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I am often asked whether I enjoy teaching, and to the surprise of those who cannot fathom spending 8 hours a day instructing the needy, I always reply with a positive. While I love to play, I don’t depend on my playing to pay my bills. I tried that, and found it an incredibly difficult task. The game is hard enough with its precipitous ups and downs without adding the pressure of earning a living. I certainly feel pressure when I play in tournaments, but not the kind of pressure that accrues when your finish means everything. My events mean a lot to me personally, but a bad round or poor finish does not mean my family won’t eat or that I will spend the next year groveling on various mini-tours. This allows me to have fun when I play, and the attempt to improve my game is then a process with no deadlines, a situation that leaves me with much in common with the vast majority of my students.
I play the game because I find it fascinating, and because the thrill of winning is addictive. At the same time I find teaching fascinating, because every student is just like me, desiring above all else to get better at any or every part of the game, and each lesson is a microcosm of my own search to advance my skills. Another way I describe teaching is that it’s a job that begins anew every hour. Each student has a completely unique set of circumstances to deal with, and it is up to me to find the best way to help them to help themselves. Having tried to help myself for many years I know a bit about the process of learning the game, and one of the strengths of my teaching is my ability to explain to the student just how to go about changing in order to improve.
Every golfer has the ultimate goal of putting their game on “automatic” when under pressure and having everything functioning efficiently enough to win. To most people “putting it on automatic” means playing without thought, simply aiming and swinging and hitting good shots. Another term used to describe this ability is “in the zone”, the “zone” being that place where mind and body coordinate subconsciously and produce technique that generates close to exactly the results that were visualized beforehand.
Unfortunately, very few golfers will ever be able to know what it is like to be “in the zone”. I have to constantly explain to my students that the swing that they show up with to the lesson is their “natural” or unthinking swing. When we take video and analyze the technique, it becomes obvious why they have been having problems: in short, their swings make multiple mistakes, which is why they have come for a lesson in the first place. As we look at their mechanics on video I tell them “this is your swing. This is what you do when you don’t think, when you rely on your feel and knowledge of the game and don’t try to change anything. If you aren’t satisfied with this (and it is usually obvious that they are not) then we have to figure out how to make it better, which means we are going to have to change it. If we are going to change it, then you are going to have to think about, and focus very hard, on what we decide to do differently.
Of course, if you are a complete beginner, then we don’t have anything to change. A beginner has never really swung the club before, so there are no preconceived notions about the workings of the swing and no grooved in motor patterns to try to undo: we can start from scratch. The first lesson starts with information that suggests what a good swing looks like and why it functions well, and covers the basics of the physics and geometry of the swing. I have found it very helpful to make sure that I go through this with all my students, no matter what their level of expertise. Better players, those that are more experienced or more talented physically, many times have conceptual problems which keep them from achieving the type of contact they desire. The impetus to change is always based on doing something that will make what already exists better, more consistent, or both.
I always start a lesson with a new student by asking a few questions about their history with the game while watching them hit a few shots. I will then take a video of their swing and bring them over to sit and watch while I analyze what they are doing. Everyone has their own reasons to take a lesson, but the most prevalent reason is a basic dissatisfaction with the results of their swing. The ball goes too high, too low, not far enough, not straight enough, or all of the above, and almost never are the ones that are good enough happening consistently. The desire is to get better, and that means that something on that video is going to have to change.
My first job is two-fold: figure out what is going on with the swing to make the results unsatisfactory and explain that clearly, and at the same time show and explain what would be better. I usually do this by showing the swing of one or more great ball-strikers such as Ernie Els, Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo, Justin Rose, Davis Love, or Sergio Garcia (among others), pointing out what they do well, and then, while looking at the student’s swing in slow motion and freeze frame, pointing out how the student’s swing is different, and why incorporating some of what the tour player is doing would be a good idea. In this way I can help the student form a model in his or her mind of how a good swing should look, feel, and function, and while at the same time educating them regarding how they swing and how they need to change in order for their swing to work better.
I have always thought that my job as an instructor was to impart enough knowledge of the swing to the student so that they could eventually help themselves, especially when they find themselves in the middle of a round suddenly unable to hit a decent shot and need to figure out why. Too many players find themselves stuck with what they have when things start to go wrong. The more knowledgeable golfer can think through what they understand to be their own chronic problems and come up with thoughts or keys to try to incorporate on their next swing in order to hit a better shot. Their guess is at least educated and grounded in things they have worked on and know to be correct, and thus has more than just a lucky chance to be helpful.
Getting back to the process of invoking a change in the swing, it is imperative that the student understand that learning to make a better swing is a process, and that it is never one simple fix that makes everything else work. In fact, one significant change at the beginning or in the middle of the swing motion necessitates further changes later on in the downswing or in the impact area simply because the body and hands have been trained to deal with a certain set of circumstances, and when those circumstances change there is no particular reason for the hands to automatically respond differently. In other words, if I change your grip so that the clubface is more open at the top of the swing, then more open as the club approaches impact, the hand release you used to use to keep the formerly shut clubface from closing through impact will now, with a more open approach, produce a massive push or slice out to the right, and will likely keep doing that until we deal directly with learning how to the let the face turn over through the ball.
When I suggest a change, I must explain how the change will reverberate through the swing, and how there will be more things to learn and work on to make the change functional. None of this is simple or uncomplicated. There is quite a bit of information to process and assimilate, and even after the mechanics are understood intellectually there is the knotty problem of physical ability to actually do what you now know you want to do. Then, when you find that you can get into the positions you know are more correct, there are the matters of sequence and timing, required items for a functional movement. Taken as a whole, it is not hard to see why the best players in the world speak constantly of “working” on their swings, while most poor players have no idea why anyone so good would ever have to “work” on anything. The guys on TV are no different from anyone else when it comes to the desire to improve. The top of the food chain is Tiger Woods, and no one talks more of wanting to get better, not to mention the time and repetitions involved in making a change in order to get better, than him.
The key for any player to understand about changing is that you can’t do it all at once, just like you can’t play thinking about all the changes you want to make. I am constantly asked whether or not it is a good idea to play while in the midst of making swing changes. In the vast majority of cases the answer is “yes”, and the reason is that results on the course are a good indication of your progress up to that point, and every time you play you are forcing yourself to organize your thoughts into “playable” groups. This is especially the case in competition. A tournament round is the best test of how your work is coming along, and since the idea is to turn in a good score you will soon see just what it is that you need to work on the most. Many times the things you are most concerned about are fine, while the things you have taken for granted (and perhaps neglected to practice) show rust and injure your round. In any event, after a competitive round or two you will be more able to assess how you stand in regards to your total game and can adjust your practice accordingly.
While working on changes it is important to get accurate feedback on your progress. Many of my most serious students have purchased video cameras, and it is always one of my goals to teach the student enough to be able to analyze their own swing using the camera. I always use the camera when I teach, but it is important for the student not taking consistent lessons to not practice for too long a time without knowing what the swing is really doing. Relying on “feel” is not going to cut it: your normal swing, the one you brought to your first lesson that was chock full of mistakes that we have decided to fix, doesn’t really “feel” like much of anything besides your everyday swing. For example, if you have the specific problem of pulling your right arm too far behind you at the top of your swing, you didn’t know it was a problem until I pointed it out to you, and it doesn’t feel like it’s wrong, it’s just what you do. If you do not use a video camera to look at your swing, you must rely on your mental image of what a good swing looks like, and chances are you think that your swing looks like the picture you have created. When I show you how different it is from what you think it is, and then get you to swing into a better position, you have something to which you can compare your normal move, and thus you can tell the difference between the two. Now, hopefully, you can “feel” when you do it wrong, and can identify when you slip back in to your old habit. Otherwise, chronic mistakes remain chronic and are impossible to change.
I am asked all the time how long it will take before a change really takes hold and becomes what you do normally rather than what you have to focus on intently. There is no answer to that question, and just as every golfer has their own idiosyncratic swing, so does the process of change vary with each player. Certainly having more time to play and practice will help speed up the process, as will having access to a video camera and a competent teacher. When Tiger Woods decided to make major changes to his swing he stated that it took him a year and a half to be comfortable enough to trust it completely under pressure. That’s the best player in the world talking, and he works on it every single day with every conceivable accessory at his command. For the rest of us, the key word is “patience”. You’re not Tiger Woods, and you probably work for a living and have a family. Changing your swing requires full attention and constant devotion, but you can only do what you can do. Far too many people beat themselves up over the game when they really have no business expecting so much from the talent they weren’t blessed with and the time they don’t have to spend on getting new things to work. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to change and improve, it only means that you should give yourself plenty of time and not be too hard on yourself when you’re in the midst of the process. Approach change with determination and intelligence, and remember that a full quota of patience will be required.
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