Podcast Transcript
Josh Nichols
Chia Chou, can a sound fix my golf swing?
Chia Chou
Well, it would depend what the problem is. The technique that we’ve developed has to do with motion. I can give you a sound to influence the motion. I can’t give you a sound for static things, like I can’t give you a sound to get the right stance or the right grip. But anything that has to do with motion, we can fix using Audio Golf.
Josh Nichols
What is it about sound that can fix a motion?
Chia Chou
Well, we have to go back a step and just recognize the influence that sound has on us as humans. The basic example is music. You’re hearing a pop song you would like and your foot starts tapping automatically. You’re not thinking about it. You’re not saying, is this the right beat? Am I synchronized? You just do it.
It’s this part of human nature and human psychology that we’re using to influence golf movements. I can use this in tennis, in rowing, in running, in all kinds of things, but there’s this extremely tight connection in our bodies and human minds. I think the technical expression for it is auditory motor entrainment — this tight connection between motion and sound.
Josh Nichols
What purpose, if we just maybe put on our evolutionary biology sort of hat, what purpose do you have a sense of why that is? Why we’re so auditorily inclined?
Chia Chou
Well, I don’t know. I think the earliest men, when they heard a saber-toothed tiger roaring like two meters behind you, you knew automatically, I gotta start running. I mean, I’m just making this up, but I think very often, especially when it’s dark, it’s better to hear the tiger before seeing it, because once you’ve seen it, there might be tricky. But I’m sure there are anthropologists who can explain that much better than I can.
Josh Nichols
Yes, I’m putting a music professor on the spot for evolutionary biology. Fair. Unfair. Okay. You do know the ins and outs of sound and its effect on people. What is it in your own life that made you realize this?
Chia Chou
Well, speaking as a professional musician — and I’m a classical pianist — there’s one thing I teach all my university students and it’s something that’s ingrained into our craft. If you want to make a specific sound on a piano or on a violin or anything else, you have to make a specific motion.
If I want to play a soft chord, I have to come down with a very relaxed wrist and just barely graze the keys. If I have a stiff wrist and I’m coming down vertically, no way. There’s a direct connection in instrumental music between producing a specific sound with a specific motion.
At some point I started thinking, if I’m saying to all my kids, sound is motion and motion is sound — in mathematics, when A equals B, B equals A — would it be possible to get a person to make a specific motion if they heard a specific sound? And the answer is yes. It’s just reverse engineered, so to speak.
Josh Nichols
I’ve heard you talk about your own kind of journey through music and how you were incredible, but there were still people that far exceeded your abilities despite your incredible work ethic. And your term was kind of, I need a shortcut to help me surpass all of my peers — they’re also practicing as much as me and they’re already better than me, so how can I surpass them? So I guess I’m curious about practice, and maybe this is tangential altogether to audio golf, but what is it about the way that most of us practice that is insufficient?
Chia Chou
Yes, well, you’ve actually hit the key of this question. It’s the thing that I say also about my own students, even the talented ones. I say regularly, my students waste 99% of their practice time. It’s mindless. You have to make a jump in a piece of Fantasie, you have to hit this chord, and they miss it. They try it again, they do it 200 times, and they might hit it, they may not — but it’s mindless. They’re just doing repetitions, just doing reps without any brain.
I often have this feeling that they’re doing this and hoping for the Virgin Mary to come down and show them how to do it. They’re not thinking about it. And this is how I got into this. When I joined this major music academy in Germany at 17, I realized within two months that everybody there was better than me and better trained than me and more talented. Even practicing seven, eight hours a day was not going to get me past these kids because they’re better than me and they’re practicing seven, eight hours a day too.
So it’s not so much a shortcut — or you call it that — but it was basically: how can I solve a problem which normally a teacher would say you need about seven weeks to fix, and fix it in 10 minutes? I must confess, maybe it was wishful thinking. I was desperate. I knew that if I couldn’t find this secret of effective practicing, I’m not going to make it. And it’s the same thing we do in Audio Golf. I’ve got clients that have been practicing something for weeks, months, and we can fix it quickly because we see the problem. But it’s very difficult to get their clients to execute it immediately. It’s all up here.
Josh Nichols
Okay, yeah, it’s all up here. So you said the secret of effective practicing. What did you do to distill seven weeks of practice into 10 minutes?
Chia Chou
Well, for example, I have a cello student — very talented guy — and he has to make this big jump and he misses it. He’ll do it seven, eight times and he’ll overshoot it every time, always going too far by maybe an eighth of an inch. So instead of doing this thousands of times, I say look — when you go for the jump, instead of ripping at it, go back a bit, go back a quarter of an inch, and then make the jump. And then all of a sudden, bang.
There are a thousand different examples. But basically, wasn’t it Albert Einstein who said a person who’s insane is somebody who does the same thing every time and expects different results? You have to change something. The question is how to find it.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, yeah. And you think audio is that — because what you’re describing about your student is more of a movement pattern and less so about audio. Am I wrong there?
Chia Chou
Well, yes, absolutely right about that, because people ask me how do I use Audio Golf in music? I can’t, because you can’t use a sound to produce a sound. I would have to reverse engineer it — if I wanted somebody to relax, to make a relaxed sound, what movement would I make on a piano or a cello? There are similarities, but you’d have to know a lot about instrumental playing in classical music for me to explain in detail how I can transfer this to a 50 yard pitch shot, for example.
Josh Nichols
Okay, I am skeptical — I’m always skeptical — because I have a lot of different people on this podcast that kind of say, I’ve discovered it, my way is the way, my way is the secret. And a lot of it involves claims of speed: my way will help you extremely fast compared to whatever. So I’m always skeptical of a shortcut claim. Respond to my skepticism here — this seems too good to be true.
Chia Chou
Well, yes, we get that a lot, and I can understand that. But again, going back to my personal story — when I went to Germany at 17, I realized I have to find a different way. I can’t practice the way I’ve been doing all my life. Four years later I won one of the major piano competitions in the world, which is equivalent in your world to like the British Open. Imagine I come to you as an instructor, I’m 17, I have a 10 handicap, and I say coach, I want to win the British Open in four years. It’s just not possible. But I did it.
It’s not about my success here — it’s about the fact that there are things we can achieve using Audio Golf that are, yeah, hard to believe. You have to try it, that’s the only way I can say. Using the so-called auditory motor entrainment, this connection in the brain between sound and motion, we can get things done basically without thinking. This is the crazy part. When you’re tapping your foot to the song, you’re not thinking. And people who dance aren’t really thinking about how they’re moving — they’re expressing themselves, it goes with the music. It’s this idea that using sound, you can take out the conscious thinking part. But like I said, people just have to try it. You’ll see the results in like 10 minutes. We offer it for free on the website too.
Josh Nichols
Wow. Okay. Yeah. And I was trying some freebies, so that’s cool.
Why does our swing and putting tempo change day to day or shot to shot? When a golfer goes from inside to outside, tempo changes. When they go from the range to the course, tempo changes. When there’s pressure, tempo changes. Does the same thing happen with the best musicians? They show up, they’re incredible, but their tempo is just different — they think they’re on the same tempo but they’re not. Does the same thing happen?
Chia Chou
Yes, of course. I mean, that’s a standard thing. I’ve got students, really good students, and they’re playing a concert and they start like 20% faster than usual. And I’m in the audience going, oh my God, stop, what are you doing? And I go to them afterwards and they didn’t even hear how fast they were. So it’s a standard thing.
The theory in music, which I think we can apply to golf and all sports, is that your feeling for tempo is directly related to your heartbeat. If your heartbeat is 75, a regular walk is boom, boom, boom. But if you’re under stress, your heartbeat is at 135, 140 — that same boom, boom, boom becomes a relaxed walk. I’ve seen it too many times and unfortunately experienced it myself as a young performer. Stress will do that to you, and that’s why things always tend to get faster.
Josh Nichols
So what do you do to offset — speaking piano-wise — when you’ve been practicing at this tempo in a very calm situation and now you’re going to perform?
Chia Chou
Well, again, that’s a long conversation going into mental golf. It doesn’t have so much to do with slowing down your heartbeat — you go in front of 3,000 people in a huge concert hall in New York, it’s going to happen. But then in those situations, I would start to think about external focus, which is I’m not thinking about my fingers, I’m thinking about the sound. I’m thinking about the beautiful music I’m trying to make.
As a musician, playing piano is the most complex manual task that humans know of. The complexity of classical music where you’re playing like 400 notes in 20 seconds — there’s just no way of thinking about it note by note. So for me it’s about external focus. And another thing, another theory I’ve been following for 25 years, has to do with intent. There’s a neurologist in Germany I’ve been following for 20 years who shows in MRI that once you want something really badly with intent, half of your neuro zones that you need to achieve the task go dark. So basically it’s about being relaxed and just doing it.
Josh Nichols
Right, it’s more of a letting go. There’s common mental game advice that would be: be present, be intentional, do your process, focus. Do you see those as steering a player in the wrong direction?
Chia Chou
I can only speak about myself as a musician. I’m going to use an analogy — I’ve got a student, but I’m going to transfer this into weightlifting. He can bench press 200 pounds regularly, no problems. Nobody’s expecting him at this competition to press 250 pounds. But I’ve got a lot of students — and I’m sure you know this in golf as an analogy — they go to a competition and they’re getting maximum 170. Stress, intent, whatever — their brain just blocks them. They block themselves instead of being free. “I can do 200, I did this morning, just do it.” But it’s this idea of competition and intent blocking them. Some of my best kids are like that. It’s horrible to watch.
Josh Nichols
The idea of kind of getting in your own way. Is that related to quantity of practice — kind of the 10,000 hour rule? The idea of kind of you’ve put in enough time, maybe attach onto that quality of time. Is there kind of an automaticity element to it, that okay, I can’t get out of my own way until I have done this amount of practice?
Chia Chou
Well, like I said, Josh, if I spend 10,000 hours making chocolate cake using cabbage and garlic, I can do 10,000 hours and it’s not making me an expert. I’m sorry. My students spend 99% of their time wasting their time practicing. They’re not practicing effectively. They’re just going through the motions and chalking up the hours.
Of course, there are incredibly talented people out there who were born with this kind of amazing talent — no one knows where it comes from — and if they practice a bit, they seem to improve. There are other people who have to do the hours. I don’t think there’s a standard recipe. When I was younger there was that classical tennis rivalry between John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl. McEnroe was this genius who apparently didn’t train a lot, but Lendl was on the court every day practicing seven, eight hours a day, and he was number one for longer. Who knows? But of course McEnroe is a world class player, no doubt.
Josh Nichols
Right, but despite the kind of lack of practice from one person to the other, natural born talent is part of the factor. But we’ve gotten pretty far away from what you do — not that you’re not an expert there — but speaking of audio specifically. How often are you approached with someone who struggles with something like the yips? Is that something that you directly address?
Chia Chou
Yes. We’ve addressed yips cases. I would say we’ve been able to fix yips in the majority of cases — not a high majority. I would love to say 95% or 99%, but we’re talking maybe 55, 60%. It depends on what the cause of yips is in a specific player. Some players I can help and some players I can’t. But the good thing about Audio Golf is that if we can fix it, we’ll see it in 20 seconds. I would never tell anybody you’ve got to practice this for two months and then we’ll start seeing results. You’ll see results right away or you won’t.
Josh Nichols
Hmm. Okay. In the ones that you don’t necessarily see results in, is it more like a psychological issue? A fear-based thing, some sort of mental game issue?
Chia Chou
It’s very interesting. The statistics I’ve read — help me out if I’m wrong — statistically, the better your handicap gets, the more likely you are to get yips. There’s no beginner or 30 handicap who’s got yips.
I’m sure it’s a psychological thing, although I’m sure there are neural things that have been connected as well. In music we have something called focal dystonia, where pianists can’t open their fingers anymore. You get these pianists to a piano keyboard and all of this happens — but ask them to put their fingers on a table and it stays relaxed. Again, yeah, of course — psychological.
Josh Nichols
Right, psychological. And that one is addressed in a different way than the sort of stuff that you do.
Chia Chou
Well yes, focal dystonia — I don’t think there’s a cure for it. There are apparently some kinds of drugs you can inject, but I don’t know how effective they are. Most of the famous pianists who had focal dystonia had to stop playing. But I think yips can, in some cases, be overcome using sound.
Josh Nichols
And those are the tempo-related cases, you would say?
Chia Chou
You mean with yips? No, that has to do with tempo. The standard thing with yips is this sort of erratic jerking — taking the ball away or going back quietly but making the actual putt, even though it’s a six-foot putt, like shaking.
Like I said, there’s a way some people can be helped, without drugs. Just getting a sound, using this idea of sound and motion in your brain, the connection.
Josh Nichols
Okay. Would this — the sound that you’re talking about — is this something where you’d say, I can talk about this up to a point but you should go purchase this to access it? Do you feel that it’s this special, that I don’t want to spill all the beans here?
Chia Chou
Well, no. All the yips candidates or clients that I have come to me one on one. It’s a very private thing. If you go to a doctor and you have something growing on you that you don’t want to talk about — yips is something people also don’t want to talk about. And secondly, I would never say there is one method, because it depends where the yips starts. Is it the backswing? Is it the transition? Is it the actual strike? And then I would offer different solutions. Without saying this will work, we can try. Most of the time it does — small majority — but I would never say, buy this and then we’ll fix it.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, I do appreciate that it’s not a cure-all, fix-all. I respect that. So a lot of the guests that I’ve had on the podcast have talked about conscious versus subconscious, and a lot of them will say something like, we have to get the conscious mind out of the way and allow the subconscious to take over. So the stuff that you propose — would you consider that a conscious effort, or do you see it more as getting the conscious mind out of the way?
Chia Chou
This is tricky. This is the minefield. Okay, I was hoping we could avoid this.
I’m going to give you a last thing. You’ve got a sound pattern for a 60 yard pitch shot, and you’re nervous, you’re stressed, your heart’s beating, everything. And I claim — although there’s scientific evidence that I might be wrong — that you’ve got a sound pattern to execute this and you’ve practiced it hundreds of times and you can really hit 60 yards without even looking. Just put your head down, execute the sound pattern, look up and the ball should be 60 yards away.
I claim that under stress, by thinking the sound pattern, you’re not focusing on the internal stuff. You’re not thinking about your grip, how far you’re taking it back — because in the sound pattern, all those things are built in. Thinking the sound pattern is a conscious act, but many clients tell me, once I’m thinking the sound pattern, I can’t think anything else.
So again, it’s not so much conscious versus subconscious — it’s about moving the focus. Instead of an internal focus on my technique, am I at seven o’clock, my stance and everything, getting it to an external focus and thinking of the sound pattern. If that’s a wishy-washy answer, I’m sorry.
Josh Nichols
No, that’s good, because you’re giving your brain a task to do instead of — golfers, it would be like a concert pianist trying to think about all 400 individual notes, every single little motion. And we think golf is complicated. How many keys are there on a piano?
Chia Chou
Josh Nichols
98, that’s insane. And you’ve got 10 fingers to work across them at incredible speed. So you’re shifting your intent from “I need to make this motion” to “I want to make music and I’m going to allow my body to make music.” The same for golf would be: instead of “I need to make this golf swing and make these motions,” I just want to make music, with the tempo of my swing. Is that how you think about it?
Chia Chou
Well, yes. It’s a fascinating thing. I mean, to compare — when I go on stage and I’m playing a piano concert, normally I have to deliver about 70 minutes of music. A soccer player has to run around the field for 90 minutes.
Now, you golfers — have you ever thought about this? One of the longest swings is the drive, and an amateur needs about 1.2 seconds for a drive. And you’re playing 65 shots. Think about how long a golfer is actually playing golf over 18 holes. Two minutes max, and the rest of the time you’re thinking. So that’s the big challenge. We as musicians have this chance of getting into flow, and I’m sure golfers get into flow too, but I think it’s just through the way the sport is designed, it’s harder.
Josh Nichols
That’s so interesting. That is something I had flagged to ask you about — what is so different about golf? As often as I have heard that golf is really played in a matter of 90 seconds surrounded by four hours of walking around, I’ve never thought about it as far as the linking of golf shots and how spread apart they are. And yet we expect — why can we not be in this flow state the entire time? You, if you were playing piano for four or five hours, you couldn’t do it despite everything being linked together. You would have bursts of flow but you’d get exhausted. Let alone playing for a second and a half, waiting 12 minutes, playing for a second and a half, across four or five hours.
You would have to have a mechanism every single time to reengage your mind every 12 minutes for that second and a half. You would never expect to have perfect continuity.
Chia Chou
Yeah. But music is not designed that way. And what was it Jack Nicklaus said once? I read somewhere — he said in a tournament he might make one perfect shot or two, and the rest are really good misses. I mean, that’s it. That’s it.
And this idea of trying to achieve perfection — I know enough of my students who, when they’re playing a concert, make a tiny mistake somewhere after 25 minutes and nobody hears it. But you see their face. It’s beautiful, but I know they can’t watch competitive ice skating either. You watch this guy doing a triple toe loop and he falls on his back, and I just can’t watch because it’s just the stress.
Josh Nichols
Yeah. There’s some embarrassment and there’s just, I’ve worked four years to get to this point. You say something that perfect mechanics don’t matter if your tempo is off. The best players in the world, when they make a mistake shot to shot — maybe it’s not fair to ask what the best players in the world are doing — but when they are the best and their swings are extremely repeatable, and despite having what we could call perfect mechanics they still struggle. Why do even they struggle with tempo? Is it something that requires ongoing work, or is it something you can kind of commit to and it becomes permanent?
Chia Chou
Well again, it’s — how do I say this? Locking down tempo is a skill. Because I spend most of my life doing just that. I don’t have to hit a golf ball. I just have to sort of hit like four notes — boom, boom, boom, boom. And if I go bam, bam, bam, bam, it’s going to be off and everybody hears it. So I’ve trained myself my whole life to get tempo right, get rhythm right, in order to play piano.
And I think the problem is that this awareness for tempo is becoming much greater now in the present day of golf instruction. I think people are saying, hey, this is actually quite important. We have the gentleman from Tour Tempo, they’ve got this idea and all kinds of other things. It’s very, very hard to internalize if you’re not a musician. Your skill is to get the ball into the hole. And you know, the tempo doesn’t matter if it goes in on a par four, right?
Just give me an example. Imagine you had a putting machine. You put it behind the ball and you can set it so the striking plate will hit the ball at 6.7 miles per hour. On the same green, you could hit 20 balls at 6.7 miles an hour and you would assume the balls would all roll out the same distance. With our methodology, I can get you to regularly hit very close to 6.7 miles an hour. What is speed? It is overcoming a certain distance in a certain time. If I get you to take the club back 14 inches and get to the ball within 0.35 seconds, consistently, the idea is with a putter you would putt the same distance more or less every time.
The sound tells you how far to take it back and how fast to get to the ball. It’s that simple. And by the way, the scientific term used here is sonification — translating a motion into a sound, and using that sound to achieve whatever.
Josh Nichols
Do you — you mentioned Tour Tempo — do you see your work as a different take on the same thing, or do you think it’s different? Do you see them as a competitor, or how do you see yourself in relation to Tour Tempo?
Chia Chou
The idea behind Tour Tempo is great. I like it a lot. The base idea — I don’t know when that gentleman started this, 15 years ago something like that — I think it was great to get golfers an awareness. I think the idea is, as a pioneer in this field in golf, hats off, it works.
But from my opinion — and I’m going to hear from his lawyers next week — it’s not refined enough as I think it should be. For example, they say in putting all the pros putt two to one — there’s this timing ratio, two units back, one to the ball. About three years ago I had the honor of meeting and working with Brad Faxon. We went out to a green and I said, Brad, I have to ask you this. If you’ve got a great player and he’s putting 2.1 to one, or 1.9 to one, but he’s a great putter, are you going to change that? And he says, of course not. So again, this idea of two to one is just a guide.
I’ve seen machines in Germany where you make your putt and a red light goes on if you’re not two to one. That’s a little rigid. All the things we offer in Audio Golf, we’ve got sort of generic sounds but they’re adaptable.
Josh Nichols
Sure. So is it more like: make a really good putt and then find an audio that matches your really good motion — or here’s the audio, try to match your motion to the audio? Which direction do you look at it from?
Chia Chou
Well, we offer in our courses standard sounds for different distances. I don’t know, did you have a chance to try our 15 foot putt sound? It’s very standard — something like “miyala bam.” And for you it might be 15 feet; for somebody else it’s only 14, or maybe 16. But we’re not fixated on it being exactly 15 feet. What we’re fixated on is: I want to see five balls after you’re putting with the sound, and they shouldn’t be more than two inches apart. A dispersion of two, three inches — that’s it.
And again, it’s about getting rid of mainly three-putts, because we know that a professional golfer’s chance of making a 20 foot putt is less than 50%. But if I can get you as an amateur golfer every time within two feet of the hole, that’s not bad.
Josh Nichols
No kidding. Yeah, eliminating three-putts. Getting speed control right.
Chia Chou
Yes, that’s it. And like I said, you have to try it out.
I thought right now might be a good opportunity — I was just thinking about this. We were just talking about sonification. I want to try this, Josh. When I first started, before I even got to golf, I was working for the Austrian Tennis Federation. One of the executives had heard about my thing and they wanted to try it out. I’m there one afternoon and we’re talking with five or six of the top best juniors in Austria and they’re practicing something called the drop shot at the net — you run full speed to the net, you take the ball at the net, but so relaxed that it just dribbles off your racket and lies there.
It’s apparently one of the hardest things you can do in tennis because you’ve got this full speed run to the net and you get there with so much energy, and you take the ball and it goes back another 10, 12 feet. If your opponent gets that ball and you’re standing at the net, it’s over. So don’t do this if you’re not sure it’s going to work.
The head coach and his two assistant coaches are screaming at these kids: relax your arm, relax your wrist, you gotta relax. And when three people are shouting at me to relax, it backfires. These kids are running through the net and taking it. Anyway, after about half an hour, the head coach comes over and says, Chia, tell me, how would you solve this problem?
I said, I don’t play tennis, I need you to show me what you want these kids to do. He says, when they get to the net, they should take the racket and pull it towards them just ever so slightly, to absorb the energy of the ball coming at them. Not stiff, and not a backhand, just pull it towards yourself like this. And I said, if you want this motion, you’re going to need this sound. The sound is “ahm.” Take your hand, pull it towards yourself and say “ahm.” So, was that hard to learn?
Josh Nichols
That’s extremely simple.
Chia Chou
It’s extremely simple. And the head coach goes, how’s this supposed to work? So I take the first kid and say, he runs to the net, you go “ahm.” And bang — first one, ball just drops over the net and lies there. Second, third, fourth, it’s done.
Now Josh, this is where it gets interesting. I want you to be the skeptic. I say this sound “ahm” and this motion are connected. I want you to show me that for you, there’s no connection. I want you to say “ahm,” but instead of this soft motion towards you, I want you to give me a vicious backhand, really hard. Try doing it — away from you, very fast, very hard, but saying “ahm” at the same time.
Josh Nichols
Right. It shortens. Because the sound follows the motion. They’re linked — A equals B, B equals A.
Chia Chou
You’ve changed the sound. Say the sound correctly and do this. “Ahm.” Not the other.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it speeds up and it feels more tense.
Chia Chou
The sound changes. Of course, you can’t do it. By the way, I’ve done this demo for six years now. Nobody can do it. I’ve met pro tennis players, nobody can do it. Again, it’s this connection — this auditory motor entrainment. It’s connected. You can’t overcome it.
Josh Nichols
Right. So if I could maybe summarize — and you tell me if I’m wrong — I think the nut of all of this is: when you’re in a concert situation, instead of thinking about motions, you’re thinking about music that you want to play. You’ve got an external focus on the output of what you want. And it’s not a rigid output — it’s more of a flowing feeling related output, something that sounds nice.
So in an incredibly rigid environment, like a drop shot at the net or a full speed tee shot, it’s so easy to think technically and quickly and harshly. But if you give yourself the intent of, I want to make music with this shot — and I want to match what I do to a sound — then your body will naturally follow that sound. Am I summarizing that well?
Chia Chou
Yes, yes. Once you have the correct sound for you, if you follow the sound, the results should be the same, even under stress. As a musician, it’s like a blind person holding on to a rope — just hold on to the rope and the music will take me where I’m supposed to be going. The last thing I want is to start thinking about my fingers. Once you start thinking for one second, you’re out, it’s hopeless.
And I say very often to my students and clients too: you’ve got the sound for a 30 foot putt — if you’re in flow and feeling confident, don’t use it. One of my favorite sayings in English is, it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. It’s a tool to use when needed.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, it’s not meant to become a dependency. A lot of my one-on-one players always talk about wanting to turn their mind off over the ball — their mind always thinks all these negative thoughts and they want to distract it with something. And I’m always saying, you can’t turn your brain off. Our brains are designed to think. You have to give it something to do.
I tend to go to motion — think about part of your motion as the task you’re giving your brain. But you’re saying, I don’t know that you’re saying that’s wrong necessarily, but you’re saying that could work — this is just more how the brain-body connection actually works. It’s more auditory.
Chia Chou
Yes, yes. I’ve met so many coaches and I hear them say, I want you to go out there and don’t think about anything. And I’m looking around saying, there’s a hidden camera somewhere here, because nobody in their right mind can mean that seriously.
And again, we spoke about this standard 15 foot putting sound — “yallah bam.” Once you’re thinking “yallah bam,” you’re not thinking about how far you’re going to take it back. Just like when your foot is tapping the music, your body will sync with the sound pattern. I think for many players who are under stress, this might help. I’m not saying nobody can learn to putt 15 feet consistently without this. But for those players who don’t have six hours a day to practice, this might help.
Josh Nichols
Just like you in your career to become a successful pianist.
Chia Chou
Yes, well I did practice six, seven hours a day — but efficiently. I used my time efficiently. I said to myself, I’ve got this problem, I’m not hitting this thing, I want to fix this in the next 10 minutes. And if I hadn’t been able to figure this out for myself as a musician, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Josh Nichols
Hmm, right. Yes.
Okay, so this is fascinating. For those listening, the place to go is audio.golf — I love the URL, it’s super simple, who could forget that? When someone goes there, what would they expect to find? Where would you want them to go first?
Chia Chou
Well, since this idea is so new and as you said, hard to believe, there is a free lesson on there — the 15 foot putt. You can just download that, go through the motions, and you’ll see how this works. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s completely free. And if you think, hey, this is not bad, this might be interesting — the next step would be a medium distance putting course, I think it’s 10, 15, 20 feet, you get three sounds at a big discount, I think it’s 70% off. And if that works — and it does work, all the time — but if it doesn’t work for you, write to us and we’ll see how we can reimburse you.
There are other courses we have online too. We’ve got a whole line for the whole game. But most importantly, first see if this works for you. There are very, very few examples where it doesn’t. I had a gentleman in Germany about six years ago who wanted a private lesson. I could see after five minutes we’re not getting anywhere. I said, do me a favor — clap your hands together and say “bam” at the same time. And he couldn’t sync them. I sent him home and didn’t charge him anything. Because you can’t take money from something like that.
Josh Nichols
Hmm. Sure. For some it’s just not the right route for them — they have different ways to improve their golf game.
Chia Chou
Right, but that’s very, very rare. It’d be like being completely off the beat while dancing — not following the beat at all — and that’s rare. Most people have this ability.
Josh Nichols
Yeah, sure. Most people can tap to a beat. If a metronome is going, you’re going to be able to catch on and do it. That’s awesome. Audio.golf — there’s a freebie for the 15 foot putt and a really good discount on one of the courses, and several courses for players to take. This is really cool. I appreciate your time, Chia. This gets players away from being technically focused and allows them to access their skill when there’s pressure. And that’s what we’re always going for. So I appreciate you doing this work.
Chia Chou
Thanks, Josh. Just one last comment. Using Audio Golf, you will practice more efficiently. If you’re doing a sound pattern for a 30 foot putt and you’re hitting 25 feet and 35 feet, the sound will tell you exactly why you’re not doing it correctly. You’ve got this guide. It’s not just how it works — it makes your practice more effective, which I’m telling my kids like nonstop, 24 hours a day.
Josh Nichols
That’s good. Effective practice is a huge part of what I talk about too. So Chia, I appreciate your time. This has been a true pleasure.
Chia Chou
Yeah. Okay, Josh, thanks a lot.
