Why Golfers Don’t Improve? | Problems & Confusion | Solutions
In my last golf instruction video I talked about the history of RST, and how Rotary Swing Tour came about, and how I developed it, and the reason it’s such a unique approach to the golf swing, and why people are actually getting better. Now, in the golf instruction world, there’s a lot of problems, and there’s a lot of confusion and misinformation and a lot of well intended people giving out bad advice. I think that quite honestly it’s one of the biggest problems facing the golf industry as a whole, because if you’re doing something and you’re putting time and effort and money and time away from your family and resources that are precious these days, and you don’t get any better, why would you keep playing?
Nobody wants to play a game that they’re no good at, and that they put a lot of work into and get worse at. Why would you keep playing this game? Of course, golf is facing this crises, where more people are leaving the game every year that pick it up. Apart from the other things that are facing the industry, I really feel like golf instruction is one of the primary culprits that is affecting the golf industry as a whole. Until that’s resolved, I don’t think you’re going to see a big change in the game.
What are the big problems facing the golf instruction world as a whole? I want to talk about that today. One, is that golf instruction typically mirrors the dominate player of the day. When you look at this collage of pictures, we’ve got Bobby Jones, you’ve got Ben Hogan, you got Jack Nicklaus, you got Greg Norman, you got Tiger Woods. Undoubtedly the five most dominate players of their era. They’re a piece of the pie in history in time of the golf world.
Each one of those guys, were champions. They’re fantastic golfers, but none of them swing even remotely similar. Which one is right, and, which one is wrong? Well, Jack won the most majors, so maybe he’s right, but he also blew out his hip and hurt his back, and had numerous other injuries. Bobby Jones, he’s the first guy to really kinda be a golf instructor on TV, right? He was the Michael Breed of this his day. He was out there doing golf tips and things on TV before anybody else did. Then Hogan comes along, and he tears up the world for a while with his really flat swing, lots of leg drives, so on and so forth. Nicklaus comes out, very upright swing, kinda the exact opposite of what Hogan did. Norman comes out, completely different. Tiger Woods comes out, completely different.
What you look at, is the golf instruction world, is kinda like the tail wagging the dog. Instead of having established out of fundamentals like I talked about in the history of RST video, and how Rotary Swing looks at fundamentals of the golf swing, versus the industry as a whole, and how it’s very different. The golf instruction industry as a whole, tends to just mirror whoever is popular.
Tell me that you’ve taken a golf lesson in the last 15 years, and your golf instructor didn’t put your swing up next to Tiger Woods. Had it been 20 years ago, it might have been Greg Norman. Had it been 30 years ago, we used golf instruction video and side by sides back then, which we didn’t have, your swing would have been put up against Jack Nicklaus, or maybe even Johnny Miller, or Weiskopf, or Watson, and then if it had been 40, 50 years ago, it would have been Hogan.
How crazy is that? Every single time, we’ve got a different dominate player, the golf instruction world says, “Oh, well let’s go chase this guy now, and get everybody to swing like this guy.” Well, just because they’re good, doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the way that you should swing. It means that this players has spent thousands of hours grooving his idiosyncrasies of his swing that’ll probably get him in injured, or cause ball flight issues, or whatever it may be. Four fifths of the players on a tour will miss about eight weeks from a golf swing related injury. It’s not a contact sport people, you shouldn’t get hurt playing golf.
Long story short, each time the golf instruction world sees another dominate player, you see golf instruction chase that player. It’s the tail wagging the dog. Golf instruction should never change. The fundamentals should never change in the way RST establishes them, they don’t. The other problem is there’s very little understanding of anatomy and kinesiology in the golf instruction world. When you are a golf instructor, and you go through the PGA program, your primary role is to learn how to run a multi-million dollar business, which is what a golf course is, you’re learning how to run the pro shop, and how to manage staff, and how to set up the Wednesday night ladies league game, and how to manage carts, and some stuff about agronomy, and so on and so forth. You get about this much in information on how to become a golf instructor.
A golf instructor is cash on the side. Becoming a golf instructor for your head pro, or your assistant pro, whatever, because he’s tired of working 12 hour days for 15 bucks an hour, and you offer him 40, 50 bucks an hour to give you a golf lesson, and you just assume that he knows what he’s doing, because he’s a golf pro. He’s like, “Hey, I’ll take your 40 bucks an hour versus 12, and gets me out of the pro shop for a little bit, and people stop yelling at me, ’cause we don’t have a size medium shirt, and so on and so forth. He’s going to take it. He’s probably a better player than you. He had to pass the PAT, which means he probably had to shoot five or six over par on your local course for a couple days.
It’s not that hard to get through that side of the program, but there’s no training for them to become a sophisticated and qualified golf instructor through the PGA program. There’s very little information about it. They’ve got to cover a lot of other material. That’s not their primary job, is teaching you how to hit a ball with a stick. In doing that, really hitting a ball with a stick is just understanding … teaching people how to move their bodies, ’cause that’s all the golf swing is. It’s a bunch of motor movement patterns grouped together that move a stick, that hits a ball.
Really, golf instruction is primarily about understanding the body. How do you get your body to move to accomplish a set of fundamentals based on requirements that will successfully, powerfully, efficiently, consistently hit the ball where you want it to go. This is the most important part is, if there was a lot of training about understanding anatomy and kinesiology, how the body moves, how to move it safely, and powerfully, and efficiently, then the golf instruction world will be completely different, ’cause your golf instructor would understand that to get the club to go where you want it, how you want it to, he’s got to get your body to move how it needs to move in order to accomplish those movements.
There’s no information out there like that, apart from what RST does for certifying our Rotary Swing instructors. If you got past all this stuff, the more important stuff, and this is where my under grad degree stuff comes in, my under grad degree’s in psychology, there’s basically no teaching out there, very little understanding in the industry as a whole on how the brain learns new movement patterns.
At the end of the day, understanding how to move is not the most complicated side of the game. It’s teaching somebody how to actually do it, and understanding the mechanics of how your brain learns a new movement pattern, that is truly the specialty of the industry, because it’s one thing to know what it is you want somebody to do, it’s a whole ‘nother to actually be able to teach them how to do it, and actually get them to learn how to move correctly. That is based on science. Neural mechanics, how your brain learns a movement pattern, it’s a biological process. It’s a very specific pathway that you have to walk through and understanding how to learn.
That’s why Rotary Swing students learn much faster and why a Rotary Swing golf lesson looks very different than what you’re used to. You probably hit two balls, you hit one at the beginning, or two balls at the beginning, one face on that we can video, and one that video down the line. Then after that, we’re doing drills. We are working your body, and teaching your brain how to move, and that’s why you improve so much quicker with Rotary Swing.
That’s really what at the end of the day, all of this stuff comes down to, is Rotary Swing was trying to establish, not only just anatomical absolutes, of how your body’s designed to move, but also how your brain learns those movement patterns. As you put all these together, you have a golf swing system that’s based on fundamentals. How you’re supposed to move safely, so that it’s injury free, powerfully, so we hit the ball a long way, what’s more fun than that? To be able to do it consistently and know where it’s going and then for me to be able to take these fundamentals that will accomplish those requirements, hitting the ball long and straight and consistently, and actually getting your brain to understand how to perform those movements, and learn new movements, that is the essence of Rotary Swing.
When you look at the golf swing objectively, and you understand that the instruction that you’re probably getting today, and the reason you’re probably frustrated with your game, you can’t really blame it on the industry as a whole, because there’s very little training for them. You can’t blame it on your local pro, he’s not getting the training, unless he’s a certified RST instructor, he has no understanding of your body, he has no understanding of how the brain learns new movement patterns.
That’s why we have learning experts on our advisory panel, we have orthopedic surgeons, neuro surgeons, PhD Biomechanists, people that have helped us understand the Rotary Swing Tour methodology, the mechanics of it, from an inside out perspective. From a biological process perspective. That is the essence of Rotary Swing, and that’s why if you follow the Rotary Swing Tour methodology, we guarantee you will improve.
