Athletes In The Zone Feel The Flow

Robyn Beck/Getty Images

Tiger was in the zone.  On Saturday, in the third round of this year's U.S. Open, Woods made eight birdies, including five on the final nine holes, to come roaring back into contention.  "All the Opens I've won [three], I've had one stretch of nine holes," Woods said. "It doesn't have to be on a back nine or front, just a nine-hole stretch where you put it together." He knows that to win, he needs to find that "flow".

After a great performance, many athletes have described a feeling of being “in the zone.” In this state, they feel invincible, as if the game slowed down, the crowd noise fell silent and they achieved an incredible focus on their mission. What is this Superman-like state and how can players enter it when they most need it?

Like the feeling of being moved down a river by the current, this positive groove has been described as a "flow." In fact, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, psychology professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, coined the term in his 1990 book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (Harper Row, 1990).

From his years of research, Csíkszentmihályi developed an entire theory around the concept and applied it not only to sports, but also to work life, education, music and spirituality.

Csíkszentmihályi identified nine components of the state of flow. The more of these you can achieve, the stronger your feeling of total control will be.

1. Challenge-skills balance is achieved when you have confidence that your skills can meet the challenge in front of you.

2. Action-awareness merging is the state of being completely absorbed in an activity, with tunnel vision that shuts out everything else.

3. Clear goals come into focus when you know exactly what is required of you and what you want to accomplish.

4. Unambiguous feedback is constant, real-time feedback that allows you to adjust your tactics. For example, fans and coaches will let you know how you're doing.

5. Concentration on the task at hand, with laser-beam focus, is essential.

6. Sense of control is heightened when you feel that your actions can affect the outcome of the game.

7. Loss of self-consciousness occurs when you are not constantly self-aware of your success.

8. Transformation of time takes place when you lose track of time due to your total focus on the moment.

9. Autotelic experience is achieved when you feel internally driven to succeed even without outside rewards. You do something because you love to do it.

Flow doesn't only happen to athletes. In any activity, when you're completely focused, incredibly productive and have lost track of time, you may be in the flow. You may not be trying to win the U.S. Open, but you can still say you are "in the zone."

See also: Tiger's Brain Is Bigger Than Ours and Tiger, LeBron, Beckham - Neuromarketing In Action

Advertisers Live And Die With Superstar Endorsements

When a company drafts a single celebrity to represent a brand, it can backfire -- in the way Tiger Woods' behavior was thought to have potentially affected certain brands. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines different ways to secure brand loyalty.

"A widely applied method for improving how people feel about a brand is to pair the brand with positive stimuli," write authors Steven Sweldens (INSEAD), Stijn van Osselaer (Erasmus University), and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida). "A brand can be advertised using attractive imagery, endorsements by a celebrity, or used in event sponsoring. Invariably, advertisers hope that the favorable feelings generated by the positive stimuli will attach to the brand."

The pairing of a brand with positive stimuli is called evaluative conditioning, and the researchers found that evaluative conditioning can occur in two different ways: direct transfer and indirect transfer.

"In indirect transfer, the positive feelings toward the brand are dependent on creating a link in memory between the brand and a positive stimulus. For example, MasterCard uses the popular NFL player Peyton Manning to advertise its product, creating a link between MasterCard and Peyton Manning," the authors write.

A second form of evaluative conditioning involves the direct transfer of feelings to the brand. In this case, the positive feeling from the stimulus "rubs off" on the brand. For example, Nike sponsors 55 current NBA players, which associates the brand with a wide range of likeable athletes.

"For these fans, the Nike brand becomes more liked as a consequence of the sponsorship of many athletes, not because of the sponsorship of any one athlete," the authors write.

This difference is displayed in Woods' association with Accenture. "If a brand has used Tiger Woods to create an indirect transfer of feelings, then Woods' recent indiscretions are particularly damaging to the brand," the authors write.

"Advertising and product use can be structured to facilitate direct versus indirect affect transfer, which yields more robust brand attitudes than indirect affect transfer," the authors conclude.

Source: Evaluative Conditioning Procedures and the Resilience of Conditioned Brand Attitudes. Journal of Consumer Research and University of Chicago Press Journals

See also: Tiger, LeBron, Beckham - Neuromarketing In Action and Tiger's Brain Is Bigger Than Ours

Please click here to take the Sports Are 80 Percent Mental 2-minute survey!

Sports Science Gym Bag - 12-8-09

Wow, what are the odds that I lead off this week's Gym Bag with a Tiger Woods story?  Don't worry, this article has no mention of Escalades, golddiggers or mothers-in-law.  Plus, plenty of other great stuff from the sports science world.


The Tiger Woods Effect

 Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school.
Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that Tiger Woods is an undisputed superstar, the most intimidating competitor in modern sports. (In 2007, Golf Digest noted that Woods finished with 19.62 points in the World Golf Ranking, more than twice as many as his closest rival. This meant that "he had enough points to be both No. 1 and No. 2.") Brown also notes that "golf is an excellent setting in which to examine tournament theory and superstars in rank-order events, since effort relates relatively directly to scores and performance measures are not confounded by team dynamics." In other words, every golfer golfs alone...

Vince Young
The underlying assumption of the Wonderlic test is that players who are better at math and logic problems will make better decisions in the pocket. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable conjecture. No other position in sports requires such extreme cognitive talents. A successful quarterback will need to memorize hundreds of offensive plays and dozens of different defensive formations. They'll need to spend hours studying game tape of their opponents so that, when they're on the field, they can put that knowledge to use. In many instances, quarterbacks are even responsible for changing the play at the line of scrimmage. They are like a coach with shoulder pads...

UN calls for football tax to fund education for poor children 
The United Nations today launches an appeal to FIFA football leagues, including the Premier League, to place a small levy on sponsorship revenues that would help get 2 million children in poor countries into school over the next five years...

Pushing Past the Pain of Exertion
LAST November, Kara Goucher ran the ING New York City Marathon, her first 26.2-mile race. Even though she was an Olympian who had placed 10th in the 10,000 meter race in 2008 in Beijing — running the equivalent of 6.2 miles — she felt fear.  “I was really scared I wouldn’t be able to handle the pain for that long,” said Ms. Goucher, 31, who had never run more than 18 miles at a time before training for the marathon. “Now I was asking myself to run eight miles farther, a lot faster. It was daunting.”

Coaching and science: What's the big deal and who cares for the science?
"As promised, today begins a series of posts on coaching and science, and how the science can be, should be, and sometimes is, and often is not, applied to athlete preparation. Obviously, it comes with an endurance focus, but there's no reason why sprint coaches and team sport coaches can also not glean some information from this.
This is a series that was inspired by my visit to the US Olympic Center in Colorado Springs. I was lucky enough to be invited there by Prof Randy Wilber of the USOC, who had organized a symposium on altitude training. The symposium brought together scientists, coaches, athletes and mangers from 22 different countries, and included 32 Olympic athletes, and numerous sporting codes, Summer and Winter Olympics among them..."

Belichick had the numbers on his side
Among the countless criticisms hurled at Patriots coach Bill Belichick for his decision to go for it on fourth down Sunday night, former Colts coach Tony Dungy summed up the most popular when, speaking on NBC, he said, “You have got to play the percentages and punt the ball.’’ What Dungy did not realize, though, is that “the percentages’’ dictated that Belichick do exactly what he did...

Short Heels and Long Toes: A Surprising Recipe for Speed
Track coaches have long claimed that the best sprinters are born, not made. Now, new research on the biomechanics of sprinting suggests that at least part of elite athletes’ impressive speed comes from the natural shape of their foot and ankle bones.
Using ultrasound imaging, researchers compared the feet of 12 top college sprinters with those of 12 mere mortals. Surprisingly, the athletes had particularly short heels and longer-than-average toes — features that actually put them at a mechanical disadvantage when running.
“What we found is that sprinters actually had less mechanical advantage than the non-sprinter subjects that we tested,” said biomechanics researcher Stephen Piazza of Penn State University, co-author of the study published Friday in the Journal of Experimental Biology. “This was surprising to us because we expected that sprinters needed all the help they could get.”

Tiger's Brain Is Bigger Than Ours

As Tiger Woods heads to Sawgrass for The Players Championship this weekend, mortal golfers wonder what's inside his head that keeps him winning. Well, chances are his brain actually has more gray matter than the average weekend duffer.

Researchers at the University of Zurich have found that expert golfers have a higher volume of the gray-colored, closely packed neuron cell bodies that are known to be involved with muscle control. The good news is that, like Tiger, golfers who start young and commit to years of practice can also grow their brains while their handicaps shrink.

Executing a good golf swing consistently is one of the hardest sport skills to master. Coordinating all of the moving body parts with the right timing requires a brain that has learned from many trial and error repetitions.

In fact, past studies have shown that the number of hours spent practicing is directly related to a golfer's handicap (a calculated number that represents recent playing ability).

Magic number
K. Anders Ericsson, a Florida State professor and the "expert on experts," has spent more than 25 years studying what it takes to become elite in any field, including sports.

The magic number that keeps recurring in Ericsson's studies is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. If someone is willing to dedicate this amount of structured time on any skill, he has the potential to rise to the top.

Some critics argue that practice is good, but we all start with different levels of innate abilities that put some at an early advantage (i.e. the boy who is six feet tall in fourth grade) While that may be true, Ericsson does not want the rest of us to use that as an excuse. "The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that's different is their innate abilities," he said in an interview with Fast Company. "There's little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level."

So, what happens to the brain after all of that practice?

In the new study, a team led by neuropsychologist Lutz Jäncke compared the brain images of 40 men divided into four groups based on their experience as golfers. They recruited ten professional golfers (with handicaps of 0), ten advanced golfers (handicaps between 1 and 14), ten average golfers (handicaps between 15 and 36) and ten volunteers who had never played golf (not even mini-golf!).

Interviews revealed the "practice makes perfect" correlation between hours of practice and lower handicaps.

Brain scans (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) showed that, indeed, there were structural differences, but not in the linear pattern they imagined. While significant differences existed in total volume of gray matter between the pros and the non-players, there was little difference between the pro and the advanced groups or between the average and non-players groups.

When the researchers combined the pros and the advanced golfers into one group called "expert," and the average and non-players into a second group called "novice," a clear dividing line emerged, showing that practice produces a noticeable step up in the brain's gray matter. This jump comes somewhere between 800-3,000 practice hours.

The results were detailed last month in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Step 1: Grow the brain
Another interesting twist is that the pros reported practicing five to eight times more than the advanced group, while the advanced group practiced only twice as much as the average group.

Yet the big jump in gray matter came after golfers achieved a skill level below a 15 handicap, moving from average to advanced. This is consistent with another study in 2008 that measured gray matter volume in students learning to juggle three balls. After learning to juggle for the first time, their gray matter increased. However, once that initial concept was learned, more advanced juggling tricks did not grow more brain cells.

It's been a long time since Tiger's handicap was 15, so clearly the additional years of practice were necessary to reach the top.  And, all of that gray has produced a lot of green.

Please visit my other sports science stories at LiveScience.com

Tiger, LeBron, Beckham - Neuromarketing In Action

Its not you, its me. That's what the CEOs at three large companies told their superstar athlete spokesmen in the last few months. First, the Buick division of GM ended its $3 million per year relationship with golfer Tiger Woods one year early. Next, the NBA's LeBron James lost his connection with Microsoft less than two years after the mega-marketing deal was announced at the 2007 All-Star game. Finally, Pepsi stopped serving uber soccer marketing star David Beckham.

All three companies issued very polite press releases blaming the struggling economy and wished their sports stars future success. Why did these three deals not work? Was the economy an easy scapegoat or were these endorsements doomed from the beginning?

For years, researchers have tried to develop models to explain consumer behavior and our emotional reactions to celebrity endorsers. Matching the right spokesperson to the right product is the key. The three leading theories for endorsement marketing, Source Credibility, Source Attractiveness and Product Match-up, guide companies in making the right choice.

Credibility combines expertise with trustworthiness. The more an athlete is perceived to know about the product, the more credibility points he earns with the audience (i.e. Tiger and golf clubs).  Attractiveness ties together likeability and familiarity of the athlete. The more a consumer wants to "be like Mike", the more effective the message. Like credibility, a logical marriage of athlete to product makes for an effective match-up. A relationship that seems forced probably won't make sense to us.

Using these models, the Tiger/Buick, LeBron/Microsoft and Beckham/Pepsi match-ups seem illogical in our minds. It may be that our mirror neurons were not firing as the advertisers expected. Located in the prefrontal cortex, these neurons can be activated by observing someone else making an action. When you watch Beckham kick a soccer ball, the same neurons light up as if you were actually kicking the ball. This reaction is the basis of imitation learning theories.

Marketers are now trying to make use of this brain function by observing consumers' brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In his recent book, Buyology, (2008, Broadway Books), Martin Lindstrom begins to apply this neuroscience to why we buy things. According to Lindstrom, Abercrombie and Fitch use this idea in their stores - the "large blow-up posters of half-naked models" make your "mirror neurons fire-up."

That might be a stretch, but Roger Dooley, consultant and author of the blog, Neuromarketing, does see a connection when using athlete endorsers. "This research suggests a basis in neuroscience for the “believe in your product” advice,” he commented. “While the individual hearing the sales pitch may be listening to the words, her brain’s mirror neurons are firing at the same time in reaction to the salesperson’s emotions, demeanor, etc. If there’s a disconnect between the words that are cognitively processed and the emotions that are mirrored, the pitch will probably be less effective. Neuromarketers should take note, too - while ads normally employ professional actors who have the ability to accurately simulate the desired emotions and state of mind, pitches that use celebrity athlete endorsers... may suffer if the viewer finds the emotions don’t match the words."

We can watch Tiger hit a golf ball with his Nike clubs and our brain can imagine (or fantasize) about swinging those same clubs. But, watching Tiger drive a Buick or imagining LeBron working on an Excel spreadsheet breaks the mirror and the connection with our hero. Of course, seeing Beckham dressed as a cowboy, surfer and gladiator while drinking a Pepsi destroyed much of his athletic credibility.

Companies will continue to invest in athletes and their persuasive powers over the masses. Forbes magazine recently named the ten most influential American athletes, as named by respondents to a survey by E-Poll Market Research.  Woods tied with Lance Armstrong for the top spot, with 36% describing them as influential. Twenty-five percent said James was influential. As long as the products they pitch match their athletic profile, our neurons will open our wallets.

Please visit my other articles on Livescience.com

Better Golf Ball Design Helps You Play Better Golf

When it comes to improving your golf game, you can spend thousands of dollars buying the latest titanium-induced, Tiger-promoted golf clubs; taking private lessons from the local "I used to be on the Tour" pro; or trying every slice-correcting, swing-speed-estimating, GPS-distance-guessing gadget. But, in the end, it’s about getting that little white sphere to go where you intended it to go. Don't worry, there are many very smart people trying to help you by designing the ultimate golf ball. Of course, they are also after a slice of this billion dollar industry, as any technological advancement that can grab a few more market share points is worth the investment.

In fact, the golf ball wars can get nasty. Earlier this month, Callaway Golf won a court order permanently halting sales of the industry's leading ball, Titleist's Pro V1, arguing patent infringements involving its solid core technology which Callaway acquired when it bought Spaulding/Top Flite in 2003. Titleist disagrees with the decision and will appeal, but in the meantime has altered its manufacturing process so that the patents in question are not used.

The challenge for golf ball manufacturers is to design a better performing ball within the constraints set by United States Golf Association. The USGA enforces limits on the size, weight and initial performance characteristics in an attempt to keep the playing field somewhat level. Every "sanctioned" golf ball must weigh less than 1.62 ounces with a diameter smaller than 1.68 inches. It also must have a similar initial velocity when hit with a metal striker, and rebound at the same angle and speed when hit against a metal block. So, what is left to tinker with? Manufacturers have focused on the internal materials in the ball and its cover design.

Today's balls have 2, 3 or 4 layers of different internal polymer materials to be able to respond differently when hit with a driver versus, say, a wedge. When hit with a driver at much higher swing speed, the energy transfer goes all the way to the core by compressing ball, reducing backspin. During a slower swing with a club that has more angle loft, the energy stays closer to the surface of the ball and allows the grooves of the club to grab onto the ball's cover producing more spin. When driving the ball off of the tee, the preference is more distance and less loft, so a lower backspin is required. For closer shots, more backspin and control are needed.

The Science of Dimples

Which brings us to the cover of the ball and all of the design possibilities. Two forces affect the flight and distance of flying spheres, gravity and aerodynamics. Eventually, gravity wins once the momentum of the ball is slowed by the aerodynamic drag. Since all golf clubs have some angular loft to their clubface, the struck ball will have backspin. As explained by the Magnus Force effect, the air pressure will be lower on the top of the ball since that side is moving slower relative to the air around it. This creates lift as the ball will go in the direction of the lower air pressure. Counteracting this lift is the friction or drag the ball experiences while flying through the air.

Think about a boat moving through water. At the front of the boat, the water moves smoothly around the sides of the boat, but eventually separates from the boat on the back side. This leaves behind a turbulent wake where the water is agitated and creates a lower pressure area. The larger the wake, the more drag is created. A ball in flight has the same properties.

The secret then is how to reduce this wake behind the ball. Enter the infamous golf ball dimples. Dimples on a golf ball create a thin turbulent boundary layer of air molecules that sticks to the ball's contour longer than on a smooth ball. This allows the flowing air to follow the ball's surface farther around the back of the ball, which decreases the size of the wake. In fact, research has shown that a dimpled ball travels about twice as far as a smooth ball.

See video of simulated air flow around a golf ball

So, the design competition comes down to perfecting the dimple, since not all dimples are created equal! The number, size and shape can have a dramatic impact on performance. Typically, today's balls have 300-500 spherically shaped dimples, each with a depth of about .010 inch. However, varying just the depth by .001 inch can have dramatic effects on the ball's flight.

Regarding shape, these traditional round dimple patterns cover up to 86 percent of the surface of the golf ball. To create better coverage, Callaway Golf's HX ball uses hexagon shaped dimples that can create a denser lattice of dimples leaving fewer flat spots. Creating just the right design has traditionally been a trial-and-error process of creating a prototype then testing in a wind tunnel. This time-consuming process does not allow for the extreme fine-tuning of the variables.

Simulation Solution

At the 61st Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics this week in San Antonio, a team of researchers from Arizona State University and the University of Maryland is reporting new findings that may soon give golf ball manufacturers a more efficient method of testing their designs. Their research takes a different approach, using mathematical equations that model the physics of a golf ball in flight. ASU's Clinton Smith, a Ph.D. student and his advisor Kyle Squires collaborated with Nikolaos Beratlis and Elias Balaras at the University of Maryland and Masaya Tsunoda of Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd. The team has been developing highly efficient algorithms and software to solve these equations on parallel supercomputers, which can reduce the simulation time from years to hours.

Now that the model and process is in place, the next step is to begin the quest for the ultimate dimple. In the meantime, when someone asks you, "What's your handicap?" you can confidently tell them, "Well, my golf ball's design does not optimize its drag coefficient which results in a lower loft and spin rate from its poor aerodynamics."

Please visit my other articles on Livescience.com


Related Articles on Sports Are 80 Percent Mental:
Putt With Your Brain - Part 2 

Putt With Your Brain - Part 1 

Does Practice Make Perfect? 

Play Better Golf By Playing Bigger Holes

Putt With Your Brain - Part 1

If Mark Twain thinks golf is "a good walk spoiled", then putting must be a brief pause to make you reconsider ever walking again. With about 50% of our score being determined on the green, we are constantly in search of the "secret" to getting the little white ball to disappear into the cup. Lucky for us, there is no shortage of really smart people also looking for the answer. The first 8 months of 2008 have been no exception, with a golf cart full of research papers on just the topic of putting. 

Is the secret in the mechanics of the putt stroke or maybe the cognitive set-up to the putt or even the golfer's psyche when stepping up to the ball? This first post will focus on the mechanical side and then we'll follow-up next time with a look inside the golfer's mind.

Let's start with a tip that most golf instructors would give, "Keep your head still when you putt". Jack Nicklaus said it in 1974, "the premier technical cause of missed putts is head movement" (from "Golf My Way") and Tiger Woods said it in 2001, "Every good putter keeps the head absolutely still from start to finish" (from "How I Play Golf"). Who would argue with the two greatest golfers of all time? His name is Professor Timothy Lee, from McMaster University, and he wanted to test that observation. So, he gathered two groups of golfers, amateurs with handicaps of 12-40, and professionals with scratch handicaps. Using an infrared tracking system, his team tracked the motion of the putter head and the golfer's head during sixty putts.

As predicted, the amateurs' head moved back in unison with their putter head, something Lee calls an "allocentric" movement, which agrees with the advice that novice golfers move their head. However, the expert golfers did not keep their head still, but rather moved their heads slightly in the opposite direction of the putter head. On the backswing, the golfer's head moved slightly forward; on the forward stroke, the head moved slightly backward. This "egocentric" movement may be the more natural response to maintain a centered, balanced stance throughout the stroke.

"The exact reasons for the opposite coordination patterns are not entirely clear," explains Lee. "However, we suspect that the duffers tend to just sway their body with the motions of the putter. In contrast, the good golfers probably are trying to maintain a stable, central body position by counteracting the destabilization caused by the putter backswing with a forward motion of the head. The direction of head motion is then reversed when the putter moves forward to strike the ball." Does that mean that pro golfers like Tiger are not keeping their heads still? No, just that you may not have to keep your head perfectly still to putt effectively.

So, what if you do have the bad habit of moving your head? Just teach yourself to change your putting motion and you will be cutting strokes off of your score, right? Well, not so fast. Simon Jenkins of Leeds Metropolitan University tested 15 members of the PGA European Tour to see if they could break old physical habits during putting. His team found that players who usually use shoulder movement in their putting action were not able to change their ways even when instructed to use a different motion. Old habits die hard.

Let's say you do keep your head still (nice job!), but you still 3-putt most greens? What's the next step on the road to birdie putts? Of the three main components of a putt, (angle of the face of the putter head on contact, putting stroke path and the impact point on the putter), which has the greatest effect on success? Back in February, Jon Karlsen of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, asked 71 elite golfers (mean handicap of 1.8) to make a total of 1301 putts (why not just 1300?) from about 12 feet to find out. His results showed that face angle was the most important (80%), followed by putter path (17%) and impact point (3%).

OK, forget the moving head thing and work on your putter blade angle at contact and you will be taking honors at every tee. Wait, Jon Karlsen came back in July with an update. This time he compared green reading, putting technique and green surface inconsistencies to see which of those variables we should discuss with our golf pro. Forty-three expert golfers putted 50 times from varying distances. Results showed that green reading (60%) was the most dominant factor for success with technique (34%) and green inconsistency (6%) trailing significantly.

So, after reading all of this, all you really need is something like the BreakMaster, which will help you read the breaks and the slope to the hole! Then, keep the putter blade square to the ball and don't move your head, at least not in an allocentric way, that is if you can break your bad habit of doing it. No problem, right? Well, next time we'll talk about your brain's attitude towards putting and all the ways your putt could go wrong before you even hit it!



Timothy D. Lee, Tadao Ishikura, Stefan Kegel, Dave Gonzalez, Steven Passmore (2008). Head–Putter Coordination Patterns in Expert and Less Skilled Golfers Journal of Motor Behavior, 40 (4), 267-272 DOI: 10.3200/JMBR.40.4.267-272


Jenkins, Simon (2008). Can Elite Tournament Professional Golfers Prevent Habitual Actions in Their Putting Actions? International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 3 (1), 117-127


Jon Karlsen, Gerald Smith, Johnny Nilsson (2007). The stroke has only a minor influence on direction consistency in golf putting among elite players Journal of Sports Sciences, 26 (3), 243-250 DOI: 10.1080/02640410701530902