Golf Coaching

'INSIDE-OUT' or 'OUTSIDE-IN'

Golf coaching! When are you being coached and when are you being taught?

I watch many of my colleagues teaching and they often work on their student's stance and posture at the start of a lesson. I hear them telling him/her to stand with the feet apart, making sure the knees are flexed and to tilt the upper body forward from the waist.

After correcting the tilt and flex, they then get their students to align the feet, knees, hips, and shoulders square to the target line.

9 times out of 10 this produces awkward looking address positions and the students look anything but comfortable. This procedure takes anything from 5-10 minutes at the beginning of the lesson and can be repeated at the start of many subsequent sessions.

This is teaching, the 'outside-in' method, where the golf teacher feeds his students with biomechanical data that he has studied for his profession.

It is just absurd. How can anyone be expected to adopt a dynamic sporting posture this way?

Now a golf coach, using the 'inside-out' method, would suggest to the same students that they should adopt a similar posture to one they use in other sports or physical endeavours. In effect help them find an instinctive posture. For example...

Stand like a wrestler facing up to his opponent; like a goal-keeper about to face a penalty; a baseball batter ready for a pitch; a swimmer about to dive; a tennis player receiving a service; a lumberjack about to chop down a tree or just standing in readiness to catch a ball. It is then easy to introduce small adjustments like stand a little taller or bring the feet a little closer together without causing them to feel stiff or awkward.

There is no question about it, the body has been adopting a dynamic posture since the earliest times and prefers to do this reflexively.

For example, look at a hunter, he takes his posture, aims, draws it back and releases. He brings the same skills out in his apprentices by demonstrating his techniques to them.

We just have to look to the animal kingdom for the natural example of 'inside-out' coaching. The cat family demonstrate the hunting of larger prey and then encourage their young to practice the same on smaller or younger prey until they finely develop these skills.

In short superior golf coaching does not fill the student with the biomechanics of how to make a certain movement (outside-in). But instead draws out these instinctive movements from already developed hereditory skills (inside-out).

As I stated on other pages it is how we learn every motor skill and golf should be no exception. Swinging a golf club, or a baseball bat, or a hockey stick, or an axe, is more or less the same. The main difference is the swing plane which is determined by where the point of impact is.

I encourage my students to swing on a more natural plane, as in baseball or swinging an axe and encourage them to feel the natural mechanics, timing, effort and fluidity that emerges.

This is, in a nutshell, how golf coaching should be carried out and if you read further, going back to the previous page, you too can swing instictively using the extraordinary golf method.

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