The pub effect for teaching the posture
It is fair to say a picture can tell you a thousand words or as Freud would say eureka is a classic form of understanding or the penny has dropped!
Well in this case, I have been a PGA golf coach for about the 10 years and I have been playing golf or about 25 years. I still firmly have the attitude enforced where the no one that plays golf that I cannot teach! To be fair and justified I develop pretty much an open mind to all coaching methods and theories. Whilst concentrating on improving my coaching skills by increasing my knowledge, skill sets, and a ultimate goal to be one of the great coaches of all times . . .
There will always be new tricks and traits to be learnt, regardless of how insignificant the information might be.
So about a year or so ago, I am on the range and teaching a standard golf lesson with a wonderful young lady and the content of this golf lesson just happens to be on posture and how much more poor posture can effect the ball flight, poor golf shot consistency & etc.
Starting from the ground up, a good posture has a number of key aspects
I. The weight is on the balls of the feet
II. The knees are slightly flexed
III. The back is straight at an angle
IV. The arms are hanging comfortably from the shoulders (palms breath from inside of the thigh)
V. The chin is out from the chest
The body is now in a ready to perform the swing
This is more or less the whole package when it comes to a good posture before making a swing at a ball. However the difficulty on this occasion was this lady would flex her knees her back would immediately straighten into an upright position. Time after, time, after time, this action would happen no matter how many different times I explained, demonstrated and was failing miserably to apply her to this task. I was at a low point in my teaching career and I had almost exhausted every descriptive phrase and the fact was almost clear on the horizon that this could be the first person in my world class teaching career that I could not get the message across!
Like divine intervention, a moment of clarity or a Zen moment. . . I said to her “do you know when you are sitting on a bar stool and your drink on the bar counter, and the glass is too far away to reach comfortably to pick it up” She said “yes”. “Well, you know when your back side is glued to the chair and you have absolutely no interest in shifting from that position and now you are stretching to grab your class?” She “yes”, “Can you act out that position?” I said – “Oh yes “she said, “now I get it!”
She zipped right into position and perfect posture!!
Now who says, “nothing good can come out of the pub!!!”
