Tips For Better Golf – Can They Ruin Your Golf Game?
There are good golf tips and bad golf tips. At least, good and bad for any one golfer. The question is, “how do you decide which golf tips to listen to?” Because the answer to the question above is, yes. Sometimes they can!
This question has been brought home to me recently because a good friend took up golf about two years ago. He has really caught the bug and plays several times a week. He also takes lessons and does practice frequently. Whenever we play together, he is constantly asking for tips and advice about his swing.
It is my belief that you should only offer a golf tip if you are sure that it will fit in with the rest of his swing. I have seen far too many players lose their swings when trying to adopt a golf tip which simply does not fit in with everything else that goes on when they swing the club.
There are certain golf tips which are universally sound, like, “keep your head still until it moves naturally with your follow through.” But equally there are plenty of other golf tips that can be ruinous even when given with the best of intentions.
In particular I recall a good player with whom I’d played many rounds who’d always draw the ball right to left, usually with good control. One day when his draw was a bit exaggerated, his partner suggested this perfectly sound golf tip: “You know, if you were to keep your right elbow well tucked in on the downswing you would lose that nasty hook.”
It proved to be one golf tip too many. He became so conscious of his right elbow that it threw the whole of the rest of his swing out of shape and it took him months to get it back again. The point is, it didn’t fit in with the rest of his swing.
This is a mistake that many golfers make. They listen to all the golf tips out there and try to adopt them all, in their desperate search for a good swing. It is my belief that your aim should be to groove with one golf swing that will give you streams of straight and long golf shots by modelling your swing carefully.
Stick with one set of suggestions that work together. Then develop a mental movie of that swing so that you can reproduce it whenever you play a shot.
Think how long some of the most famous partnerships between golfers and their swing coaches have lasted. Think of Jack Nicklaus and Jack Grout, Tiger Woods and Butch Harmon, Nick Faldo and David Leadbetter to name but a few. All these great players relied on one coach’s vision of their swing to keep their mental movie in shape. They did not go asking for golf tips from other players.
Your best bet is to find one complete approach that works for you and then stick with it, honing it as you go, rather than watering it down with other people’s ideas. The mastery will come if you let it!
Jeff Seward
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