Quiet Eye Training
Golf is one of the hardest sports to play consistently with putting being the great equalizer of the game. If you play all parts of a round great, but can’t putt, winning is still exceedingly difficult. When you look at the number of putts per round on average for players on the PGA tour, #1 is 26.5 with #173 being 30.5. That means 4 putts in a round separates the best putter from one of the worst. This has led to a whole host of methods and manners of training for people to increase the putting accuracy. One such method is quiet eye training. One of the great advantages of quiet eye training is it is a transferable skill to any golf stroke or almost any sport with an initiation moment such as pitching, free throws or taking penalty kicks.
Quiet eye training is a form of gaze control and is defined as aiming fixation. This means focusing your eyes on a target for a period of time as the final step before executing a task. They have found that experts typically have longer periods of quiet eye than non experts. This is easy to track in golfers as you can rank them by their handicap. And they have found that golfers with a lower handicap have a longer quiet eye duration than their higher counterparts.
So how exactly does one do quiet eye training? In putting, the most commonly used protocol in research is as follows:
Maintain a normal hitting posture and focus on the ball
Place the ball in a fixed position and focus on the hole
Look at the hole no more than three times
Place the final focus on the back of the ball and hold that gaze point for 3 seconds, then start you back swing
Make sure not to look at the head of the club during the strike
Maintain visual fixation on the same spot on the ground for 1 second after the club touches the ball
This protocol has been used in different research papers and they found a few interesting things. First, the individuals who used it had more accuracy in their putts, meaning they holed 24% more putts than individuals who didn’t. Their missed putts were also closer to the hole 4.58cm vs 8.37cm. Now a common critique is that these are laboratory numbers and they don’t translate to what happens on the course. Well, Vine et all actually trained golfers in quiet eye techniques and then had them play 10 rounds and tracked their results. They found that individuals trained in quiet eye technique made 1.9 fewer putts per round. If this was on the PGA that individual is going from 173rd to 45th. Not a bad increase.
One reason quiet eye training is so effective is it is able to decrease anxiety and pressure that the player feels. The actual mechanism behind it is poorly understood but one of the prevailing theories is what is called an external focus of attention. This is similar to a shot process. By having a specific process it stops athletes from thinking about internal stressors (I have to make this) or on physical mechanics (feel the hip turn) or external distractors (what does that sign say) or negative thoughts (I’m not good enough). This consistent process of using a quiet eye technique helps damper down anxiety. Quiet eye training also helps athletes do what coaches have been begging them to do for ages (slow down). The increased time helps the motor system communicate with the visual system and helps organize muscle activity for the task more accurately and produce things like a more consistent ball strike.
All together, implementing something like a quiet eye technique into your swing can help you be more consistent with your ball strike, perform better under high pressure and anxiety situations, and have better accuracy with tasks. Not bad for a little staring.
Vine SJ, Moore LJ, Wilson MR. Quiet eye training facilitates competitive putting performance in elite golfers. Front Psychol. 2011 Jan 28;2:8. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00008. PMID: 21713182; PMCID: PMC3111367.
He, Q., Liu, Y. & Yang, Y. The effect of quiet eye training on golf putting performance in pressure situation. Sci Rep 14, 5182 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-55716-z
