What Do You Know
About The Golf Swing?

Intelligent people who play golf tend to read and watch all they can in order to learn about the golf swing, which is why so many feel they are knowledgeable about the subject. To explain their inability to improve, these golfers believe their problem is that they can't put their knowledge into action. In other words, they think they know what to do, but they just can't do it.

Without getting into a philosophical debate about what knowledge is, let me ask a question. Isn't knowledge more than just the acquisition of information? Shouldn't the acquired information be correct for it to be considered knowledge?

This is an important point for those wanting to learn about the golf swing. Surely you've noticed how one golf instruction article conflicts with other golf instruction articles, sometimes within the same magazine. If the articles conflict with one another, then how do you know which is correct, if any? Of course, I could have mentioned one golf video conflicting with another video, or with an article or lesson, it's all the same.

For those who have amassed a considerable amount of information on the golf swing, much of it may be correct. However, while being correct, it may very well be wrong also! To explain, let me provide an analogy: what if you have thousands of jigsaw puzzle pieces and all of them fit into a puzzle, but it isn't just one puzzle, it's ten? Each piece is correct for one puzzle, but incorrect for the other nine. It's the same with golf swing knowledge because there are a number of effective ways to swing, not just one.

So how are you to know which swing concept goes with what swing? Unless you are very familiar with at least one complete swing style, you can't. Even most instructors fall into this trap and are just as likely to be adversely influenced by the same information as you. As a result, many instructors tend to teach what I call a "Frankenstein swing"—a hodgepodge swing in which parts of different swings are brought together into one swing, but these parts don't work well together.

The problem is that swing information comes at you from a wide variety of sources and all of these snippets belong to a number of different swings styles, yet these snippets get classified in your brain under golf swing rather than the specific swing type that they belong to.

The golfer who claims they "know what to do, but just can't do it" could be correct, but it is much more likely that they struggle because what they think is knowledge, isn't, or at least it is knowledge of incompatible swing concepts.

I have first hand experience with this. By the time I was eighteen I had taken many lessons from a number of different instructors and read a number of books and a ton of magazine articles on the golf swing. I believed I pretty much had the golf swing figured out. Now as I look back, what I knew was relevant to different swings, not one. No wonder I was stuck in a rut and found myself getting worse rather than better.

 

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Casey Eberting Golf Instruction

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