Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

So as a golfer if you feel that you’re getting yourself into a slump you are not going to work quite hard to get yourself out of a slump. Now a lots of golfers will come to me for a lesson and they’ll sit down. I’ll say, “Okay what’s the problem, what can we work on? And they can’t necessarily pinpoint one part of the game. It’s not like okay I’m slicing my driver on three putts and everything and that’s what I want to work on. Everything is just a bit not quite there. Everything is just not quite fine and they feel like they’re playing okay but it is not returning scores. And that could be a fact that they’re in a slump and the more you get into a slump, the more the confidence starts to deteriorate and it’s almost self-perpetuating.

So what we work on generally with golfers like that to get them back to doing some good positive things on the golf course and better scores is actually just get back to basics. You don’t need to full swing rebuild. If you did, your golf would be erratic and you’ll be hitting balls all over the place. What you need is back to basics to boost your confidence and actually just to learn that most of the things you’re doing technically are pretty good and pretty good, pretty solid fundamentals and quite proficient. That’s why you were playing some quite good golf before you came into your slump. So it’s not rewriting the entire swing. It’s just getting back to some good fundamentals.

So we look at things like proper alignment. Let’s make sure you’re taking that end. Let’s make sure your ball position is bang on. Let’s make sure your distance away from the ball is bang on, good posture, good grip. And one key thing for me is just make that swing a little bit slower just to improve the quality of the tempo of your swing. Generally golfer who is in a slump is going to be bit rushed and a bit frantic and a bit aggressive. We just want to make sure that the tempo of the swing just smooths down a little bit. Try and control your swing a little bit more, get back to those really good positive things. And within a couple of lessons, most golfers have actually started to believe and trust that their technique is not the issue. My technique is pretty good, Pete is happy with the way I’m swinging the golf club, I’m starting to see some better shots on the range, then they can start to take that out on the golf course. So it’s generally quite a quick turnaround that if you get around to getting the basics sorted out fairly quickly, slow your swing down, improve your confidence, you should bottom out that slump quite quickly and start to improve again.