**Disclaimer: The original idea for this post is not my own. It was discussed by a colleague of mine, Scott McWilliam, and I am simply taking was he said and putting it into a blog post.
Tiger Woods announced last week that he will, once again, be missing time due to an injury to his left knee. This time it is said that he has sprained his left MCL, whereas in 2008 he had surgery to repair his torn ACL in his left knee. Despite claims that his knee has been feeling fine since the surgery, Woods has failed to win a major since winning the US Open with his torn ACL in June 2008. Why?
Some speculate it is because of everything that has happened with the media starting in November 2009, but I'm not buying that. What seems more logical to me is that Tiger's former superhuman body has been structurally altered, bringing him back to the level of the rest of the playing field. This is not some sci-fi act that has taken place, but rather one that can be easily explained.
Professional athletes are professional athletes for many reasons, not the least of which is their body's ability to create compensating patterns to produce the same motor pattens over and over again even when an injury occurs. Think about it this way: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. This line represents the optimal muscle firing pattern to produce a movement. The more you can deviate from this line, the more compensating patterns you have to produce this same movement if an injury were to occur or if a muscle is not working properly. Most people can deviate slightly off of this line, but not significantly enough to actually make another distinguished line. As you go further along the continuum of athleticism, however, you find people who have more and more compensating patterns, until you get to somebody like Tiger.
With that line in mind, I want you to think of a third point, equidistant from the first two points, creating a right triangle.
Between the diagonal line and the corner of triangle, that represents all of the compensating patterns that were once available to Tiger. However, after his knee was structurally altered with the reconstruction of his ACL, his number of compensating patterns diminishes significantly.
What the compensating patterns allowed him to do was keep his ideal swing even if a muscle had an aberrant firing pattern, meaning, if he needed muscles A B and C to swing properly but muscle B was aberrant, muscle A and C might pick up the slack and muscle D might kick in as well. However, once he was structurally altered with the surgery, muscle D may no longer be an option if all is not working well and so A and C may have to work harder than before but now in order to produce the same result with the golf ball, the mechanics of the swing have to be altered. This can be clearly seen by the fact that he won the US Open while playing on a torn ACL but has yet to win a major since having his knee repaired.
So there you have it. Tiger can continue to alter his swing until he finds something that works, or he can visit a MAT specialist and get his muscles firing properly again. Of course, most everything written here has been opinion and wouldn't actually be able to be proven unless Tiger did visit a MAT specialist and then noticed an improvement in his game. Nonetheless, it is thought-provoking and intriguing when you start to realize how interconnected the entire body is. And I didn't even scratch the surface of what was discussed earlier, but I hope you were able to get an understanding of the basics of this theory.
*image from tutorvista.com
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