AXIOM Introduction
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Have you been looking for a wait to learn a tour pro swing through a simple feeling so you don't feel like a mechanical robot? Want to erase your mind of all swing thoughts and feel fluid and athletic again? Then the AXIOM is exactly what you've been seeking!
Have you ever wondered why golf really is hard? What is it? What is it that you can take some of the best athletes in the world, the top performers in those talented, coordinated, phenomenal athletes, and get them to hit a golf ball and they look nothing like their former self and their prior sports. I've been lucky enough to play with some of the best athletes in the world. John Elway, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and all of these guys are phenomenal. The best of the best. It put a golf club in their hands. For the most part, they certainly don't realize their, their former glory from their other sports. Now, why is that? What is it that allows somebody like me to hit the ball so much better and so much farther than guys that are twice my size and far more talented than I'll ever be?
Well, I have a theory. I'm going to come back to that in just a second, because the difficulty in the game is that you need to first understand what other sports are now. You're probably like many of my members, who've probably done other sports and feel like, you know, I have good hand-eye coordination. I've played baseball or basketball or football or whatever. And yet golf still eludes you. What is it? Do I just have a mutant gene or PGA tour players? Truly just better athletes. Well, no offense to Craig Stadler and the golfers of that stature in the world, Craig stab, there's got a green jacket and I don't, but certainly he doesn't appear demise. This world-class athlete. So what is it? What makes golf so darn hard. Well, let me first talk about a couple other things real quick. Think about other sports that you've played.
If you were shooting a basketball, for instance, say you're out on the free throw line and you're going to shoot a free-throw everything. When you shoot a free throw, it was moving in the same direction, right? You're just going up and shooting pretty simple. If you're throwing a ball, everything is moving essentially in the direction that you're throwing baseball swing has some similarities to a golf swing, but a very short backswing. And again, most everything is focused on going out toward the pitcher golf on the other hand, a little bit different. All of those sports that I just mentioned are all only really moving in one direction. They're only dependent on the forward movement and golf requires precision in both directions, both moving away from the object that you're trying to hit and then moving back towards it at great speed. Think about that for a second.
You're asking somebody to move incredibly powerfully, incredibly, precisely, incredibly fast in a very short period of time in two different directions, one direction going back and the one direction going really fast going down. When you think about that for a second, there's very few other sports that you could probably think of that have such a demanding ask of the person playing the game. Golf is very, very unique in that sense. And so for me, and to help my students, I started thinking about this pretty deeply and started wondering, well, what would it take to get anybody to understand how to move like the best players in the world? Because quite frankly, the tour pros, the reason they're so much better is that their swings are so much simpler. There's so much more efficient. There's so much more consistent and repeatable compared to the guy who you see on the driving range, who looks like he's falling out of a lawn chair trying to hit a golf ball.
He's moving in lots of different directions. So what if, what if you looked at the golf swing and you looked at the tour pros and you really tried to understand what they're doing, could you boil it down to just one movement, not a back swing and a transition and a down swing and an impact and a release and hip goes here and shoulders go there. And so on. What if you could get everything to be one movement? In fact, I ask what if that's exactly what the tour pros are doing right now? And it's the thing that nobody's leak looking at. Nobody's thinking about because asking somebody to move in different directions, move away from the ball and move back to the ball and do that precisely and powerfully in two seconds. It's a pretty big ask. So what if that's not what the best players in the world are doing at all?
What if they're actually all only moving in one direction, the same direction, and it's the opposite of what you're doing right now. That is what the Axiom is. Now. I want you to think for a moment how you've tried to learn the golf swing in general, everybody pretty much nowadays these days, any top tier instructor is essentially a teaching, a lot of the same positions, mechanics, et cetera, of the golf swing. So that's great. There's a great consolidation. There's far fewer outliers of all kinds of goofy stuff that you've seen over the years in golf instruction. And it's become far more consistent because we have incredible technology today that is unthinkable even 10, 20 years ago, high speed cameras. Everybody's got one now force plays, launch monitors are available all over the place and 3d motion capture. We can see and measure and quantify everything that is happening in the golf swing and the best players in the world and yourself yet has that really made a huge difference in handicaps around the world.
And golfers has it made a huge difference in you? Are you hitting the ball as well as a tour pro? And he said, oh, well the tour pros practice all day every day. That's definitely true. But again, the truth is if you moved simply and you moved correctly, then the ball striking. Yeah. You may not be able to score as well as a pro every day because they do practice every day as their full-time job. You've got a normal life and a real life. But if your swing had the same key fundamentals that the tour pros do, and of course, there's lots of different variances in the swing, but when it comes down to striking the ball, there's far more similarities amongst all the best players in the world. And there are differences. You're going to see, they maintain their posture. They keep their tush line, they get their hips open.
You always see both butt cheeks, they're off the right side, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the things and the swing, plane and path are that what really matter the rest of it, as long as you get that part, right? It doesn't matter. But the trick is getting that backswing stuff, right. Is generally what allows the downswing stuff to start to unfold. But what if the backswing stuff didn't really matter? What if the way that you're trying to learn the swing and the way that you're thinking about it was actually handicapping you for your entire golf career. Now, what do I mean by that? Think about this for a second. You're out on the course, you're 12 holes in you're playing a match with your buddies and all of a sudden your swing starts leaking a little oil. We've all been there, right? You step up on the tee.
And all of a sudden, the fairway looks like this, the water hazards look, this big wind comes up out of nowhere. Of course it's left to ride. And all of a sudden you're freaking out, right? What do you do? Well, if you're like most golfers, you go back through that catalog of tips in your head or catalog of mechanical thoughts. And you start trying one of the other things that you think are going to work, but the problem is all of those things are mechanical thoughts and mechanical thoughts. Anybody will tell you who's ever picked up a golf club and played for any amount of time are very, very difficult to play with, especially backswing mechanical thoughts that so many golfers have, but we'll come back to that. So when the swing starts leaking oil, you need to get it back on track. You need to get home into the clubhouse.
And you're resorting back to the only thing that you know, which is mechanical, technical thinking, because that's how you learn. If you learn through mechanical technical thinking than when you're under the gun, that's what you're going to resort back to. When all of a sudden your swing starts leaking oil. That's what you're gonna go back to. So really not only can you make learning very difficult by solely thinking mechanically and not understanding how to translate that into a feeling which is the goal for any instructor, who's trying to teach a student how to smooth properly and get their body in the proper positions and have proper swing mechanics. At some point it has to be translated into field, but a lot of times golfers never get there. So I had an idea. What if I could teach somebody how to move like a pro with no mechanical thoughts whatsoever.
Now, what would that do for you? First of all, when things do start to leak a little bit of oil, which they will for everybody, it doesn't matter if you're tiger woods or Jack Nicholas. They didn't win every single week. And they certainly tiger. Didn't hit the best shots every single week and still managed to win. So what would you resort back to if you had no mechanical thoughts in your mind at all? Because you didn't learn that way. What if you learn the swing that you're going to have for the rest of your life through feel? Now the problem is y'all know, you're thinking this right now. You're like, well, Chuck, you say all the time, feeling real. Isn't the same, a hundred percent true for most golfers out there, hands down, they have truly no idea what they're really doing in their swing.
And they're often shocked the first time they see their swing on video and say, that's not me. Of course, it's you. I didn't dress somebody up like you to come swing a golf club right before you showed up for your lesson. So feeling real are often radically different. And so that's a huge problem. So what you need is a feel that is accurate, a field that produces proper mechanics solely through feeling rather than mechanical thought. So then when things start to fall apart, the only thing you have to resort back to is a feeling. And if that feeling was incredibly simple yet gave you all of these huge results. Then all of a sudden, anytime that you're playing golf, you always resort back to this one simple thing. And that feeling, if it's accurate, it's the right feeling. It's the feeling that the pros have that they don't know how to articulate to everybody, or maybe they don't want to, but they don't realize what they're doing because they're natural gifted athletes.
But again, I argue that I'm quite certain that Patrick Reed is not going to be as good of an athlete as Michael Jordan. And it doesn't mean that Patrick, Reed's not a great athlete. He may be. I have no idea. He's a phenomenal golfer, but the reality is these pros are all doing something. There's some underlying movement that people haven't been able to figure out yet. And that to me was the holy grail of golf instruction. If I could look at my own body, I've been a plus handicap for over two decades. What am I doing? What's so special about me. Why can I hit the ball so far? Why can I swing so fast? What is it that's so special about me? I'm five, nine, a hundred sixty five pounds, nothing special about me at all. What is it about all these tour players that allow them to hit the ball?
So well, so consistently, what if there was just one undercurrent, one overarching move that if you understood what that was, and more importantly, that feeling could only be learned through feel, what would that do for your game? Imagine if you could just step into tiger woods shoes for just a moment into his body and swing the club, just exactly like him. Like literally you put on a tiger suit and you swung like tiger. How cool would that be? First of all, it'd be pretty hard. I'm sure some of us have thought about that, but the thing is you would understand, like that's what it feels like. And I guarantee you, if you were able to do that, it would feel so bizarre and so different to what you're doing now that you probably wouldn't even like it at first, it would feel strange because you have no idea how tiger woods is moving or Jack Nicholas or Dustin Johnson, or what have you and their swings look so different on the outside.
But when you look on the inside and you really try to understand what they're doing, then all of a sudden things become very, very clear. And at the end of the day, clarity would probably be the most valuable thing I could ever give you. If you stepped up to every golf shot and you knew exactly what you needed to do, you knew exactly what it needed to feel like. And you weren't bumbled up with all these mechanical thoughts you could play to your potential, but of course you have to have the right feeling. So I gave myself a task. I was determined and I have been for a long, long time has been a vision of mine for a long time. I've had this vision that I could take any golfer and get them to move like a tour pro get into the same movements, positions, mechanics, et cetera, et cetera, in a very short period of time, as fast as humanly posts, not days, weeks, months, I mean like instantly in that lesson.
And you guys saw that during the road show, if I've got hands on and I'm seeing right there, I can move you and correct you and you can start to feel it. But that requires me to be there physically in person. And so the stuff going on in my brain and things my eyes see over 25, 26 years of teaching is not going to be the same thing that everybody else sees. So I have to be everywhere at once, which is not realistic. So how do I get millions of people to be able to finally have fun again and enjoy the game? I gave myself this task to figure out what that overarching movement was. Is it a throwing motion? Well, a lot of throwing motions, right? You can do sidearm under arm over overarm, but if it was really just a throwing motion, wouldn't every baseball player on the planet knows how to throw a ball really well, be a scratch golfer, a plus handicap, or be able to go to the pros.
It's not totally a throwing motion because I've never seen any pitcher throw a ball with both hands that doesn't make any sense. Is it a baseball hit? Well again, we've got that short backstroke, completely different angles. So much stuff is different. Is it a tennis forehand? Is it a right-hand Dom? Is it left-hand dominant? Is it body dominance? You show it, turn your shoulders. You've heard everything. And for me, when I started really thinking about this and started experimenting and started testing and started coming up with this idea and forming this concept, that if there was just one movement and this movement was so simple, it gave you one thing to focus on for the rest of your career. In this thing to focus on was a feel, and that feel was the same today as it will be 10 years from now because it's so incredibly simple.
It's so easy to understand that would be game changing because how many times have you gone and taken a lesson or gone out to the course? And you said to yourself, I had it. I have it. I know what to do. Well, there's a saying in racing and the five most expensive words in racing are, I thought I had it. So what you say right before you hit the wall. So in golf, that happens all the time. We go out to the range, we have a great session. We take a lesson. He gives you that
Thing that you, and it works for a day or an hour, a week
Around the golf for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, whatever it is. And then like all band-aids, it gets wet. It gets tired and it falls off. And then you're back looking for that next fix. And the feeling changes every single day, because the feeling is so complex based on all of the idiosyncrasies of your swing, it's almost like the tower of Babel. All golfers are speaking a different language. If I tell you I feel something in my swing and you try to replicate that it's probably useless to you because you're moving nothing like I am, but what if we could all speak the same language? What if we all had the same feeling? And it was one feeling, it was stupidly simple. It was just really weird. Then we could all start to improve together. Cause we could all be talking the same language.
And that language is the language of the prose. It's this one little movement that is a butterfly effect. You're going to focus on one simple thing, one part of your body. And if you do this, literally as you've seen in my before and afters, you will be able to completely change your golf swing and feel for the first time, what it feels like to step into a tiger suit, to step into a tour pro suit, where you master right away. Some of you have, as you've seen, some of you take a little bit more time, but the reality is you will get there. If you work on this feeling and you start to let your brain let all those mental thoughts that are like a way crashing on you, every time you step over the ball and you're going through this massive preflight checklist and okay, I've got my setup in my grip and now I've got to make sure that I need to shift to the right, but how much, and I need to turn, but how much do I turn and where do I turn it?
And also when do I turn? And as I work with my hands, I wonder how my hands go. It's impossible. It seems crazy. Right? And that's why golf is such an infuriating game that I'm determined to make it a fun game to make it simple. Because honestly, for me, hitting pure golf shots is one of my best things in the world. It's one of the best feelings. It's something I literally look forward to. I love going to the range and just being by myself and puring shots, it's the best, but I want to do that every single time all the time. And I, I can do that, but how do I get you to do that? That's what the Axiom is. And that's what I'm going to show you in this next video.
Michael
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)