August's Golf tip
By Kati Biszantz
Aug 30, 2006, 09:21
Picture this – you are practicing your heart out without much success when the fellow next to you (significant other, friend, relative, etc) offers this unsolicited advice – “Keep your head down”. He then proceeds to dissect your swing and offer five more “tips”. You get lucky and actually make fairly solid contact with one of the tips thereby giving credibility to what has been said.
If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. I have seen a lot of golfers who think they are being helpful and are willing to pass along the latest tip they‘ve just read or what they are working on themselves. Unfortunately, it seems like the less skilled the player is, the more likely he is to share his ideas. Is this what you are looking for to improve your game? Is their swing what you want to model?
Unless you seek out advice from a certified Professional, you will be getting a lot of misinformation and while this is not brain surgery, it can certainly cause many months of frustration due to improper fundamentals and possibly cause you give the game up. I have had so many students coming to me as their last hope loaded with so many improper mechanical thoughts that they cannot even start the club back.
The golf swing is a sequence of related events – causes and effects. A qualified Instructor understands these does not just address the symptoms, called band-aid teaching, but provides advice for the long term. Even good players are not good teachers unless they have studied the swing and can communicate effectively. Good Instructors have studied with top teachers around the country and know ball flight laws, principles of teaching, formatting lessons, left and right-brainess in their students, and the many learning styles of all golfers. They can easily identify errors and have many ways of offering corrections in the form of drills and teaching aids as well as ideas on proper practicing.
If you happen to be that helpful person, the best advice you can ever give is to point them towards a certified Instructor who has a minimum 8-10 years teaching experience and has had extensive experience playing the game at a professional level.
Good Golfing.
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