“You must be 100 percent committed to each action. If there are doubts in your mind, your muscles won’t know what to do. Let your routines switch you from the thinking mode to the trusting mode.”
— Gary Mack, Mind Gym
Gary Mack was a sports psychology consultant who worked with professional athletes across baseball, football and golf. Mind Gym, written with David Casstevens and published in 2001, collects that work into short chapters. This is from the one on routines.
The third sentence is the one doing the work. It says a routine is not a superstition and not a warm-up. It is a switch, and it has one job: end the deliberating.
Everything that needs thinking about belongs before the routine starts — the line, the disc, the wind, what a miss long costs against a miss short. Once the routine begins, that decision is closed. What is left is a body doing something it has already done a thousand times.
The tell that you crossed back over from routine to thinking mode is a aa simple reach-back that slows down: some part of you still arguing for the other line while the rest of you is already throwing, or my personal favorite…good old plain doubt. Mack’s point is that the muscles hear the argument too, and they settle it by doing everything at ninety percent (or worse).
Which is the demand hiding inside the quote. The routine has to be short enough that you will actually run it on every throw, identical every time, and the same on a practice field as on the last hole of a round. A routine you only use when it matters is not a switch — it is one more thing to think about.
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