Sigmund Freud once claimed all human behaviour is governed by our desire to move towards pleasure and away from pain and now the guys at deWiz believe that principle can improve your golf swing.
When I was told I should try the deWiz golf watch, which delivers electric pulses or – whisper it – small electric shocks when your swing goes awry, I’ll be honest I was a little apprehensive. But as golfers we’re no strangers to subjecting ourselves to a little pain on the course.
All joking aside, the thing that interested me most about the deWiz golf watch was that by tapping into the subconscious it might be able to make swing improvements which stick. As we all know, making a swing change is a really difficult thing to do. We all go out with the best intentions to make improvements but so often it all just ends up looking the same as it always has done.
Why is that? Well a golf swing, like any kind of motor pattern in the human body, is ingrained over years of muscle memory, for good or ill. Each of us unwittingly write a unique script for what to do when we repeat a motion and once the body recognises it’s happening, it follows that script. With me so far? Now this deWiz golf watch has been created to try to solve that issue by short-cutting the script you have created for you golf swing. How does it do that? Well to change your swing, you need to write a new script for your body to follow.
Once you know what the new script looks like, the deWiz feedback alerts your brain immediately when you move away from it and back onto the old script. The electric shock allows the brain to calculate the feedback exponentially faster and accelerate the pace of learning. So instead of having a coach tell or even show you what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your golf swing, the deWiz golf watch is hoping to communicate with you by feel to make your body move away from pain, to quote Freud.
So how does the deWiz golf watch work?
You put it on your wrist, just like a watch, and connect it with the free app. Once you pair the two up, you can select one of four modes – discovery, practice and learn, challenge or get started. Whichever area you select, you will be prompted by the app which is clear and easy to use and then the deWiz golf watch will track your hands through the swing. It’s up to you to set the parameters – so if you have a habit of coming over the top in transition, you can preset the deWiz golf watch to buzz you if you are repeating that movement instead of dropping the club on the inside on the way down.
What else can it help me with?
You can focus on various aspects of your swing – including the length of your backswing, tempo, swing plane or how you transition the club between your backswing and your downswing. Once you choose which area to focus on, deWiz tracks you and then provides you with a 3D picture of what that looks like on the app.
Do the electric shocks on deWiz golf device hurt?
The first thing to say is that you get to set the strength of the tingle to your wrist – anywhere between level 1, which is the lowest setting and level 7. And in fact you don’t need to even have it turned on at all. It’s obviously best to start at the bottom and gradually increase the level until you find what suits you. For it to work, it needs to be slightly uncomfortable, or your body won’t subconsciously move away from pain – to answer the question, it doesn’t hurt but you will notice it, which I guess is the idea!
What else do we know about deWiz golf?
This watch is the result of years of development, lots of testing and plenty of feedback from many of the world’s top players. The likes of Bryson DeChambeau, Henrik Stenson and Annika Sorenstam are ambassadors but it was former European Tour player Markus Westerberg, who came up with the idea. Once he finished his golf career he went to college and focused his studies on motor learning and performance at Lund University in Sweden. Another student, now his co-founder Christian Bergh, came to him with a seed of an idea and deWiz started to grow from there.Can deWiz golf swing things my way? Should you I buy one?
As we have said, making swing changes permanent and not just going back to your old swing is notoriously difficult. I was sightly cynical trying this out and feared the electric shock was a something of a gimmick but I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only did the device show me things about my swing I had never picked up on video, but it actually did start to help me ingrain the changes I wanted to make. Will this help you swing it like Rory McIlroy overnight? No, of course it won’t but will the fact you get feedback at the very moment you go wrong, means it is easier to identify the movement where your swing starts to go awry and fix it. So if you are serious about making lasting changes and genuinely getting better at swinging a golf club, you must give this a go.How much does a deWiz golf watch cost?
If you are buying in the US it costs $699, in the UK £539.00 and in Europe it is €639,95. So it’s not a small investment but new drivers cost almost as much and this will give you a chance of actually getting better at swinging the golf club. We all now a new driver probably won’t!For more information or to buy a deWiz golf watch visit www.dewizgolf.com
