Golf Instruction Blog

Woburn Golfer Wins Volvo Champions Amateur Pro Team Competition. 

I'd like to say a huge Well Done and Congratulations to Kevin Aherne who has just won the prestigious Volvo Champions Pro Am in Bahrain.  Paired with Paul Casey and Darren Clarke, 4 handicapper Kevin made 3 gross birdies and 2 net birdies to help the team to a 16 under par winning total.  Casey posted on Twitter after the round “Our Am Kevin was a legend.”

Kevin described the experience as “the most memorable of my golfing life”, adding “both Paul and Darren were fantastic, helping me on the greens and with club selection.  I was playing with two legends of the game, both were true gentlemen.”

Kevin has worked hard on his game over the past couple of years and thoroughly deserves all his success.  He has a very good natural golf swing, we have mainly worked on his posture, alignment, ball position, and swinging the club with good body rotation rather than with his hands and arms.  He does the simple things well, and it was no surprise to me that his game stood up so well under the pressure of playing with two Ryder Cup golfers.  Congratulations Kevin, you should be very proud of yourself.

You can read a full report on the tournament here.

Getting yourself into a good golf posture is one of the areas that I see many golfers having problems with.

This video shows you how to arrange your body to give you the best chance of making a good swing, and importantly how to make sure that you don't run the risk of injury when you are playing.

I’ve had a reasonable start to the winter season. I won the NPGA Pro Am at Kettering last month, shooting a one under par 68. I have played four of the winter Pro Ams at The Bedford GC, finishing 3rd twice. Despite the frost we managed to get the Thomson Tour event at Chesfield Downs played on Wednesday. The course was in really good condition for winter, and I shot a one under par 70 to finished tied 2nd, mainly relying on my short game and some good putting. Despite making 5 birdies I made 4 bad bogeys and wasn’t really happy with the way I hit the ball.

So, found some time to get in the studio yesterday evening. I’m much happier with the way my hips and legs are moving in the backswing now. I’m getting my weight nicely onto the right heel, and getting loaded properly into the right glute. On the downside, as I mentioned in a previous post I’ve always had a battle with my right arm coming away from my chest and getting too deep behind me in the backswing. From here I tend to throw the club over the top and can either hit a cut or a pull.

I watched the latest instruction video from RotarySwing.com which deals with getting the club from the takeaway position to the top of the backswing. There are a series of drills to do without the club and the ball which break the backswing down into its individual elements. After practicing each move for a few minutes, I noticed that the drills gave me a much flatter left wrist position than before, but the feeling that the clubface was massively shut at the top of the backswing. I was slightly incredulous at the time, as I couldn’t believe that this was 'correct', but after checking the position in the mirrors and then on the video, I could see that the ‘shut’ feeling, actually put the club in a much better position at the top of the swing.

             

This is one of the hardest things to overcome when learning, or indeed helping someone else to learn the swing, especially if an existing movement pattern is very well established. ‘Feel’ and ‘real’; that is what the golfer thinks is happening, and what is actually happening are often miles apart, leading to a lack of trust in the new movement, and a speedy reversion back to the old habit. This is why it is so important to use either mirrors or a video camera when making changes. Your eyes are perhaps the most reliable and trusted source of feedback, so it is vital to make the best use of them when you are learning. You need to see what is happening, and then be able to relate that to what you are feeling, as the feeling can often be deceptive.  The other key point is that it is much easier to make changes to a movement by breaking it down and practising without a club and definitely not by hitting golf balls.  The feedback you get from your eyes is much more reliable than the feedback you will get from a golf ball.

I’m writing this after reading Chuck Quinton’s excellent article about Ball flight teachers on the Rotary Swing blog.  This is perhaps the most common sense I’ve read in one place about the different approaches to teaching the golf swing.  Chuck was in turn responding to an email I received from another golf professional about a piece I wrote on this blog last month about changing my backswing by working in the studio, rather than hitting golf balls.

Chucks’ response is very black and white as it was addressing a specific issue; that of long term improvement.  Unless you have a clear understanding of the biomechanics of the golf swing, and work towards implementing them correctly, you will always be chasing your tail and putting Band Aids on top of Band Aids.   As we all know, you can make any golf swing work if you are very talented and hit enough golf balls.  Most of us do not have unlimited practice time and bundles of talent.  I believe there is a ‘best’ most efficient way to swing a golf club, and at present, Rotary Swing Tour is it.  Working towards this model is the route to long term success.

 However, in the ‘real world’ as we know, things are rarely black and white.  Varying shades of grey are much more common.   I suggest that as professionals we come across situations every day where the teacher and student together need to make a decision as to whether a Ball Flight lesson is required, or a Movement  lesson.   As a good teacher, I feel I should be able to do both.  The student is the customer, and unless I have the kind of relationship with the student where we can talk about what is happening in his or her game, what their immediate and long term plans are and can come to an agreement about exactly what direction we should take and when, I probably shouldn’t be teaching them.

 I had a typical situation with a student recently.  Steve is a very good player, a 1 handicap. He has a good, well grooved golf swing, but has a very shut clubface at the top of the swing and as a result, is prone to hooks and blocks and has trouble controlling his distances with short irons.  We started working together on RST in April, but made a decision to leave the major changes till after the season had finished.  We sorted out Steve’s strong grip, bad ball position and poor balance and posture and he has played some good golf this year, culminating in him reaching the final of his club Scratch Matchplay championship.  He came for a tune up lesson this week as he was hitting his wedges poorly, with a lack of distance control and the odd bad pull.  These are all symptoms of the shut clubface at the top of the swing.  But the last thing I want to do the week before an important match was to give a Movement lesson and have Steve going out and playing ‘Golf Swing’, rather than playing golf.

It was clear in this situation that a ball flight lesson was required.  I explained to Steve what I thought, and how his swing differed from the RST model, and what I wanted to do.  He agreed, so we got him set up slightly open with his wedges, to open the face slightly at address and move the ball forward, and to exaggerate the feeling he has anyway of holding the clubface off through the ball.  The result was what felt like a little fade with his wedges, the opposite of his natural drawing ball flight.  Due to the loft on the clubface the ball doesn’t actually move left to right in the air, just floats and sits which makes distance control easier and also gives some protection against the pull, the real problem shot with a short iron.  After 45 minutes practising this ball flight, Steve started to feel like he had much better control of his distances.  He will practice some more this week and I’m confident he will play well in his final.  On Sunday we will head into the studio and start work on the big issues in his swing, safe in the knowledge we have all winter to get them fixed and to get Steve feeling comfortable and confident before the season starts again in April.

One point which is often brought up as a justification for just teaching someone to change their ball flight, is that by changing the ball flight, the movement itself will change.  This has some validity.  If you teach a slicer to draw the ball, eventually the movement will change to allow the club to come more from the inside.  However, I’m not sure how efficient this method of learning is, or how lasting the changes will be.  I have the feeling that you would need to hit a huge number of golf shots to effect significant change,  I know from my own experience over the years that it wasn’t until I learned to move properly and understood the cause and effect relationship of movement of the body and movement of the club, that I really began to get control of my ball flight.

I am absolutely committed to RST as a swing model and a ‘Method’, for all the reasons that Chuck explains in great detail in the Blog and on the website.   My long term goal for myself and for every single one of my students is to help them swing as efficiently, correctly and safely as possible.  RST helps me understand what is going wrong in a golfer’s swing, understand the compensations which exist to allow the golfer to hit the ball well sometimes, and to plan and implement a programme of improvement. 

But at the same time, I still consider myself a tournament golfer, and I know how it is virtually impossible to play your best golf while thinking consciously about your swing.  Chuck’s Mushin Golf articles describe a great mindset to play well.  I just like to focus totally on the target and let the ball go to it.  There is a time and a place to work on the Movement, and a time and place to focus on just flighting the ball to the target.  It is up to the teacher and the student to communicate and come to a decision about the best way to proceed to ensure the student both enjoys his golf and improves his skills and technique in the long run.  As an RST instructor, I know I have the depth of knowledge and understanding to deliver the right lesson at the right time for all the people I work with.   As a Movement coach, I can give either type of lesson.  A ball flight coach is more limited in his options. 

I’ve been working hard on my own game over the past few weeks. I played poorly in the National Assistants at East Sussex National at the end of July and that gave me a real kick up the backside as I felt I was playing well going into the tournament.  On my good days I can play some really good stuff, but my ball striking is still too inconsistent, especially in tough conditions as was the case at East Sussex in the first round.  Despite some decent driving, I just wasn’t controlling my golf ball well enough with my irons.

I put myself on video when I got back and there were some things I really didn’t like.  My posture was sloppy, I wasn’t loading into my right glute and right heel in the backswing, my right arm was loose and away from my body, my transition was weak and I was sliding rather than turning in the downswing.   All of which was leading to big pulls with my irons, and weak cuts with my driver.

Here are a couple of pictures which show the issues.

  

My first point of call was my posture.  I needed to get sat back into my glutes and get my weight going down through my ankles. I then set to work on my backswing.   I have always had a problem sliding my hips to the right and getting onto the ball and the outside of my right foot.  It’s much better than it used to be before I started implementing Rotary Swing Tour principles, but it still creeps back in.

The main point I want to stress here is that I stopped hitting  golf balls when I was working on this. One of the main conclusions I have come to is that a golf ball is a very poor feedback device when it comes to gaining information as to whether you have made a good movement or not.  You can hit a pretty decent golf shot with a not very good golf swing, and you can shank it with a movement that is very close to perfect. 

You can draw a couple of conclusions from this.  This first might be that if that is the case, why work on the swing at all?  Work on your short game and putting and accept the bad shots and learn to recover from them.  It seems to work pretty well for Phil Mickelson.  I actually think this is a great plan for most amateur golfers, except for the fact that very few people want to learn about and work hard on their short game.  Everyone I talk to wants to hit long straight golf shots and to look good doing it.

This brings us to the second option; which is to work on the movement of the golf swing in a time and energy efficient way.  To cram as much learning into as short a time as possible, and to make that learning as durable as possible.  I promise you hitting golf balls is not the best way to learn the movement of the golf swing.  Hitting balls is useful to see what the results of the change in movement pattern might be, but it is nigh on impossible to actually make the changes while worrying about where the ball has gone.

Most of my time was spent without a club and a ball, in front of two mirrors, one in front and one down the line, making small movements, chunking the movements down, chaining them back up until I could feel and crucially, see in the mirrors exactly which parts of my body were doing what.  Once I could feel it, I picked up a club and went over the process again, watching the effect that small changes in body position would have on the relative positions of the shaft and the clubface.

I know a lot of people are struggling with the top of the backswing position, and maybe focusing on the right arm and shoulder elevation.  I thought it might be a lack of flexibility that was causing the problem.  As soon as I got the right heel in the ground and into the glute, the right arm just started behaving itself with no effort at all.  So if you are struggling with the movement of the arms, go back and make sure you have the weight shift and turn in the takeaway nailed down first.  If the body works properly, the arms will follow.

The key point for me is that if I hadn’t been using the mirrors, I wouldn’t have spotted this.  It was so obvious. Weight on the heel and in the glute, right arm in a good position.  Weight on the ball of the foot, right arm wings out and gets behind me.  Instant feedback.  For years I have been working on keeping the right arm tucked in.  I could have written a novel in the time I have spent hitting balls with a bloody glove in my right armpit.  What happens when the glove comes out?  The right arm flies away, because the problem isn’t the right arm, it’s the way the torso is moving over the hips.

 Here are a couple of pictures with my backswing starting to look somewhere near where I want it.  Next step is Move 3, the transition.

   

Happier with the turn and the weightshift in the backswing, still not getting fully onto the left heel at the start of the downswing.  More work required.

Here is a great explanation about how learning and teaching of the modern golf swing has evolved over the past 80 years
  

I guess this is the main reason.

 

and this.

 

If you would like to learn how to swing the golf club like Chuck, please get in touch using the Lesson Enquiry form.

Taking the club away from the ball is the crucial first movement in the golf swing.  This video shows how to do it correctly.



As Ben Hogan says in his famous book, 'The Modern Fundamentals of Golf,' the golf swing is a chain reaction.  The takeaway is the first link in the chain.  If you get this wrong, it is very hard to get the rest of the swing working properly.  If you get the takeaway working properly, the rest of the swing just flows.

In his book 'Understanding the Golf Swing', American teaching legend Manual De la Torre describes his superb approach to the mental side of golf. I'm tempted to reproduce his words verbatim, but I'll attempt to sum it up in the hope that you might want to get hold of a copy of the book yourself. I thoroughly recommend it.  De La Torre says 'Everything we do in life is done with some form of mental control. Without proper mental attitude, mental control and mental direction (conscious or subconscious) there can be no physical performance.'

'Muscles do not move on their own; they need to be stimulated in order to move. They have no brain, no mind, so they cannot have any memory. They simply do what they are told to do through our mental processes. To produce a certain specific movement, they must not only be stimulated for movement, but this stimulation must be directed so the muscles produce the movement desired. This direction and stimulation can only come from one source - our mind.'

Mental Attitude

According to De la Torre, there are three types of mental attitude golfers tend to adopt; positive, negative and corrective. A positive attitude is the one all golfers should cultivate, because it concerns itself with what the golfer should do, without any concern for doubts or possible failures. Knowing what to do and having total faith and trust in it, brings about a strong positive mental attitude, and a marked reduction in fear and anxiety. "This is what I will do, when I do it, I hit a perfect shot - my only concern is to execute it. "

'To have good, (positive) mental attitude, first of all we need understanding. Understanding of what we must do in order to produce a movement with the club that will propel the ball towards the desired target. Once we know this, the next step is to believe in it, have faith in it, and trust it. Without this trust the desired results will never be achieved.'

Needless to say, the other two mental attitudes are to be avoided. However, I will describe them here so you can identify them in case you ever start to slip into them, and hopefully avoid letting them take hold.

The golfer with a negative mindset always feels afraid and expects bad shots from his swing. He is always afraid that 'something bad is about to happen.' Rather than thinking about what he is going to do to make something good happen, they are concerned with not doing something, so that bad things don't happen. (If you haven't read the article about fear, please go and read it now.) So the player never has a plan of what needs to be done in order to succeed, since the plan is to prevent bad things from happening. In our normal life, no one makes a list of things they don't want to do today, or goes to the shop with a list of things they don't want to buy. We go with a positive attitude, with ideas of what we do want.

The other attitude is the corrective mindset. This golfer is always changing his swing as a reaction to the previous shot. When a shot is hit which is not satisfactory, the swing is blamed, and a change has to be made in the next swing to correct the next shot. Most players do not understand how the swing works, so the diagnosis is rarely correct and another problem may be created. As in the case of the negative attitude, consistency of performance is impossible, as the player is attempting something different on every swing.

"Players are constantly trying to groove their swing, but they never develop a grooved swing, until they first groove their thoughts through mental discipline...... This groove must be as narrow and as deep as possible, so it is extremely difficult to slip out of it. Once we have established this groove, our mind will provide the same stimulus to the muscles over and over again, so that through familiarisation it becomes easy for us to be repetitive in our actions."

When you know what it is you are doing, and how you are going to do it, you reduce the fear of the unknown, and you establish the positive mindset so crucial to playing your best golf.

Mental Direction

No matter what our abilities as a golfer, we all hit good and bad shots relative to that ability. When we hit a bad shot, most golfers first reaction is to blame the swing. Very rarely will the golfer question the mental direction he was giving to his body to produce that swing. If we set ourselves the task of driving to the supermarket, but somehow we end up at the golf club, do we blame the car and take it to the garage? It wasn't the car, but the mental direction that was at fault, and most of the time the same is true with our golf shots. In my experience, from my own game and of others, it is a lapse in mental direction which more often is the cause of bad swings and poor shots. The muscles that swing the golf club need the correct stimulation in order to produce the required movements. If your mind is not providing that direction and stimulation, then the result is unlikely to be what we were hoping for.

The absence of mental direction, or a change in that direction, is the reason so many players hit the ball well on the range, or in a lesson, but then cannot take those good shots out onto the course. The capability to make the swing is still there, but the mental direction has changed. Instead of the mind being closely focused on what is required to make a good swing, it becomes distracted by thoughts of the score, or distance, or the hazards or playing partners, or a dozen other things. Everything we learn is with one purpose in mind. To perform on the golf course so our scores are what we would wish them to be. There should be no change in mental direction when we go from the practice ground to the golf course. You must continue to direct the muscles in the same way.

We are perhaps at our most susceptible when we are hitting the ball well during a lesson or practice session. As De la Torre says, the idea that "I have it now" is a dangerous one, because it is the first sign of what he calls "the deterioration in the mental direction". The player starts to produce a movement with little or no conscious thought, believing perhaps that 'muscle memory' will take care of the swing. Unfortunately, the muscles have no memory, and while they may perform adequately for a time, soon variations begin to creep in. Even more damaging is the vacuum that this lack of correct mental direction leaves, usually to be filled by thoughts which do nothing to help us hit the ball where we want to hit it.

As Manuel De la Torre says, "No one, professional or amateur, can produce a swing through reflex and subconscious alone and have it last. If this could be accomplished, touring professionals would never get off their games or miss a shot, yet they do. In spite of the hours of practice and the rounds they play, their golf swing must be produced with with good awareness and strong mental direction."

So, to play our best golf, regardless of whether we are on the practice ground, playing a social round with friends, or playing the 18th hole in a round which means a lot to us, our mental approach should be exactly the same.

1. Know what your basic concept is; what you want to do. (Positive mental attitude).

2. Produce that concept through strong mental direction.

3. Be aware that you are doing what you want to be doing, while you are doing it, (this is focus, or concentration). You didn't do it, unless you know you did it. Observe yourself! Be aware!

If you know your swing, observe yourself, and remain aware of producing that swing, you will not allow any strange interferences to creep into the movement.

Awareness

If there is one are where most golfers could improve it is in being truly aware of what they are doing while they are doing it. Most of the time their heads are full of extraneous thoughts and distractions, with the task of setting up the body and hitting the golf ball left to the subconscious mind. Often, when I ask a student what he was thinking of at a certain point in the set up procedure or the swing, he can't tell me. In order to provide the mental direction that the muscles need to perform properly, you need to be aware of what you want to do, aware of what you are actually doing, and aware of how the two match up. The body can perform on a subconscious level, but it is much more efficient when full awareness and attention is given to the task at hand, allowing the subconscious to operate in the background. If the conscious mind is distracted by negative or irrelevant thoughts, the subconscious has to run the whole show, rather than operate on the level of fine detail and fine tuning at which it excels. Remember, if you did it, but you didn't know you did it, or know how you did it, you haven't done it. Observe yourself with full attention. Be aware!

Turning theory into practice

The biggest problem most golfers face is not not knowing what to do, it's doing it. We all know we need to hold the club correctly, and after some tuition, most of us know how to do it. So why do we not do it? We have the knowledge. The areas that most people start to lose it on are their mental attitude, having strong mental direction, and weakest of all, have awareness of what they are doing when they are doing it. We seem to be so distracted by the task of hitting the shot (or by thinking about the result) that we 'forget' to do what we need to do in order for that shot to be a success.

With these principles and problems in mind, it is vital that we build a pre shot sequence to help ensure we adhere to them whenever we swing a club, whether it is on the range or on the golf course.