Is Golf The New Hair Shirt?

2010-03-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

In years gone by, when someone needed to make penitence, they wore a hair shirt under their clothing. The course fibres rubbed with every movement to leave their skin red raw. Nowadays we take up playing golf instead!

How many times have you booked a tee time and looked forward with anticipation to a perfect day, playing a round with your close friends in perfect conditions, only to trudge off the 18^th green with a score to forget? We all do it, often more regularly than we would like to admit. Yet we still spend vast fortunes on new clubs, shoes, etc, and not to forget endless baskets of balls at the driving range. All in the vain attempt to develop a golf swing that will keep our ball out of the rough!

In recent years, the local pro and huge library of “Teach Yourself” books have been joined by new methods of instruction (or should that be therapy?) such as video swing analyzers, Youtube videos and a variety of straps and braces to truss your body with and keep your swing right. I often wonder whether it would be much more advantageous to forget all that and instead spend the money on a course of hypnotherapy because the biggest obstacle for most players, to improving their golf, is inside their head.

Most people fall into the trap of over analyzing the golf swing. How complicated can it be to swing a stick through the air and strike a ball? I’m not talking about playing to a level to challenge on the PGA circuit here. That is out of reach for all but a tiny percentage of players. I’m not even talking about playing at a level to challenge your local club champion either. I’m simply suggesting that swinging a club to strike the ball in the direction you intend it to travel and to a distance that your club is designed to hit to, shouldn’t require more than a simple set of instructions and basic actions, followed by the obligatory quantity of practise.

The correct golf swing for you is probably going to be a motion that is unique to you. Your height, weight, bone structure and muscle mass (middle-age spread) are likely to be different to most other people. Two people of the same height and weight may very well have different arm and leg lengths, so the arc of their golf swing and angle of their stances could differ substantially.

The challenge to the average golfer is to get sufficient time to practise their swing. If you work and have a family, you are lucky if you can grab a couple of hours a week at the driving range. You don’t have the time to work on the minutiae of every aspect of the golf swing. So keep your practise sessions simple.

The Golf Swing - Does It Have To Be So Hard?

Is Golf The New Hair Shirt?