What Makes a Good Instructor?
In the past few weeks, I’ve been rebuilding a lot of my golf swing. I’ve been trying to reduce sway in my backswing, loosen my grips and wrists, implement proper weight transfer, work on a full shoulder turn, and fix my early extension. It’s just a lot of things to think about at once and impossible to do all at once. On the range, I tried doing one or two things and once I got those down, move on to the others. It’s also often been said that if you’re out there on the course, you should have at most one swing thought, let alone a dozen.
I recently watched a video of Bryson DeChambeau giving a lesson to Grant Horvat, and he said something really interesting. If an instructor is giving you a swing thought and you can’t immmediately implement it, it’s probably not the right swing thought for you. Or it needs to be explained to you in a different way. It really resonated with me because lots of times instructors (with good intentions) will give students a swing thought and the student just cannot implement that change after dozens of tries. I’ve definitely had this happen to me on more than one occasion and it made me walk away from the lesson wondering if golf is just not for me because I don’t have the raw athleticism or hand/eye coordination for it.
