How PGA Coaches Are Taught To Teach

Happy Monday,

I hope you’ve had a great weekend of golf…

This week

How PGA Coaches Are Taught To Teach: This is a short lesson from the Golf Insider Lab. I’m currently building a new module on ball flight and impact factors.

Weekly Skills Game: Don't miss our regular skills challenge to keep your practice sessions fun and effective.

Tip of the Week: A quick, actionable advice to apply immediately to your game.

Quick Video: Practicing Vs Practicing Correctly.

Enjoy.

How PGA Coaches Are ‘Taught To Teach’

In this module, we’re going to cover the exact way we as PGA coaches are taught to coach. We’ll then dive deeper using the latest data and research on what causes the golf ball to behave the way it does.

We’ve got a lot to cover but before we dive in I want to give you a broad overview of how this process works.

The goal is to give you this coaching knowledge to help you better understand your own performance for the rest of your golfing career.

The Big Picture

Golf performance is all about controlling where your golf ball goes. As coaches, we are trained to work backwards from your ball flight to work out what we should change in your golf swing.

All golf lessons follow a simple 3-step diagnosis process once we understand the golfer’s goal.

✅ Ball flight > Impact factors > Swing principles (Swing changes)

We’ll explain each concept above in depth in the coming lessons, but just be clear on this sequence.

The key is to work backwards from the outcome to ensure we find the quickest and simplest way to improve your performance.

Let’s dive into an example to see how this works.

Example 1: Golfer Slicing Their Driver

One of the most common golf lessons is working with golfers who struggle with a slice. Their slice is often worse with their driver than their irons (for reasons you’ll learn in this module).

Goal

Their goal is to straighten up their ball flight so their drives finish closer to their target and ideally finish on the fairway more often.

Ball Flight

Our player indicated that their shots are finishing right of the target and are curving through the air, but we need to watch 5-10 shots to work out exactly what is going on.

As we’ll see in the coming lessons, there are actually three different ball flights which could be happening. We need to be sure which one our golfer is struggling with.

Once we know this, we can diagnose what impact factor(s) are causing this ball flight and then work backwards to work out the simplest and most effective swing changes to improve this golfer’s driving.

If this player has a ‘push slice’ we need to make different changes to if they have a ‘slice’, so spending time understanding your own ball flight is very valuable.

We’ll dive into this concept and more in the next lesson.

Why Most Golfers Don’t Get Better

There are two prevalent reasons golfers work on their swing but don’t get better (and often get worse).

Starting With Their Golf Swing

The first issue I see is when golfers try to change something in their golf swing ‘because it doesn’t look right’. This is one of the best ways to get worse at golf…

Often, your body has found a complicated set of corrections to make contact with the golf ball. Arbitrarily changing one of these factors without understanding why; results in your performance falling apart.

❌ Golf swing changes > changes impact in the wrong way > worsens ball flight

Placing swing changes first, ahead of ball flight and impact results in the sequence above.

Not Understanding The Impact Factors Causing Their Ball Flight

The more subtle issue we see with golfers is when they understand their ball flight, but they only partially understand what is causing this shot.

The most common example is a slice, where golfers work hard on their swing path and neglect working on their club face angle.

This entire module is here to make sure you have the most robust understanding of golf performance and ball flight.

Key Learnings

The key lessons to take away are:

1) Your golf performance is your ball flight. A great golf swing is one that allows you to control your ball flight.

2) If you are working on your golf swing always follow this process: Ball flight > Impact factors > Swing principles (Swing changes).

3) Spend time to truly understand your ball flight, subtle differences in start direction and curvature are key to working on the right swing changes.

Let’s jump into the next lesson…

If you’ve enjoyed this and want more, check out the Golf Insider Lab – a set of resources to help you shoot lower scores without complicated swing changes.

If you have any questions or are unsure if this is right for you, just reply to this email and I’ll happily answer.

Happy Golfing – Will @ Golfer Insider

Break X Golf Skills Game

Many golfers say they can perform in practice but not on the golf course. This is often because their practice lacks consequence—meaning there is no real cost for hitting a bad shot.

Pressure chipping is a simple example of how you can add consequence to your practice. You have 30 minutes to complete the challenge below.

If you fail any stage you move back to the start. If you complete all stages, congratulations you get to leave early and move onto the next skills challenge. 🎉 

If you want more games like this one check out Break X Golf

Break X Golf is a sister project to Golf Insider and was co-founded by Will Shaw.

You can check it out here.

Practicing Vs Practicing Correctly

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Happy golfing – The Golf Insider Team

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