Is Golf Instruction on the Right Path?

                                                   

In golf instruction today there is a battle between simplicity and complexity. The human brain always gravitates naturally to simplicity and it still works that way with students. Apparently that no longer applies to many golf instructors.

Let me state up front that this is only my opinion and it is just simply my personal observation. I would like to think it is as an educated observation based on 40 plus years of teaching golf, studying the golf swing, and the last few years studying how people actually learn complex motor skills.

The Way It Was

Somewhere along the way golf instruction lost its original purpose, that of helping people to learn to “play golf.” For golf instructors there has been a large transition from learning the art of teaching people to play golf to focusing on the science of how to swing the club. I find this interesting since the best players in the world all have their own golf swing that is as identifiable as their face.

For generations golf instructors taught people to swing the club and hit the ball. The message was simple. People were taught the purpose of the grip and generally how to grip the club so that the hands could square the club up at impact. People were taught how to use their hands properly and shown generally how to hit a golf ball, but it was primarily about ball striking and controlling the ball.

During this era of golf instruction which lasted well over a hundred years, we had some of the greatest golfers to ever play the game. Most of them actually learned by watching other good players and experimenting with how to produce the shots they wanted. Many did it with equipment most people today couldn’t even get the ball airborne with. There were no golf schools and being a golf instructor wasn’t even a profession.

Then It All Changed

With the advent of high speed photography the ability to analyses the swings of the top players started the golf instruction in a different direction - analyzing positions in the golf swing. There developed a belief that the secret to a good golf swing could be found in studying and duplicating the positions of the golf club and body parts throughout the swing.

I have to admit that I was originally fascinated by this technology. Early in my career, I was living and working in Atlanta. I was offered the opportunity to use and study the state of the art Sony Motion Analyzer. They wanted to break into the golf market, but the product cost what a Trackman would cost today. After a couple of weeks I realized that the detail it provided didn’t provide me with anything I really needed. I wasn’t going to invest that type of money in a piece of technology just to be the first in my area to have it. I would have had to raise my lesson rates to pay for it and other than showing my student’s incredibly detailed video of their swing it didn’t really provide anything I needed.

Fortunately Sony never launched a campaign saying if you didn’t have one of these devices you were relegated to a second tier golf instructor.

This trend has continued to the point that much time and money is spent analyzing the exact angles of the club face as it approaches impact with the golf ball. Today many are studying the bio-mechanics of the golf swing in order to gain a greater understanding of athletic performance through mathematical modeling, computer simulation and measurement. They are focused on computer generated images of how the entire body is moving while swinging a golf club.

The Result

In a desire to create a profitable niche in the golf instruction field much of this information has been disseminated to golfers in order to prove that someone has discovered a “secret” or “key” to the golf swing.

This has given birth to instructors using terms such as:

    “The external rotation of the trail arm is a hot topic among instructors right now to try to help 'lay the shaft down' and create the correct hand path relative to the sweet spot of the club, but I think the timing of this trail arm external rotation/amount of trail arm external rotation during the swing could also be a big factor to creating the results we are looking for.”

    “Here's a suggestion...divide your body in two at the pelvis. Upper and lower MASS distribution. While the upper MASS is rotating the legs must manage the upper MASS. Your CORE (center of     MASS) is to vertical - tilt the torso out moving your CORE towards the golf ball.”

To make it even worse golfers are hearing and reading this and are out there giving their buddies tips about creating lag, maintaining spine angle, core rotation, angle of attack, etc. When you go to the range and ask golfers what they are working on today the vast majority will usually list off at least three things they are working on that are all about the position of the club or the body.

It is time to step back and take a deep breath and realize that gaining detailed knowledge is of very little benefit unless it can be communicated to a student in a form that they can understand and use. Golf instruction is not about who has the most knowledge or data, but who can communicate their knowledge best to the student and help them quickly.

All of the best teachers that I have studied have or had a highly developed ability to communicate with the student. Technology is not going to teach us that.
As far as discovering secrets or something truly new about the swinging of a golf club; as long as we are standing facing the ball and aligned to the target we are not likely to discover anything that we haven’t known for at least fifty years.

I do still find video a very useful tool and have used it since it replaced movie film, but I do not need to break it down into frame by frame extreme detail to fix a slice or any of the problems the average golfer has.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that we need to go back to teaching people about swinging the club and striking the ball. Not about what position everything needs to be in based on our personal opinion.

Has Golf Instruction Gone Wrong

I will add this disclaimer to my dissertation – I focus on and write about the average golfer. Highly motivated low handicappers and elite players are completely different than the average golfer and only comprise a tiny fraction of the people that play golf. While it may be necessary to teach the average golfer how to use his hands properly, an elite player that has been playing since shortly after learning to walk already knows this. They should not necessarily be taught the same things or the same way as average golfers.

I also realize that I probably will not get much agreement from golf instructors that have never been exposed to or studied anything other than technology and positions, but it doesn’t change my opinion that we need to move back toward the teaching style of the Harvey Penick’s, Claude Harmon's, and John Jacobs of the world

If I only get a few more teachers considering this or thinking this way the time and research I put into this will be well spent. PGA Hall of Famer Bill Strausbaugh once told me that a golf professional should never teach a method, but he should have a method of teaching and that's what I am advocating. We need to examine our present method of teaching this wonderful game.

Conclusion

Changes are usually customer driven so if you are an average golfer and I define that as anyone in the mid-teens or higher handicap. You do not need to pay extra for technology and you need to interview a prospective teacher and ask about his teaching methods.