Instruction Too Technical

[Pete Hurrikane]

Hello everyone.

I've been in central Europe for just over 15 years but before that I was mainly in the place where all Sassenachs - anyone who isn't Scottish - borrowed oor geme. As my forefathers invented this game I think they would be very annoyed to see what has been happening to it. This simple game was not supposed to be a micro-science project.

I love this game but some of the simple scriptures are being over tampered with.

[tgmexpertnot]

I disagree.... The inventions both inside and outside of the game of golf have improved the way everyone plays. Why shouldn't understanding and breaking down the swing and understanding exactly what is happening, and more important, why it is happening. Now, I don't have a full understanding of everything there is to a proper golf swing, but videotaping myself in high definition and using programs to slow things down to see exactly where I went wrong can't do anything but help improve someone's game.

You should know as well as anyone that "feel" in the swing isn't really what's going on. In order to make changes, you have to realize what you are doing, and then typically have to exaggerate the movement in order to "feel" the change.

We can't "invent" how to swing, but we can analyze faults in people's swing using such technology. All of the good changes in my game have come from seeing what I was doing wrong, not feeling what I was doing wrong. There's no way that I or most mid-handicappers can "feel" everything they do wrong. Some of my best feeling swings have resulted in the worst shots. By breaking down the swing into different quadrants, it allows us to work on one piece at a time and see the difference as we do small things right. Start with the big things and continue to improve from there.

This is where the proper instruction comes in. You can't just dump an entire swing theory on me in one lesson, I'll end up getting all screwed up and not hitting the ball at all. We start at the beginning and concentrate on one thing at a time, analyzing as we go. Once my take-away is where my instructor wants it, we'll add in one more thing. Small differences is all it takes to work towards those "over-complicated" swing patterns. You can't rebuild a swing overnight and dump all the info on a student, it's a process.