Thoughts on "Immediate Improvement"

[iacas]

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What do you think?

And, as always, disagree with me if you want. Be honest. Say what you think. Just bear in mind that this is a nuanced discussion.

And…

[Jeff Covelli]

Tour pros hit thousands of balls a week EVERY week looking for gratification.  Look at Jordan Speith and the overhaul he’s in the middle of…..this past week he was gratified on Thursday but not so much on Friday.  He’s been working on his changes for a year and still searching.  That is inherent in all of us that strive to get better.  Making exaggerated moves to improve or get away from bad habits take time, often t leading to worse results at first.  Trust in your qualified teacher (like Erik) you’ll gain trust in yourself and the benefits will come.  Hitting hundreds and hundreds of balls is part of the process to changing muscle memory.  Nothing worthwhile comes fast or easy. 

[saevel25]

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I believe if the info you are getting is correct you should see immediate improvement. However, as it says most feel they are performing the change but they aren’t. The biggest cause for regression is that the swing thoughts ruin the fluidity and clear mind needed for good golf.

I see a problem with this. The info might be correct, but that does not mean the body will respond how we want. 

Example, you tell a golfer they need to do X. Doing X will improve their swing. Yet, they could make 100 golf swings, saying they are doing X but video or GEARS will say they are not. 

There can be translation errors between what needs to be done, and what the golf actually has to do. Like anything in life, trial and error is what is needed to get things figured out. 

He seems to be talking like he will know all the variables, even how the student's own mind and body will perceive the motion he is trying to teach. 

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It doesn’t have to be that way sorry. I’ve seen you change guys in one lesson. Why would I take my car in and get it broken more before fixing it? If you have to get worse before better everytime who the fu!k would sign up for that? A tour player could lose his card.

It is easier to get a golfer to change the image in a lesson than it is for them to then go out and produce that amount of change on their own when they head off into the wide world. The keen of an instruction is invaluable, but it also takes a "good" student to take what the instructor has given them and stay the course so they see improvement. 

We are not talking about tour players, we are talking about all golfers. Yes, sometimes you need to take things down to the studs to build it back up. Some people love the game so much to do that. Who are you to say they don't want to give that journey a try. 

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That’s just a teachers excuse to cover his ass! We should ONLY get paid for improvement .

No it isn't. 

I bet he accepted plenty of payments for lessons and the golfers didn't improve over the long term. Odds are, there are plenty of golfers who didn't train hard enough to raise their baseline. 

 

[boogielicious]

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Me: Hi. I’m a new guitar player and just bought this electric guitar. Can you teach me to play Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption in one lesson? If I can’t play it by the end of the hour, you won’t get paid.

Teacher:

Sounds like the griping of someone who doesn’t want to put in the work to improve. The analogy of fixing a car is comically horrible. I’m certain it took Kevin Roman a year to learn how to poop in a toilet.

[klineka]

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That’s just a teachers excuse to cover his ass! We should ONLY get paid for improvement .

Absolute nonsense. If he truly believes that then he should start charging people if and only if their scoring average decreases or their handicap goes down after seeing him for lessons.

You go see him for a 5 lesson package and your handicap goes up? No need to pay him, because after all, he should only get paid for improvement, right?

[iacas]

[saevel25]

From my perspective, the search for immediate improvement is bad for long term gains. Expectations should be set and understood by the golfer. 

 

 

[iacas]

Kevin never defined "better" or "worse" or "immediate." He didn't really define anything.

And the car analogies are really bad.

[GolfLug]

13 hours ago, iacas said:

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What do you think?

And, as always, disagree with me if you want. Be honest. Say what you think. Just bear in mind that this is a nuanced discussion.

And…

Welp.. my two cents, but a rank beginner is white knuckling the grip is barely making contact let alone good one should in most cases walk out with some improvement. 

But someone like me who is a mid-capper who has for 15 years hit by throwing the clubhead at the ball with and does it somewhat competently with compensations, the undoing and re-doing is a huge system difference and for a moment will hit block slices and push hooks until turn-rates catch up (just an example).

It's a different set of match-ups in a lot of cases like mine I think.. Bit unreasonable to think I can walk out from a lesson with all cleaned up or even better immediately. 

[colin007]

Are there some lessons or changes that will result in immediate improvement?

[JetFan1983]

25 minutes ago, colin007 said:

Are there some lessons or changes that will result in immediate improvement?

Setup changes such as alignments (shoulders too open for example), ball position (too far forward, too far back, too close, too far away), balance points in the feet (getting weight out of the heels)... fixing any of these tends to make a person hit it better right away. Grip changes can too, though I think people can struggle in the short term with a grip change more often than most setup changes.

And sometimes someone can hit it better right away with a change to the motion itself. Typically though, some things are just so wired in with our swings, changing one small thing can take a while, if ever.

[mchepp]

I am worried he is just doing some grandstanding at the expense of your thoughtful and clear argument. The car analogy is bullsh*t. The 20 pack lesson, is awfully rare in the coaching industry anymore. If you ever run into a coach trying to sell that we have all been trained to avoid it. It is the old used car salesman trope. 

My feeling is that he isn't responding to a thoughtful argument, but just saying things people want to hear or old-timey tropes that are not really indicative of the industry any more. 

Personally, I really like the direction coaching has gone. It is probably one of the few places where social media (specifically video) has really improved an industry. The challenge now is finding meaningful information for the you as an individual. There is SO much information now, much of it will lead you down the wrong path. Best to find someone who can help you deifier the important bits for you, and even better if they live near you so they can put you in the right positions to "feel" the change.  

[Big Lex]

There are so many pitfalls in semantics, and in general in trying to argue things on Twitter or on online forums. So in deference to Roman, I get the general idea, the "spirit" of what he is saying, maybe, in that the teacher should be focused on making a student improve, no matter what it takes, and shouldn't be satisfied (or expect the student be satisfied) with anything less than "improvement." But there are reasonable limits to the amount and the pace of improvement. 

But how to you define improvement? Does that mean hitting it better at the end of the lesson than you did at the beginning? I think this is a pretty easy task for most teachers, if that is their goal. But what does that get us? Not much, I don't think. Making real improvement, the durable kind that lasts, requires you learning something until it is instinctual; for a complex motion, I define instinctual as something you've learned to the level at which you can execute it reasonably correctly most or all of the time, without having to think about it. And to make it even harder, quite often, building something like this also means you must extinguish something which is already instinctual but which isn't correct. Expecting all that to happen in a straight linear fashion, without any backward steps at any point along the way, is not realistic at all.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Big Lex

[iacas]

5 hours ago, colin007 said:

Are there some lessons or changes that will result in immediate improvement?

A guy's third lesson with me one summer at Chautauqua was "Man, my irons are great, but my driver is terrible." I can't get off the tee!

This was a fast, big guy who could move it.

He hit some irons warming up, and he was hitting his 7I like 195, etc. Just smashing it. Straight, high… the works. So I start working with him and he hits a massive push, then a big pull-hook…

I have him freeze right before he hits the next one and put a stick along his heels. It's like 80 yards right.

He sets up to the stick in front of his toes and smashes the next five balls, six balls, ten balls almost dead straight, 300 on the fly.

I jokingly said "hey, lesson over!"

He said "no, man, it really is. I'm gonna hit for a bit more and if it's good I'm gonna go home. This was AWESOME." He hit like 10 or 15 more balls, and at this point, others were watching him on the range.

So he went home. I tried to get him to stay, but he said to me something like "nah, man, this was the greatest lesson I've ever gotten. Thank you!"

(He had worked really hard to make changes on the first two lesson pieces.)

So, yes, there are some. Of course. They're not even an insignificant part of my lessons.

4 hours ago, mchepp said:

I am worried he is just doing some grandstanding at the expense of your thoughtful and clear argument.

To be fair I think he's just got a different definition of "good" and "better" and "immediate" and "worse" and so on. I don't think he's a bad instructor or an idiot by any stretch.

4 hours ago, mchepp said:

The car analogy is bullsh*t.

On that, I agree, though I disagree with not just typing out the word "bullshit."

4 hours ago, mchepp said:

Personally, I really like the direction coaching has gone. It is probably one of the few places where social media (specifically video) has really improved an industry. The challenge now is finding meaningful information for the you as an individual. There is SO much information now, much of it will lead you down the wrong path. Best to find someone who can help you deifier the important bits for you, and even better if they live near you so they can put you in the right positions to "feel" the change.  

That's a good point.

4 hours ago, Big Lex said:

There are so many pitfalls in semantics, and in general in trying to argue things on Twitter or on online forums. So in deference to Roman, I get the general idea, the "spirit" of what he is saying, maybe, in that the teacher should be focused on making a student improve, no matter what it takes, and shouldn't be satisfied (or expect the student be satisfied) with anything less than "improvement." But there are reasonable limits to the amount and the pace of improvement.

Like I've said, and you say literally with your next words… define "improvement." For example, my bunker story above.

[iacas]

Kevin has… since deleted his Twitter account?

[phillyk]

9 hours ago, colin007 said:

Are there some lessons or changes that will result in immediate improvement?

One similar to @iacas, I once gave a “lesson” to an older guy. He warmed up for a bit, I stopped him and asked him something about his set up (I don’t remember what it was). He made the adjustment and hit the next few like he wanted, then said that was it. I looked at my watch and it was 5min into the lesson. I asked if he wanted to check with another club or work on a different part of the game. He said nope and that was it. 

Some immediate improvement of performance lessons would be course management and club selection, typically happen during playing lessons.

Regarding general improvement after lessons. I would say it depends on how we define improvement. There can be improvement in understanding the mechanics, improvement of feel, improvement of performance, etc. So, yes, I would expect immediate improvement after a lesson simply because they should leave with a better understanding of their swing, the mechanics of the priority piece, and a general feel of what to work on/towards. Their performance will likely not jump to perfection simply because of the competing motion patterns they are now working through. 

[pganapathy]

This Kevin Roman guy is a complete moron.  There is no field of human endeavour where even the best in the world can achieve things perfectly with one lesson and zero practice to ingrain a habit.  Yes, certain things need less practice and effort and others need more, but none need zero and offer instantaneous improvement

[Vinsk]

I think this Kevin guy is mistakenly simplifying ‘improvement’ with the immediate result as being the strike quality. Let’s say Erik is trying to get me to stop yanking my club in at the takeaway as it’s leading to several errors at the top and eventually the downswing.
 

I may have to spend hours, weeks, or months before I finally show on video that I’ve gotten myself to bring the club back on a much preferred path. It feels odd and it’s new so my ball striking sucks. But on to the next component of the grind. 

To me, I’ve improved. It’s actually an important milestone for me. But in Kevin’s simplistic and poor understanding of learning, I’ve gotten worse.