Golf tips and drills won't bring you skills...

..but games should do it nicely.

We can't really have fun as we improve...can we?

Let me see if this sounds familiar...

How to fix your swing?

After another frustrating round, you start looking for answers.

The quest begins; you scour golf magazines, search the internet and take advice from anyone who offers. There are long sessions at the range scraping over ball after ball, enduring the pitying gaze of other golfers. Doubt floods in and you start to worry you'll never get it.

And then.

Something clicks. You find the "magic" tip. Suddenly you start to enjoy things again. Confidence returns. Golf is fun once more. You're so delighted you share your discovery with anyone who'll listen. You really feel that you've got it.

Haven't you?

Sadly, you don't. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when things start to slip, but they do. Not to worry, all you have to do is to reapply the magic tip...isn't it? But, much like a sitcom in its fourth season, the magic has gone. An unpalatable truth lies before you.

Your improvement occurred in spite of the tip, not because of it.

It's the boom & bust of tips and drills. The bogus focus on the golf swing as the sum total of golf improvement. A cycle that can repeat in perpetuity, or at least until you throw your clubs into the darkest recesses of your garage.

Frustration is the only guarantee of this approach. I know because I've been there.

This obviously isn't the case when we see a PGA pro. At least then the advice is individualised and fitted to your swing...isn't it?

Not necessarily. Some professionals are married to teaching a system, rather than focusing what an individual might already have. I'm not a golf instructor, so I'm loathe to criticise. However, I'm dubious a complete swing rebuild is what most amateur golfers want or need. Might the frustrations arising from this contribute to the number of golfers leaving the sport each year? It's certainly not a route that I'll be going down.

Or your professional may be keen on video analysis. Again, this is something I'm not sure is as helpful as they may believe. I'm not alone in this; Michael Hebron at Neuro Learning Golf, the Instinctive Golf team and Marc Solomon of Golf Made Simple are prominent doubters.

I started dabbling with golf during an illness enforced absence from work. Progress was slow, but addiction came quickly. I started following the course I've outlined above, peppered with the occasional half hour range lesson. As a return to work loomed I fretted that my hard won skills would dissipate.

But they didn't.

In fact they started developing faster than I'd dared to dream.

Some of this was a matter of reaching the threshold where the ball flew as intended that crucial bit more often...and some was due to sitting down and committing to fitting golf around work and family life.

Some of my development was down to these factors. Some, but certainly not most.

I changed how I practised.

I'd already invested quite some time listening to the Golf Smarter podcast. I'd been very impressed by a number of coaches who appeared to be advocating a paradigm shift in instruction. They wanted to move away from golf's prevalent culture and its limitations. One of their main ideas was to stop the golfer playing "golf swing" and instead get that golfer playing golf. To achieve this, they suggested that golfers start to "practice like they play". This made a lot of sense.

Why should we practice like we play?

Not long before Mrs Geek & I got married, we completed an Advanced Life Support course. This was a very busy course, covering everything from how to press on the chest through passing a tube into the larynx up to delivering the patient to Intensive Care, all over a period of 3 days. It was a mixed group of participants with differing knowledge bases, so the course had a lot of ground to cover.

What's interesting is how this was done. There was a course handbook to be read before we started, then a few lectures and a quick recap of the basics on the first day. But most of the course was running through carefully crafted scenarios designed to cover all of the relevant information.

Repeated simulation of real situations formed the basis of instruction.

The scenarios started off basic, but by the end they were getting more and more complex. The instructors were all excellent at creating and maintaining the correct atmosphere, to the point where you'd feel a genuine pang of sadness any time the dummy "died". As I'm a robust soul and had made no secret of my desire to be an instructor, my scenarios were most complex of all by the end of the course; they even had me trying to manage a situation where a pregnant woman had collapsed into a swimming pool after taking illegal drugs! It was a relief to discover the final test was a bit more straightforward, whilst still covering all of the necessary areas.

It's very different to how golf is traditionally taught.

If we'd been teaching these skills as golf is traditionally taught, we'd probably still be there. We'd be looking at slow motion replays comparing a candidate's chest compressions to an instructors, or flicking through magazines to see how to get the angle of the laryngoscope perfect.

Instead we ran through the algorhythms so often I could recite them in my sleep, and did so in situations far more complex than we would typically see. This led to a much greater understanding of what to do and how to do it. And it worked for everyone, not just those with the greatest knowledge base and experience. One of the best things was how egalitarian it was, putting nurses, doctors and paramedics on an equal footing.

Most of all, it was a lot of fun.

It's pretty obvious it's different from the traditional paradigm of golf instruction. There's good reason for this. It's an internationally recognised qualification which is paid for by the taxpayer. Almost all of the participants were government employees undertaking paid study time. It's also, as you can imagine, an important thing to get right. The course therefore has a huge responsibility to educate participants fully and in the most efficient way. It's essential the education is both efficient and sufficient. I've never heard anyone who's been on one of these courses dismiss it as worthless.

How does this relate to golf?

If repeated simulation of real life scenarios is an effective way to teach health professionals vital skills, then surely it's an effective way to learn golf? It's certainly improved my game and revolutionised my practice. Instead of aimlessly thwacking balls out into the range before scraping over another ball to hit it in the same general direction with the same club, I'm using special shot challenges which challenge me to hit specific shots to order. This is learning how to control the club, which in time will lead to mastery. Done properly, it makes the range a lot closer to the course. This makes it easier to take your "range game" to the course- a frequent lament of golfers. Quite apart from all of that, it makes practice a lot more fun, which is great for those of us who can't always find the time to play 18 but can squeeze in 40 minutes of practice.

Choose your coaches wisely.

A good coach is wonderful to watch in action. I spent a long time looking for my current coaching team, and I couldn't be happier. Their group sessions are very similar to that life support course. There's a brief discussion of the theory behind the desired actions, a run through the basics and thence to repeated simulation of "in-game" scenarios. This often progresses to harder than usual situations, or the deliberate inclusion of pressure (e.g. make x consecutive shots from y feet). Add in a bit of friendly competition and you have an excellent environment for sporting growth that's fair, fun and fit for purpose.

Increased fun, decreased frustration and the confidence that time spent practising will lead to on course improvement. What's not to love?

Let me know your thoughts. You can catch me on Twitter, but did you know that people who comment on blog posts have a 42% greater chance of being thought attractive by the opposite sex?*

*sadly, this isn't true. But it should be. And I really like what you've done with your hair today.

Are you Lost In Space?

The remedy is already in your possession.

Imagine you had a state of the art device which could revolutionise your golf. This device would require some calibration, a brief period of trial and error but after this would be the single most important tool at your disposal. It would be easy to use, cheap to run and best of all would be absolutely free.

You'd use it constantly...wouldn't you?

After all, you'd be crazy to pass up something like this. Why on earth would anyone not want to use it?

And yet most of us completely fail to realise such a system is already in our possession.

It's even thought to be older than our sense of smell.

You can't hear what it's telling you because you've forgotten how to listen and it's hurting your golf game.

It's not the sense that tells your arse from your elbow; instead it gives scrupulously precise information on where your arse is relative to your elbow. It's vital for any pursuit that involves moving any part of the body whilst looking elsewhere.

It's the awareness of the body's posture both at rest and on the move, arising from nerve sensors inside our muscles, tendons and joints. Often known as kinaesthesia or proprioception, it doesn't matter what you call it. Just learn to listen to what it's telling you.

Cultivating our awareness of this sense accelerates acquisition of motor skills. How often have you had a swing lesson, spent some time at the range working on what you thought you should be doing only to find at the next lesson you've got it wrong? Would it not be easier to remember the positions our body should be in when we're aware of how those positions feel? Are we not more likely to be able to repeat the great shot we just hit if we train our position sense to analyse and record the movement? Positional awareness is crucial should we wish to influence any complex sequence of movements.

We have in our possession a complex sense more remarkable than any GPS system and yet we're happy to spend significant amounts on gadgets whilst neglecting our intrinsic hardware. Which of these do you think has more potential to improve your golf?

Once again, I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Thanks for reading!

Go with the flow and you'll feel like a Pro

Is your shot routine a well-oiled machine?

Think of the last professional golf event you watched. Think of the final round where the TV cameras take more time over the players in contention, rather than jumping around with televisual attention deficit disorder. Think of all the times you watched players complete their shot routine. Now think of the last time you played and the routines you saw out on the course.

Imagine someone has taken the trouble to motion capture the shot routine of the entire gamut of golfers, showing them from initial planning until the initiation of the back swing. Do you think that you would be able to tell the professional from the amateur? The single digit handicap from the lucky-if-he's-28?

I'm confident it'd be obvious to anyone who took the time to look. Even if all of the golfers were replaced with a CGI Tiger Woods.

It all comes down to flow.

This dawned on me recently. I found myself behind some novice golfers during a practice round. Their skill level was immediately apparent, even from 250 yards down the fairway. The time they took over the ball was remarkable; it was obvious they were trying to consciously control every part of their swing. There were too many practice swings to count, and then a very long pause before the backswing started with a jerk and a wobble.

Please don't misunderstand my reason for mentioning this. I wasn't harrumphing about the delay, I didn't put my bitch wings up or stride forward to remonstrate.

Instead I watched, waited and pondered. It really wasn't that long ago that I was there, 18 months at most. My last attempt at a medal round has also shown that I still need to be on my guard. If I'm not playing at my best I have a tendency to slow down and try to think my way through my swing. To date, this has never made the situation any better and usually makes it worse.

Think about it - have you found yourself thinking how to do something that's usually automatic and ended up making a mess of it?

As a student, I had a lecture on the anatomy of walking - a pretty interesting topic, not least because computerised analysis of gait patterns was just starting to be used. (I'm showing my age here; we've now reached the stage when similar technology is being used to analyse the biomechanics of the golf swing).

The really fascinating thing is what happened after the lecture. Not one of us was able to walk comfortably. We were clumsily stumbling, bumping into each other as we tried to consciously control something we hadn't thought about for years. I'll never forget the smile on the lecturer's face.

So if trying to consciously control something as fundamental as walking is a disaster, what then are the chances of consciously controlling our swing leading to a good result?

I was practising chipping a couple of weeks ago, working on trying to get balls into a laundry basket. I realised that my best shots were coming when I set up and swung with swiftly unhurried efficiency. These swings were not rushed, but I'd be focused on my target, swing my eyes back to the ball, feel settled (I thought of it as "half a heartbeat", the lub of the lub-dub) then starting the swing. Once again the focus was on propelling the appropriate amount of energy to the target letting the back swing take care of itself. This was very successful, and results improved still further as I concentrated on making the routine flow as slickly as possible.

In other words, I start my swing before I start thinking. The flowing rhythm through the routine allows me to swing reflexively, with my feeling brain rather than under the clumsy control of the higher or thinking brain. Don't get me wrong, the thinking brain has a role in golf, but it's limited to the initial planning phase of the shot routine. It quickly analyses the factors affecting any given shot along with calculating which shot characteristics give the best chance for success. It then decides on the shot, the club and the aim, before handing over the baton to the feeling brain.

Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson at VISION54 probably characterise this best with their Think Box/Play Box concept, going so far as to encourage their players to put down a marker as a decision line whilst rehearsing so that they get used to the discipline of moving from thinking to feeling, of making the decision and then committing to it.

I've struggled with this a bit, as my thinking brain is used to calling all the shots. It's hovering in the background like an IT consultant watching their technophobic partner on the Internet, just dying for the slightest opportunity to take over. By flowing into the routine and executing the shot with swiftly unhurried efficiency, my feeling brain can execute the shot before the thinking brain has even realised what's happened and is still filled with thoughts of the target, by far the most useful place for most if not all of us to park our conscious attention. What do you think most tour professionals are thinking of when they swing? I'm certain that focusing my attention on this area over the winter will yield better results than trying to perfect how I swing a club.

What about you? Is your routine the well oiled machine of the low handicappers at your club? Is it consistent and fluid, running freely from behind the ball to your follow through? Or are you, trying too hard to swing the club precisely through the latest positions in Golf Monthly, or constantly trying to learn how to swing during a round? Can you identify with my experience above?

If you can, why not try it next time you're mucking about chipping. Pick the target, swivel eyes back to ball, tiny pause...then go. Watch the results. Try it at the range if it works in your short game.

It might just be an easy way to look, feel and ultimately play more like a pro.

This is what I'm going to be working on this winter. If you're intrigued and think it might helpful, please give it a go. Please let me know if and how it works for you.

(This post was a re-working of a post that didn't quite work. I'm working through PushingSocial's keys to spectacular blog posts. I can heartily recommend this program and their excellent content. If you're blogging and are new to the game or looking for a way to tzuj up your content, check them out)