Vision Training & Ox String for Golfers & Coaches

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The quick answer is that it's NOT possible with traditional golf training, but it is not only possible, but expected with the right brain and vision training.

Most training focuses on gear and technique.

Those are all important, but 80% of golf is above the neck...brain skills like vision and balance, and when you've got them dialed in, you can play better with any club you pick up.

The "above-the-neck" stuff is what drives (or limits) your ability to perform because it's the foundation that all skill and technique is built on.

Even psychology and mindest training is built on neurology...and neurology is what what FINALLY helps golfers get control of their mental game.

Neurology...and vision in particular, is what will let you unleash the potential of the clubs and technique you've got.

But most golfers struggle with one or more of the following and they act like a parking brake on performance and no training or course has addressed them all, until now...

For the last decade, my focus has been on tactical vision and neurology training for elite military and law enforcement training programs as well as responsibly armed citizens.  Basically how to optimize training for high stress situations where lives depend on performance.

I regularly speak at national and international instructor conferences and one of my books has been called the best book on firearms training in existence by the former commander of US Army's 19th Special Forces Group...because of how it gets better results by focusing on making the brain work better and not gear or tactics.

What I found was that shooting performance--like golf--is built on a foundation of vision, balance, and stress modulation.

And oftentimes, those 3 things act like a brake and keep us from unlocking the potential of our gear and training.

Ironically, golfers and elite shooters have several common challenges.  One of the biggest is limited time.

So, I had to create vision drill sets that would optimize their brains and performance that only took a few minutes to do.

Here was the crazy part...

Lots of shooters also golf, and when my tactical students golfed after the training, they got the same dramatic improvement on the golf course as they did on the range!

With many cutting 5-10 strokes off of their game with just 5-10 minutes of drills! (most of those happen on the back 9)

Many of these were golfers who love the game, but just don't have time to get to the driving range or the course as much as they'd like.  They needed something that would help them with tee shots, fairway shots, AND putting that didn't take a ton of time or gear.

One instructor wrote in to tell me...

What we've seen is that the more a regular golfer struggles with consistency, despite doing everything right, the more they'll benefit from vision and brain training.

And when you use these drills before you practice or play, you'll hit straighter, more consistently, and perform better under stress...regardless of whether it's playing with a friendly foursome for bragging rights or high stakes tournaments.

Unbelievable? Absolutely.

True? Yes...but the key is a cutting edge, pocket sized tool called the "Ox String" and the vision, balance, and choke-busting stress modulation drills that you can do with it.

I'd like to tell you about both the Ox String and vision training...You can either read, watch, or do both.

If you'd rather watch, I've got a video of a presentation that I gave at a national conference to a room of more than 100 people where I walk them all through some of the drills I mentioned above.  

I had them do assessments, some quick drills, and then re-assess and you can see just how dramatic their improvement was in real time.  

You can even do the drills at home and see for yourself.  It was primarly for concealed carry pistol, but you'll be able to see very quickly why it works so well for golf.

And will give you a small taste of how I can help you improve your golf game faster than ever before...

If you'd rather read...here you go 🙂

One of the big misconceptions about vision is that it's all about how clearly you see and whether or not you wear 'readers.'

That's sight.  And it's usually easy to correct with glasses or contacts.

Vision is what happens in the 20+ areas of the brain that do primary visual processing.  

80% of our sensory input for survival and performance come from the visual system and it impacts almost every system in the body...including balance, tight-sore muscles, stiff joints, our perception of pain, stress levels, headaches/migraines, and more.

I mentioned eye dominance earlier.

Right eye dominant and left eye dominant are the easy ones.  There's 2 more!

11% of the population has Cyclopean or "central" dominance where the brain combines the images from each eye into a hybrid 3rd image that doesn't exist in reality that appears to come from an eye in the middle of the forehead.

Another 10%-20% have "shared dominance" where the image that they try to use for sighting appears to come from the corner of the eye, rather than the middle of the pupil.

That gives us 4 different types of eye dominance.

Anything other than having stable dominance at a single eye is going to cause us to mis-strike the ball and mis-judge the direction we should hit the ball.

This was a continual problem for my tactical clients.

I didn't have months or weeks or days to help them...I had to develop ways to help shooters stabilize eye dominance to one eye in just a few minutes.

And what we figured out pretty quickly is that the eye dominance drills that I taught for tactical applications also work incredibly well for driving, fall avoidance, and golf...especially putting.

The big bonus here was that the brain doesn't like it when eye dominance isn't stabilized to one eye.  It's draining.  It changes our head orientation and posture and oftentimes causes a tight, stiff neck and back.  When we can finally stabilize eye dominance, a lot of that tension melts away and many golfers find that when they are fresher and have more endurance, energy, and consistency on the back 9.

2.  Egocenter < This is a crazy one.  Imagine picking the perfect line to the hole.

You line up your putter and think everything is perfect, but the instant you make contact with the ball, you know that you're off.

What could have possibly happened?  How could you have 3-4 perfect practice swings and then biff the real putt?

There's a few reasons, but one of them could be your egocenter.

Your egocenter is the "origin of aiming" that your body uses when sighting and aiming.

When it's stabilized to your dominant eye, our real putt will strike the ball exactly the way we expected.

When the brain is trying to aim from the bridge of the nose instead of from the dominant eye, then we can end up having random, inconsistent performance.

Fortunately, this is an easy, quick fix with a Patent Pending vision training tool I created called the Ox String and it can cause a dramatic increase in performance with zero additional effort.

3.  Eye alignment.  People understand that eye alignment issues like being cross-eyed or having a lazy eye cause challenges, but because of how the cones of the eye are concentrated in the center, an eye misalignment issue of as small as 1 degree (too small to see) can make a big difference on putting performance and cause us to miss towards our non-dominant eye or sometimes even see double-holes, 'jumping' holes, or double-balls.  The Ox String is the easiest, most portable tool to help with this.

4. Deactivating the 'yips' and shot anxiety.  The eyes are made to MOVE throughout the day, but computers, phones, and glasses all conspire to keep our eyes imprisoned and stationary.  There are very specific eye movements that we can do for a few seconds that will turn down the emotional intensity of important shots and make yips and shot anxiety a thing of the past.  

5.  Back 9 Fatigue.  The more of these issues we have, the harder our brain has to work in order for us to play consistently.  Even though the brain is only about 2% of our weight, it uses more than 20% of our daily calories!  

As we address vision and balance issues, then we're naturally able to play better while using less energy.  Which means we have more gas in the tank when we need it most for game winning clutch shots.

The cool thing is that we can take care of all of these (and more) with a patent pending pocket sized vision & balance training tool I created called the "Ox String" and a few minutes of quick, easy drills.

In the basic version of the Ox String drill, golfers hold one end of the Ox String at their nose and either hold the other end with their other hand OR fully extend the Ox String and either attach it to something solid or have a training partner hold it.

Then, they focus on one of the beads.

In the image below, I'm focusing on the green bead.

If your eyes are both pointed at the green bead and your brain isn't suppressing (turning down the intensity of) the image from either eye, you'll see an "X" form at the green bead.

But many people don't see an X at the bead...and that's a problem.  

In the images below, I'm showing 6 different versions of what people might see if they're visually fixating on the BLUE bead.

The brain might also partially or completely suppress (turn down the intensity of) the image from one eye or the other and make sections of string fade or disappear completely!

Each of these impact performance in different ways...causing frustrating misses to the right & left, short and long.

And "getting the X" is only the beginning...

Once we get the X with one bead, then we start getting the X at different distances, increasing speed, and doing drills to increase our ability to shift focus quickly in any direction, track targets in all directions clearly, get the eyes working together better while the head is moving, and more.

And the impact goes WAY beyond golfing better...

When we don't see the X, it causes the brain to burn excess oxygen and glucose when we try to aim, move, or read and it's like trying to go through life with the parking brake on...we'll probably get where we're going, it'll just take longer and performance will be a little sluggish.

Using the Ox String allows us to quickly identify these issues AND oftentimes dramatically improve performance in just a few minutes.

And I've used it to improve performance with golf, shotgun, pistol, and rifle (regardless of the sighting method), martial artists, and athletes involved in basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, soccer, pickleball, cornhole, billiards, golf, driving, trail running, and more.

Even for non-active people, these drills help reduce eye strain when doing screen work, can reduce headaches and neck tension, improve classroom attention spans, improve reading speed & enjoyment, help with stair/obstacle navigation and fall prevention...and much more.

This is possible because we've got 20+ areas of the brain that are responsible for visual processing and vision accounts for 70%-80% of our sensory input.  When there are unresolved issues with vision, it can have a major impact on every area of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

And the quick & easy drills you can do with the Ox String are some of the highest leverage drills you can do to help with all of these things.

You may have seen "beads on a string" before...About a century ago, a Swiss-born optometrist, Dr. Fredrick Brock was struggling with eye alignment issues and did not want to entertain surgery as an option.

He realized, even back then, that when the eyes are not aligned correctly, the brain has to work harder than it should to process the images from the two eyes, to avoid threats, and to avoid tripping and falling more than necessary.

People make the mistake of thinking that the eyes have to be WAY out of alignment for it to matter, but a tiny deviation of even 1 degree (smaller than what most people can see in a mirror) can have a huge impact on everyday life AND performance...especially for people trying to hit little balls with long sticks (golfers) :).

So, he created a vision training tool called the Brock String that is basically a string with colored beads on it that allowed him to correct his own eye alignment issues, and then thousands of patients over the course of his career.

In the decades since, millions of people have been helped by the Brock String...including me.

I've used the Brock String with hundreds of tactical athletes, ball sport athletes, people with reading challenges, and people concerned about reducing their trip & fall risk with fast, dramatic results.

My good friend and creator of the US Navy SEAL Sniper Training Program, Chris Sajnog, had such good success with the Brock String that he called it "Front Sight String."

But the Brock String has always had a knotty problem.

It works best when it's permanently tied to something...and that's not good for golf or other sports.

As soon as you try to put it in your pocket or a bag, the old-school Brock String has a magical ability to become a jumbled mess of knots.  And then you have to waste 5-10 minutes de-tangling the string just to do a couple of minutes of drills.

I knew there had to be a better way...

So, over the last decade, I've used or created 50+ alternatives to the Brock String to solve this knotty problem...but the Ox String is the only one that's so different and so improved that it's worthy of a patent.

The most dramatic feature of the Ox String is that it's retractable and portable.  It fits in a pocket or bag so that you can always have it near and it will never get tangled.

The beads are quite different than what has ever been used on a Brock String before...the diamond-like facets, the specific shades of colors used, and even how the silver interior and primary colored exterior subconsciously interact with the brain to automatically pull the eyes into alignment all make the Ox String dramatically more effective than an old-school Brock String.

The Brock String is great...and you can make your own by simply tying a few knots in a shoelace, but the Ox String will allow you to do much, much more.  And the real value is in the drills that come with it that will show you how to unleash your brain's full potential.

Great question.

It depends on which package you get.  

They're all designed to help train for situations where lives depend on performance, so you know they'll work that much better for foursomes, tournaments, and friendly games of golf.  

You've got 3 options:

I'm Mike "Ox" Ochsner.  I'm one of a handfull of neurology based firearms instructors in the world.  

I wasn't always a neurology professional.  It was kind of forced on me.

In my mid-late 30s, the consequences of 15+ concussions where I lost time caught up with me.  None of my concussions were from heroic deeds.  I've had more than my share of hard impacts with rocks, cement, trees, fists, and heads.  And more than a lifetime of being next to people shooting .50 caliber rifles with muzzle brakes.

As a result, I had vertigo most nights for a few years, my eyes stopped tracking correctly, I had constant headaches, I went from being very athletic to falling often (and getting more concussions), reading wasn't fun anymore, my hand-eye coordination stopped working, and I had constant random pains on the left side of my body.

Life sucked and it was hard.  I wasted a ton of energy "seeing," not falling, and not running into things.

I had to make a choice of whether this was my new "normal" or if I had another option.

Neurology, and specifically vision training, helped me get my life back...in less than an hour with a neurology trainer.

On a hunch, I started using some of the drills that helped me with shooters I was working with, and saw explosive results.

I was hooked.

I dove deep down the neurology rabbit hole...training with Next Level Neuro, Z-Health, Wharton Neurology, and more.  Hundreds of hours of neurology continuing education...including more than 100 hours of live training this year alone!

Neurology and vision training changed my life.  It took at least 10 years off the clock and allowed me to become a master level shooter with a subcompact.

In the process, I wrote a book on neurology based gun training that's been called the best firearms training book in existence and used by elite military, law enforcement, and civilian instructors and shooters.  More recently, I was the co-author of the best selling book, Red Dot Mastery.  My presentations at firearms instructor and neurology conferences have been called the best in 20 years, and I've had the opportunity to help thousands of shooters use neurology and vision training to unlock performance that they didn't think was possible for them.

In the process, many of these shooters were also golfers.

And, as impressive as their gains were with shooting, they were even more dramatic with golfing.  In some cases, it allowed them to blast through plateaus and it gave new life to their golf game.

And I'd like to do the same for you with this training.

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Individual results will always vary and yours will depend entirely on your unique neurology, effort, and a host of other factors.

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