A Conversation About Lessons and Practice

[iacas]

An occasional student (a few lessons a year, great guy, retired, LOVES golf) messaged me today, and I'm going to share the conversation (with his permission), and then try to wrap some things up at the end.

The conversation occurs between the horizontal rules:

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Student: Erik, need some advice.

First off I’ve taken a lot of lessons from many different people and even went to the Pinehurst Golf Academy. The lessons I’ve done with you seem to have helped me the best but I am still very inconsistent. One day I think I have a good feel and then the next I can’t find it.

My thought here is that it’s my fault because I guess I’m not applying what I’ve learned properly - I don’t know but I’m the one swinging the club.

My question is what do you suggest I do to get more consistent? Just more lessons? Start my swing over from scratch and pretend I’ve never touched a club?

I’m not one of those 20+ handicappers that someone looks at and says to themselves “no matter what I say he’s never getting any better” . I’ve had rounds in the 70’s. I know it’s in me. I’m just getting frustrated and want to find the best way to get consistent without throwing money down the drain.

Me: I’ll be home soon and can reply on my computer.

Student: Take your time. It’s already happened this year lol. Was out a few weeks ago striking every club great. That held up for like three rounds and now I can barely hit the ball. I know swing thoughts come and go but it shouldn’t be to those extremes over such a short period.

Me: Okay, so… if you’re okay with it, I’m going to be pretty direct here. That okay?

Student: That’s what I need

Me: First, thanks for what you said about how my lessons have helped the most. I appreciate it.

Now, when I think of you, and your game, and the lessons we’ve had, and what I saw on the range the other day… etc. You as a golfer, and a student, I see someone with some skills, enough speed to play good golf, etc. For sure.

What I also see is someone who, even during our lessons, has their mind going a mile a minute and is constantly looking to find a “reason” for every shot. I see someone who wants to progress far more rapidly than is possible by any person.

You’ll have a lesson one day, and two days later you’ll tell me how that thing helped but what really let you play well on the back nine was such and such other thing.

I think two things apply most to you (there are some other smaller things, but these are the big two):

1. You don’t practice or work on the “piece” you’re given at a slow enough pace, with short enough swings, or do your drills, for anywhere near long enough. Changing a habit is hard. Your golf swing looks more like what it did three years ago than I’d have liked.
2. You search for a reason for EVERY bad shot, and often switch gears or tracks or feels or swing thoughts all the time. This ties into #1 again, but consider Tiger. Game’s best, and yes, his margin of error is much smaller. But it took him a year + to get what appear to us to be pretty small changes.

If I was to give you tough love, it’d be something like that. I’d make you practice better, stop jumping from thought to thought, feel to feel, band-aid to band-aid. Even during a lesson you’ll say “what I did on that one was…”

It’s pretty common, all of that stuff. But you’re toward the upper ends of that type of person, for sure.

People often think “if I understand something, I can do it” but that’s not how learned muscle patterns work. Understanding is the first step of many, and people learn best, generally, by working slowly and deliberately.

Student: I think you’re pretty accurate there with just about everything that’s why I asked you the question because we know each other pretty well and I knew you’d give it to me straight.

Me: If you said you’d give me $100k if you can become a 4 handicap, we’d mostly work on only a few technical things, and we’d practice deliberately a BUNCH.

We’d emphasize a post-shot routine which, most of the time, would be to just throw away a shot and not think about it until there’s a very clear pattern, and even then we’d apply the simplest correction to get to the end of the round.

I appreciate that you could take that in the way in which it’s intended - to try to help you out.

Some free advice is this: when your game stinks, it doesn’t do you any good to go to the range and make full speed full swings. I’d go to the range and chip a 7I 50 yards, and see if I’m getting good contact with that. Then 70. Etc.

Me: My daughter usually draws the ball. Lately she’s been leaving the face open, so the ball starts too far right. She hit enough "right" balls that didn't draw or even cut a little that she instinctively started to swing left a bit to “pull” the ball. Which isn't her pattern, and that just makes it fade, of course. Which she hates. Plus, since it wasn't her pattern, her contact suffered, her timing and distances were off, etc.

Before she could get too far off the rails (she was still easily shooting in the 70s doing this), I told her to take her 7I, go to the range, change her grip in a certain small way, and then to do a thing in her swing that closes the face properly… and then to make EVERY ball do two things: 1) pull, and 2) hook or at least draw.

But every ball had to both START LEFT and CURVE LEFT. Every ball.

Then to slowly ramp up the speed. Because she’ll have less time to do the wrist stuff, every ball will start left but not as much. And they should all still draw.

I told her that when it came time to play, to do the grip, to do that thing… but also to just set the face slightly right. That way the ball starts slightly right and (likely) still draws.

By making every ball start left, she’s forcing her body to keep swinging out to the right. It’s been a week. She’s up to about 70% of her usual distances on the range now. And she’s a scratch golfer whose swing path or face was getting 3-5° off, max.

She has played a bit in the meantime, so it’s not like she’s ONLY gone to the range. Just that when she has, I've asked her to do ONLY this. To be deliberate about it. Because that will be what gets her where she wants to go the fastest.

You can get more out of fifteen minutes of deliberate practice than two hours of whatever you were doing on Tuesday.

Student: The 7i 50 yards is the kind of stuff I don’t do. I guess I just need to get some of those drills like that and just do them without thinking.

Me: She hits it much shorter than you, of course. 😃

No, you do them WITH thinking! 😊

Read that topic (the first post, mostly). The point of practice is to have “success,” but success isn’t just “hitting the ball awesome and far.” Success is “did you learn, did you change the pattern much?”

Me: “Did every ball start left and curve left?” I asked her. For example.

Student: I know I said before I scored this and I scored that but to be honest I’d rather hit the ball well and not worry about the score because if you hit it well the scores come.

Me: Yeah. I always just try to hit good golf shots. Sometimes I’m more satisfied with a 76 than a 71.

Student: So what do you suggest I’ll do whatever I need to in whatever manner I need too.

Me: What I’d do if I were you right now is this…

1. Go back to look at the old lessons I gave you. Maybe not too far back, but you’ll see some commonalities in what we’ve talked about.
2. If you want, ask me any specific questions about them. Some of the notes or “feels” may not make sense now because you forgot the context.
3. Read the Five S Words topic and go to the range with those in mind. You can get more out of 20 minutes of deliberate practice hitting 25 balls than 18 holes or 2 hours on the range.
4. Let me know how it’s going. Next week after conference championships I can add you to CoachNow if you wanted to have me be a sort of a "trainer type" to keep you accountable.

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I almost added this conversation to the Five S Words topic, or to the "Stop Conning Yourself" topic.

But I think there's value in seeing it here, separately, as a topic.

I think a lot more of us are a lot more like this Student than we're willing to admit. Hell, I fall into this trap sometimes. I then berate myself for being stupid, and fortunately it doesn't happen too often (I also don't get as much time to practice as some, so it may happen more if I practiced longer!).

What do you think? Are you like the Student above? Do you know people who are?

[woodzie264]

I definitely fit into that category where if I think I can understand something, then I can just fix it (without all of that deliberate practice stuff) 😜  but working through a few of my PP’s over the past couple of years have proved me wrong 

[mdl]

Awesome topic.

My wife got me video lessons for my birthday last year. Every other week for 8 lessons. I was hitting only in the net in my back yard so it was easy to ignore the terrible ball striking while making big changes. It took me 4-6 weeks just to clean up my back swing to the point where I could film my swing while thinking about some other issue and my back swing didn't back slide significantly in one way or another.

Then I moved on to dropping my hands and getting shallow from the top rather than yanking my hands towards the ball (not literally, but ~on that line from the DTL view) and getting super steep. I was practicing obsessively. Almost every day, often for an hour+. Always at least 30min. Lots of pause swings. Slow swings. Partial swings. Film maybe every 5th swing. It took me a month to be able to do it reliably even ugly where I was clearly just manually forcing/directing my hands to put the club in the positions I wanted. I'd say it took me ~3 months before upper body looked reasonably like I wanted from A4 to A6 and it felt natural. And it still drifts and is something I have to stay on top of and check on film and do pump drills and the like to keep it.

[boogielicious]

I definitely have to work at having the discipline to focus on slow, specific practice. Sometimes in a session, it may only be 10 minutes before I need a break. Other times it can go for a while. It is so easy to just hit balls and fall back into bad habits. This is why I try and mix it up. I’ll do 10-15 minutes of PP drills and work on the feels. These are the 5S drills and sometimes the contact stinks, but when I see the film, the change is happening. Then I may move on to another piece. But it does take a lot of discipline.

[dennyjones]

This strikes home with me.    thanks for this thread.   much needed, much appreciated.

[billchao]

While I do get lazy with practicing correctly at times, I feel like I’m almost the opposite of this student. I don’t think enough. Often I’ll mishit a ball and have absolutely no explanation for it. It’s very difficult to make small adjustments on the course if I don’t know what I should be doing differently.

[TourSpoon]

After years of chasing the holy grail I finally had a realization that golf takes time. If I cannot be patient enough to nail down priority #1 then going to #2 is futile. So for the last month its set-up and hip rotation on the wall.  Every day. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars. It doesn't work that way. 

Thanks for sharing the honest feedback. It takes time. 

[iacas]

An update to the conversation:

Student: Can't thank you enough. Just had my best range session in a long time. Also short and not a lot of balls. Went through our lessons and focused on my down swing path and hitting ball first with half to 3/4 swings.

[nandersen]

This might be too on the nose. Please add a Trigger Warning for those of us with big egos.

[colin007]

I'm not only the student....I'm the president of the student association!

 

[nevets88]

I think sometimes I might overdo the slow bit. You have to swing slow enough that all the swing dynamics, the flowing nature of it is there. Exaggerate too slow, for me, it's the second half of the swing, and you're not really practicing what you want to practice I think.

Also, maybe when everyone around you is machine gunning balls, drawing from 2 giant buckets, it may make you go faster, harder to concentrate. I've found practicing more often with fewer balls is way better than hitting 300 in one go a week.

[nandersen]

1 minute ago, nevets88 said:

I think sometimes I might overdo the slow bit. You have to swing slow enough that all the swing dynamics, the flowing nature of it is there. Exaggerate too slow, for me, it's the second half of the swing, and you're not really practicing what you want to practice I think.

Also, maybe when everyone around you is machine gunning balls, drawing from 2 giant buckets, it may make you go faster, harder to concentrate. I've found practicing more often with fewer balls is way better than hitting 300 in one go a week.

It's funny- when I was starting to play golf, I used to fire through two jumbo (120+?) buckets in 45 minutes and wonder why I was done early. Now I'll split a large (~90) with a friend, hit maybe 30-40 of them in an hour, he'll hit the rest. Take my time setting up, getting the grip, aligning, checking it out, etc.

 

A while back I saw an unedited video of Xander Schauffle on the range at Kapalua (wish I could find it again). I think his fastest time between shots was 45 seconds (if even that fast). Every shot was set up, aligned, checked alignment with pointing the arm downrange, practice waggle, etc, swing. I'd like to someday be this slow.

[boogielicious]

14 hours ago, nevets88 said:

Also, maybe when everyone around you is machine gunning balls, drawing from 2 giant buckets, it may make you go faster, harder to concentrate.

I agree with this. If it’s crowded, I really have to focus on what I’m doing.

[nevets88]

Maybe there's a market for like an AI practice babysitter app to make sure you're on track during a practice session? Or gamfication?

[Darkfrog]

I struggle with the slow part. Yesterday I was working on new backswing priority piece, and I started off making what felt like a 75% speed swing. The swing speed from the launch monitor was only about 3mph slower than a regular swing. I did it again, and it was the same. If I wasn't in a practice bay with a launch monitor, I would have thought I was going at the speed I perceived, but I was actually going way too fast.

[JGus]

I'm a little late to this, but I align pretty closely with this student.  My main struggle is tinkering, mainly with my transition as one will work one day but not the next, so I change it until it works, at least works to get me around the golf course. 

But late last year after getting my new irons and moving into this year, I have tried to slow things down on the range and focus on one thing at a time, which has helped, but it is a constant battle with myself to stick with it.

But will also add that I have taken 3 separate lessons the past few years, and nothing against the folks I went to, but they were not the right fit for me.  It could be said that it is probably me, and I probably couldn't put up much of a defense, but I think you have to somewhat gel with the instructor to buy into what they are saying.

[uitar9]

Because of covid, I have chosen to stay away from driving ranges. Just my choice.

But kept up with indoor super slo swings all through the winter. Sometimes 50, usually 10-20 swings, daily. 

Its really helping me know and keep , where my club face is at impact. Just concentrating on the basics.

Been out this season maybe 8 times. 6 9's and 2 18's. The last two rounds, feeling like the rust is off. 

Managed  6 over on the last 9. My only goal, to eliminate triples and strategically manage doubles.

and try to turn my brain off when I'm setting up and hitting

 

 

[iacas]

FWIW, April 15:

Can't thank you enough. Just had my best range session in a long time. Also short and not a lot of balls. Went through our lessons and focused on my downswing path and hitting ball first with half to 3/4 swings.

And May 6:

Just wanted to let you know things are still going well. I'm still working on my downswing path and striking the ball first (things we worked on in my lessons) and it continues to improve. My range sessions are now like 45 minutes when in the past they could be two hours or more. My GHIN index has dropped almost 3 points!!