Teaching one's self to play golf. A method.

Not meant to be the ultimate method. It just makes sense to me at this time. Perhaps it will for some of you as well.


Teaching one's self to play golf. A method.


Introduction

Golf is comprised of many different aspects all varying in difficulty. All varying in complexity. Typically, there's the tee shot, the fairway shot and the approach. That last one can be either a full iron shot, a pitch or a chip. Then there's the recovery shot which itself can be either from the rough or the sand bunker or even from shallow water. Then there's the putt. The long one and the short one, the straight one and the breaking one. All of these shots make up the game of golf. Some combine two or more of the above. Like I said, all varying in difficulty and complexity. Some are easier than others. The 3 foot putt, for instance, is much easier than the 30 foot putt. This is the point of this essay. Easy is easier than not.


Easy does it.

Easy is easier than not. This means that when it's not easy, it's difficult. It's more complex or takes more skill. It takes more practice or more experience. All of this takes more time. But easy can easily be learned. It can be learned quickly. We become good at it early and can apply what we learned soon after we begin. Easy does it. This implies that difficult does not. There's some truth in that as we will see below.


Graduating to difficult.

It's not for no reason that we start with kindergarten. We don't know anything, we must begin somewhere. Easy is easier than not. Let's start with easy. Go on from there. Once we've mastered the easy stuff, we can graduate to more difficult stuff. We go on like that until we get a job and start paying rent and pretty much do grown up stuff. But we started somewhere, that place was easy. We graduated to the difficult stuff only after we'd become good at the easy stuff first. Or good enough, at least. As it concerns this subject, the easy stuff would be the 3 foot putt. And the most difficult stuff would be the 1 wood from the tee. The math is simple, 3 feet is much easier than 300 yards. Everything in between varies in difficulty gradually from easy to difficult. Keep that in mind.


Parallel skills.

As we learn the easy stuff, we learn other skills, parallel skills. Skills that can be transfered to the more difficult stuff. For instance, with the 3 foot putt, we learn that we are more successful if we strike the ball with a square clubface than not. This skill can be transfered to the 150 yard approach, for example. And it would work pretty much like it does with the 3 foot putt: We are more successful than not. These parallel skills are also easily and quickly learned because they are developed while learning the easy stuff. In turn, these parallel skills make the difficult stuff easier and quicker to learn later on.


Confidence. Get some.

Mentally, doubt is what makes us fail. Confidence is what makes us succeed. As we practice the easy stuff, we build confidence. We build it easily and quickly because we build it on easy stuff. "This is easy. I can do this." This is confidence. With confidence, we trust our skills. Our lack of confidence, doubt, would otherwise affect our skills negatively. We would doubt, hesitate and finally fail. It's difficult to shake our confidence when it was built on easy stuff. Because again, this is easy, we can do it.


The expert. At something.

Being an expert means to be better than most. Even to be the best. It means to know your stuff so well that you can be certain of the outcome. It's easier and quicker to become an expert at the easy stuff than it is with the difficult stuff. I may not be an expert with the driver but I've become quite the expert with that 8i. I did that with extensive practice and determined efforts. The result is that I am certain that when I hold a 8i in my hands, I will achieve success. Can you say the same for any part of your game? If not, pick something easy and practice it until you become an expert at it. Until you know everything there is to know about it inside and out. It will serve you well and it will boost your confidence.


Make the difficult easy.

Ever hear the saying "they make it look easy"? There's a lesson. Maybe they make it look easy because for them, it is. Maybe it is easy for them because they made it easy. They found the easy way to do the difficult stuff. Maybe that's why they make it look so easy to us. If it's too difficult, they probably don't do it anyway. Unless they absolutely must. Even then, they don't often do that. And when they do, they give themselves all the leeway they can so that the next shot is easier as a result. So when faced with a choice, choose the easy shot.


Make a habit of success.

When in doubt, take the easy way out. It's simple, when it's easy, success is common. Practice the easy stuff often. Practice success often. Make success your daily meal. Make it a habit. As the proverb says, habits die hard. Better make good habits than not.




The alternative.

We begin with difficult. We never graduate to more difficult because we're already there. When we want to progress, we must do it downward in difficulty. That is not an encouraging prospect for the ego and confidence. "Oh I can't do it, gotta go back to basics. Gotta go back to the newbie stuff." It takes us much longer to become any good at the difficult stuff. So it takes us longer to develop the parallel skills. So it takes us longer to apply them to other easier stuff. So it takes us longer to learn anything else. We fail often because it is difficult. Because we must learn everything at the same time. We must learn the difficult stuff, the parallel skills, boost our confidence, learn success, etc. All this in a constant environment where failure is much more common than success. Because we started with the difficult stuff first.

Basically, we went to university at age 5. We're still stuck for years because we lack all the necessary knowledge of all the easy stuff we bypassed to be here. Because we lack the confidence that we would have gained from becoming good at the easy stuff. Unless we think of our confidence in our ability to fail at the difficult stuff. "I can't do it and I'm certain of it: I tried countless times." Because we've never become an expert at anything except perhaps failing since that is so common. Because we can't improve what we haven't developed. Because we can't maintain what we don't know. Because we don't know how to make the difficult easy since we never learned the easy stuff to begin with. Because our habit is to fail.


A good challenge.

I don't mean to say that you shouldn't try the difficult stuff once in a while or even every day. I mean when you know you can't do it and still try, it's not a challenge anymore. It's a guaranteed slaughter for your confidence which in turn affects your skill. If you want to kill your confidence and build doubt, try stuff you know you will fail. And if you really want to feel bad about yourself, do it in a tournament where you have a few dollars on the line. Or a million. But the shot you know you can do, yet is still difficult enough to give you a good challenge, try it and try it often. I'd call this practice but you may just call it a challenging experience. Be prepared for failure anyway. And if you do fail, fall back to a shot you know you can do so that your confidence, and subsequently your skill, is not affected by this tryout, this challenging experience. A good challenge is one that has a chance of success. Not a guarantee of failure. Anyway, as you practice more and more those difficult shots and succeed more and more, you'll become better at it eventually. They will become easier to do. And that's what it's all about. To make it easier to do.


Easy does it.

__________________
Ultimately, doubt is
what makes us fail.
If we doubt that,
let us take a moment
and consider the irony.

martin,
thats easy for you to say.

Hi Martin,

Not sure if you are making a statement or proposing a discussion on the subject matter?

I cannot disagree with much you have said actually. Starting with the fundamentals and building from there has to be the correct way to learn anything.

I wish I had taken an easier path to learning golf, I am still learning but knowing what I understand now I think I could have shortened the learning curve by a large amount.

After the fundamentals of posture grip and alignment, teaching someone to strike a golf ball with fair results could be simplified substantially. The clarity of 3 Skills is something most people could progress well with tied with a few other pieces of imagery, I have always liked the one from Leadbetter of standing in a barrel and swinging the club around a hoop. Then there is practice, lots of it.

Yes, Easy does it!

__________________
Best Regards
Brian

________________________________
Funny o'l game!

Yes, the fundamentals serve as a foundation to the rest.

Starting with the easy stuff would be learning the 3 foot putt. The difficult stuff would be the driver. Many will jump on the driver and wonder why it doesn't work, why they can't make it work. Apparently, many still don't know after years of playing golf. Had they learned and become proficient at the 3 foot putt, perhaps then they'd have used the knowledge from that and applied it to more difficult stuff. The square clubface is always relevant to a discussion of technique regardless of the distance whether it be 3 feet or 300 yards. The same goes for the grip. We grip the club with the hands, we should control it with the hands as well. I still don't understand this talk of passive hands or over active hands.

Those two skills, square clubface and a proper grip, are easily learned when we practice the 3 foot putt, the easy stuff. It's so easy to succeed from that distance that when we fail, it's obvious. Not only that, but since we see the entire sequence from impact to when the balls stops, the reasons for failure is just as obvious which makes it easy to bring the appropriate corrections. Last, the time it takes for the sequence to complete is so short that we can consider it as immediate feedback. Our actions are still fresh in memory and can be easily analyzed to look for the mistake and bring the appropriate corrections accordingly. Let's try that with a 300 yard drive. Can you make a clear picture in detail of what you just did and still see it after 5 seconds of ball flight? I can't. 5 seconds is a long time when all my attention is on the ball and where it's going. For the 3 foot putt, it takes about 1.5 seconds for the entire sequence to complete from impact to where the ball stops. I can remember precisely what I did in detail and can bring corrections quickly and can test those corrections just as quickly and bring further corrections and so forth.


The fundamentals, grip, stance, posture, alignment, ball position, clubface alignment, can all be learned when swinging the driver. They can all be learned when practicing a 3 foot putt as well. But with the 3 foot putt, it takes a fraction of the time to learn them and success is several orders of magnitude more common. It's ironic, I think. The pros have a saying "drive for show, putt for dough". That would imply that they make their money doing the easy stuff.


Come to think of it, maybe I'm trying to give myself reasons to keep up my 3 foot practice. It does get boring and I want to continue to practice and improve so I want all the encouragement I can get. Convincing myself that I can transfer those skills to more difficult stuff later is one way to do it.

__________________
Ultimately, doubt is
what makes us fail.
If we doubt that,
let us take a moment
and consider the irony.

Hi, Martin, just a wee bit wordy, halfway through I lost the thread, sorry for the dreadful pun.

My method:

Have someone come along to the course with you with a battery powered shock device and have them attach electrodes to your lower back or some other place on your body that will not impede your swing. The leads from the shock machine must be long enough so the person operating the device can stand well back of you. Every time you make a bad shot, have the person administer an electric shock to you. Start off with a very small shock and build it up. If you can finish the round without passing out you probably had a pretty good day. You probably won't be able to finish the round the first few times you do this but you should see progress until the fateful day when you complete 18 holes.

ROTFLMAO...Pavlov's swing.

The words you write tell us who you are. It would be wise to write words that make you look good. Bruin, bampot, Jambalaya and GregJ, you all look a little worse for your words. I wanted a serious discussion but I got only one serious reply. The rest was inconsequential, irrelevant, showed a lack of respect or plain old childishness. It almost feels like Jambalaya wanted to insult me in some way, to provoke me.

I want the moderator to clean this up if the posters don't do it themselves.

Hi Martin,

It was no mistake that Tiger Woods learned the game from the Green to Tee, as I taught my son, his first club was a putter, if I were to take the time with a complete beginner to teach him/her golf I would advocate all what you have put down.

I understand you may not be a 3Skills fan but I would certainly start with what the club does to the ball to achieve the best result, i.e the 3 Skills, the club face contact with the ball, and the path involved. This I think could give even a complete novice a chance to swing the club to achieve the 3Sks.

I certainly find you threads very interesting and sometimes very deep, not everyone is as thoughtful as you or indeed takes to time to explain your inner workings and thoughs involved in the learning process.


Thanks

Ian.

__________________
Once you learn the swing, your next step is mastering golf psychology................

hi martin,
no disrespect intended.
your method is sound enough,in fact , i would say it's the way i have used to learn the 3sk's.started with 9 iron and worked up to 5 iron.it's taken 3 months to get that far , now i am introducing fairway woods into the game,slowly getting there, not going to run until i can walk.
at least i can play during the winter,so hopefully by next spring i can start reducing my h/c.

I meant no disrespect at all. I only reacted to a funny reply that only seemed light hearted in nature.

I actually read your essay and had a hard time with it. Not to say it was bad, but to say that you pretty much said the same thing several times in slightly different ways and that was hard to read. You did make your point that learning difficult things is hard, that I get.

(Just to comment, I actually think that 3-foot putts are hard. The problem is that we expect to make them all the time. A missed one devastates you. If you miss a 10-foot putt, that's not as bad, you walk away thinking that one got away. A missed 3-footer stays with you for the rest of the round and into the night...)

But I understand your point.

__________________
I'm a golfaholic, no question about that. Counseling wouldn't help me. They'd have to put me in prison, and then I'd talk the warden into building a hole or two and teach him how to play. ~Lee Trevino

The 3sk is a method in its own right. I haven't looked at it in detail but by your account, it looks like it works. You say "not going to run until I can walk." I have a drill that I explain just that way. Crawl, walk, run. Instead of going right away to the full swing, I start with a quarter swing. I practice that then go on to the half swing and so forth. Once I get to the full swing, there's little left to develop since I've done most of it with the previous quarter and half swing practice. It becomes easier and I have three shots with that club instead of just the full swing.

__________________
Ultimately, doubt is
what makes us fail.
If we doubt that,
let us take a moment
and consider the irony.

Hard to read. Gotcha. I'll work on that.

I think 3 footers are hard too. I think they're much harder when I don't practice them at all. If all I practice is the 10 footer, I'm bound to fail more frequently in practice. Since I fail more frequently, when I fail on the course, it's no big deal. I expected to fail and it was based on practice and experience. But with the 3 footer, I tell myself, "this is easy, I can do it." When I don't practice, I can only rely on my confidence which itself is based on the idea that the 3 footer is easy and I can do it. I expect to succeed but it's not based on practice. So when I fail the 3 footer, my world crumbles. Doubt sets in, I hesitate and finally I fail in other tasks.

I would prefer to walk away from a failed 3 footer thinking "that one got away." Knowing full well that with all the practice I did, I can do most of those. I can't possibly think that for any longer putts.

__________________
Ultimately, doubt is
what makes us fail.
If we doubt that,
let us take a moment
and consider the irony.

I have his book, "How I Play Golf". I browse it frequently. I used to look only at full swing pictures and text but now that I'm at home with only my rug and putter, I started reading about his methods on "rolling the rock". Maybe he's been a strong influence on my current thinking. But maybe where I'm at now is just a function of how I got here on my own. Since I'm self taught, I must begin with the simple things.

Hi Martin,

I have this book, it's a great read.............I like the mental section, I also have his 3 DVD life story told by him and his parents which has helped me with Liam.

Ian.