Golf Instruction: Can You Have Too Much?

By Dan Yoder (Head Golf Professional)

Not all golf instruction is good for your game!

What? Yep, I’m not kidding. Once I fully realized this, it freed me up to begin to start playing my best. Not Tiger Woods’s best or Annika’s best, but Dan’s best. You see, I was a fanatical golf magazine reader, and I was always asking for tips from playing partners to help me with parts of my swing when I’d hit a bad shot.

I was so twisted up in knots about golf advice that I never had a chance. In fact, it was when I literally gave up “trying” to improve that I made my biggest gains. I took every tip I saw or heard, worked on it at the range for a while, and then proclaimed to myself that I have now found the answer to my golf swing troubles! That would last for all about 2 holes before I would give up on that idea as I continued to spray my shots. Were these bad golf tips? No, top pros created them and used them on their students in their lessons with much success. The problem for me was, I wasn’t in these lessons! (By the way, if you have no idea how to swing a club, then a set of lessons or ONE and only ONE instruction program should be your first move).

You can’t transplant a chicken leg to a one-legged human patient and expect the person to then walk! There are so many different theories on not only how to swing a golf club, but also on how to TEACH how to swing a club.

Much of it contradicts or is completely opposite from one teacher to another. On top of that, we have all sorts of different body types, muscle strengths, flexibility levels, and on and on that make for many different (and now here’s the kicker) SUCCESSFUL golf swings!

I am here to tell you, right now, in print, that for most of us: Your swing is good enough!

Even one of the greatest golf teachers of our time, David Leadbetter stated that “there is no definitive method” to a golf swing. This leads me to the heart of today’s lesson. And that is, “The Pareto Principle”. If you’ve never heard of it, it has also been called the 80/20 rule (or 90/10 rule) and it basically means that if you work on the 20% most important items first (for whatever you are trying to achieve), you will be 80% effective! In other words, you want to get the most results from the least effort. Especially if you’re a busy person with little time to work on your game.

You know that the whole golf industry is geared toward selling you new equipment each year and teaching you how to get “the perfect swing” (which doesn’t exist anyway). Don’t get me wrong, improving your swing is not a bad thing. But it is not necessary for you to get quick, time-efficient scorelowering gains. The proof of this lies in the fact that there are countless top professionals that win at the highest levels with unorthodox swings! Look at Jim Furyk, who won the U.S. Open.

And he has a huge LOOP in his swing. Look at Allen Doyle on the Champions Tour, he looks like he’s hitting a hockey puck! Lee Trevino always said that students should NOT try to copy his swing and we all know how successful he was. He was beating Jack Nicklaus in his prime! Spend some time watching the Champions Tour and you’ll see all sorts of wacky swings.

Forget about the pros for a minute. How many times have you seen a senior at your local course hit the ball straight down the middle nearly every time without hardly making any turn in his swing? While you blast drives 60 yards by him, he destroys you on the scorecard. Do I need to remind you that it’s only the final score that matters in this game? Stop working on your swing and start working on SCORING! There is no prize for the prettiest swing. Shoot, even though I am still tempted, I now actually force myself to ignore any swing instruction that I see in a magazine or book and just keep on with the basics of what I learned while striving for a REPEATING SWING, and not a perfect one. You can always work on your swing later after you tackle the 20% most important stuff that you need to work on to improve YOUR SCORES. After each round, it’s a good idea to reflect on and even write down a few things that caused your score to be higher than it should be. Do this for 5-10 rounds and then compare. The similarities you find in these notes make up the 20% most important things to work on to improve your game.