Why Elite Performance Training?
Over the past 15 years, the term “high performance training” has become a common buzz word in the world of sports training. You may possibly associate it with the Olympic arena. The good thing for us is golf is progressively moving that direction and becoming more of a high performance sport for youth as well as the professional athletes.
One of the components that is consistently missing in golf teaching, training and coaching is high performance mindset training. I haven’t seen many – if any – teachers going that direction. The majority of their emphasis is purely on the technical part of the game, as they fail to integrate mindset training as they work with their athletes.
We all have heard the question, “How much of the game is mental?” You will hear answers anywhere from 80 – 90 percent. Why is it never implemented into the technical aspect from the teacher to the student remotely close to that proportion? In may cases, it’s an afterthought once they begin to play the game. They dabble in it and associate themselves with sports psychologists, but never adopt and fully integrate a proven system into their own training.
I do think some great golf and mental coaches are trying to partner their strategies, but there is still a huge disconnect because they’re not truly on the same page. The mindset coach isn’t fully aware of what the golf teacher is working on with their students and vice versa.
The true void lies in the golf teacher not being able to reinforce as well as teach, train and coach the concepts of a high performance mindset training system. Their downfall exists in not truly understanding why their students can have a great front nine and a disastrous back nine, why they can’t finish off an event strongly, or put two consistent back-to-back rounds together. We could volley examples back and forth, but the common denominator is this: why are students not consistent?
The answer lies in something hardly addressed and/or taught: the self-image. This represents what you are likely to do in a situation. Out of all the research I’ve done the last 18 years, I’ve found only one system that addresses the idea and importance of how to build, protect and grow the self-image.
We built our Academy on the technical aspects and training your game for competition, and for the last 10 years we’ve done extremely well. But I always knew I was missing the mindset training aspect and could never truly find a high performance system that was designed to fit into our training structure, solving the riddle for consistency.
That is, until I met Lanny Bassham (Olympic Champion and Coach), founder and creator of Mental Management Systems. For the past ten years I’ve worked side-by-side with Lanny, learning, teaching, training and coaching his Mental Management System. The Shawn Humphries Youth Golf Academy became the first in the world of golf to integrate MMS. In that time frame, I became the first golf coach in the world to be a licensed MMS coach.
We integrated Lanny’s system into our Elite Performance Systems. Mastering how you THINK – TRAIN & PERFORM like an Olympian. It’s been a game changer for us and the Academy. Our academy members have won more than 1,400 events, and 100 percent of our graduating seniors have been offered golf scholarships. We now have 25 NCAA Div. I Universities running Elite Performance Systems (EPS). Its now become a direct pipeline for our academy members. Students train in EPS and this creates an incredible opportunity for them with our EPS Universities. When athletes have been trained in the same system as the university, it makes a seamless transition, not only for the student athletes, but more importantly for the coaching staff. They are not only speaking the language, they are training like the other college players.