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.

What I always come back to is to simplify things. I just want to understand visually what I’m doing wrong and what is the easiest swing thought to fix that one flaw I’m working on. A good example of this is fixing my early extension. I could not for the life of me fix it while still being able to make contact with the ball. I hit so many buckets of balls thinking I was not early extending, but when I took videos of my swing, I could see that I was still clearly doing it. One instructor told me something so simple, which was to put my weight on my left heel and feel like head and sternum were aligned with my left foot when I made contact with the ball. Not only did this immediately fix my early extension, but it helped a lot with weight transfer and hitting less fat shots.

Anyway, I recently tried out the app Swing Tweaks, which is an app where you upload your swing and an instructor will give you a swing analysis/lesson for a reasonable fee. I want to say I spent something like $25 on the lesson. Overall, I thought it was kind of cool and obviously a lot of it depends on who you get as the instructor. I got a lesson on my driver swing on why I keep topping the ball, and the instructor I got didn’t even address my issue at all. He did point out some things I could fix which were really helpful but also didn’t help with me topping the ball. So I actually paid for another lesson a few days later and I ended up getting the same guy, which was disappointing. My overall rating of the app is that you should use it to get a very high-level analysis that will point you in the right direction, but does not beat someone who can see you in person and understand your movements, limitations, etc. Definitely worth checking out though.

I just want to leave you with a popular and cool video of Pete Cowen teaching the basics of a golf swing in a simple way that only he can.