Why The Best Golfers Know When to Slow Down

I want you to think about two golfers. One is having a great round. The other is not. It could be two golfers in a major championship. It could even be you in different rounds. There's a difference you might not have thought about. Your pace. When you're playing well, the game slows down. You're relaxed and thinking clearly. Your tempo is easy. But when you're fighting it, everything speeds up. Your swing is quick. Your decisions feel rushed. Even your walk from shot to shot, at least for me, it's like you're just trying to get it all over with. It seems like such a simple detail, yet it's rarely something we think about when we play, and it ends up mattering in ways we don't even realize. So I wanted to understand what it means to take our time on a golf course, how it can help us, and also clear up some misconceptions about what that doesn't mean. I talk to golfers, coaches, and scientists about how our pace influences everything from our swings to our strategy to how we handle pressure. And along the way, I discovered some really simple tactics that will make enough of a difference you'll wish you had thought of them sooner. Okay, so one thing we need to get out of the way first is that slowing down is not the same as playing slow. Playing slow is five-hour rounds, or telling stories on the tee box when it's your turn to hit, or standing over the ball for what feels like an eternity. None of this helps. Slowing down is being intentional about what you need to do, and not being hasty when you can't afford to be. The word psychologists use for this is being regulated, which is different than being calm. Let me give you an example. This was Cam Young's tee shot on the 18th hole of the 2026 Players Championship. It might have been the shot of the year. A monster 375-yard draw carved off the tree line and back into the fairway, setting up a closing par for the win. But that part you probably remember. Let's back up for a second. What's more interesting is what came right before. Standing on the tee box, Young was tied for the lead with Matt Fitzpatrick. He had just birdied the 17th hole, where the crowd exploded when his ball found the cup. In a moment like that, a golfer is pumped up, and that leads to mistakes. The day before, in fact, Young stood on the 18th tee and pulled his tee shot into the water. So this time he moved intentionally slowly. He focused on his breathing, and as he looked down the fairway, he began to picture the shot he wanted to hit. You know, my thought process over that ball is, you know, one, making sure that I'm committed to my line, and two is the overarching thought is, you know, I'm gonna hit the best shot of my life right here. This idea of committing to your line and picturing a great shot is something you probably have heard before. Maybe you think you already do it, but what Cam was doing was something else. When many of us stand over the we're either thinking about the technical swing, or we think about the end result. We want the putt to go in, or we want the ball to be three feet from the pin, but that's different than pausing to visualize the shot. Scott Wiley is a cognitive neuroscientist who says certain mental images are more effective in getting our bodies to respond. In a sense, Young standing behind the ball and seeing the shot he wanted to hit is like his brain providing a blueprint for his body to follow. The more vivid the picture, the better, which is also why blind shots are so challenging. When you can't see the shot you're trying to hit, your body has fewer instructions to work with. So when you're studying the shot scene and the lie and the distances, you're building a mental map that will then contribute to the quality of your motor execution. You can't not take a look at the scene and get over the ball and be successful. So the quality of that mental picture contributes to the development and the execution of the action. This is the first reason a golfer needs to slow down, so they can give themselves the time they need to process and execute the shot in front of them. But the other reason is moving too fast leads to all kinds of mistakes. When I get angry, I get going really fast. I start walking fast, going through my process way too fast, and I just feel like I'm walking in slow motion. Start really working on my breathing and just doing my best to give myself those 15 seconds to say or do whatever I want and then kind of forget about it and just really slow down and think about the next shot. Whenever I get in a stressful situation, I have to slow myself down because I get really fast. I start talking fast, breathing fast, and I kind of get a little worked up like that. So I just have to really calm myself down, try to walk slow, talk slow, make everything just a little bit slower, which is a challenge. I feel like I've had enough experiences where I've seen it work, where I've seen sort of Ryder Cups, seen big events where it's happened, and I can kind of calm myself down a little bit. But yeah, it's definitely, for me, it's just the pace of everything just goes up. There's a way to consider why this is important. For example, let me show you two tee shots from the same player on the same day. This is Mito Pereira in the final round of the 2022 PGA Championship, teeing off on the first hole with a three-shot lead. And this is Pereira on the 18th hole with a one-shot lead. What do you notice that's different? The first swing is rhythmic and confident. The second is hurried and abbreviated, as if he just wanted to get it over with. And that's not surprising. Under pressure, our bodies produce what is known as a stress response. And that doesn't always have to be bad, which is something I've discussed in previous episodes. When our stress systems are elevated, it just means we're asking for something extra. We want to be alert and sharp, and the blood to be pumping to all the places that need it. The tricky part is that this is an old system designed for an earlier time. And occasionally, the same pressure we feel about hitting a golf shot could be misconstrued as a real threat to our physical safety. Dr. Steven Ginsburg is a sports psychologist who works with professional and amateur golfers. And so the goal isn't necessarily to be calm. It's to be regulated. And so if we are speeding up and we're walking too fast, we're signaling to our brain that there might be potential danger. And the second that we are in a danger mode, we are in a protective mode. And so the idea would be, if we can slow down our body, if we can slow down our breathing, then what we're doing is we're signaling to our brain that we are not in a state of threat or a need for protection. A lot of times when we see a golfer walking slowly in a tournament, it's not because they want to move that slowly, but the opposite. Their instinct is to rush and get it all over with. And they know that won't help. Rory McIlroy talked about this at the 2026 Masters. On Sunday, he was ready for a shot long before his playing partner, but he realized he wanted to control his pace better by waiting. I just tried to hang back to, you know, just so I could get to the ball and go through my normal routine and not be waiting up there for what I would feel like is forever. Believe it or not, another way to control our systems is not just in how fast we walk, but in something else we do. Remember, our stress responses were designed first as a protection against physical threats. So another way to signal that we're actually okay is by stopping to eat or drink. You might see golfers do that and think it's just for fuel, but it actually serves another purpose. If we are being chased by a lion, let's say, we are not going to slow down for a glass of water or a bite of a sandwich. And so by doing that on the course, and if you go through each major, each Sunday afternoon, you're going to find that whoever's leaving the tournament is going to be walking up the 18th with a sandwich or a bar or drinking some water. And what they're doing is not just giving themselves energy, they're slowing their brain down and they're controlling their nervous system so that they can make rational decisions by the time they get up to the green. Okay, so let's review a few important points. Slowing down can help in a bunch of different ways. It gives us a chance to visualize the shot we want to hit, and it's a way of regulating our nervous systems under pressure. But this raises a big question. Most golfers play too slow to begin with, so why would we ever suggest they need to play even slower? We're not, trust me. So it's important we explain the difference. Let's go back to the whole idea of the mental picture that Scott Wiley says we take when we visualize a shot. It's true, we need time to process the image, but once we have it, we can't afford to wait. As Wiley said, when golfers take a picture of a shot and then stand over the ball, they only have a brief window for it to be effective. There are individual differences in the quality of the visual and spatial information that we take in, but everybody's brain can only hold that information for so long before the image in your mind starts to distort. And when it starts to distort, again, you're using an incomplete or a distorted picture to guide your action. So there's some general principles and rules. Five to seven seconds, you're starting to see a little bit of distortion of a mental image. You get out 10, 15 seconds, you probably distorted it 50% or greater. Here's another difference. Slowing down is a way to better handle distractions, because distractions actually influence how we move. The more cluttered our minds, the more variability in our movement patterns. That's a good reason for giving yourself time, and it's why you see so many golfers follow a strict routine before they hit a shot. But what happens when you play too slow? You lose your feel, or you have a group behind you waiting on every shot. Or if you're competing, you might get put on the clock, which means you've now forfeited the chance to take the time you need when you need it. In theory, the higher level the golfer, the fewer the shots, the quicker they play. But tournament golf in some settings can get this equation wrong, because the effort to slow down leads golfers to believe they need to be slow everywhere, and this can have a cascading effect. The whole idea of managing your pace is to give yourself the time you need when you need it most, but to be efficient everywhere else. So maybe you hustle off the green and then start walking slower once you're close to the next tee. Or when other players are hitting, you have your yardage and club hold so that you have the space you need when it's your turn to hit. There's no perfect pace that works for everyone. The real skill is learning to recognize when you're rushing, when you're dragging, and what you need to get yourself back into rhythm. The goal isn't to play slower, it's to never feel rushed. So think back to those two golfers we talked about at the beginning. One is making the game look easy, the other looks like he's trying to find it. Maybe the difference isn't that one of them has more time, maybe one of them is just better at knowing when to use it. Thank you for watching. If you have topics that you'd like us to explore on the mental game, let us know in the comments below.