Our Motivation!

 

As golf teachers our prime responsibility is to the average golfer, because talents such as Tiger Woods, or any tour player for that matter, come to a small percentage of trainers once in a life time. This does not make our work mundane because any golfer, independent of their individual talent level, who has a steadfast curiosity to learn, must be a motivation to any good teacher.

One problem, for the teacher and pupil alike, is the mass of confusing and paradoxical instructional information in golf. It is often said that when you have 2 golf teachers in a room, then prepare yourself for 3 different opinions and reading golf magazines will support this.

When we met some 15 years ago, our first motivation was to try and sort through this confusion to find a logical explanation for the golf swing. We felt it should be definable, efficient, repetitive, without paradoxes, easy to understand and based on sound scientific fundamentals.

Fine! Bio mechanics we felt would give us the answers because the body has limiting factors, such as the angles that an average person can bend a joint, and there seemed to be common factors involved in sports where a ball is thrown or hit. Weight transfer, the body moving the arms, head flowing with the spine, to mention just a few, were all evident in these sports although many golf teachers preached the opposite.

There were golf teachers who seemed to have a grasp of the problem, whose explanations appeared logical and we learned a great deal from them.

However, in our daily work the success rate was not that which we wished.

Slowly our attention was turned to the golf club itself.  Surely, presumably like everyone else, we thought the golf industry had done its homework? We could all watch the top players and wonder at their quality of play and scores. But to blindly accept something, in this case standard golf clubs and custom fitting methods - and not question its validity- is not how the human race advanced. Noting that hardly any two players swung the same, we started to query whether top players were able to perform movements that average golfers could not. And they can!

Virtually all are bent in the spine to a greater or lesser extent and injuries amongst top players support this. But why?

The answer is so simple that at first one must be slightly sceptical until one studies the facts.

There is, in the golf teaching world, no general consensus of opinion for the spinal angle in the address position but there is a consensus of opinion that the swing is a chain reaction of events.

If, generally speaking, most golfers are playing the same length of club, then tall golfers will have to bend to touch the ground and smaller golfers less. Under these circumstances it is impossible to give a broad definition of the address position.

If, the golf swing is a chain reaction of events, then the amount of bending in the address position must be maintained throughout the swing for a successful result.

Our motivation was then to define the address position and make the club fit the golfer and not vice-versa, allowing the golfer to make a swing where bending is reduced to a minimum, which in turn allows an efficient, healthy, performance orientated swing.

Our motivation, then as now, is to make golf simpler. Golf should not be a question of how tall you are.

Golf should be a question of talent, maximizing performance, dedication and above all, fun.