Do you have any golfing experience? Did you experience an immediate improvement, or did you lose heart and go back to your old method of trial and error?
After teaching for 33 years, I’ve come to realize that most once-weekly golfers follow a similar basic pattern. Your potential can be unlocked by comprehending the mindset that underlies this pattern.
First stage: The novice golfer has a clean slate to work with. He or she frequently visits the practice area with friends and is somewhat successful in terms of merely making contact with the ball.
Stage Two: The student usually makes contact but questions why each club seems to travel the same distance. Well-meaning friends make suggestions, but they have mixed success. The student usually seeks out expert instruction at this point.
Stage 3: Depending on the instructor’s preferred teaching style, this phase can either accelerate the student’s progress or doom him (or her) to an unending cycle of error detection and correction.
What determines the student’s progress?
The instructor can either concentrate on the student’s errors or emphasize and improve the parts of their swing that work well.
Am I advocating that you overlook significant methodological errors? Not at all.
I’m trying to convey that a student doesn’t need to fully comprehend all the technical issues with their swing in order to fix them. The task of the teacher is to give the pupil an easy-to-understand key that will lessen—and ideally eliminate—the technical error.
Focusing on an idea or recommendation (what to do) rather than becoming fixated on what to avoid (what not to do) results in continuous improvement.
This theory might seem overly simple to skeptics who are knowledgeable about the subtleties of perfect mechanics. Without knowing the causes of a swing flaw, how can you possibly fix it?
Please think about these two queries.
Do you need to comprehend your car’s combustion timing cycle in order to operate it? The ignition is turned on by turning the key.
Do you need to understand electricity in order to flip a switch and turn on the light? Why is the golf swing any different from other sports?
Regardless of skill level, the ability to avoid the seductive trap of obsessing over potential swing flaws and reinforcing the feelings of your best shots is the biggest mental key to improvement for any golfer.
It is admirable to want to learn, but you also need to be able to hit the ball for 1.5 seconds without pausing to think about it.