Equipment

Many of my students and people I talk to just in general conversation find it very amusing that I try to get them to practice with old style blade clubs that have flat lie angles  and persimmon woods.

Their belief is.."I can't hit those"

That IS NOT THE POINT......IF you learn to hit them then just think how much easier your regular equipment will become to use!! 

I have stated many times you need feedback from your swing. The lighter, upright perimeter weighted equipment deteriorates your swing and doesn't allow your hands and brain to feel the mistakes that have occurred throughout the swing and the strike of the ball. 

To gain improvement you HAVE to make the playing field more difficult.

It amazes me that people all want to take the easy way out. They use horribly designed clubs that insist on no good basic movement. Their swing evolves from a pile of dirt into a pile of rubble.

They blame lack of improvement on their clubs and go buy the newest latest greatest equipment to hit the market thinking those clubs will hold the 'golden ticket'  inside them somewhere and help them improve. They waste thousands of dollars and are still blankly staring at square one. 

If you were a mathematician and all you ever saw pass across your desk was questions that involved 4 + 4 or  5 + 2...how would you gain knowledge? 

I always think back to the most remarkable cricket player the world has ever seen. 

Sir Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who finished first class test cricket with the unbelievable batting average of 99.94 runs per innings. 

This means he made 100 runs EVERY time he went in an batted. No-one has come even remotely close to approaching that figure and no-one ever will. 

When Bradman was growing up he used a cricket stump or a branch of a tree to practice. He would hit a golf ball up against a wall with the stump/branch which was about 1/10th the size of a regular cricket bat. 

He made the act of striking the ball more difficult .... once he could do that well... when he had a regular size bat in his hands and the regular size cricket ball was coming at him from a bowler's delivery ...it looked like a watermelon to him. 

He was so good, the other teams couldn't get him out and had to resort to trying to bowl at him and hurt him so he couldn't bat. The man was a genius and excelled at his sport by making practice HARDER....not by making anything easier. 

A great lesson to be learned right there and worth evaluating for your own golf game. 

Here is a video of Sir Donald Bradman in action.......



http://www.vimeo.com/video/21356386

 

bradman from Golf Aus on Vimeo.