Golf instruction suffers today, as it has from perhaps its beginnings, from a fundamental imbalance which has hindered its potential effectiveness — too much emphasis on form, and not nearly enough on function. To highlight the sentiment, let’s draw an analogy between striking a golf ball and another task, which most would consider fairly uncomplicated.

Let’s call this fictional task “hammering.” Let me explain quickly how it works. We’ll be using a long-handled hammer to drive a spike into the trunk of a tree. The head of the spike will be roughly a foot above the ground, and already inserted into the trunk in some pre-specified direction. The object of our “game of hammering” is to drive the spike into the tree without bending the spike.

For now, let’s simplify the game further by saying that it hardly matters how FAR you drive the spike in, only your efficiency in doing so. A hammer strike with 100 percent efficiency will see three specific conditions met:

1. The head of the hammer should be delivered accurately to the head of the spike (you might call this hitting the nail on the head).
2. The direction that the hammer head is travelling at the moment of the strike should be in the same direction that the spike is pointing.
3. The face of the hammer head should arrive flush or square to the direction that the hammer head is traveling.

Any deficiencies in one or more of these three conditions will result in more bending and less driving-in of the spike. So the RESULT we are after is the spike being driven in straight, and the ACTION that achieves that result is described by the three specific conditions of the strike. Fairly simple, right?

Not coincidentally, for ball-striking, the same three user-controlled strike conditions are the factors that create your ball flight, besides speed. And your ball flight creates your results, which in turn, creates your scores. Yet in a lesson for the beginning golfer, how often do you think it is explained that the sole purpose for the swing is to achieve just three conditions at the strike point, plus speed; or what those conditions should specifically be; or how to determine them on your own?

All too often, I find the form of the golf swing — the position and movements of the body, or biomechanics — are over-emphasized at the expense of the function of the swing. Ask yourself, given the task of hammering as described, do you feel that the average person would feel like they would have a decent chance of achieving good results equipped only with the intention to create the three strike conditions described, with no formal instruction on how to achieve those conditions? Do you think that person would feel intimidated to even try? So then why is it that although the criteria for the two tasks, hammering and ball-striking, are virtually identical, one task seems fairly straight-forward and achievable for persons of average physical ability, while the other (golf) is generally perceived as difficult to learn?

Now let’s say a new “hammer player” makes some strikes that reveal a noticeable bend in the stake. To the expert observer, that player’s next question might likely be, “What did I do wrong?” Ask yourself, if the expert answer/analysis were a report of the actual strike conditions against the known ideal, would that seem to be lacking? Would it be enough, on its own, for you to feel better-prepared for future strikes, equipped with a new/different intention(s), based on the findings?

In golf, the question, “What did I do wrong?” is asked all the time to teachers and friends alike. Very rarely is the answer a factual report of the strike conditions such as “You struck it on the heel,” or “Your club face was open.” Rather, the usual answers belong to an infinite number of unverifiable, subjective opinions relating to biomechanics. Ask your buddy what you did wrong after a particularly poor result, and the response is likely to be something like, “You picked up your head.” This approach seems like a clear case of putting the cart before the horse.

Let me share a couple of quotes on this subject from two of the greatest golfers of all time.

• “The only reason we bother with form and the correct swing is to find the best way of consistently bringing about the proper set of conditions at impact.” — Bobby Jones

• “Whatever any golfer does with a golf club should have only one purpose: to produce correct impact of club on ball.”  — Jack Nicklaus

Now there are probably plenty of people reading this who are thinking that the strike conditions required in golf are obvious, but the real secret is HOW to consistently achieve them. But in order to improve one’s ball-striking, it would be wise to first make an accurate assessment of the present strike conditions, for any given stroke, and on average. In my experience, very few players, including good ones, possess the level of skill required to determine this on their own without falling into common traps. And most aren’t even trying, skipping this critical step entirely and moving right on to the biomechanical self-analysis.

Case in point: when a slicer produces a ball flight that starts fairly on-target and curves well to the right, why is the self-correction almost always to strike in a MORE leftward direction when the ball flight indicates a strike direction which is ALREADY leftward of ideal? Or what of the player who commonly intends to strike upwardly a ball lying on the ground? Could you imagine intending to hammer the spike upward into the tree if it were clearly pitched downward? A golfer doing this is not even clear on the required direction of the strike!

Very often, struggling players will swear that they know “what they’re doing wrong.” Yet almost never does the self-analysis relate to the actual strike. Apparently, this has been going on for some time. More from Nicklaus’ “Golf My Way,” published in 1974:

“I got into a discussion with a pro-am partner about his slice … He’d tried just about every method or gimmick ever invented. But what he’d obviously failed to comprehend were the simple, basic mechanics of impact-what causes the ball to fly a certain way. He was forever changing his swing without really considering what he wanted it to achieve for him at impact.”

As a player, your ball striking is driven by your intent or intentions. And these are all that an instructor ultimately passes on to a student. There are mainly three types of intentions a player can have. The first is internal or biomechanical. This involves the intention to do something specific with part(s) of the body. This is all that most golfers seem to think golf instruction is or can be. They’ve learned this by the historical methods of golf instructors, which in turn, have influenced “what my friend said.” The second is what you might call an abstract intention. An example would be the intention to swing at a specific tempo. The third is an external intention. This involves physical objects outside the body, like the club and ball. An example would be the intention to push the club head downward through the ball.

As you may have guessed by now, my favorite intentions for my students and for my own striking are usually external. Recent research testing on athletic cuing has also found that external intentions easily outperform internal types. And this is why I feel that it is a mistake to present a biomechanical analysis before determining what intention(s) will be best to improve ball-striking. Remember, most people only have room in their conscious mind for one or two intentions. So if it is ultimately determined that the best intention(s) for improvement are not internal, then introducing a biomechanical analysis will only serve to confuse and constitutes too much information.

It’s usually at this point where skeptics might come back at me with, “So you’re saying that it doesn’t matter what you do with your body?” Hardly. EVERYTHING matters. What I do for my students is to teach them to strike the ball better, more efficiently. I evaluate ball-striking from strike conditions, then instruct what I feel is the best intention — sometimes more than one — to improve specific strike conditions, and thus the strike as a whole and on average. Your consistency can simply be summed up as your average strike conditions for ALL strokes played.

Sometimes my instructed intention(s) is purely biomechanical, and the video camera and V1 software become important tools. But most of my students are regular people who don’t have the time or desire to embark on a major swing change. They just want to hit the ball better. I find that these folks, like just about all golfers, have wandered down the wrong path in their progress to varying extents, drawing the wrong conclusions about their own performance, stemming from a lack of knowledge.

“Knowledge of the game, not talent, is the equalizer that eludes the many who strive for excellence.” — Moe Norman

The comment of one of my recent new students sums-up my approach perfectly. He said, “I can’t believe how much better I’m hitting the ball and you haven’t tried to change my swing!” But of course, his swing DID change. Only he wasn’t aware of it because his only intention, per my instruction, was to strike the ball in a specific, new way.

The following is from Ernest Jones’ instruction classic, “Swing the Clubhead:”

“Ernest Jones had happened upon the then-little-understood fact that the human brain need only experience a persons’ desire to perform a task. On its own the brain devises a means to create the muscular action to achieve the task. The individual is only aware of ‘what’ they want to do. The brain’s action in deciding ‘how’ it will accomplish the task is completely unconscious.”

But you see, very rarely is it enough to simply have the intention to achieve a final result, such as to hit it on the green. WHERE you want to go is quite obvious. More than that, you should be clear on HOW the ball must be struck to achieve a desired flight. And this is where I find much room for improvement, especially for recreational players. Now, I’ll concede that if the name of the game were primarily speed, then biomechanical intentions would surely dominate. But the vast majority of my students tell me that they just want to hit it straight and be consistent. Top speed is usually the LAST strike condition I would seek to improve.

At the present time, golf instruction largely has no formal standardization. This is not such a good thing. My wish is that it becomes standard practice to make a formal assessment of the strike conditions as the basis for analysis. These conditions are a question of fact and subject to physical law. And while launch monitors from the likes of Foresight, TrackMan and Flightscope can largely make that analysis for you, it is not difficult to make actionable determinations without them with the acquired skill. Once the proper analysis is made, instructors are still free to teach whatever they like as no intention is wrong, per se, if it improves performance. But the continuing measure of performance lies in the strike conditions, the true beacon for those seeking the path to improvement.

What about stats and scores as the ultimate performance measures, you say? As these are affected by influence outside the player’s control, they are not the best measurement of pure performance. There is an element of luck in golf, albeit a relatively small one. Besides strategy, the strike is the aspect of performance for which the player is in total control. That’s why when people ask me for my teaching philosophy, I’ll often say, partly for effect, “Three keys: impact, impact, and impact!”