If you’ve done the full swing rebuild process at the right time, you probably haven’t been playing a great deal of golf during the time you’ve been actually making the rebuilds happen. And I guess if you were playing golf at that time it wasn’t overly successful, could have been quite frustrated. But I guess in the back of your mind you just kept telling yourself it’s a process I’ve not fully transitioned, I’ve not fully made all these changes. Then there will become a time when you say to yourself, right, that’s me now, I’ve got my new swing, I’m happy with it, coach is happy with it, I’m ready to take it out on the golf course for the first time and test this thing properly. And it’s at that point that the disappointment if you like, the tension, the frustration might start to creep into your game particularly if that first round of golf or that second round of golf as well doesn’t go particularly well. We’d all love to say that you can go on the golf course after you swing rebuild, shoot on the handicap, break the course record, and win the first competition you play in if only it was that simple.

It has been proven even by the world’s greatest players that when they make these changes there is a period of settling into their new swings even if the technical aspects of the swing is perfect and you’re hitting the ball exactly as you want, there’s probably too many swing thoughts at the moment and there’s probably too many thought and not enough trust. And really we need to change that round, we need to make the thoughts happen less and the trust happen more, so we need to encourage more trust in your motion, more trust in the quality of your swing, the hard you’ve done through the winter stance payoff, the trust in your ball flight. So when you pull the club out of your bag you look down on your target line, you’re really trusting the movements you’re making in your swing to go ahead and hit quality iron shots rather than being worried about your swing, concerned about, did I get that position right, did I go back to my old habits there, would coach have been happy with this position. And then when you do finally hit the ball you probably don’t have it hit with enough trust.

So we need to reduce the swing thoughts, increase the trust. And just take those little baby steps out in the golf course, no score card in hand, a couple of spare golf balls in your pocket, and if you don’t hit the ball brilliantly drop another one down and give it another go. And again, that’s why I would make some plenty of time to make these changes happen out of season, don’t expect to play great golf the first round back, so try and get half a dozen rounds under your belt before you start playing back in competitions.