When talking about the movement of the body there are what are called errors and compensations.  If something happens, something else will happen as a result of that – if an error occurs, many times compensation will be created. I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve been plagued by the same “issues” for several years. In my backswing, I tend to “stand up” and lose my posture. This was caused by a physical limitation in my right hip. On the downswing, of course, I need to go “down” to compensate the amount I stood up in the backswing. This “bobbing” effect is relatively common, and while not ideal, if the down offsets the up – things seem to be okay. But I went one step farther – on the down I would go down too much, thereby creating another error and compensation. With me going down too much, I would stick the club in the ground – so to speak – behind the ball, hitting it fat. So I then created compensation – a shortening, or “pulling in” of my arms through impact. Wow – were you able to follow that?

Anyway, the first thing I did was got my hip in better working condition, and now I’ve set out to try and get my swing to be a little more consistent. While there are many things that are negotiable, when there are a series of things going on, like in my case, I just can’t get be consistent enough, and it’s basically preventing me from taking my game to another level (remember I’m a golfer first). So now I’ve got my posture much more level going back, so shouldn’t the other cause and effects also adjust themselves? The answer, I think in most cases, including mine is “no”. I believe the reason for this is that most of our compensations are on a subconscious level – in other words, when I started to go up – then down just worked its way into my swing – otherwise I would have missed the ball completely, as I would have been too far away from the ball. And just because I now have erased the error, the compensation is still going to take some time to erase. In fact, when the error is erased, and the compensation still exists, the compensation now becomes an error (and you thought it was easy to be a golf coach!) Some of the changes for my compensation will be on a conscious level, and some on a subconscious one. And of course I have multiples, so this could take some time.

If you found this post to be complicated and confusing – I apologize. So here’s my point. If you have discovered an “error” in your swing that is preventing you from swinging the club more effectively (and it should ONLY be addressed if this is a case), be patient, you probably have developed a compensation to help offset that error, so it may take some time (and attention) for the compensation to erase itself. Like me, you need to be patient, and if your goal is to improve, embrace and enjoy the process of working to negotiate your own effective golf swing.

The other day I had a golfer call me and needed an “emergency” putting lesson – his putting was terrible. So we arranged a time, the same day, for a lesson. When I got to the practice putting green, he was hitting some putts. My first question was “what’s going on?” He responded his putting was really bad. I then asked him why he thought that was the case. He said, he because “he was cutting across the ball”, something he was told by a “reliable” source. So I had him hit a couple of putts and watched him stroke the ball. You could see that there was a slight putter-head path movement going across the target line – but it wasn’t anything dramatic, yet some of the twenty-foot putts he was hitting were coming up 8 feet short, or long. These types of misses are really not caused by a faulty putting stroke, but rather they are caused by a faulty mind. In other words, this golfer was thinking so much about the stroke that he was “watching” the putter head go back – something that can be a disastrous because the golfer is no longer thinking about the target – the hole – and many times a golfer’s putting can get really bad when this happens. So I spent the entire lesson having the golfer work on his pre-shot routine with the last component of it, having him look at the hole, then when his eyes came back to the ball – just stroke it the putt with no other conscious thoughts. And his putting improved dramatically, without talking about the mechanics of the stroke. In other words, sometime you need to let the subconscious mind do the work. Many times, especially with putting and chipping, as Homer Kelly once said, “Conscious thought annoys subconscious thought”, and I found this to be very true. So the next time you’re having a hard time with your putting, try working on your mental approach and your routine first, you may just find that that is the culprit.