Swing Thoughts Kill Shots: The Line Between Building a Swing and Playing Golf

A practice range in Incheon, seven in the morning on a Tuesday. A man of about forty sets the club down, steps back half a pace, then walks back in. He repeats the motion three times before he actually hits the ball. After the first shot he turns to his partner: "My shoulders turn too early." Second shot: "I shifted my weight wrong." Third shot: "The face closes early." Three shots, three different diagnoses, and not one error repeated from the previous swing.

I stood there for nearly forty minutes. What caught my attention was not his technique — the shoulders and hips looked ordinary to the naked eye. It was the number of variables he was trying to process inside the roughly 1.2 seconds the body needs to bring the club from the top down to the ball: club path, shoulder angle, weight position, wrist at impact. Four variables, one swing, one brain supervising all four at once.

Jamie Mulligan describes exactly that phenomenon in an instruction piece published on GOLF.com headlined "Too many swing thoughts can kill your golf game. Here's how to avoid it." Mulligan is a PGA Professional, a member of the GOLF Top 100 Teacher list, and the coach working with Patrick Cantlay on the PGA Tour and Nelly Korda on the LPGA. His argument is compact: the more a golfer understands about their own swing, the more opportunities they have to interfere with it, and the interference is what breaks the shot.

I did not come out of the "just feel it and it'll work out" school. I came out of a football club's finance department, where everything has to convert into a number before anyone is allowed to believe it. But there is a genuine paradox here that deserves more serious treatment than the advice to "think less."

The supply of information and its hidden cost

Mulligan opens with an observation about supply. Slow-motion video of the best players on earth sits in your phone. Thousands of instruction videos, hundreds of explanations of the same movement, all free, all posted within seconds. He proposes that this abundance may be net harmful.

That is a hypothesis about the economics of information, not about golf technique. And it has an operational basis: when the cost of producing content approaches zero, the average quality of that content drifts toward the average of the producers, not the average of the best consumers. An amateur in Incheon who watches three videos about the same movement receives three different descriptions, with no warning label explaining that each was written for a different body type.

In Korea, where I live and work, this abundance has its own shape. Domestic golf instruction channels produce content at an industrial cadence, dozens of new videos each week, competing on how different their angle is rather than how correct it is. Viewers are not short of raw material. They are short of a standard for throwing things away.

Across three seasons working in club finance, I learned something that transfers directly: the real cost of a decision is not what you spent, it is what you gave up by spending it. A golfer who spends twenty minutes a night watching instruction videos loses no money. He loses twenty minutes he could have spent hitting thirty balls with a single target. Money never lies, but the balance sheet knows — and an amateur's balance sheet is measured in focused practice hours, not videos watched.

A correct principle with no evidence behind it

The article's central mechanism is a real motor-learning principle. Consciously controlling movement degrades performance; reacting to an external target preserves it. In the research literature this is the internal-versus-external focus of attention axis, and the result is reasonably stable among skilled performers: directing attention outside the body produces better outcomes than directing it inside.

The problem is that Mulligan reaches a defensible conclusion and backs it entirely with professional authority. There is not a single number anywhere in the piece: no Strokes Gained, no ShotLink data, no dispersion table, no tournament result. There is no measurement comparing shot-pattern width under target focus against shot-pattern width while running a checklist of swing thoughts.

For an instruction piece, that is not a genre violation. But it opens a gap the reader can fill incorrectly. A golfer carrying a genuine mechanical defect — a systematically open face, or a two-way miss — will read this and conclude that his problem is attentional. Committing harder to the target will not fix that defect. It will only produce a more repeatable version of the same flaw.

The article touches this boundary and walks away. It places technical work on the practice tee, but never states the boundary condition: below what level of competence does trusting what you have built become actively harmful.

The most important line: building a swing and playing a shot

The strongest technical content sits in the distinction between developing a swing and hitting a shot. That framing is correct in motor-learning terms: skill acquisition and skill expression are different tasks with different optimal attentional states.

Acquisition happens in blocks, with feedback, consciously, with repetition. Expression happens once, carries consequence, and must be implicit. Mulligan says the best players know when to switch modes. That is his most correct point and also his most easily skipped one.

I have watched Korean players practice at several different levels over the years. What separates the good group from the decent one is not that they carry fewer thoughts. It is that they keep a clear calendar: non-tournament weeks for technique, tournament weeks for targets. The swing is built on the range, but it is exposed on the first tee — and those two places demand two different states of mind.

Mulligan's formula — see it, feel it, trust it — is in practice a delivery protocol. Pick the target, pick the shot, pick the intention, then let motor memory take over. The piece also describes visualizing the start line, trajectory, curve and landing area before every shot. He calls that state being "in it," and calls the rest of it — the noise of technique — "the party," a party the player has to learn to step out of.

A protocol like that governs the delivery of a motion that already exists. It does not create the motion. For a player with a stable base, it is the right tool. For a player without one, it is a way to lock a flaw in place more securely.

An unfalsifiable diagnosis

The most important sentence in the article is the one hedged with "not necessarily." Mulligan says the problem is not necessarily the golfer's mechanics.

That phrasing makes the thesis untestable. If the problem is not necessarily mechanical, it may also be mechanical. A testable version would need dispersion data: how wide is the shot pattern under target focus, how wide is it while running swing thoughts. No such measurement appears.

The test is not difficult to run. One launch monitor on a range, thirty balls with a single technical thought, thirty balls with a single target, measuring standard deviation laterally and longitudinally. If the pattern narrows when the technical thought is removed, the thesis holds. If it does not change, or widens, the problem lies elsewhere. Any coach with measuring equipment can run this inside forty minutes. The article does not offer it.

I understand why the author chose the safe phrasing. A coach cannot diagnose through a newspaper column. But in the industry I work in, a statement that cannot be wrong is not a statement — it is an insurance policy.

There is a notable internal contradiction. The same author describes his own professional toolset: 3D motion analysis, force and pressure measurement, high-speed video, launch monitors. Those tools generate precisely the kind of information the article warns is harmful. The two are reconcilable — coach-facing diagnostics are not the same as player-facing in-round cognition. But the piece never draws that line, leaving a skeptical reader to find it alone.

The contrarian read: time, bias and a second market

Mulligan uses Patrick Cantlay and Nelly Korda as credibility anchors, placed immediately before the explanation of method. That is the classic authority-transfer move: association with elite players standing in for evidence. The article says nothing about either player's form, record, ranking or technique. The causal arrow is never established.

With Cantlay there is a notable tension the article stays silent on. The "in it" state — full commitment, target chosen, shot chosen, intention chosen, then let the body work — is an internal state of commitment, not a fast one. Cantlay has been publicly criticized repeatedly over his pre-shot pace. The framework in this article contains no time discipline whatsoever. There is no timing data, so I am not claiming the framework causes slow play; I am only noting that it carries no mechanism to protect against that possibility.

With Korda the issue is selection bias. A coach gets credited for a player's winning run precisely while the player is winning; the same method is rarely invoked to explain a slump. Using a hot streak to validate a mental framework is textbook outcome bias.

Then there is the genre paradox. The anti-overthinking genre has itself become a growth market. This article is one of the thousands of instruction videos it warns about. It cannot solve at scale the problem it diagnoses.

Finally, the material conditions of the advice. "Trust what you built in practice" is a very different proposition for a player hitting forty balls a week than for one with daily range access. The piece assumes a coach, a facility, and repetition volume. Not every reader has all three.

And one system detail: "GOLF Top 100 Teacher" is an editorial ranking voted on by GOLF.com's editors, not a governing-body certification. GOLF.com is the outlet that published this article. That is a structural conflict of interest, not grounds for dismissal — but the reader should know whose product they are reading.

The blind spot on pace and rules

The article breaks no rule. Launch monitors, 3D analysis and force plates are practice and coaching tools, not equipment used in a stipulated round; the piece never proposes using them on the course.

The nearest rules-adjacent risk is pace of play. Visualizing start line, trajectory, curve and landing area before every shot is a time-consuming procedure when performed deliberately. The article states no target duration for the pre-shot routine. That is the single most useful missing number, and it is the number every pace-of-play argument on tour circles around.

There is an optimistic scenario: commitment replaces doubt, not speed. Removing the mid-swing re-check loop usually shortens an amateur's pre-shot time — that loop is the most common actual cause of slow play.

What is worth carrying out of this article

Golf instruction has sold players more information than they can convert. Mulligan's piece is a correction, and mostly a correct one. But it is also selling something additional: a private vocabulary, a branded method.

What an amateur actually needs is neither less information nor more. It is a filter: knowing the threshold at which you stop collecting and start converting. Three months to build a swing, three years to understand where it broke. The good player is not the one who thinks less. It is the one who knows exactly where he thinks, when, and where he leaves it before stepping onto the tee.