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Nick Randall: Gym work in the winter off-season is great. There’s lots of opportunity to hit the weight room and work on mobility, conditioning, and other physical attributes that regular competitive golf makes it hard to focus on. Being mostly confined to the indoors is also a great chance to work on your swing via training movement patterns.
Improving your movement efficiency and making a positive change can be tricky when trying to play golf. Breaking down old patterns and building new ones is largely incongruent with being target focused and practicing to play for score. That’s why the colder months are the ideal time to separate movement patterns from on-course outcome and really focus on the quality of movement and ingraining better habits. When it comes around to competitive golf season again, everything will be less conscious and more automatic, allowing you to focus on scoring… as opposed to swinging.
While coaching at the Australian Institute of Sport golf program, despite favorable year-round weather for golf, my friend Tony Meyer would regularly take squad members into a netted indoor area to make significant changes to their movement patterns.
Tony Meyer: I found that they tended to react to ball flight and direction too much on the range. The players would unconsciously adapt their movement patterns to make the ball do what they wanted, even if it was the exact opposite of what we were trying to achieve for long-term progress. If you remove the outcome, the player can become totally focused on changing the pattern. This also helps with buy-in or compliance with the change.
The worst thing that can happen is for a player to be shown a new movement pattern only to initially see the ball going sideways as a result. Belief in the process of change goes out of the window and regression to old movement patterns is the inevitable result. Getting real-time feedback on the quality of movement is also very important, and it can really help speed up the learning process of a new swing pattern. I like to use training tools and constraints that give the player a strong of idea of how they are supposed to move. It gives them a chance to work it out for themselves without the need for verbal or visual instructions from the coach. I’ve found this to be a very effective way to learn, even if it does involve me saying a lot less in my lessons!
In the Golf Australia and Golf Queensland programs, one of the most popular pieces of feedback equipment we use is the GravityFit TPro. It gives that real-time feedback that’s so effective in training posture and movement patterns relating the individual and their swing habits.
