Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons may be the greatest golf instruction book of all time, but it may have managed to do more harm than good. Hogan’s book is one of the most successful because it simplifies what is typically very complicated into five easy steps. It makes players believe that if you can master these five techniques in your golf game you too can play like Hogan. He changed the world of instruction forever, the idea of a secret technique to cure all your golfing woes took hold of the world and has kept a stranglehold on golf instruction for decades with technology only reinforcing this method. After Hogan, next came the camera, and now we could see all the flaws you make in your golf swing in a step by step sequence. Then came launch monitors so we could quantify those flaws at the moment of impact, now we have our 3D analysis to show the exact moment that those flaws pop up in your golf swing. Technical instruction for golf uses the Five Lessons as source material and overlooks Hogan’s answer to how he discovered these 5 keys, “The answer is in the dirt”. Hogan’s greatnesses didn’t come from technical understanding of the golf swing, it came from a passion and a love for practice. Through practice and repetition he gained an in depth understanding of HIS SWING. We need to curb this plague of technical instruction that makes players believe the path to improvement comes from dramatic swing changes. Improvement in golf comes from an increase in control of the golf ball, control of the golf ball only happens through constant trial and error. Hit the ball, make an assumption on why the ball did what it did, test assumption, reassess, repeat forever. This how you improve.
I want to use this second paragraph to soften the blow from the first, I don’t believe that technical instruction is useless. I make my living giving golf lessons and I know that a good golf lesson can have a dramatic effect on a player, HOWEVER, that player usually needs to have a dramatic flaw in order to get the dramatic benefit. I equate technical lessons to giving a player surgery, you shouldn’t get shoulder surgery because you want to be able to lift more, you get shoulder surgery because you arm is falling out of its socket. Surgery makes the arm that is out of its socket dramatically better, but is it better than the shoulder that didn’t have surgery? Time will tell. What we need to focus on is skill development, not technical improvement. Skill development is taking the swing you have and mastering it. Those that work on skill development aren’t worried if their ball is slicing or drawing, they are focused on getting the ball to land where they expect it to. Rather than spending weeks or months working to stop coming over the top and straightening out your slice and then having to learn to control this new ball flight, develop the skill of controlling your slice. Remember the scorecard only tells you how many strokes you took not what the strokes looked like.