The BEST Golf Tip You’ll Ever Hear…

Below is a transcript of this podcast you can listen to here: https://rotaryswing.com/podcast/golf-tips-podcast.mp3

Hey guys, Chuck Quinton here, founder of RotarySwing. I wanted to answer some common questions that I’ve been seeing over and over again via email and on our Facebook group that deals with essentially at its foundation the idea of tips, golf tips, how many of us waste time looking for golf tips, trying to find the next fix for our swing, trying to find the next fix for just the next shot to get us through this round of golf.

Golf tips have generally been the way that people have thought about learning the golf swing. You go, you’ve got a buddy who’s a good player and you say, “Hey man, how’d you hit that great shot?” “Oh, here’s a tip. Try widening your stance.” Okay, well that didn’t help. Uh, what about, I’m swinging over the top. Oh, try to swing out to right field. Um, okay.

That didn’t work either. Let me give you some context for tips because as you know, I am not a fan of tips, but I want to explain why. So many of you know that RotarySwing is definitely not my first business. I’ve started many, many businesses over the years. I started my first when I was 19, and during that time I’ve been fortunate to be successful in those endeavors.

And so I want to give you a tip about business that I will tie back to golf instruction in just a second for how I started every single one of these companies that has gotten me to the place where I am today. When you start a company, take no debt. That’s my tip. Now, in some of you, I instantly created a cognitive dissonance in your head because if you’ve studied business at all, many of you understand the power of leverage, the power of debt when you’re looking at investing in real estate or a manufacturing business and growing production and so on and so forth, having debt makes sense.

Now I’m telling you that I don’t believe you should have debt. Now it’s a double edged sword. I’ll come back to that in just a second. But from my own personal experience, I have never started a company with debt. I’ve never borrowed money. In fact, I don’t really use debt much at all. There are certain places that I do, but for the most part I don’t and in businesses I never have and it’s pretty unlikely that I ever would.

Now I’ve built a successful business, many successful businesses over the years without using debt. So the context of this is here is a successful entrepreneur who’s made a good deal of money and become successful investing in lots of different things. He’s never used debt so surely he must know what he’s talking about. So I shouldn’t use debt in my business. Now maybe, but maybe not.

The context of this is what matters most. I believe that you should try and create the minimum viable product when you’re starting a company and that means not taking on a ton of debt, not taking on a bunch of employees and trying to create this exponential growth out of the gate. I believe that you should try and create and understand the product yourself, build it with the minimum amount of resources possible and test the market.

Now, if you’re buying a company or building a company to build cars like Tesla, well, I’m going to have a hard time doing that without any debt, unless you’re just incredibly wealthy. And even then as Elon Musk is proved, you’re still gonna need to take on a lot of debt to grow this thing. For certain things, it works well. Debt is a valuable instrument in growing and building a business. And in other times people take on too much debt too soon and they don’t know if their product is any good or not.

The market is going to tell you whether or not there’s demand for it. And so if you go out and take on all this debt and you have no idea if anybody’s even remotely interested in what you’re selling, well you’re taking on a huge risk. And that is the point of this is to say that everything that you learn in life, every tip based thing needs context around it to know if it’s valuable or not.

And you’ve heard me talk about many times the way most golf instructors learn how to teach is they figure out what works in their own swing and they start sharing that information with other people and because they’ve experienced success with it for themselves and whether that success is relative or not is not the point for them. They have found a way that they can get the bat on the ball and if they’re hitting the ball better than you, then you go and try and learn something from them.

That’s kind of how golf instruction works, but you don’t have the context for this person’s swing. Maybe the tip they’re giving you, taking a wider stance is simply because of a million other flaws that they have in their swing. Taking a wide stance is a really common one. When you’re swinging really aggressively from the top of your swing with your arms and hands, you’ve got all this force of movement swinging out away from you toward the ball, trying to knock you off balance. If you stand wider, of course you’re going to have better balance. It’s context. Having context is what really makes understanding the golf swing much simpler. Rotary swing is all about providing a context.

In the past, everybody’s had a tip or or many tips or several tips that they could glue together. They would tell one person one thing that might tell another person another, and then you go to another instructor.

He tells you something completely different and that’s the nature of the industry. That obviously was not something that gelled real well with me, which is what created RotarySwing in the first place. I believed that there had to be some scientific reasoning behind how to swing a golf club and of course there is by taking an objective look at the golf swing, I was able to give tips context, as I just mentioned with the stance, it’s, it’s wider than than what we would advocate.

There’s contexts that provides a reasoning behind it. There’s a how and a what and a why and all of the things that you see online typically don’t have context with them. If somebody says, Oh well I think you should turn your chest more to the target. Now I’ve gone to great lengths to prove that that is a pretty great way to injure your back and also to slow down the release of the club.

It’s when people are talking about how to release the club, they’re trying to control something that really wasn’t designed to be controlled. Think about what it means to release the club. What does it mean to release? It means to let go by its very definition to let go is the opposite of trying to control something.

When people are telling you to rotate your chest through the target and hold the club face open, not only are they slowing down the rotation of the toe, but they’re trying to control something that wasn’t meant to be controlled. It’s meant to be released. You’ve got to give up control to gain control in the golf swing. Again, it’s context. It’s understanding the physics behind the speed of the club face and how the toe is designed to rotate around the hozzel and so on. That gives you context for understanding.

So here’s the bottom line. When you look at a tip, you need to have understanding, you need to have context for that tip. Why is this person telling me this? What is it that they’re doing that’s causing them to believe that this is the right way to swing the club? Is it just based on their own personal preference? What they found works on their own swing? That’s not a very good context. One person does not make a swing philosophy, right? You have to be able to test your ideas amongst many, many, many, many people. And so what is the context of what it is that you’re trying to do? Is it scientific based? Do they have physics reasoning behind it? Do they have studies to prove that? Do they have anatomical research? Do they have people that have helped them understand how it’s going to protect the body and so on and so forth?

So that is the point of understanding what tips are. Tips are completely useless without context. When you put context around it, you can start to evaluate for yourself and decide for yourself. Because at the end of the day, nobody’s going to care about your golf game more than you, right? Even the best, most dedicated instructor in the world, you’re still going to care more about your golf game than he does because it’s yours, right?

Nobody’s going to take care of your business or, or your swing or your body or anything more than you are. So you have to take care of yourself. And by doing that, you need to educate yourself. You need to have an understanding of how and why the swing is going the way that it is. And, and so then when you get a tip, you can look at that tip and say, well, what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense because it’s defying the laws of physics or it’s against this anatomical principle or whatever it may be.

And once you have that underlying context, that foundation, you can look at any aspect of the swing or any anybody’s golf swing and start to understand what that person’s going to get into. I know so many of you think like, Oh man, Chuck must be a wizard. Because he keeps predicting all these people’s back injuries or hip injuries or whatever, not at all. It’s context. I look at the swing through a lens that is very specific and black and white.

I try to get my bias and my personal opinion out of it as much as humanly possible and look at it purely through a set of requirements and fundamentals on how the body’s designed to work. By being objective like that I can look at the swing and say, well, if this person does this, this will be the result in the golf swing is all cause and effect relationship.

If you rip the club to the inside on the takeaway with your hands, of course there’s going to be a consequence for that. If you push hard off the right side in the downswing, there’s going to be a consequence for that. Those things are really easy to understand when you have the context of understanding and so even if you don’t want to use RotarySwing for whatever reason you, you’re hooked on so-and-so as an instructor and you think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. That’s totally cool. All I ask is that you educate yourself so that you study the swing objectively, not based on somebody’s personal preference.

Question everything you hear. If somebody tells you to do something a certain way, say why? If your instructor says, I want you to feel like this, tell me why and how. Tell me exactly how you want me to do it.

What muscles do I want to engage or do they even know? It’s important for you to take the time to develop this understanding so that everything that you do from here and learn going forward, you’re deciding for yourself whether or not that makes sense. That’s the most important thing and that’s what I want you to think of RotarySwing as. If you don’t follow the whole system, obviously it’s a holistic system.

It’s not meant to be something where you watch one RotarySwing video and he said, Hey, here’s how to stop swinging over the top and so I’m going to take that tip and apply that to my swing. It’s not how it works. That swing on how to stop swinging over the top is based on the fundamentals of the entire rotary swing system. They all go hand in hand. Every single video is tied together.

There’s not one video that I put out that is living on its own. They all work together as a holistic system, so that’s why I really, really don’t like it when people are just saying, Oh, I read this tip or something, my instructor told me to try this or, or try this tip, and then there’s no context behind it. There’s no reasoning behind it.

There’s no understanding behind it, and you have to, you have to develop that understanding for yourself. You can’t just rely on everything that anybody’s telling you out there because it could be the most well-intended advice in the world. It just may not be in the right context for you for your swing and understanding how the swing works is going to give you that context for that understanding. So I hope you, I hope you think about this for a minute. I hope you think about understanding tips and why they’re so dangerous.

Again, I’m telling you that you shouldn’t start a business taking out a loan. Now, of course I would never ever tell that in a real consulting circumstance because there are circumstances where debt is super powerful and effective and you need to do it, but in general, this is the point is that some tips are good, some tips are bad, but you don’t know until you have context for them and once you understand context, you’ll stop chasing tips.

You’ll realize that the tip based approach is just giving you one teeny tiny little morsel of the bigger picture and what you really need is the big picture. First you need to understand the golf swing as a whole. What is it that you’re really trying to do? When I started developing rotary swing, that was the first step. I literally sat down on a dry erase board and said to myself, what is it that I’m really trying to do with the golf swing?

What is it that I’m really trying to get my body to do? What is it that I ideally want the club to do and how can I get my body to get the club to do that consistently and powerfully and effortlessly and pain-free. And once you do that, once you look at it objectively, you can develop a set of requirements. This as well. I need my body to turn like this. I need my arms to elevate like this. I need leverage for power here. Where can I get that?

And once you develop a set of requirements, then you can understand everything against those set of requirements. Is it meeting that requirement? If I stand really wide, what is that going to do? Well, you guys should know by now that if I take a really wide stance and I shift my weight properly, like there is an all hitting and throwing sports, what’s going to happen to my head?

It’s gonna move off the ball. It’s context. Stance width is a fundamental of rotary swing based on the context of understanding the swing as a whole. So hopefully this will eliminate some of the questions on the Facebook group of people saying, Hey, uh, you know, I read this tip online. What do you think about this? Or whatever. Educate yourself, understand, learn, think about things objectively, think about things critically. I want you to question everything you’ve ever heard me say everything down to the enth degree so that you start drawing your own conclusions based on your own understanding of the golf swing.

If you want proper, science based context for your golf swing, join RotarySwing.com today and learn the answers to ALL your burning questions about the swing!