You Don't Have a Swing Problem. You Have a Guessing Problem.
Most golfers don't have a swing problem.
I know that probably sounds weird coming from a golf coach. I've spent nine years teaching, and before that ten years trying to get better myself. For most of that decade my swing improved but my scores didn't. I got better at swinging the club and no better at golf.
You've probably done something similar. You have a bad round, you go looking for the cause, you find a video about the thing you think went wrong. You take it to the range. You hit some good shots. Your scores still don't move. So you find another video, and the same thing happens again.
A year goes by. You know more about the golf swing than you ever have. But your handicap hasn't moved.
That is the guessing problem, and it is the most expensive thing in amateur golf.
First, the question you need to answer
Before anything else, ask yourself this: what shot were you trying to hit?
If you ask most golfers that, they say they were trying to hit it straight. That answer feels sensible, and it is the reason they are stuck.
There are nine functional shots in golf, and every one of them is a ball travelling towards the target. Three heights and three shapes. The heights: high, medium and low. The shapes: fade, straight and draw. That's the whole menu.
Straight counts. It's a legitimate shot and some golfers hit it well. It's also the hardest shot in golf for most people, which is why "straight" as an intention usually isn't a plan.
And here is the problem with a vague intention: you cannot read a result against an intention you never had. When the ball goes left, you learn nothing. When it goes right, you learn nothing. There is no answer to check it against, so every mis-hit sends you back to the internet.
Pick a window. High draw. Low fade. Anything specific. You will immediately have something to measure against, and that alone changes what you do next.
If your intention is unclear, you don't have a swing problem
This is the first thing I check with a new client, and it isn't their swing.
If a player can't tell me what shot they were trying to hit, they don't have a swing problem. They simply have no plan. They have a lack of clear intention and no intended shot shape. That includes the start line: where the ball starts, and which way it curves. You cannot diagnose a result when there was no aim and no clear target. And you cannot commit to something you haven't decided.
I usually know within a couple of minutes where someone has been going wrong, by asking one question: why are you working on this? Very often there is no clear answer that relates to what the club is doing to the ball to make it fly the way it does. That tells me more than a launch monitor would.
It also isn't their fault. The golf industry is organised to sell you a swing thought.
The algorithm made this worse, not better
You went looking for answers. What you found was a deep rabbit hole that is hard to climb out of.
Too many thoughts. No clarity. Constant second-guessing of yourself. Every video you watched was probably correct, as far as it goes. The tip was real. The drill works for somebody. It just wasn't your problem.
Sometimes you didn't even go looking. The algorithm decided you needed more swing tips and put them in front of you anyway. There are two kinds of people in this: the ones actively searching, and the ones who were only interested in golf and got sucked in. Both end up in the same hole.
If you are searching, you're looking for a needle in a haystack. And the haystack keeps growing, because the thing you're searching in has no idea what is actually happening in your swing. It only knows what gets clicked, and what gets watched to the end.
So you work hard on real things, in the wrong order, with no way of knowing it. Most valuable resource in all of this? Not money, and not talent. It's your time. Two years of range sessions on the wrong things, and none of it comes back.
The push slice, and why your fix made it worse
This is one example of the pattern. There are many.
Say you have a push slice. The ball starts right and keeps curving right.
You do the sensible thing and look it up. Everything comes back the same: you're swinging out to in, over the top, cutting across it. So you work on your path. You spend a month learning to swing more in to out.
Now the ball goes further right.
Your face was open. It was open the whole time. And when you swing more in to out with a face that's still open, the ball starts further right and curves further right. You fixed a real thing and made the shot worse, because you fixed the wrong thing first.
A push slice is a face problem. Fix the face, and the path very often takes care of itself.
You couldn't have known that, because nobody had looked at what your club was actually doing at the moment it met the ball.
The second one, and it isn't a movement problem at all
A beginner trying to lift the ball into the air. Scooping under it, leaning back, helping it up.
That isn't a movement error. It's a learning error. The player doesn't understand what the club is for or how the tool is designed to be used. Nothing is wrong with their body or their swing; they've simply got the wrong idea about the task, and no amount of range time fixes a misunderstanding.
You can have a perfectly reasonable motion and still get nothing out of it, because you're asking it to do the wrong thing.
What the guessing problem actually is
Three things, and they stack.
One: no clear intention. You hadn't chosen a shot, so there was nothing to aim at and nothing to measure against.
Two: the wrong order. You had a result you didn't want, and you started changing things. But you started at the wrong end. You changed your motion when the answer was your setup, or a misunderstanding about the task.
Three: no way to see it. Nobody had looked at what the club was doing to the ball, so you never found out that you'd changed a real thing in the wrong order. That doesn't need a launch monitor. It needs someone, or something, to tell you what the club actually did.
Put together: the guessing problem is changing something real, in the wrong order, with no way to see the result.
That's why it lasts for years. Every individual step makes sense and the whole thing is broken.
You can only control two things
Here's the part that took me longest to understand, and it's the most useful thing in this post.
You can't control your swing in the way you think. Your hands, your path, the clubface at speed: you don't have direct command of any of it. Ask any golfer to hit a specific spot on the face and watch what happens.
What you can control is your intention and your commitment to your intention.
That's it. Two things.
So if your intention was unclear, you couldn't commit to anything. And if you didn't commit, you can't blame the swing, because an uncommitted body makes an uncommitted motion. You can't blame the swing for a shot you never committed to.
Where this gets practical is at the end of the shot. When the ball doesn't do what you wanted, you don't start with your swing. You start with what you were trying to do, and whether you really committed to it.
The order is fixed
When a shot misses, the diagnosis runs in one direction, and it doesn't run backward:
Intention. Then ball flight. Then impact. Then setup. Then swing.
You start by checking the intention, and the ball flight is how you check it.
And commitment runs underneath the whole thing. If the intention was unclear, nothing after it counts. If you weren't committed, you can't blame anything that follows.
Almost every golfer works at the far end. The swing is the interesting part, it's where the feeling is, and it's the only end you can see without help.
The ball flight is where you should start, because the ball is the evidence and your swing is the explanation.
Five things that cause the rest
A launch monitor like TrackMan measures around 30 numbers on every full swing.
Five of them are inputs in the swing itself:
Low point
Swing direction
Swing plane
Centredness of strike
Club speed
Most of the rest are consequences of those five. Face angle is the big exception: it's largely decided before you move, by your setup and your grip.
That's why working on the wrong thing, or the wrong TrackMan number, feels productive and changes nothing. You're adjusting a consequence.
One question splits everything
Is your ball flight inconsistent, or is it consistent and consistently going the wrong way?
If it changes from shot to shot, the problem is usually the quality of your strike. If it's consistent and going in the wrong direction, the problem is in the face or the path, and the fix is often in your setup before you move at all.
Either way, you now know where to look. Ten seconds of thinking, and more than most golfers ever do.
What to do about it
Two things. One is free.
Ask yourself the question. Why am I working on this? Answer it in terms of what the club is doing to the ball to make it fly the way it does. If you can't, you've found your problem before you've hit a shot.
Then pick a window. Choose a height and a shape, out of the nine, and commit to hitting that. Straight is fine if you can hit it, but it's the hardest one, so most of you should pick something you can repeat. Write down what the ball actually did, not what it felt like. Five shots is enough to start.
That habit will tell you more about your game than the next twenty videos.
If you want it done properly. If you're near Edinburgh, the place to start is an Assessment. One hour, £125. We read your ball flight together before we touch your swing, and you leave knowing exactly what is actually costing you shots and what to work on first.
If you're not near Edinburgh, The Sunday List is one idea a week, never a tip. Join here.
