Phil Mickleson shows how detailed his shot selection process is. This is a huge part of Phil's golf mental game and was built up over hours of deliberate and contextual practice.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner, intermediate or advanced golfer, recreating and simulating the specific challenges you will face on the golf course is such a powerful training methodology for one main reason – it gives you the opportunity to chunk. Which isn’t as terrible as it sounds.
Imagine a piece of information. Within that piece of information, there are details, nuances, concepts, movements and much more. The piece of information is what’s being referred to as a chunk and is stored in our memory. Chunks then become accessible pieces of information that, if trained to do so, golfers can retrieve and use in a tournament situation.
To be accessible during the competition, your practice must have heavily involved both the recreation and the simulation of game-like situations.
Over a period of time the stimulus that is created from the environment around a golfer will fire the right patterns, connect to the right chunks of information and allow you to transfer skills you’ve practiced into tournament play.
