The best advice for any established golfer is to abandon all thoughts about how to hit the ball … when on the golf course.
Different matter off the course - think as much as you want about backswing, weight distribution, clearing the left side, alignment, grip pressure etc. There are literally thousands of videos and other instructional materials on the internet to satisfy an endless and invariably fruitless quest for improvement.
However, there is only one thing that work reliably on the course and that is to trust your instinct and be joyful when you play. Forget about technique and cause and effect. Embrace feeling and instinct instead. But how do you reconcile such an approach when you've just taken 5 to hole out from the side of the green, or you've hit your drive out of bounds and you so much wanted to play well today? Most golfers will take the easy solution and go back to what they've been doing since they started the game - focus on technique and how to hit the ball.
And that will never work because your mind simply isn't capable of translating conscious thoughts into physical actions. The only thing you can trust is your instinct, your unconscious thoughts. It's your best friend on the golf course and will never let you down. But it takes work, sometimes a lot of work to transition from thinking the game to feeling the game.
We can all understand that feeling relaxed is the best condition to be in at address. And when we are truly relaxed we are undoubtedly more likely to perform well compared to being tense and anxious about the outcome. And therein lies a great golfing conundrum - we know that performance increases with relaxation and winners of golf tournaments will often tell us so on TV, but when it comes to our turn, on our course with our humble package of golfing ability, something bad happens. Why is that?
Let's consider the case of Stozzer. Once a shining light on the golf courses of southern England, but now reduced to a quivering mess when faced with the prospect of chipping on to the green, especially when there's a bunker in the way. In fact, there doesn't even need to be an obstacle because Stozzer's problem isn't how he chips, it's how he thinks. One day he'll be thinking that taking the club outside the line is the answer and the evidence of a few good results will convince him that he's right. The next day, the evidence points 180 degrees in the opposite direction as the ball goes sideways or worse, doesn't go anywhere. That's right, even a golfer once good enough to be plus-2 can have an air shot from just off the green.
Then there's Mutt, another good friend, a magnificent ball striker that consistently reduces par fives to a drive and short iron. His only problem is when the short iron doesn't put the ball on the green. Faced now with the appalling anxiety of a chip shot that will likely fare no better than Stozzer's, he opts instead to chip one-handed as the only solution he's found so far to overcome his inner demons. Mutt had chipping lessons with a renowned short game instructor, but after his first effort - with 2 hands - missed the ball entirely, the only sensible course of action was to revert to one-hand. Teaching someone that fails to make contact with the ball is difficult. To be fair, though, he's not too bad with one hand, but what a waste of talent.
Then there's my good friend Tim, who gives the appearance of being completely relaxed at address and the outcome often reflects this. But there's a discernible stutter on the backswing, the smallest pause 6 inches in to the backswing revealing that momentarily, at least, thought has overcome feeling. Like Stozzer and Mutt, Tim possesses outstanding raw ability to hit golf balls well, but only realises a fraction of his talent on the golf course.
Tim would tell you that you only have to hit enough balls to eventually reach a desired standard of play. As much as I love Tim, I have to disagree. Someone who has a very high opinion of himself wrote a book in which he claims that Tiger Woods reached golfing excellence as a result of hitting the ball 10,000 times. That's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous because one summer I religiously hit the ball 10,000 times - I counted them - and at the end of the exercise, instead of golfing nirvana all that I achieved was a bad back and a worse golf game.
And therein lies another conundrum - how on earth can there be no correlation between practice and performance? The answer has everything to do with what I said at the beginning - over-thinking how to hit the ball. When you practice you confirm to yourself that what you think you should be doing is actually what you are doing because the ball does eventually start going where you want. The longer you stay on the range, the more you are convinced that it is indeed keeping a shallow angle of attack that is working. You leave the range confident that tomorrow's medal will be a repeat performance of today's practice session. After you proceed to knob it off the first tee, however, that conviction is quickly replaced by a growing sense of panic and bewilderment; yesterday's shallow angle of attack is readily substituted with another technical thought. What about keeping the left wrist bowed at the top of the backswing? Like Dustin Johnson and Sergio Garcia. Works for them.
What about leaving all those thoughts of technique in the rubbish bin? Instead of practising how to play, why not try practicing what to feel? Techniques are like leaves in the wind - they blow one way and then another, never settling. What you need is a solid foundation to play well at golf. Something that you can rely on, something constant. What about instinct? We are all accidents of biology, mere life forms competing to survive. Our will to survive is instinctive, it's what we all do inherently. It's what we do best. Instinct is natural, never premeditated and as such, never practised. But what if we could harness our instinct? And use it to govern our play, rather than the endless supply of tips and techniques gratuitously offered by the golfing industry.
The easiest way to play more instinctively is to remind yourself as you address the ball “trust your instinct”. That's really all there is to it.
That simple directive is mostly all it takes to eliminate a debilitating invasion of technical thought. I say “mostly” because there will be occasions when the urge to think overcomes the need to trust. You'll recognise when this happens by a failure to have moved your weight to the left side after impact. An authentic swing that trusts to instinct will always transfer your weight fully to the left. It must because it's a natural physical reaction to allowing yourself to release the club unencumbered with thoughts as to how.
If you are thinking about how to hit at address, you've basically got no chance of making a committed swing. You might get away with mediocre shots caused by swing deceleration as your mind remains focused on how it wants the body to behave. The mind must not be allowed to control how you hit the ball - the only thing your mind should be doing at address is focusing on the target - i.e. the ball and nothing but the ball. It's the only thing standing between you and the desired destination. It must be your one and only focus of attention throughout the swing and those crucial seconds of pre-shot preparation.
Practice it next time you're on the range. Learn to embrace those occasions when it goes wrong as encouragements to better trust your instinct. Nurture the feeling of swinging freely through the ball. Above all, enjoy how it feels when it goes right. It's a delicate balance because our minds always want to associate result with cause, and it would be a mistake to believe that a successful outcome was the direct result of say, a shallow angle of attack. If you don't have someone taking a video, then you don't even know if a shallow angle of attack was responsible. Even if you do have a video, and you can perceive a shallow angle of attack, is that the only reason the shot was successful? Of course not. There are a thousand different muscles involved in swinging a club - can you intelligently conclude that those involved in keeping the angle shallow are the sole cause of a good shot?
And that's the reason why trusting your instinct works so much better than trying to replicate some belief that you are making a correct movement. Consider another of those vaunted must-have movements - transition from the top of the backswing starting with the lower body - you see Mcilroy doing it on TV, you hear the commentators salivating over his prowess and believe that you can have a bit of that too. All you have to do is start the downswing by moving your hips first, allowing the arms to follow in a beautiful arc that delivers maximum power from the inside. Do you honestly believe you are able to consciously control such a sequence of movements in the half-second it takes to make a swing?
The slightly odd thing about playing instinctively is that the more you trust your instinct the more your body will behave correctly. It's like throwing a ball into a bucket - do it instinctively as an immediate reaction to the target and it goes in - but start thinking about the parabola and correct amount of force required and you'll miss. In fact, the more you think about how you need to throw that ball, the less likely it will go in the bucket. Golf is exactly the same.
Sometimes it gets so bad that I really think I should give up. After all, it's such a stupid game. Who in their right mind spends hours traipsing round a field failing time after time to propel a small spherical object into a 5 inch hole? Well, me for a start and hundred of thousands of other deluded individuals. We convince ourselves that we are having a good time because we're out in the open, usually with friends, collectively engaged in a similar pursuit. Be honest, though. What really makes you happy on the golf course? It's that glorious drive down the middle, it's the delicious pitch shot that checks and rolls close to the hole, or best of all, for me at least, is when that long putt imparted with just the right amount of momentum drops into the heart of the hole.
I can count on one hand the number of good shots I've made in the last 5 years, and each was followed by unalloyed joy. There's simply no better feeling in life than hitting a perfect golf shot. By the same token, there's no more miserable feeling than duck-hooking it off the tee or three-stabbing from nowhere or chunking a chip shot. Is it like that in tennis, I wonder? I reckon not, for the simple reason that tennis and games like it demand more of an instinctive reaction to the target. In golf, you can spend as long as want deliberating over the shot, and usually the more time you think about it the more tense and anxious you become. Misery is almost guaranteed.
You want your golf swing to be a natural reaction to how you feel. Don't sabotage your game by believing you know the right technique and can faithfully enact it. You can't. Give yourself the freedom to judge your golfing outcomes based on how instinctively you played. Accept that you've hit enough good shots in the past to know instinctively how to hit the ball. You don't need or want any technical imperative to misguide you.