Technically focused or Task focused?

When thinking about your golf, do you feel relaxed enough to play? Do you think of too many things? My old coach used to joke with me, he’d say “Kevin try not to have more than 500 swing thoughts at any one time” - funny I know but very true!

I would definitely promote having sound technical knowledge of the golf setup and swing it’s all quite easy really, my concern is do we take too much of this to the golf course? Are we out there playing and enjoying golf or are we trying to manipulate a victory?

We can compare this to many things, imagine a footballer taking a penalty; they place the ball as we do, they have a routine as we do, they run up naturally and kick the ball. If we compare our golf approach to this, they would be more like put your left foot there and right foot then left, when does my angle set and oh I’ve got to kick the ball as well, the chances of them making a clean strike towards the goal has been reduced greatly, sounds ludicrous I know but we’ve been overthinking our technique on the course for years.

I wanted to share this with you - in the video below, one of my pupils Josh and I have worked on the technical aspects in his game. We always need to do this with all golfers, he understands this well and is clear on his technique, I now want him to play the game. On the weekend, we worked on becoming more task-focused, we got away from thinking about swing and instead of thinking about squaring the club-face up at impact, the natural results were instant and clear to see from the video. I have voiced over to explain.