Whilst golf may not be instinctive learning is……and learning a movement skill is not about the accumulation of information and knowledge. There is not a Tour Pro alive that wouldn’t give up everything he or she knows to have control over the ball. Information is the booby prize…but we have an insatiable appetite for it. The Instinctive Golfer on the other hand doesn’t, and is able to separate themselves from what is “interesting” and what is actually critical to learning a motor skill like golf.

The Instinctive Golfer plays with feel and a level of awareness that we all had as kids but had taken from us by well meaning people telling us how to do it and what we did wrong. The baby learning to walk is allowed to get on with it. We simply create as safe an environment as possible and then let the learning happen. A baby falls around 100 times a day and yet we don’t feel compelled to tell them what they did wrong…….how lucky are we that we couldn’t communicate before we could walk!

Golf on the other hand is often a very different experience. Dad tells son how to hold the club and how to stand, then bombards him with reasons why the ball didn’t go where it was meant to. We’ve all been told to keep our heads down and swing slow by a parent or well meaning friend. It all seems so innocuous, but in fact it is incredibly damaging. To steal a kids opportunity to fail over and over as they learn a new skill is how the instinctive golfer is lost. Rules and structure are the enemy to uncovering the creative problem-solving genius that resides in us all…..the instinctive golfer!

Therefore, despite your past experiences or where you currently are with your game the instinctive golfer within you can be guided out, but you’ve got to want to do that. Layers of others beliefs, doubt fear and anxiety are stopping him showing up and therefore we have to peel those back if we are to reveal the authentic you.

If you love to explore and discover what’s possible then Instinctive Golf Coaching is definitely for you!

Learning a new skill can be a very rewarding experience, however we also want to be able to perform those skills when it matters. For some that may be producing shots in a major championship or monthly club medal, or simply when out enjoying a relaxing 18 holes with friends.

Developing skills is at the heart of IGC, but the interesting thing is that the state you need to access to learn a new skill effectively is virtually the same as required to perform it.

We all know the importance of concentration when it comes to learning something new, and that is certainly no different in golf. Performance also demands focus and when that level of concentration is deep enough we access a place known as the zone…..or flow state. If we can become totally immersed in a task then learning is massively accelerated and that is no different than the state that Lewis Hamilton has to be in if he is to safely navigate his way around a race track at 200 miles an hour, react to other drivers losing control or doing something unexpected and win the race. The consequences for Lewis not being fully engaged are potentially life threatening, however on the golf course we only “die” emotionally as a another shot appears to have a mind of its own.

So we can probably all accept that paying full attention to something is key to both learning and performance, but what should we be paying attention to in golf? The ball, my left arm, my right knee, my hips, my balance, not dropping my height….you get the gist. IGC would say none of the above is what we would consider a critical factor, in fact there is only one key factor when it comes to where the ball goes…..the club! The club is the only thing that the ball reacts to, not your feet or your head. The ball only goes where the club tells it and we tell the club, so given that fact paying attention to what the club is doing would be a great place to direct your attention. If you can heighten your awareness of what the club is doing as it swings you can then explore delivering it in various ways to hit your intended shot. That exploration will allow you to develop a feel for a specific shot, and each shot will have its own distinct feel which you will be able to recall as long as you remain absorbed and committed to delivering that feel on the ball and not get in your head concerned about the outcome.

The best players would always tell you that they want to be absorbed in the process and let the outcome take care of itself, and this is really what they are talking about. They simply play the game with a level of feel that most of us don’t….but we can develop more feel if we practice effectively.

Jack Nicklaus once said that “concentration is a fine antidote to anxiety” and Jack was right. However Jack didn’t mention what he was concentrating on and that could be because playing with feel is Jack’s default mode, it’s like breathing to him, and therefore very difficult to verbalise.

So whether you want to learn or perform something then…….pay attention!

Kids are learning machines, and it goes without saying that they can learn golf with very little intervention from us. The Instinctive Junior Golfer does not want to be told how to do it and hear what he’s doing wrong. They simply want to have a go and missing it a lot is all part of the process. If you can refrain from showing how to hold the club you will be helping them far more than you can ever imagine. The desire to jump in and help is very strong amongst us parents but a child who really wants to hit something will eventually hit it. I know there will be people reading this who are thinking…..”but surely you’ve got to get the basics right at the beginning”? Incredibly logical but unfortunately that will not help them become independent learners and that is what we want. Left alone they will find a solution and if you can encourage them to keep exploring then they will probably come up with another solution to the same problem. Tiger Woods first coach Rudy Duran said that one of the most astonishing things about the 7 year old Tiger was that once he had solved a problem he wanted to figure out how many other ways he could hit the same shot. If Tiger could go back to being that exploring genius we might just see him back at the very top!

The best way to help your child become an instinctive junior golfer is ensure that they are in an environment where failure is simply seen as part of the journey and not a sign of them having done something wrong. Then play with them, trying to hit crazy shots and explore limitlessly to find out what they can do with this 7 iron or that rescue. Structure and rules are not what creates creative problem-solvers, and that’s what the kids will need to be as they embark on their golfing journey.

If you can get into the habit of asking a great question rather than telling them what in your opinion they did wrong that would also be a great way to coach them. You might ask them “what shot are you trying to play here”? or “what happened to make the ball do that”? or “what are you going to try to change that last shot”? or “I bet you couldn’t hit that same shot standing or gripping the club differently”? And if you can join in the exploration and fail together that would be awesome.

The genius resides in the kids our job as parents and coaches is to help draw that out and a good question for us to ask ourselves is….”what I can learn from this child”?

There’s not a player on the planet that doesn’t want to hit it further….probably even Dustin Johnson! And whilst there are a number of ways to produce more power the club golfer is unlikely to embark on a punishing gym regime to gain the strength that might allow him to hit it further. So is there a way to acquire more instinctive power? Of course!

How far we hit the ball is down to a number of factors and strength is only one of them. The clubhead speed we generate, the centeredness of the hit, the effectiveness of the club delivery, the efficiency of how we moved during the swing…and of course then there is the latest equipment. If you’ve maxed out on all of those then unfortunately you’ll need to dust off the gym membership card, however no one has yet managed to max out on them all so there is every chance there’s lots of potential for improvement.

Some of us are blessed with more fast twitch muscles than others and that can be one of the reasons why you see small skinny guys hitting it a long way. Here again this is not something you can changed easily so let’s look elsewhere. The areas that I would concentrate on would be the effectiveness of your delivery and that could well come simply through learning a new skill. If you are like a lot of club golfers and slice or fade the ball then learning to draw the ball could well give your distance a nice boost. As with any new skill you will need to pay attention to the club as it swings and use that awareness to explore swinging the club more to the right than you currently do and have the clubface more closed as it swings to the right (RH golfer). You may well have to be quite extreme with your exploration to find the appropriate path to face relationship to hit the draw, but keep at it as the rewards can be substantial.

There has been a lot of research done on golf biomechanics, and it would suggest that most golfers move pretty inefficiently. And whilst there’s no doubt that many of us have poor fitness, strength, flexibility and stability adding to the problem IGC believes that a lot of poor movement is down to poor concepts and miss-conceptions, and therefore if you can address that and move the club in a more effective manner then there is a far greater chance of your body learning to adapt and move more efficiently.

The short game almost always represents the route to lower scores and improved performance, and yet it is amazing how often this relatively simple aspect of the game strikes fear into even the most experienced player. However despite those challenges you can still develop a much more instinctive short game. A short game should be full of feel and touch….but how do you develop that?

Well perhaps when we look at the journey that the best in the game had we’ll get a clue? Seve Ballesteros, Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Tiger Woods and many others all had one thing in common…..they developed their incredible array of skills by exploring what was possible with different clubs and having fun messing around. Seve famously learned every shot with only a 3 iron. Phil’s dad built him a green in the back yard where he could explore to his hearts content….and given some of the astonishing shots we see him hit today…he certainly did that! Bubba, well Bubba as we know became a creative genius with every club in the bag simply by figuring it out on his own. Tiger just played games with his first coach Rudy Duran, who revealed that once the 8 year old Tiger had solved whatever “problem” Rudy had set him he insisted on trying to find out if there were other ways to play the same shot. Little did he know that this was the early signs of the problem-solving shot-making genius that would take the World by storm some 13 years later.

So how does that help you? Well the first thing you need to close in on your inner instinctive short gam is explore delivering the club in lots of different ways. You can develop your feel by improving your club awareness, and a great way to do that is by hitting “disguise shots”. To do that aim the club a few yards left of your intended target at address and then manipulate the clubface open during the swing to hit the ball at the target. This may seem a strange thing to do as you’re unlikely to play this shot on the course, but what this exercise forces you to do is take charge of the club and improve your ability to influence it. You could then aim the clubface right and close it during the swing. As you do this your awareness of the club and the feel you have for it will heighten and you will be forced to stay in the moment and not attached to the outcome. You might struggle initially to do this but stick with it and in no time at all you’ll begin to feel you could do anything with the club. The shot where you open the club slightly can very often result in lovely soft shots and this time of application (heel led) tends to be the way most top players apply the club around the green.

In general I would suggest you go out and explore how many different shots you can hit with each of your clubs, applying them with a clear pre-shot intention. You will be amazed at what you discover.