If you’re in the depths of golfing despair and feel like you’ve lost your swing, then this video is for you. Having been in that position for much of the past six months, I recently had an eye-opening lesson which led to two discoveries that almost instantly set me back on the right path. In this video I run through what they were, how they helped me, and how they might be able to do the same for you.
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*Chapters*
01:16 – Losing your swing
03:34 – Setup
04:20 – Alignment
06:06 – Swing thoughts
07:38 – Results
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Welcome to my Golf Life Crisis.
If you feel like you’ve lost your golf swing and you don’t know where to turn, then this video is for you. I have been playing some pretty terrible golf this year until one recent lesson gave me two discoveries. Since when I’ve shot some of the best rounds of my life. So stay tuned because in this video I’m going to share that experience with you. So hopefully you can do the same. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the channel and to what is something of a sort of recent golf therapy/coaching session experience that I had which was very revoly for me and has done thankfully wonders for my golf game but I thought might help some of you out there who may be struggling in a bad run of form or feeling like you have lost your swing or just really having a bad time of on the course and don’t necessarily know where to turn. For anyone new here, welcome. I am Joel. I am a golfer who took up the game just a few years ago and I’m now in the middle of a golf life crisis. I am documenting that experience on this channel. My trials and tribulations as I look to get as good as I possibly could in middle age, maybe helping you along the way, either just by laughing at my misfortune or possibly learning from my mistakes. So this year I have not or crucially had not been playing very good golf. My handicap has thankfully come down over the course of the last 6 months or so from 16 to around a3. But I was very very stuck. I was shooting rounds which were couple of shots above handicap, sometimes a little bit more than that. Never managing to go low. Always sort of in that kind of fatty middle part of the curve, right in that meaty part of the curve. And it just wasn’t a very enjoyable place to be. I was working on my game. I was getting out fairly regularly, but I was just losing confidence in various parts of my game. One day it might be my driving, next day it might be my chipping, but overall just not feeling like I was making any progress. Feeling very, very stuck and ultimately played a couple of really stinky rounds back to back just before a recent lesson. Quick side note, apologies if you can hear any noise in here. There is either some construction going on nearby this sim room or some sort of nuclear bomb siren/ test. Um, let’s hope it’s the former, not the latter, but apologies if the mic is picking any of that up. So, I basically threw myself at the mercy of my coach and told him what had been going on. Told him that I didn’t really know where I was. I had a million and one swing thoughts every time I stood over the ball. I didn’t have confidence in any part of my game. And although I felt like I knew I was a better player, I wasn’t scoring well, and I wasn’t really feeling like I was continuing the progress that we had set in motion towards the end of last year. and the start of this. Thankfully though, there are a couple of things that one can do in this situation to make things better fairly quickly and fairly easily. My coach was able to distill these down for me and I wanted to relay the experience to you because not only were those things good advice, they are fairly easy to implement and subsequent to doing them, I have had two of the best rounds of my golfing life to date. So, I wanted to share what his wisdom was to me. Maybe that can help some of you guys and also just put you on a better path getting out of your own head to thinking about some of the basics that might help you play as well as you know you can rather than having a million swing thoughts going on and feeling very very lost out on the course because I am well aware that is not a fun place to be. So really there were two parts to this process. And the first one, as basic and fundamental as it sounds, was just setup. And setup is one of those things I think is easy to take for granted when you move from being a sort of beginner to an intermediate golfer. You think you know how to set up to a ball. You think you’re doing it right every time. But like so many things in life, degree by degree, it can drift and it can drift and it can drift until suddenly you’re completely out of whack. But you don’t really realize how you got there. And it turns out that was the case for me. Uh my setup was wrong in terms of alignment, both my feet and my shoulders, but also other things in terms of posture, ball position. Lots of things were out by a degree or two. And it all added up to this huge variance where I could swing the club and not really know in which direction the club was going, let alone the ball. So, the first thing we did, and no, it’s not glamorous and it’s not exciting, but there is a reason you see tour pros doing this out on the range before tournaments, was work with alignment sticks. Now, like a lot of golfers, I have owned alignment sticks for quite some time, but I don’t use alignment sticks every single time I go out to practice. And in fact, my alignment stick discipline has been very, very poor. But it turns out, and I was able to see this from the video, that my coach was taking of me during this lesson, that my alignment was indeed all over the place. Feet were closed, shoulders were open, and although somewhere in the middle, I was vaguely aiming at my target, there was no way that I was able to swing the club consistently along the right path with my body or ski width. So essentially, we move to putting two alignment sticks down. One to help me line up my club head, one to help me line up my feet. uh and then just checking shoulder alignment before every shot to make sure that I wasn’t twisting my body open as is my tendency. So that was the first thing. The second thing was ball position which had snuck further and further back in my stance. Getting that a little bit forward, making sure that my head wasn’t advanced to the ball, making sure that again I was just giving myself the best possible chance to make good contact. And I caveat all of this as I have said before and will say again that I am not a PJ professional and I am not even a very good golfer. I am just one of you mid to high handicappers who is trying to get better, but someone who has forgotten some of these fundamentals along the way and through reminding myself of them has seen a dramatic improvement in my game, which is obviously what we all want. So, this was something that we did that had an almost immediate effect out on the range. I went from spraying the ball right and left to hitting it fairly straight, which is obviously nice to see. And thankfully, it was also something that translated very, very quickly to the course. I will come to that. The second part of the equation is one that is slightly harder to solve and certainly slightly harder to stick with consistently and that is mental. You’ve really gone mental. The fact that I was playing badly meant I was looking for fixes after every shot or every round. That meant that I had more and more swing thoughts stacking up to the point that I had a million and one things going through my brain over every single shot. And as we all know, that is no way to live, let alone play golf. So, we move back to thinking of just one single thing before each shot. Posture was the first thing to get right and then one swing thought. Now, my swing thought will differ from everyone else’s out there. I would recommend working with a coach if you can to identify what yours needs to be in terms of the most important mechanical thing that you’re trying to focus on at any given time. But if you don’t have a coach, then perhaps you know, or perhaps you’ve just had a swing thought that has worked well for you in the past. So, maybe revert to that. But the important thing was one just have one rather than thinking about takeaway and arm position and hip rotation and sway and all of these other things and length of back swing that I’d got myself into was just go back to one thing which was going to allow me frankly to just hit the ball in the center of the face and keep the club square as best as I possibly could. So there’s one thing there which is easy to do for everybody. It’s just a question of your checkpoints in terms of your feet, your shoulders, your grip, your stance, your posture. And then there’s one thing which is harder to do because we are all bombarded by these thoughts as we stand over the ball. What could go wrong? What could go right? But is really really important to try and nail down. And I’ve been able to see almost immediate results from that. So I went from playing a lot of mediocre to not very good golf for the 6 months preceding this to 4 days after this lesson going out and shooting the best round of my life and then 3 days after that shooting the second best round of my life. Now, those were not results that I was expecting, and your results may of course vary. But I think it was a really great illustration of the distance between feeling lost and feeling found again in golf really not being that great at all. I was pretty much in the pits of despair, throwing myself in my coach’s mercy, telling him I didn’t know what I was doing, and I’d completely lost my game to shooting two of the best rounds of my life in the space of a week. So, do not give up hope. Sometimes the difference between triumph and failure is just going back to those basics, trying to clear out the head and get back to some of the fundamentals. There is, as I say, a reason why you see pros working on things like alignment so religiously at the range. It is something that a lot of us amateurs forget to do or drift away from. And over time, that drift can add up to some seriously bad consequences without us even realizing what the problem is. And similarly with swing thoughts, they can just stack up and up and up until you’ve got so many you’re trying to juggle, you just can’t even begin to swing the club properly. So hopefully that helps. As I say, this is just my experience, but from speaking to a lot of golfers, from people in the comments, I know that this feeling of having lost your swing is a very, very common one and it is frankly a very miserable one. So hopefully this can help. It has certainly helped me. I’m feeling much more confident uh over each of my golf shots now. feeling much more optimistic when I go out to play. And that is a much brighter place to be enjoying my golf from. So hopefully it can help you. Hopefully it can help you find your swing if you do feel like you’ve lost it and get back to shooting some good scores and just enjoying your golf more. If you do have any thoughts, questions, or comments about how to find your swing, any thoughts about how I’ve gone about rediscovering mine, then please do drop them in the comments and we can discuss. And I will see you in the next one.
1 Comment
Another great video!