You have seen me be very critical of the famous instructors like Haney, Leadbetter and Pelz, but they are nowhere near as bad as the ones you can find at your local course.
A friend once showed me a video of his golf lessons. I call this video the lesson of death.
Here are some of the peaches that I saw…and I have to get a bit technical to explain how bad some of this advice is:
1. At the top of your swing, the palm of your right hand should be pointed behind you (your club will be so shut, all you can basically hit is a massive hook or massive block).
2. Start your downswing by burying the inside ball of your right ankle into the ground (not only will this make you dive at it and cutoff your lower body turn, you are going to blow out your right knee and/or ankle).
3. Send your left knee at the golf ball (not a typo) on your downswing, because if your lower body turns, you are over the top (shutting the club and not turning your lower body is a 100 yard hook waiting to happen).
4. He put a bucket outside the ball and told my friend to swing around it and not to release the club (well, when you read my “swing inside/out” post(coming later today) you will know this is bad and you guessed it…it led to shanks).
These are 4 of about 10-12 things that I saw in this video that were absolutely horrible. As best as I can tell from listening, he picked out an unorthodox detail in the swings of several great players and combined them all into one swing…and added some of his own garbage on top of that. On top of all this, these things were all coming at once and you should really only work on one thing at a time.
Here is the rub. This is pretty much what this guy teaches to everyone and his lesson calender is filled every day.
If you go to someone they should start with things like balance, posture, rhythm and proper rotation…if they don’t, run and run fast. Bad habits from the implementation of unnatural mechanics are really tough to break.
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