I was transferred from Ohio to Connecticut in June of 2004.

My office was 500 feet from a driving range on Sullivan Ave. and a nice golf course was about a mile down the road. I literally had nothing else to do most of the time so I hit balls and golfed just about every day.

By the middle of August I was killing the ball. Drives long and straight, irons unbelievable and the short game was better than ever. The only thing keeping me from playing scratch golf was putting.

I was so comfortable with my swing and golf game that in November I decided to give myself a set of fitted clubs for Christmas.

After the long winter layoff, I never felt comfortable while I was being fitted. I was worried about my swing but excited about the new clubs.

I picked up my new fitted clubs at the end of February 05 and started swinging at a heated driving range.

My swing from 2004 was gone. I could barely hit a ball.

Every wood shot was driven into the ground a couple of inches in front of the tee. Every iron shot was hit fat or thin or shanked or pulled. And I couldn’t chip.

I literally felt like I forgot how to swing a club. The winter layoff then hitting hundreds of balls during the fitting process really screwed me up.

The first time I played in 2005 was ugly and it didn’t get better after that. I suffered for 3 years. Bad shot after bad shot. I can’t begin to tell you how bad it was.

And I couldn’t fix it. I went to 3 different pros for lessons and couldn’t get it fixed.

The pros tried to fix the swing they saw which wasn’t my normal swing.

I hated golf and I hated all golfers but I kept playing. What else was I going to do?

Let’s fast forward to May of 2008.

I still can’t hit a good shot. I know that the bad habits I picked up over the past 3 years made me stay back on my right side. I couldn’t transfer my weight back to the left side which had me raising my left shoulder and while hitting down and across the ball. I could see it on film but I couldn’t fix it. Man was I screwed up.

Then one day I get this email from a guy who advertises to take his golf swing test and find out about your swing faults.

His test was actually something I use to practice and kind of forgot about it so I gave it a try.

To make a long story short, a bell rang in my head and I knew exactly what I was doing wrong.

During my club fitting after the long lay off, I can’t tell you why I did it but I really flattened my swing and got way out of plane.

That just caused me all kinds of trouble and I really suffered for 3 long years.

In a couple of minutes, the golf swing test showed me how out of plane my swing was and I corrected it in a couple of swings. It really clicked for me and saved the day.

Most golfers will agree that golf is a very difficult game to learn, particularly for adults. Kids, on the other hand, have a greater ability to imitate than adults do, so they tend to pick up the game much more quickly. Adults simply have much more difficulty imitating a good golf swing for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, conventional instruction does not deal very well with teaching adults who may have less ability than others. Conventional instruction normally just introduces the fundamentals to an adult beginner similarly to a child beginner. This simply does not work for most people, due to their inability to imitate. As a result of these issues, an industry was born several decades ago, and it continues to grow. This is the golf training aid industry. Combined with the technological advances in golf equipment, the training aid industry was developed to help golfers improve without having to practice much. Unfortunately, the average handicap remains stuck at around 16 for male golfers.

There is a faster way to learn, however. In many disciplines, we are taught to take notes when learning a new vocation, taking a class, or in any other educational environment. While some golfers do take notes at times, they are usually not focused in the right areas. In other activities, such as the martial arts, a good instructor will require a student to keep a journal and notebook. Students of martial arts are required to learn many forms or kata, and within these forms are many details that are difficult to remember without notes. The golf swing is similar to a mini form, as are many other areas of the game. Also, as in the martial arts, the golfer must learn to prepare for different conditions. While golfers get to experience the real deal more often, unlike the martial artist who will rarely fight, they still should take notes.

In other businesses, such as trading the financial markets, the best traders typically keep very detailed notes so that they can learn from their past failures and successes, and also to have a good reference tool for when market conditions change.

Golfers should follow this example as well. They should take notes and keep detailed statistics in order to get much better feedback from various parts of their game. These techniques have been applied by some instructors with very positive results with their students. This is according to Ed Feeney, a corporate behavior analyst who applied his craft to golf instruction. Top instructors are now incorporating these ideas into their instruction programs. These techniques now give both the student and the teacher a method of measuring results.

Copyright (c) 2010 Scott Cole