Discover How To Golf Using the Seat of Your Pants

Let’s return to the days of your youth. Remember the summer of your 16th birthday? The falling off the dock fun of being a carefree teen trying to inhale as much excitement from the universe as possible in 24 hours. Life was exotic, neurotic and hypnotic at each turn. Lives were fuelled with the potential of the forbidden and the unknown.

The single common unifying desire among all teenagers was the acquisition of the single greatest passport to the hidden delights of the adult world: the driver’s licence. Nothing else truly symbolized the true right of passage more than this 3.5 x 2.5 inch piece of laminated liberation.

What I would like you to do is try for a moment to recapture in your mind and in your body the feelings you had when learning to drive. The first time behind the wheel is a time of great awkwardness and anxiety. Every movement is wooden and self-conscious. You had to think your way through each step and hope like hell you didn’t lurch forward and stall the damn thing.

Contrast that feeling, to how you then felt a few short days and weeks after passing your test. Deliberateness fell away and was replaced with the increasing grace and mastery of the act of driving. No more need for the mental checklist as a performance aid. The car and you merged and moved as one. So long neophyte, hello world. I have arrived.

You should be asking at this stage what has this got to do with the game of golf? Good question. First I want you to answer this: where does your sense of control reside when you are driving your car? It is not from your conscious brain. If it was, you would never have progressed from that awkward beginner stage. You control the car (if you are a competent driver) from the seat of your pants. You literally get all the feedback from the road and the vehicle from your seat. The subtlest of changes are registered there and you quietly and confidently make the series of minute , but accurate, corrections that lead to a seamless driving experience.

Now translate this to the matter before us. How do we learn to swing a golf club? Or better yet, ask yourself if you have ever felt that you have made the transformation from self-conscious effort to the quiet, confident flow of movement that characterises your driving activity? Get my drift... or should I say skid?

This is the best modern swing system out there, see it here.

I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that virtually all of modern golf instruction is focussed on a learning model which requires that you learn a series fundamentals and body positions. We all know that ultimately all these moving parts must be co-ordinated into a rhythmic, flowing swing. The barrier for golfers of all abilities (this includes touring pros) is how to get from one state to the other both mentally and physically like we do when we drive our cars.

Much, if not most, of golf psychology has focussed on how to get from state to state in the mental part of the game. The feeling is, if you have got some control over your mind and emotions, you have a platform to perform physically. This is the hope, but it really is focussing on one part of the equation.

What ultimately needs to happen is you must have an integration of the physical aspect of the game with the psychological (mental/emotional). I have been looking at NLP (neurolinguistic programming) as a psychological model which may hold out some promise for golf instruction. To date, NLP has only been applied to the “mental” side of the game. The real breakthrough in golf instruction will come when something like NLP (or a hybrid theory) is blended with an instruction methodology. The student will then begin to integrate the physical and mental skills into a single learned activity not unlike the way we perform the skills of driving. When this happens, there will definitely be a quantum leap forward in the way we are taught to golf.

I know some great swing methods, I highly recommend this but it uses conventional teaching methods.

Back to the lab to see if I can advance the field of golf instruction.