Utilize The Wait Time During Your Round For Increased Success with Dr. Izzy Justice

looking at it. That means that your brain needs space that when it looks back down at the ball after your last look at the hole or whatever your target is, it needs low frequency, it needs space, It needs less traffic to be able to remember where the ball is going to go because you're not looking at it. Wait times in golf is one of the largest untapped opportunity. Why are you looking at somebody else? It's of no

value to you. But if you want a higher outcome, if you want a better motor output out of yourself, you've got to use your weight times as a countdown to your preshiat routine.

We're trying to understand how we travel, our diets, you know, our sleep patterns, all these things, technology a lot of that allow us to work and function, communicate. I mean, all these things we've made significant advances on, but we're still fred believe it or not. I don't care what people believe in in terms of when life started. But we're still literally learn to understand what's happening in the brain.

And just to close the thought there, you know, it's been very hard to study the brain, honestly because number one, there's electricity in the brain. So what like, what are you looking at when you look at the brain. It's not like the heart or the liver. W you know, you can see things coming in and see things going out, and how do you measure electricity and what you know, how do you interpret what it is that you're actually

looking at. And then lastly, you know, I have unintentionally sort of drawn this, you know, gap between clinical view of the brain versus functional view and think of clinical as you know, probably ninety five percent of all the work that's done on the human brain and the human experience is on the clinical side. I have all Zheimer's, have dementia, I have epilepsy. Something's wrong, and therefore there's a reason for me to go look and find what's wrong and then find a cure for it. That's not

what I do or what I've been doing. I've been on the functional side, which is we're just trying to make a putt. I'm just trying to make a free throw. I'm just trying to respond to an email. Like what goes on in the human brain when we're just trying to be functional, when we're just trying to remember our best inventory of skills and past experiences and what we

want to do. And so it's been an amazing discovery journey and I've just learned so much myself, and you know, I put it all together in this new book and or at least as far as as as I've learned thus far.

And so that was the context of this technology where somebody could stand six twelve feet away look at a human brain while something is going on. And this ability to do it wirelessly is the game changer because we've been able to look at the brain, but typically it's using an MRI machine or and you have to stand very still, you have to be horizontal, you can't even move, so there's no functional work that you can really measure

or track if you're you know, using traditional methods. So when I could expose to that technology, I quickly pivoted and said, all right, you know what is going on in the human brain for example, you know when someone makes a free throw or makes a pot is there a certain pattern What's going on in the brain when someone misses a free throw or a potter? And I'm

just using two examples, is there a pattern there? And lo and behold, I discovered along with you know, other studies that were done long before I came along, that there, in fact, is a state in the human brain that you know from an electric perspective, because electricity is the language of the human brain. Electricity is the language of motor function and fred if you think about it, it has to be electricity. It cannot be anything else. It can't be light, it can't be gravity, because just think

about it. What else is so fast that it can allow us to protect ourselves. If I am walking and I see a lion, do I not need that visual input of the line to go to my brain and within a half a second turn around and start running as fast as I can. So there has to be you know, a top of a gas a modality that can work very quickly. And in the human experience, electricity other than light, is like the fast the second fastest mode. So electricity really is the language of the brain. It

really is the language of mode of function. And so studying it and saying, okay, how do you get the brain to a state when it can use that electricity at an optimal perspective? And by optimal. I mean two things, Fred. One is you can access your inventory. So if you tell me Fred, for example, oh, I've been putting for playing golf for twenty years. Great, and I will ask you, okay, all those shots you've hit, all the putts that you made in a tournament or non tournament, where's that inventory.

It's not on a Google drive, but it's on some hard drive in your brain along with you know, dozens and thousands and millions of other data points about your life. So you need access to it when you're about to make up put you know, the factory setting of the brain is your brain to retrieve your last worst one because it wants to predict, It wants to protect you

from making the same mistake. Now, if that's a factory setting of your brain to remind you of your worst pot when you're trying to make a pot, right, should you not have the ability to say, oh, let me change that factory setting and let me access that inventory. So when the frequency, when the electricity generally speaking in the brain is low, it's vibrating at a low frequency,

how access goes up because it just isn't enough. There isn't a lot of traffic And the second magical thing, and both in sports as well as life, that happens when electricity is low in your brain is that it amplifies sensory input. As human beings, we don't have five hundred and fifty. We have five senses, right, that's not a lot. But you know, there is an airport in our brain where it's called the sensory cortex where all of that sensory input goes, and it's always there, even

when we're sleeping. It's there. But a lot of times that input is not processed by the brain because there's just so much other noise. So, for example, Fred, if you had a really really crazy day at work, you know, just a lot of stuff going on. You get in your car and you're driving home at the end of your day at five o'clock or whatever time it is, and you put some music on. The odds are by the time that you get home whatever it is, thirty minutes later that you're able to recall the music that

was playing is almost a zero. But it was playing. The auditory input was there, but there was so much other noise in your brain. So by bringing that frequency down, you know, it allows us to for example, feel the grip pressure, feel the weight of the putter head, see the target, see how you want the bar to roll or where the ball you want the ball to start,

and where you want to finish it. So those two magical things access to your inventory and just an applification of sensory It would happen when that frequency is low around ten to fifteen herts in your brain. So that's why I call it chasing ten hurts because that magic number, chasing ten herts is in life. That's what we're doing. We're always doing something to allow us to get to a point where we can enjoy a moment or be

the best version of ourself in each moment. And ironically it's not a secret, Like how many people have told you, oh, I was the best version of myself when I was angry and agitated, Yet everybody says, oh, when it's calm and relaxed and focused and slow. Well, those are all, you know, lay labels that we're using to describe that stage. So we're beginning to de mystify how this brain works. And for a golfer, you don't have to be in that magical ten hurts for five hours. It's just fifteen minutes.

I mean that's the amount of time in totality that you're hitting a golf shot. So it's a reasonable ask to say, hey, can you be in that state for fifteen minutes, non contiguously over five hours, that's doable.

motor function. I mean our ability as living creatures to move is central to our survival. That movement has to happen at an accelerated pace. I must be able to see something and say, oh, there's a big gully here, I'm about to step into it, let me stop walking. Or there's a snake walking by, let me jump over it. You know. So, for example, let's say that right now, as you're speaking, something over your right shoulder is itching you,

and suddenly you feel like it's biting you. Well, very quickly, yeah, well very prickly. You'll take your left hand, you'll go to that spot. You'll you'll itch it, you'll scratch it, you'll you'll shoot it away. But just think about that moment. How did your hand know where to go? How did you find that exact spot to scratch? How did it know when to stop scratching?

with someone. So it's you know, is that part of the electricity that distracts me away from it as well?

or all those kinds of things. And so part of our distraction is that when we you know, when all this information is going to the brain, we lose focus of what's happening now. I don't know if that's the bigger distraction. I think the bigger distraction is the world that we found ourselves in, where our devices now are giving us so much stimuli. Our brains are not designed. We talked about this three years ago, but our brains are not designed to consume this much volume of stimulation.

So if I see even a ten second video, for example, I mean my brain has to interpret that, and it's interpreting that using lots of parts of our brain and so you know, our hippocampus, for example, is our memory. It gives context to what's going on. It alerts us that's nice, that's not nice, I'm angry, that's that's that makes me feel good. It you know, produces all of these you know, neurotransmitters and homones and and chemicals that

are going on in the brain. So it's becoming I've said this, it's we're living a time reread now where I don't think it's ever been easier to be physically healthy. Like we can track so many buyer markers, our nutrition. There's so much high quality information of what we need to do to be physically healthy. Yet I don't believe in the history of our existence that it's ever been harder to be mentally healthy, just because there's so much garbage.

There's so much stimulation in our brains that it's, you know, all of our good you know, values like empathy and compassion and kindness and listening skills, they're all getting compromised, not because we've suddenly become bad people or but because our brain is competing. It's competing between being present and noticing a frown on someone's face and say, oh, you okay, versus replaying the ten things that you have to do as soon as you get done with the conversation or

before or after or tomorrow or yesterday. So in non reactionary sports like golf, oh my goodness, it's even a bigger challenge, rightow.

matter of fact, even today, are clinically based. I'm looking at serotonin levels to reduce stress or you know, to you know, almost every malaise about the brain is a target for a drug, right, And so a lot of these doctoral programs are funded by pharmaceutical companies and research and grants. They're designed to come up with some cure. And that's good, that's not a bad thing. I'm not judging that. But again, where is the money to be made by teaching someone how to get to ten herts

without using anything? Like if I just taught you a neurohak, you know, like what we did last time. You know, for example, we can do one right now. So let's just do one right now. I want you to count. Don't start until I say go right. I want you to count from one to ten as fast as you can, and then do a pop and then go from ten to nine as slow as you can.

ten fast and ten slow, that wasn't random. We did thousands and thousands of these scans to see, okay, which ones allow most people to get to that ten hertz and you'll be in that calm state, not permanently for the rest of the day, but at least for the next few minutes. And again in that calm state, two magical things are going to happen. Number One, your ability to access your own inventory brain functionality. Remember an article that you read, a video that you saw, a conversation

that you had. Make your conversation richer, make you human experience richer by you know, inventoring what's in your brain. And the second thing, like I said, is just amplification of your senses. After you did that slow, countdown, and you ate something, I guarantee you taste more of it

because that traffic is gone. So this model, I think is a model that I am advocating, is that all the traditional wellness techniques like yoga and meditation and mindfulness and working out and cooking and going for a walk and listening to music. These are wonderful things to do and people should do them and I do them every day, but they're not things that you can do on the go. So you know, it's it's our mental wellness is based on how can we fix things as they're happening. So

I call it when the brain spikes. So, for example, if I started yelling at you right now, if I said, oh my god, Fred, you're one of the worst people I've ever met. This is horrible blah blah blah, And obviously I'm joking here, But if I meant that and you were like, oh my god, this is going awful in that moment, in that unpredicted moment of stress, you could do that count up and countdown and your response to my unfair characterization of what's happening would be better.

You would have a response before, but you would say, ah, let me say this, let me say that, let me do it in this way. So this sort of fix it as you go model is what we as human beings need, but in golf it's also something that we can do. I don't have to be perfect three minutes before I make a putt, but if I'm ten seconds before making a putt and I can feel my brain saying, don't leave it short, don't need it too hard. Oh I just missed the last one I got to make this.

That's a clue that Oh my gosh, now my frequency is higher. So in that moment, what options do you have? What options does the golf I have? Ye? I mean you could say, start your routine again, but how many

times are you going to do that? Right? So these neural hacks, these techniques of getting that frequency down, not permanently, but long enough to execute the next thirty sixty ninety three four minutes to the best of your ability, is really the key, both on the golf course for athletic performance, but also in life.

watch the other player putt. And I will tell you that that is garbage input for your brain. Of what value is that information to you? You know, you're watching someone go through their routine. You're you're judging them, you're analyzing them. You know. Now, unless that put is identical to your line, you know, we're just, without even thinking

about it, looking at somebody else that time. If you repurposed it and did not look at the at your fellow competitor, and use these nerraks so that by the time that you started your routine, that electricity was as low as possible, right, give you a chance. So I talked about this in my Burke where in my opinion. The reason golf in general, but putting in particular is the hardest, the hardest target sport in the world is because your eyes are not on it. Like in what

other sport are you trying to be so accurate? Like it's a four and a half inch target, but you're not looking at it. That means that your brain needs space that when it looks back down at the ball after your last look at the hole or whatever your target is, it needs low frequency, it needs space, It needs less traffic to be able to remember where the ball is going to go because you're not looking at it. So wait times in golf is one of the largest

untapped opportunities. You know, is why you're looking at somebody else swing a club. It's of no value to you now if you're playing casually and you're making fun of somebody else with your buddies and drinking, you know by all means. But if you want a higher outcome, if you want a better motor output out of yourself, you've got to use your way times as a countdown to your preshot routine and get that electricity down. Get it down by using techniques like the one that I just showed you.

It's like, I, you know, I can't tell anyone that this is going on, but I really think my child is reading my mind and then they're hearing other people going through the same thing. And I'm just curious where the electricity might be. If you know anything, I'm way off on this one.

context whether it's something is a threat or not. So our sensory cortex in the human brain is literally right next to the hippocampus, which is our hard drive. In other words, the input that we're getting, you know, the nonverbal input, is right next to the place where the inventory is there for us to make sense of it.

So if you want to understand something and you say, oh, let me go google this, So you got to Google and you type it in, well, Google's got to go and search all the web to do give you a good answer as to what it is. This means our brain does something very similar only Obviously we don't go to the Internet, and we don't go to Google, but we're going to our hard drive, right, So I think they're phenomenon out there that we don't understand, so we give it a label that we use. But electricity needs

a electricity. I mean, my first undergraduate degree is in physics. I understand how electricity enforced works, but it needs a medium to travel. Electricity cannot travel sort of wirelessly. You know, it's got to be some type of a medium. And so what we interpret as oh, I can I know what they're thinking. But the reason that thought comes into our head is because you know, we've taken all of these nonverbal cues. We've made sense of it because of

patterns and those kinds of things. My mother, for example, in my own house. She passed away few years ago, but my mother was ninety percent deaf. She was completely deaf in one ear and she was almost almost almost completely deaf on the other ear, and so she couldn't hear us. And back then, hearing aids we're not that good either. So and she wasn't born deaf, she became

deaf as an adult. But her ability to look at us and you know, without hearing, communicating completely understand how we felt, how we thought we were, you know, was stunning, Like it was amazing how she would she was so accurate. But that's because as a mom, that inventory that she had for each one of her seven kids was so high. I mean, she basically has been looking at us since

our first breath. Right, So that's what I mean is that, you know, someone could call that, oh, well, she has telepathy. I would say, I don't know. I don't think it's that. I think it's more that these kinds of people, all their sensory input is so high. They're observing every inch of a non verbal input into their brain and they can ascribe a good inventory to it and make sense of it. And so it feels like, oh my gosh, I know what they're saying, I know how they're feeling.

It's a long time to be out there, and you have highs and lows in golf, and you know, you have time in between, and just like life's events and experiences. But it's the ultimate battle between you and you, right, I mean, no one's playing defense against you, which is also life, you know, like it's really a battle of what's happening in my life and how can I navigate this challenge or this situation to the best of my ability.

And because golf is a stationary sport, right, I mean I'm standing over a putt, over a drive, over a wedge, you know, it's a lot easier to study it. I've studied basketball players, lacrosse players, soccer players. There's a lot of movement going on over there. So they're more difficult to study. You know, I have a son that plays junior golf and as a dad, he's in college now.

But as a dad, as you know, I don't know if you're a dad, Fred, but you know, we are the worst coach that kids are not going to listen to us, you know. So I had to figure out a lot of backdoor ways to understand my son, to figure out ways to help him. And you know, I am fascinated that in golf. You know, nobody seems to be talking about the fact that what really makes golf hard at the end of the day, in my opinion, is that it is a target sport where your eyes

are not on the target. That means the role of the brain is off the charts. Your brain has to have space to recall the target. It has to take very good targets that cannot be lost. There's a big difference when you say, oh, it's a left cup pot versus Oh, it's going to go over that little white blade of grass right over there. Those are two targets, but in the brain they could not be more different.

I've measured them both. One is going to play much longer in your brain, you know, the one way you describe the blade of grass and it's going to go over where the other is much more of a technical It's a six thirty pot or a left cup pot. They're both targets, but one is significantly better than the other. And my definition of better is your brain can remember it while not looking at it.

the better I get. And you know, especially since two thousands since COVID fred, honestly, the number of calls and text messages that I've gotten in coaches and athletes from every sport that are telling me explicitly, you know, hey, doc, like you know, it used to be when we had a good practice, we had a good game, not all the time, but most of the time, there doesn't seem to be any correlation at this point between the amount of time that you're practicing versus the outcome. Even at

the tour level. You know, people will be at home one week and say, oh, I had played really good, I had good practices in They go next week to the tournament and they're missing the cut. And so what's really happening is what I talked about earlier, which is that you know, there's a there's something called coating. Encoding, in my opinion, is or should be the most important part about practice. So just give me a minute here, let me walk you through this logic. Sure, let's say

that you hit one hundred balls right now. I will tell you where is that inventory all those balls that you just hit, the puts that you made, or the chips that you made. And I'll tell you that all of that inventory, the value of hitting one hundred balls is going to one place, and only one place in the entire universe, and that's your brain. It's not going to your muscles, because muscles have no memory. It's going

to your brain. So if I had a great practice, right and let's say from ten o'clock in the morning until twelve noon, I have two wonderful hours of practice. If I don't go through a process after that practice called encoding to make sure that that inventory is number one stored in my brain in such a manner that I can retrieve it. In my opinion, the purpose of practice should be I'm creating an inventory that I can access in competition. What else would you practice?

break up, all of that inventory is gone. Right. So, and unfortunately we live now at a point where the only time that the brain is processing the inventory of the day is when it's sleeping. So I tell people, when you get done with practice, your practice is not over. You should not consider your practice over until you have recorded what it is that you've done, use a selfie video, write it down, and then bring it back up in

the last thirty minutes before you go to bed. Take that inventory and move it back up on the very top of the list that you want your brain to store at night. Let me go back to the definition of practice. The purpose of practice should be that when I'm in competition, I can recall what I did. If you have a great practice, no matter how many balls you hit, and you go to competition and you don't remember what you did yesterday or last week, what was the value of that practice?

but they're still underperforming. I don't know if, like I said, in the last five years, the variance between someone's good and someone's bad is getting bigger, it's not getting smaller. On any given day, a golfer can shoot a seventy two and you know an eighty two. You know, and that's because you know when they go play, you know, depending on what's happened to them. Because our brains are very fluid, we're human beings. We are processing so many

things about life. If I didn't sleep very well, if I didn't eat very well, if I have a little bit of a scratch, I'm not pinky finger on my back, my brain is going to be distracted in those moments. I'm going to need access to all the things that I've done in my practice. So I don't think that they're these coaches that say practice practice, practice and muscle memory.

I don't think their intentions are bad. In fact, I think the intentions are very good, sure, but they're missing the point that you know, the memory is not created in the muscles. And think of a quadriplegic, right, a quad polegic. Their brain works fine and their body works fine, but there's a spinal injury, so there's no transfer of that electricity, so they can't move anything. Otherwise, the muscles

would just move themselves. They wouldn't need the brain to say, oh, grab that cup of coffee or move or walk right right. So muscles are at the mercy of the brain. The brain is the quarterback of life. And so you know, I think that so much practice could be so much more efficient if coaches and athletes learned how to encode and build these angrams and grams are these wonderful memories that you can easily access.

easier to forget, especially if they're far away. Right. So what I tell teach people is that a target that stands out is the best target because your brain will remember it more. If it's a color contrast or a shape contrast, or something about it is odd. Those are the best targets. Now, there's no rhyme to it. Odd target, small mess, like it doesn't rhyme as well as a small mess. Sure, I find people looking looking and finding something small on a tree leaf and then they look

back down at the ball. You can't remember that.

from the sun's reflection. So I try to teach people like enjoy the process of looking from a tea box to the fairway or the fairway to the green or on the green, of searching, lose your eyes and say, okay, what can I find over here? Because your ability to find good, holdable targets is really the key. And I don't know whether I care whether it's a big or small, or you know, a general area. Just find something that is contrasting enough that your brain can remember. I will

say this again. I'll say this again. Forgive me, Fred, Please forgive me.

the basket is right there, I see it. You know, if I have a soccer ball in front of me, I see the ball. I can quickly in my peripheral vision see generally where the ball is going to go. Not so in golf. This is why the role of the brain is so important in golf is because we've got to create the state where there's space in the brain to recall that grit neuron, that target, which then is the glue to your motor sequencing.

all of these people. The other two golf books are Golf EQ and and Jerra Gough this book is relatively short, and that was intentional. I didn't want to put a lot of you know, uh stuff out there. I want to kind of get to the point very quickly, and really my goal was to give people a language to understand the electricity in the brain and the role that it plays in motor function and life.