Imaging this: You've just come out of a golf lesson hitting it incredibly well. You are excited about the future and the ability to take this new found skill onto the course. You rest easy that night and dream of hitting huge straight drives and towering iron shots onto the greens next to the pins.
The first weekend morning round finally arrives, you're feeling great and you think you remember exactly how to replicate the learned skill from the lessons. You step onto the tee with the swagger of the high school jock at Prom, and confidently rip your 7 iron from the bag. A few pseudo stretches and you're ready to crush that golf ball exactly where your mind imagines it to go. Gripping the club, you feel powerful, confident and ready.
You take the club back and wham.....a nice fat shot that trundles its way just over the edge of the driving range box and stares back at your as if to say, "Sorry buddy, I just can't lie to you!" You chock it up to being a bit stiff and try it again, this time the ball gets a free haircut (thin top shot) courtesy of the guy you once saw hit the ball so well at that lesson. What gives?
Well, I hate to say it but your brain needs to be convinced a bit more than a 45 minute lesson on a driving range in the dark with no feedback or numbers to evaluate your progress. The sad reality of golf instruction, and to nobodies fault except for the Finance Manager, is that the traditional method does not work.
See, the learning comes through proper practice. Learning a skill and being diagnosed in a lesson is no longer valuable to golfers who can go on Youtube and find the next Youtube golf coach who will indeed give good advice, but will not usually illustrate that by fixing one thing or making a change in one area of the swing, you unknowingly change something else.
Remember, nothing in life is really for free, they want to string you along to monetize their Youtube channel with hopes that you'll give them a message and book a lesson. Similarly, in the UAE the top end lessons at Claude Harmon in Dubai will cost you from 475 to 720 AED for the hour and most Troon facilities will cost you from 420 to 535 for a 45 minute session. That's a hefty price to pay, not to get better. Furthermore, you are not incentivized to take more lessons as it is way too expensive and usually doesn't work.
The end result is a frustrated customer who doesn't want to play golf anymore, and thus the game is shrinking or people are apprehensive about taking a lesson. Can you blame them. These lessons are not actually golf lessons, they are a time for the coach to tell you what is wrong with your swing. You can quite easily find that out yourself by looking at some ball flight laws and then heading onto Youtube to find some drills. But is there a better way, and how can we learn from different industries in order to improve our success rate. We know through proof that there is a better way indeed: Compounding Practice.
Imaging this: You've just come out of a golf lesson hitting it incredibly well. You are excited about the future and the ability to take this new found skill onto the course. You rest easy that night and dream of hitting huge straight drives and towering iron shots onto the greens next to the pins.
The first weekend morning round finally arrives, you're feeling great and you think you remember exactly how to replicate the learned skill from the lessons. You step onto the tee with the swagger of the high school jock at Prom, and confidently rip your 7 iron from the bag. A few pseudo stretches and you're ready to crush that golf ball exactly where your mind imagines it to go. Gripping the club, you feel powerful, confident and ready.
You take the club back and wham.....a nice fat shot that trundles its way just over the edge of the driving range box and stares back at your as if to say, "Sorry buddy, I just can't lie to you!" You chock it up to being a bit stiff and try it again, this time the ball gets a free haircut (thin top shot) courtesy of the guy you once saw hit the ball so well at that lesson. What gives?
Well, I hate to say it but your brain needs to be convinced a bit more than a 45 minute lesson on a driving range in the dark with no feedback or numbers to evaluate your progress. The sad reality of golf instruction, and to nobodies fault except for the Finance Manager, is that the traditional method does not work.
See, the learning comes through proper practice. Learning a skill and being diagnosed in a lesson is no longer valuable to golfers who can go on Youtube and find the next Youtube golf coach who will indeed give good advice, but will not usually illustrate that by fixing one thing or making a change in one area of the swing, you unknowingly change something else.
Remember, nothing in life is really for free, they want to string you along to monetize their Youtube channel with hopes that you'll give them a message and book a lesson. Similarly, in the UAE the top end lessons at Claude Harmon in Dubai will cost you from 475 to 720 AED for the hour and most Troon facilities will cost you from 420 to 535 for a 45 minute session. That's a hefty price to pay, not to get better. Furthermore, you are not incentivized to take more lessons as it is way too expensive and usually doesn't work.
The end result is a frustrated customer who doesn't want to play golf anymore, and thus the game is shrinking or people are apprehensive about taking a lesson. Can you blame them. These lessons are not actually golf lessons, they are a time for the coach to tell you what is wrong with your swing. You can quite easily find that out yourself by looking at some ball flight laws and then heading onto Youtube to find some drills. But is there a better way, and how can we learn from different industries in order to improve our success rate. We know through proof that there is a better way indeed: Compounding Practice.
So what is Compounding Practice? Let's look at it from the Banking World from where this whole idea started at Performance Golf. The idea of Compounding comes from those well intended "Financial Advisers" who call you up asking you to invest your cash into their savings/retirement schemes. The idea is that a regular and routine influx of cash into the bank account will create interest which will then add to the principle and compound (get bigger faster). The idea is the same in golf.
The compounding effect of a learnt skill and then the ability for you to grow that skill properly under supervised practice means that your capabilities will compound and therefore have a bigger, better, effect over the very short term. So how do we do so at Performance Golf? Well, we have created a monthly option which allows you unlimited use of the facility and the access to our coaches for a fixed price for the 30 days.
We learn a skill in a traditional lesson that follows a step by step swing building approach instead of a band aid solution that is typical of a traditional lesson. Each step that you learn, is then supervised by our coaches during your practice sessions. At the beginning of each session whilst you warm up, our coaches are watching your swing to see to what level that skills has naturally set it. If that step has been naturalized, we can consider moving forward to the next step.
These practice sessions have the compounding effect power full in display. Even if you think you have failed miserably at achieving the movement, an incremental step each few days will have a massive result to the overall golf swing. In saying so, the average individual that goes through our programs will gain 15-20 yards on their shots and we have been tracking the results of the handicaps with the average student dropping 4 handicap strokes across that time. This is possible given the fact that longer more accurate shots means it is easier to get on the green in regulation and therefore make more pars. That is real value for money and real results based upon the compounding effects of supervised practice.
So why are we giving away our secret? Well we know that golf courses cannot replicate this and are honestly not willing to replicate this. They don't have the staff, the willingness to help people practice better nor the time to manage the influx. Also, the finance manager responsible for you feeling ripped off, would never allow it.
That's the benefit of dealing with an individual business versus dealing with a large corporation that has no flexibility to it whatsoever.
So, consider how powerful the effect of supervised practice is on your ability to improve your golf game, when you are considering a golf lesson. Remember that a small step forward each day means a huge journey across a period of time. The more you put in, the more you will get out by just making incremental improvements to your skill.
