Justin Roth

🏌️Golfer - My distance control is awful right now. Im hitting a lot of fat shots and I'm coming over the top of it occasionally. I think I'm too steep and that's why it's fat and left. 🧠My brain as a golf coach....... (everything that goes into the final advice) "They're hitting the 6th groove and 10mm toe with a good standard deviation. They occasionally hit one left when the club hits the ground too early and it twists the face closed. They're blaming it on their 2 deg left path (they think they come over the top more when that happens) but it's not. If we can lower the strike by 2 grooves, they'll reduce detrimental fat shots by 20%. They will increase thin shots by 5%, but those will end up better result so it will be a net gain. They'll also see a better face direction standard deviation due to fewer fat-face-closers. Their attack angle is good, so that shows it's not a low point problem. They have low speed and an 18 deg launch, so we don't want to change the release to move low point forwards more as it's not needed and they will just launch it too low for their speed. They're obsessed over the fact their path is 2 deg left, but that's not a big issue. And if we shift the swing direction more right, that will move the low point back and attack angle will get too shallow and they'll likely hit a fat shot that is worse. So I have to let them know that's not a priority. If I sense they don't believe that, I can explain further as to why 2 deg left path is fine. Best option here would be to raise arc height 7mm. That would shift ground contact forwards without disturbing attack angle or face/path. It would also move the strike more towards the heel with a 90% certainty, as for most people the face strike follows a diagonal lower-heel, higher-toe pattern when changing arc depth. I could tell them about the fact their body goes down a little too much in the backswing, but that internal though usually affects coordination and movement synergy too much. I'm going to go with the external thought process of picking it off the sand and see how the body self organizes the change. This also fits in well with what I've seen work in my 20,000 hours of instruction, as well as the motor learning scientific literature. If they struggle to swing the club higher through impact through an external focus, we will monitor the 10-shot pattern and use millimeter level changes as indication of success. Ill then gamify and push them to do it more - it will likely feel like they are trying to blade it to achieve this 7mm change, but I will explain to them how feel is not real by showing them visually the actual change. I'll then explain to them how to train this skill at home to calibrate it with just a small piece of carpet and a guitar pick, giving them rules to follow depending on the miss. E.g. if the guitar pick is missed, then focus on digging a little deeper into the carpet. If carpet shifts too much, focus on grazing the very top of the pile. This will dramatically improve vertical strike location, thus ground contact location, as well as reducing fat-left combination. And the drill will encourage long-term coordination improvements to further refine the vertical strike standard deviation, resulting in better consistency of outcome from both a mechanical and biological perspective. It also gives them the tools to self-coach when they're on their own. It's simple enough to understand and implement on the course, and is mechanically a good option. The only issue is it's so simple that they might not trust the advice. They're quite analytical, so to ensure adherence, I will use socratic questioning to help them understand why this is a good option." 🟢The advice....... "Just feel as if you're picking it off the surface for me. Imagine the ball is in a fairway bunker and you're trying to take it cleanly without any sand." ✅In lessons, my advice can sometimes be super simple. Don't mistake that for lack of understanding. The best coaches I know have trended towards simplifying down, over time. The complexity of a coach's thought process is not necessarily reflected in the complexity of their instruction. In fact, the relationship can sometimes be inversely proportional. The more expertise someone develops, the better they become at filtering out unnecessary information The instruction might take five seconds to deliver. The expertise behind it took decades to develop