Visit any driving range in the world, and you’ll see golfers giving out free advice to anyone nearby who will listen, including their friends, spouses, and other family members. An observer might be led to believe that golf is the only sport in which there are more instructors than students based on the volume of informal instruction.
Which golf instruction myth is the most prevalent? telling a student what they’re doing incorrectly in an effort to help them, but failing to understand the student’s perspective.
Before you can suggest a workable solution, you must ascertain a student’s preconceived notion about the swing. The students’ innate resistance to change will disappear if you alter how they perceive the swing.
Let’s examine a common scenario in which a student seeks professional advice to get rid of a persistent slice. Of course, each golfer will respond to treatment differently, but the idea is universal.
When a student approaches you holding a wild slice, how do you help them? He takes a few shots (most women, in my experience, hit the ball fairly straight), and the more he tries to correct the left to right curve, the more obvious it becomes.
It’s obvious that the student is “casting” the club to start the downswing. Your advice seems to encounter some (unconscious) resistance despite your efforts to explain the cause-and-effect relationship and illustrate the error. How can you persuade the student to follow your advice?
Ask the student to demonstrate how he would fix the issue. 90% of poor swing mechanics among golfers who play just once a week are the result of incorrect assumptions about the swing.
The idea that the clubhead should travel in a straight line back and forth is among the main causes of a chronic slice. The full swing lacks any straight lines. The goal is to swing the club in a consistent arc or “plane”. While the “straight line” solution sounds logical, it actually exacerbates the problem.
The rules of golf defy logic: swing easily to hit the ball farther, hit the ball lower to cause it to rise. Effective learning depends on assisting a student in making sense of these apparent contradictions.
You can collaborate with a student to create a new, efficient motion once he or she has realized the misconception. With a fresh perspective, he will observe glimmers of development followed by consistent growth.
Understanding a student’s perspective is the first step in effective instruction.
Thanks for reading!