Articles: Golf Products

Everything helping the development of good control must be inspired, everything obstructing it evaded. Their building up is essentially comatose and unobserved, in-deed even a successful pupil will generally feel that small progress is being madeuntil maybe quite all of a sudden he is going to be stunned to find himself playing effective, assured golfing. I remember with special pleasure how that occurred to a young pupil of mine. She led the field in the qualifying rounds and was only put out on the last green in the semi final. On her return she revealed to me,'I did not know I could play like that! Nobody was more stunned than I was. I knew she had the golfing in her and that at some point soon the controls we were building would allow her to play it. But I was happy, because you wouldn't routinely expect a young pupil to play a bit above her best on such a nerve-testing occasion. So when a golfer announces to me,'I must learn how to concentrateconcentrateconcentrate!' I counter with [*CO]'No, you have to build controlscontrolscontrols!' Now I claim that the best way of learning golfing has nearly nothing in common with the'learning' we probably did in class, it is a completely different process. Memorizing the capitals of Europe or a Latin declension, or 'learning' chemistry or arithmetic, are only mental attainments and rely solely on psychological memory, while I say that to learn how to play good and consistent golfing you want muscled memory. What you want to learn ( or learn by heart ) aren't the technical or mathematical details of a good shot but the feeling of it. If you and each element muscle in you can recall the feeling of a good shot, you can make itand you became what I term a reflex golfer. That's to point out, the good shot has become your'reflex,' or automated reply to the look of the ball. But do not forget this golfing memory is a memory of a cycle of sensations which follow and mix into each other quite smoothly. Each sensation must be connected up with those which predate and follow it, it can't be considered independently. The reality is that it can't even be felt independently.

You can't, to take a crude example, feel the head of your swing as such, you can only feel a sensation between the feelings of the back swing and those of the down swing. And why do I call sensations controls? Just because I need you to control your golfing by these sensations rather than by thought. There's another excuse why your memory of a golfing shot must be a memory of a cycle of sensations, not of a number of separate sensations. It takes an exceedingly skilful juggler to juggle with 6 glass balls at once, but if the six balls were threaded onto a string many of us could manage themand the memorizing of sensations as a cycle ( rather than as independent items ) does thread them up for us extraordinarily much in this way. To turn for an instant from learning to teaching.

Almost all of the teaching of golfing is totally negative and an only negative thing can have no positive value. Why do I say that golfing teaching is negative? Well all of us can find faults in one another's game, millions of them, and we all begin to educate golfing by indicating these faults and'curing' them. I did this for 25 years, but I've now discovered that the correct way to get a pupil to hit the ball satisfactorily is to look out for any good natural qualities that could be there and to build the swing around them. We all hit a good ball often. I note the faults, naturally, and suggest the essential corrections ( which is positive ). So I never tell a pupil that he over swings and breaks his left arm, I explain width to him. That's to assert I give him a positive conception and by working on it he cures his faults without even being aware he had them. Now there's another point about teaching which I want to emphasise.

You may find that in this work I've not attempted to set down a set of controls in 1 way and leave it at that. I have tried to set the same stuff down and explain them in many alternative ways. So when you find me repeating myself don't think it is carelessness! All good teachers must repeat, but never in precisely the same words or with just the same connections. I need to give you a clear concept of the controls which will permit you to supply a useful swing, and I don't mind if I need to say the same in twelve other ways while one of the 12 gets home with you. I am hoping you won't mind either, because you should be in a position to pick something new out of the other eleven also.

If you agree my strategy of learning you don't need plenty of practice on the course to become better you can assimilate the beliefs in your armchair and put in handy practice on the hearth rugwhere you want no club because yeu can feel your muscled movements without it. You have to learn to feel the sensations thru your intellect and then forget them intellectually and leave them to your muscle-bound memory or control system. How long does it take to'learn golf'? Well I'm still learning after forty five years of it! I've known pupils who hit the ball very well after only 4 lessons and others who have taken a year or longer to do even tolerably well, but time is inclined to level things out a lot. Golfing is a curious game in being straightforward of understanding but ( infrequently ) long in awareness.

While I was writing this I'd started 2 young ladiesone of sixteen who is still at varsity but weighs about a hundred and 70 pounds and another in the early twenties who weighs less than half that. Aside from the weight of their clubs the conditions will be the same for both, yet clearly their issues will work out way differently. But I've found by long experience that these things typically level themselves out in the endI have seen many presented and precocious newbies fail just because they wouldn't put in the difficult work which is critical before the elementary stage is passed, and just when the elementary stage is passed can golfing genius come to the surface. So don't despair if you're making an attempt to learn golfing, or better golf, and getting no results. It might be that you've been attempting to learn too many things ( like juggling with too many balls ) and when you have attempted to add only 1 more, your full game has broken down on you. We may streamline the things you've got to learn by stringing them together into cycles of sensation because they are then better to remember and better to add to.