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson’s theory around deliberate practice, which states we learn best through focused, intensive sessions, was popularized as the “10,000-hour rule” in Malcom Gladwell’s best-seller “Outliers.” But as Ericsson and others noted, the 10,000-hour rule has been misinterpreted as emphasizing volume. In fact, it’s far more about quality practice.
In that sense, there is no specific timetable for how long a break a golfer requires, but Cuccaro says it needs to be long enough that you’re sufficiently re-engaged in the process.
”A practice should be emotional and done well, and if we're just kind of numb to it and turned off from it, you're not gaining,” Cuccaro said, “The research says we're good for about 90 minutes max, and then the learning really just falls off a cliff.”
The more we bang balls or slog through rounds without purpose, the less we stand to benefit. If the goal is to ensure the game has our full attention whenever we have a club in our hands, we should consider the value of taking those clubs out of our hands first.
“ Whenever we have that disconnect or we’re easily agitated and distracted, then it’s absolutely time to step away,” Cuccaro said. “Because then the other side of it is those first few days back—and I see the same with an athlete coming back from an injury—there's this almost massive celebration. They have a better perspective and enhanced motivation that they would not experience if they kind of stayed in the doldrums of it all.”
Low Net is a Golf Digest+ newsletter written for an average golfer, by an average golfer. To get Low Net directly to your inbox, sign up here. Have a topic you want me to explore? Send me an email and I'll do my best to dive in.