‘How Are You Getting On With That Swing Change?

This week’s blog topic is called, ‘How Are You Getting On With That Swing Change?’

Are you currently making some changes to your swing to improve your ball flight and lower your scores? How well have you been doing with it? Let’s look at a few areas to help you on your journey.

Having A Feedback Loop

It’s important to have some feedback when making a change and hopefully, you are making this to lower your score by improving your ball flight and strike. When you make the new move what is the flight and strike like vs your original move?

This is a great way for you to be able to improve your understanding and awareness of when you execute the new move better. Don’t get me wrong, you are going to hit some shockers in there, which give you few clues, but that’s what happens when we try something new and increase our cognitive load. What is your intent, and did the outcome match your intention or resemble what you were trying to achieve?

A Change Of Focus

There is a lot of research out there to suggest that we perform better when adopting an external focus. What does this mean?

If you have become internally focused, you are very focused on the body parts when trying to perform the movement. An external focus could be on the flight of the shot. If you are trying to improve your chest rotation in the backswing for example you could add a sticker to your chest and aim to rotate the sticker away from the target. This would be an example of adopting a simple change of focus to achieve the same task.

It’s Going Great At The Range But On The Course…

Finally, if you are experiencing some good performance on the range but struggling to transfer that to the course, then here are some questions I would like you to ask yourself.

Are you adding any variability at the range? This could be changing the club and target more frequently.
Are you adopting any of the behaviours from the course? Are you picking a target? Factoring in the yardage? Where do you want the ball to finish in relation to the target? Is there any wind? What shot are you trying to hit?
Am I performing the new skill in a representative environment? Become great in multiple environments to help transfer to the golf course and remember to integrate your pre shot routine.

If you want specific help with nailing down those pesky swing changes don’t hesitate to reach out!

-Coach Tim