The Measured Golf Podcast

Why Golf Lessons Fail

• Michael Dutro, PGA

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Ever take lessons, swing “better,” and still shoot the same scores? We unpack why so many fixes fade under pressure and how to build change that sticks. Michael shares a candid client story that redefines what makes a “great coach,” then dives into the core problem: chasing the club instead of coaching the human moving it. You’ll hear why discomfort is essential to motor learning, how implicit practice away from the ball builds durable patterns, and why timing good shots isn’t the same as sequencing a reliable swing.

We get specific about measurement. Baselines, force plates, and launch monitor data are more than gadgets; they keep both coach and player honest. Michael explains how to set targets for pressure, path, and delivery, then use test-train-retest loops to confirm that a pattern actually changed—not just the appearance of the swing. He also tackles the incentives that keep coaching transactional, and makes the case for fiduciary or transformational coaching that puts results and referrals ahead of ego. If your coach can’t show their work, you’re guessing.

There’s practical guidance too: when to practice without a ball, how to choose specialists for putting and wedges, and what a modern session should include. We break down sequencing for consistency and speed, connect body movement to club forces, and show how better concepts make “limited mobility” less limiting. The payoff is confidence on uneven lies and under stress, with a swing you understand and can self-correct.

If you’re ready to move beyond tips and into measurable progress, this conversation is your map. Subscribe, share with a golf friend who’s stuck, and leave a review with the one change you plan to try next.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Measured Golf Podcast, where you, the listener, join me, Michael, as we sit down and discuss all things pertinent to the golf industry, the game of golf, and really anything going on around golf. So without further ado, we're going to get into a fun conversation. Today, we're going to talk a lot about the question that I most frequently get from potential new clients. And that question generally revolves around why they've taken golf lessons in the past and why they haven't worked for them. And it's a very real thing. There's a lot of people out there who participate within the game of golf who decide that they want to try to get better, or maybe they want to try to chase scratch or whatever the case may be, but they tend to seek help in that endeavor, which is a great thing because for a lot of people, uh, they need help in getting better. It's maybe they don't understand the concepts, maybe they don't understand the um the geometry or the physics or how the human body kind of works throughout the golf swing. But there's a lot of people out there who definitely would benefit from some help with their golf game. And you may even be chuckling to yourself uh about maybe a playing partner in a league or something of that matter. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of people who go out, want to get better at golf, and choose to take golf instruction and quite honestly just don't see improvement. And I'm kind of reminded to something that happened this week. Uh, I'm recording this on a Friday. I had a client fly in to work with me from New York on uh Tuesday, I believe it was. And this client came in, really nice guy, uh, but you could tell that he was really not feeling great about his golf game. And when he got here, or I actually picked him up at the airport, and we were kind of talking on the way from the airport to my facility here in Ann Arbor, and he was telling me that he had been to multiple golf coaches who were fairly famous golf coaches, and it just didn't really work for him. And he, you know, kind of decided during COVID that he was going to take it serious again and has kind of been doing the online lesson thing since uh COVID. And that hasn't really been translating to better scores or more enjoyment on the golf course either. And when I was asking him about his most recent experience online, he started by telling me what a good guy and what a great golf coach he was working with and how he actually got worse during that experience. And I stopped him during the conversation and I asked him, I said, you know, you said that he's a great golf coach. So what makes him great? And he told me, well, he works with a lot of good players and he has a big following and he's always putting out content. But at the end of the day, his function as a golf coach is to make the players that are paying him for help better. And he didn't do that with this gentleman. And this gentleman, like a lot of other people that I've worked with, tend to blame themselves and they think that they're the reason it didn't work, and that golf coach is obviously very good, and they're just so bad or so messed up that you know they can't be helped, and it leads to this sense of hopelessness. And I just think that's terrible. Um, I don't think that the golf coach is good if he doesn't help the person in front of him. And I don't mean help in a non-tangible way, I mean help in a tangible way. So if you have a player that comes in struggling with hooks and their club path is five or six degrees to the right, and you can't fix that club path and help them hit the ball a little straighter, I I I mean, that's the basic function of the job, right? So I really uh challenged his assumption as to what was good and what wasn't. And I think that really made him feel a lot better and made him more open to trying something different and something new, which is what he claimed I did for him. And and I'm not saying in a comparison that I'm a better coach than this than this coach that he was working with, but for this client, I certainly was. And this client had a tremendous session, uh, ended up getting a lot of things uh that he wanted, gained some distance, gained some precision, and most importantly, felt confident and positive about where his golf game was going for the first time in a long time. So the question that I kind of want to delve into uh within this podcast episode is why doesn't golf lessons or why don't golf lessons work for more people? Uh what is the holdup? What's going on? And how do we, you know, maybe pick a better golf coach for ourselves in the future if that's a route that you're thinking about going? And there's a lot of reasons to this. There's it's going to be uh kind of an in-depth conversation, but generally speaking, you know, one of the things that sticks out to me um is that a lot of golf coaches, if they won the lottery, wouldn't show up to teach golf the next day. And you know, that's kind of sad. I love what I do. I don't have a job. Uh, I'm very, I'm very privileged, very honored. Uh quite frankly, I I don't even believe it most days, but you know, I really enjoy coaching golf. I I love it. The fact that I'm doing this podcast and the YouTube and you know, the social media work that we do, that's all so that I can teach more golf lessons. That's to grow my business, which is a teaching business. And if I won the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn't do those things. But I can promise you I would still teach as many golf lessons as I possibly could each and every day because there's not a better drug on the planet for me than coaching golf. I love it. I love helping people. Um, and I really, really enjoy helping somebody play a game that I love so much at a higher level, which brings their enjoyment up because it's infectious. And when we can share this amazing game with other people and help them play it better, it means that they play more golf. It means that they expose maybe their family members to golf. And this is growing the game, right? Is we need more people playing better or at least feeling like they're making progress. And that's what's really going to lead to generating more growth within the game and getting the next generation interested in it and the generation after that. So I think that a lot of people focus on the transactional part of this, and you see that a lot, right? There's a lot of golf coaches who are out there who don't have any training. Um, you know, this has really become prelivent since COVID, but a lot of people have gotten into golf because quite frankly, there's money to be made. And you I've seen them, uh, a lot of them, you know, they set up shop online, and I hate to tell people, but a lot of these quote unquote famous golf coaches, if you click on their followers, it's a lot of bots and it's a lot of people that aren't from the country that they work in, and they've bought these followings, and a lot of people use that follower count as clout, and they think that that means that they're good at what they do, and they just kind of more or less do what they think that they need to do. But one of the biggest issues that I see with that, and I see within golf at large when it comes to the instruction side of things is that most of the golf coaches who are out there are focused on what the golf club is doing. And I understand that. That makes sense. When I was a young coach, I was very distracted by this shiny thing on a stick, and we know that we want to control the club face, we know that we want to hit the ball with a target, we know we want to hit the ball far, but primarily most of the golf coaches within the industry are focused on how the club is moving. Now, I'm not saying that how the club moves isn't important, it certainly is because that's what we hit the golf ball with, but we really need to dig a little deeper into this and think about the function of the golf swing and most importantly, think about how the body plays into that. If we're not satisfying the requirements of a human being making a motion on planet Earth, and we're just trying to change the position that the golf club goes in during the lesson, that generally doesn't stick. And I think a lot of people have experienced this to where you go to the driving range and you find it. You go take a lesson, you find it. And you find this way to kind of manipulate the golf club to get the golf ball to more or less do what you want it to do. But then when we go out onto the golf course or we get a little more under pressure, or we come back to the driving range a few days later, what we see is that it hasn't really elicited a actual change. And we're right back to where we started with the same mess, and we're very frustrated because we feel like we're spinning our wheels. And for a lot of golfers, that is the main reason they stop taking golf lessons, is that they're not seeing the improvement that they're paying for. And that bothers me. I don't charge a nominal fee for my golf lessons. Uh, I've invested heavily in my education, I've invested heavily in the technology that we use here, and these things cost money. We have to pay for these things. So we charge a fair rate, a market rate for my instruction. And a lot of people still come to me, even though I'm not the cheapest option. And the reason they come to me is because we really try to be more transformational versus transactional. And what I mean by that is I'm going in the trenches with, excuse me, I'm going in the trenches with each and every client. I am going to be there when things aren't going well. I'm going to be there when things are going well, but I'm not going to take the credit. I'm going to help them understand and help them own their golf swing. This isn't about me. I'm going to do what my clients need to do to play better golf. And at the end of the day, I am a golf coach. I'm not a friend for hire. And so many golf coaches in the industry are just that. They're very nice people. They show up, they're warm, they're positive, they make you feel like a million dollars, but at the end of the day, they're not really making you a better golfer. And one of the things that I would say is very true about me is that when it comes to the coaching part of the equation, and that hour or four hours or how much ever time we spend together in the coaching situation, I am not there to be your friend. I'm there to be your coach. And there's a lot of science and a lot of research that talks about this. But generally, human beings learn best when they're uncomfortable. That's when we can bring about change. But if we're just having a little like friendly session and we're kind of like relying on that instead of the instruction side of things, then it's very hard to get people to make change because quite frankly, it's difficult to make change unless there's a need. And that's where we have to push people, get them uncomfortable to change the motor pattern, which is what's going to bring about and elicit the real change in their golf game or golf swing. So this whole idea of being a nice guy and kind of like just supporting your players all the time and they'll get better, I simply don't agree with, and neither does the research. So I'm not saying that I don't like my clients. I love my clients to death. And I'm friendly and friends with a lot of my clients outside of the coaching relationship. But in that time that they're paying me to be their coach, I am going to coach and push and make them uncomfortable so that we can learn what we need to work on. And a lot of people honestly are just uncomfortable with that because of the reasons I just said, I'm I'm trying to make it uncomfortable. And not just to make it uncomfortable for uncomfortable sake, but because we're there to make a change. And one of the biggest things out there that a lot of coaches rely heavily on is they say, well, my players would get better if they just practiced more. They got to dig it out of the dirt. Well, if we're trying to change a motor pattern and we're trying to elicit a change with how we're going to move to swing the golf club, that's never going to happen with a golf club in their hands and a golf ball on the ground. Because the minute we put that ball into play, we all care about where that golf ball goes relative to the target. Therefore, we're going to fall back into what we know how to do to try to get that ball onto target. So a lot of the work that I do with clients is, you know, with a weight or down in the gym that we have here at Measured Golf. And we're doing a lot of work to create new motor patterns and create new neurological pathways between the brain and the muscle group that we're trying to engage and trying to learn how to use. Once again, that's not very traditional, but it does lead to making the change that we need to happen. So I think for a lot of golf coaches, they're way too dependent on their relationship with the client to keep them coming back and not dependent enough on actually making the change that wants makes the client want to come back. And they're so reliant on that relationship to get them to come back that they're not willing to push the client in a session because they're fearful that they'll sever that relationship or burn that bridge. And now the person doesn't come back and now they don't make money. And when you're transactional, you're really not incentivized to make your clients better because when you make your clients better, there's once again a chance that they don't come back. And that's where the golf industry really struggles, is the club companies are not incentivized to sell you the best driver or the best putter or the best wedge ever because they need to sell you another one the next year. I think of all the club companies, uh, with the exception of Ping and maybe a couple other minor brands, they're all publicly traded companies that hold these companies, the umbrella that holds them as a publicly traded company. And because of that, they have to have sales year over year, and they need to sell more year over year to keep their investors happy. So for a lot of these companies, they're incentivized to give you something maybe a little different, maybe slightly better, but they're not truly incentivized to help you and to graduate you from needing them. They actually need you to need them so that they can make a living. And honestly, you know, one of the biggest fallbacks and one of the biggest faults of me owning a business, and my business partner and business manager will both tell you this is that I don't have a business plan. I never have. As a matter of fact, most of my golfing career, excuse me, my coaching career, I've spent trying to break even at best. And it's just what it is. And I'm okay with that because as long as I'm getting better as a coach, as long as I'm learning, and as long as I'm able to share that information with people, that's why I do this. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm doing it for free. I'm not, I'm not saying that, you know, we don't make any money, we do. But generally, it is a break-even proposition at best. And if I didn't have the amazing support of my business partners, I would definitely be out of business. I wouldn't be able to afford the force plates, I wouldn't be able to afford the trackmen, I wouldn't even be able to really afford the rent that we have for our facility here. So I'm very, very fortunate that I have the support of people who believe in what we're trying to do. And at the end of the day, we will eventually, you know, do enough of this stuff and grow this enough to where it becomes profitable and it becomes an actual business. But at the end of the day, that's not why we come to work every day. And I can promise you that. So I think for a lot of the coaches out there, you know, they have a mortgage, they have children, they got to pay for school, all these things, but that's the reason they show up to work, not to actually try to have this change or this agent of change mentality with their clients. Because honestly, a lot of people when you push, especially successful people who are coming to me to take golf lessons, when you challenge them, they don't, they typically don't like that. And a lot of us just aren't really accustomed to professional coaching, which is going to challenge what you know and is going to challenge what you do and is going to push you into uncomfortable situations to where we're able to learn and to grow from. So I think really trying to think about, you know, why do these lessons not work? Well, we have to look at the goals and the motivations of the coaches who are giving these lessons. And we have to ask ourselves, do they want me to get better or do they want me to sign up for another package? And I think if you ask yourself that question with a lot of these coaches, I think you're going to find what the answer is for yourself. So I think a lot of a lot of the online stuff that's kind of happened since COVID, like I said, is because there's money to be made. But a lot of these coaches who are online, you send a video to them, maybe a couple of them face on down the line, kind of the traditional angles. And then they kind of look at how the golf swing, I'm sorry, the golf club is moving through time and space, and then they kind of base everything off of that. But they don't really understand how that person can actually move. They maybe don't understand the body all that well. They're not using any technology to get any objective feedback, and they're more or less just kind of telling you to swing the golf club the way they think you should swing the golf club. And we used to call that a cookie-cutter approach, but that's kind of gone by the wayside and we don't say that anymore. But that's really what it is. If a if a coach is simply telling you the positions to be in because they think that's what's right and they can't show their work, well, then that's a preference. And if that's a preference, then that is their preference, and they're applying that to everybody, and it doesn't work for everybody because there's a lot of people who either can't move that way or aren't ready to move that way, or simply just don't want to have their golf swing look like that. And that's where I think a lot of the traditional golf instruction really goes amiss with people is chasing positions versus chasing function, which means that we have to tie the body into this thing because the function of a golf swing is to be powerful and accurate. That's what we want to do. We want to deliver the club in a particular way to get the ball on target, and we want to be able to swing it quickly so that we can make distance, which gives us an advantage on the golf course. And most importantly, we want our body to stay healthy while we do this. This is a game for about 98% of the people that are involved in it. And we can't have a game hurting people because then they can't play golf, then they can't get better, and now they can't go to the golf course either, which just hurts the industry all the way across the board. So where I see the biggest problem with chasing these positions is that in order to get certain people into certain positions, they really have to violate how the body moves and is designed to move. And that is a recipe for disaster because not only will the golfer not get better, not only will they not make any real change, but now chasing these positions potentially can get hurt as well, which, like we said, is just kind of a massive failure across the board. So we really have to dig in deeper and we have to actually look at what's going on uh behind just how the golf club moves through time and space. And we got to kind of look at how they're moving their body and how that's affecting how the golf club moves. So one of the other things, one of the other points to be made about why I think traditional golf uh golf coaching doesn't work very well for most is that there tends to be, uh, especially in-person lessons, there tends to be a lot of show and tell. So the the instructor will tell you what he thinks is supposed to happen and tell you what he thinks is wrong with what you're doing, and then he'll show you how he does it or she does it. And now it's up to you to do it and to replicate it, kind of the monkey see, monkey do, if you will. And unfortunately, most people don't learn very well that way. Most people need to learn through actually going through the process themselves, creating those new feels or those new neurological connections to the muscle, and they need to be able to feel it and understand what it feels like to make this motion in this way. And we just don't really create a lot of that within traditional instruction. Um, there's a lot of hitting balls, there's a lot of being pushed into positions and kind of pushed and pulled and all that fun stuff. But that is not the best way that human beings learn. We need to be able to show through drills and through different mechanisms, you know, this is how it feels, this is how it looks, this is how it's going to kind of move through time and space. And then we need to create the safe space for that client or that athlete to be able to try some of these things free of judgment. And, you know, the one thing that I've always noticed is they say it takes 10 years to become a good golf coach. And I kind of agree with that. And the reason is is because of patience. And one of the biggest things that you have to have in this coaching experience is you have to have a lot of patience. You have to create the space and the time for people to actually be able to start feeling some of this and doing some of this for themselves. Because at the end of the day, what we want the most for our golfers is for them to be able to own their golf swing and to understand it. And most importantly, they need to understand when they see the left miss and when they see the right miss why that happens and how that ties into what they're trying to do. Because without that, when we get to the golf course and we play the first three holes beautifully, and then we pull that fourth T shot, it's like all bets are off because they don't understand why that happened. And now they spend the rest of the round trying to make a correction for one poor swing, and it's just kind of a mess the rest of the way. So I really think that this kind of gets into the uh two types of of really kind of instruction, if you will, which is we have explicit and then we have implicit. And when you think of explicit, it's kind of like the mama bird flying into the nest and kind of providing the food for the little baby, baby birds, right? And it's kind of I tell you what to do, I show you what to do, I explain what to do, I just I do all the work, and then it's kind of dumped on you. That's the explicit part to learning, and it is necessary because as I said earlier, a lot of golfers, the reason they struggle so much is conceptually they just don't understand what they should be doing. So for them, they need to be told what they should be doing and they need to be shown what they should be doing, but we also need them to feel what they should be doing. And that is the part of learning that I think goes overlooked the most, which is this implicit part to learning. And the implicit is where the client or the athlete is the person who has to feel this, has to learn this, has to experience this. And the amazing thing is, is in the implicit part, that's when the ownership actually takes place. Because when we try something new and we're very uncomfortable and it feels terrible, and we do this new thing, and then the ball flies straight, all of a sudden, like that really perplexes the nervous system. That really creates this need to create these new neurological pathways. Because while the body didn't expect that to work, the mind's eye didn't expect that to work, what ends up happening is we see positive results. And now all of a sudden, there's a little bit of a dopamine release in the brain, and now the brain kind of learns, like, well, wait a minute, even though that's different, that's okay. That leads to a positive outcome, which gets me my fix of dopamine, and the brain is very satisfied with that. So the cool thing about the implicit part to learning is the more we challenge ourselves and the more we kind of learn for ourselves, when we go to sleep at night and we hit the rim cycle of our sleep, now the brain goes about creating those neurological pathways to those muscle groups and almost kind of starts wiring up this new movement, which leads to the new swing. And now it starts becoming more second nature, and we can have more of that ownership of our golf swing, which is amazing because at the end of the day, I want to work myself out of a job. I want my clients to graduate. I want them to take ownership, and that doesn't mean they never come back, but they start coming less frequently because they don't need the help all the time. And maybe they get stuck here and there and they need a little tune-up or a little refresher, or maybe they get a little bit confused. But at the end of the day, we want to empower our clients and our athletes to own their golf swing and to take full control of it. And we need there to be a little bit of autonomy there. But to create that autonomy, we also have to create the space for them to be able to learn on their own. Excuse me. So that's really, really important, and I think it's something that goes overlooked. And there's things that we know without knowing, but one of the things I didn't know when we first built this facility at Measured Golf was that we were really creating a place that has objectionable feedback. I'm sorry, objective feedback, and we're able to give lessons here, we're able to work with our clients here, but then our clients are able to go over on a track man simulator or go over to the force plates, we tell them kind of what they're hoping to see range-wise with data points and numbers and graphs. And now they're able to kind of start figuring some of that out for themselves, which once again just reinforces that implicit learning and it's magic because that's the only way people are going to learn. If we just go out and kind of dig it out of the dirt, so to speak, and hit balls at the driving range, as long as the ball feels like we hit it solid and it lands on target, we generally are led to believe that we're doing all the right things. But as we know, it's way more about how we get there than it is the end result. Because when we're practicing, typically, we're on a flat lie, the lies aren't changing, meaning the ball is not below your feet, not above your feet. And it's like pretty easy to figure that out. But if you're practicing off of a flat lie and you're hitting a pronounced draw, and that's kind of the shot you think is your stock shot, when we go onto the golf course and the ball gets below our feet, which is the fade lie, and we try to make that pronounced draw pattern, that typically isn't going to lead to a lot of good results in the ball on target. And most people think it's because their golf swing isn't good and this, that, and the other. But the reality of it is, is we have to be able to create a golf swing to where we deliver the club in a fairly neutral manner to where we can hit all the shots off of these different lives. Because when we go out and play golf outside, we're going to get all uneven lives and we're going to have to learn to let the ball kind of fall both ways, left and right. And when we're out there practicing and we're trying to like hit this consistent draw every single time, and then we go to the golf course and try to force that shot onto every situation. Generally, it does not lead to what we're looking for in terms of results. Um, it just doesn't. And that's a shame, but that's kind of how things work. So I think that kind of gets into a little bit of the, you know, why does golf golf lessons kind of not work? Um, why does it seem like most people who take a golf lesson tend to struggle a bit and a lot of those things? But another big area is that, you know, so many coaches uh claim that they can fix anything that relates to golf. So uh not that long ago, I had somebody who came in and wanted a job here at Measured Golf. And I was asking them, I was like, so you know, what are you really good at doing? And he's like, Everything, man. I was like, really? And he's like, Yeah, I can do it all. He's like, you know, I can do swing coaching, I can do chipping, I can do pitching, I can do putting, uh, I can do mental work, I can do course strategy, uh, I can do green reading. And it's like, wow, like, good for you, man. Like, that's really cool. And I don't want to say that the young man couldn't do that, but for several coaches that I see, and especially the situations that don't work best for most people, is that there's this very generalist approach of the golf coach, and they feel like they can just do everything. And the reality is, is that every single one of these kind of you know, siloed parts to golf are very complicated in their own right. So, you know, hitting a driver really well isn't necessarily the same thing as hitting a wedge really well or being good with your distance wedges. And we have to understand how the body has to adapt to make those swings work for the person. And a lot of people just generally think that because they think the golf swing works this way, uh, it works this way for all the different things, meaning that you have the same exact swing for a driver that you do for a wedge. And in reality, we do kind of have more or less a generalized motor pattern that is very similar, but we are going to need to have different parts to the swing that are going to lend themselves to one club, the driver being very long and flat versus a wedge, which is short and upright. So we have to understand how the posture has to change a little bit, how the setup has to change a little bit. But just going, well, yeah, I can fix it all, that's that's a tough thing. Um, I try to tell people and I try to advise other coaches that it's 100% acceptable and kind of needed to look at all these different components, but I try to be somebody who can triage until I can get you to the to the specialist. And I have my own specialities, whether that be ground force or the go the way the golf swing moves or chipping and pitching and putting, I'm very good at that stuff. And generally, I'm not referring a lot of that work out. Now, to be 100% transparent with everybody, I feel like I'm a pretty good putting coach for most people. However, there are really good players that I work with. Who have a different putting coach. And that doesn't affect me at all. That doesn't hurt my feelings. That doesn't make me feel like a less than coach. But I am not a specialist putting coach. I haven't I haven't committed my entire career to understanding the putting stroke like maybe a Phil Kenyon or a Steven Sweeney has or John Graham. So what I tend to do is I love to bring in other people. I love to get other opinions. I think that this is a super healthy way for us as coaches to kind of show that we're trying to do what's in the best case of our clients. And so many coaches are terrified that that other coach is going to steal their client and they're not going to be able to work with them anymore, therefore, not get paid. And that's just sad, right? Like we need to make sure that we're putting the needs of the client or the athlete first. And we need to make sure that we're getting them the best possible information that's going to be the most applicable to them. Because at the end of the day, that's what we're charged to do. They're here for help. And our job is to be a good Sherpa and make sure that we're getting that help for them. So I think this idea that these coaches exist that kind of are expert level at all these different areas, I just don't believe that. And I think that that's by and large, ego talking. Um, I think that we all are very good at certain things. And I think we need to identify what those things are. Now, does that mean the things we're bad at we should just glance over and ignore? Probably not. We should probably look into those things and try to educate ourselves a little bit. But once again, we're only because we're part-time looking into this, we're only going to be triage people. We're only going to be able to put the band-aid on, stop the bleeding, until we can get them to the surgery where the actual specialist is going to do their work. And that's a completely different mindset than I think you'd see in a lot of the coaching that's available to the public. Now, interestingly enough, when you go out onto the PGA tour, you're going to find that the teams behind a player tend to be quite large. And they have, you know, maybe a full swing coach and a wedge coach and a putting coach and a uh mental performance coach and they have a nutrition, like they have all of these different things because they need experts. They want the best information possible. So if you're a player who is pretty good and you're taking golf lessons and you feel like that's getting better, and you're seeing results on the golf course, and maybe the putting's not so good, I would argue that maybe instead of going to that coach who's really good at full swing for putting, maybe you should seek out somebody whose putting is what they specialize in and commit their time to, because they're going to have way more expertise in that area than maybe the full swing coach does that teaches full swing all day. And there's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, I always tell people, you know, go give it a go. If it's not for you, if it doesn't seem like it's working, that's okay too. But at least we've kind of scratched that itch and we can go back to the drawing board from there. But I think the idea that one coach is kind of taking care of everything and overseeing everything, uh, I don't see that at the tour level. And I do see nothing but that at the amateur level. So I think amateurs, you know, really could benefit from thinking outside the box a little bit there and getting out of this kind of generalist mindset that, hey, my buddy Steve, who's a good golf coach, he can take care of this. Because like I said, Steve is, you know, doing full swing all day, every day. And it's kind of like a tattoo artist. If if you go to a tattoo artist that does kittens all day long and you ask him for a dog, that's gonna be tough because he does kittens all day. And I'm not saying he can't do the dog, but he's gonna give you a way better kitten than he is a dog. So, long story short, I think kind of looking into you know the specialists that kind of focus on one area is always gonna be a great place for you to start if that's the thing that you're looking for help with. So, with that being said, you know, when we talk about golf coaches, um, and everybody knows this, but golf coaches can be a little bit guarded. Uh, we tend to have a little bit of an ego. A lot of us tend to drink a little bit too much for our own Kool-Aid, so to speak. And generally, like as a golf coach, uh golfers look up to us because generally we can play a little bit better, uh, we have this experience, and we get to work in golf, and a lot of people are envious over that. But the biggest problem with being a golf coach that I see is that so many golf coaches are just out there still, which is unbelievable, but are still out there armed with little more than the naked eye. They maybe have a couple training aids, they maybe have a couple alignment sticks, but they don't have a launch monitor, they don't have force plates, they don't have 3D motion capture. And I'm not saying that you have to have all those things to be a great golf coach. You certainly do not, but you do need a way to keep yourself objective with your clients. And one of the biggest drawbacks I see right now within the industry is the lack of objective measurement and feedback for the client. And I love this part of the conversation because one of my favorite things about what I do on a daily basis here, coaching at measured golf, is I love to prove myself wrong. I love to do it. And I'll give you an example. That gentleman I brought up that flew in from New York. So he didn't load into his trail side very well. And that's kind of one of my non-negotiables and one of the starting points for what we always do with golfers is making sure they're getting enough pressure into that trail leg by, you know, shaft parallel in the backswing. But this gentleman just wasn't quite getting it, wasn't doing it when he came in for the lesson. So no big deal. I've done this a million times. Like I said, this is something we see all the time. And I'm like, oh, great. Let me show you a couple drills. Took them down to the gym, showed them these things, and then I was like, oh man, that looks a lot better. Because it did. It absolutely looked better to my naked eye. So I'm so excited. I'm like, oh, we're gonna fly through this and we're gonna be able to pick this up quick. And we go and I throw them back on the force plates, which is how I identified this, because once again, you cannot see pressure and force with a naked eye. You have to have force plates or pressure mats. So we objectively figured out that he was getting 62% of his available pressure into his trail side by shaft parallel. That's not enough. The minimum that I'll sign off on is 75%. So I take him over, I have him show me the drill a couple more times. Looks beautiful. I'm convinced this is right, and we measure it on the force plates, and guess what? 62% again. It's 100% true. I'm not making that up. And I'm like, wow, that's that's kind of interesting. It looks so much better, but nothing's really changed. And that's because it hadn't changed. Maybe some movements of the body had changed a bit, but in terms of the function and getting more pressure into that trail side, we hadn't achieved that goal yet. So because I checked my work, I was able to identify that even though I made it look better, I didn't make it function better. So we tried some different things, which is the part of the job I love. I love having to be on my toes. I love having to come up with different ways. I love the fact that one thing that works in one lesson doesn't work in another. So we did some other things and I made up some stuff on the spot. And wouldn't you know it? We re-measured and we got him up to 82%, which is considered to be more of a center post for those of you familiar with Mr. Adams' front, center, rear post terminology. So getting him here really led to a lot of good things throughout the rest of the golf swing, and it created way more speed, way more consistency, and bought him some time and his golf swing to complete the motion that he was trying to make. But once again, if I would have just gone sight unseen and not put him on the force plates again, I would have been tricked into drinking my own Kool-Aid and thinking that I'm the world's greatest coach and I have the best drills in the world and that I was able to make this change when in reality, even though it looked like we had made the change, when we checked the work, I hadn't made the change. So I'm happy that we do that. I'm happy that we have the force plates here because it makes it easier for me to do these little quote unquote experiments with people. And we can check our work. Are we making the change we think we are? Or are we just moving the club around a little bit differently? So you have to have this objective measurement. You can't rely on yourself, you can't rely on your feelings, you can't rely on when you're making change, I should say. You can't just rely on what you think you know how to do. Because once again, the minute we hit a golf ball, we feel judgment no matter who you are. And when we feel that judgment, we're going to do what we know how to do. So when it comes to making an actual motor pattern change or changing how we're trying to move the body, we really need this objective data because people aren't naturally going to move different. The body likes to do what it knows how to do, and the brain likes to tell it what to do that it already knows how to do. So by being able to create this uncomfortability, working through some drills to where the golf club is removed, so we're free of the judgment. Now we're able to actually elicit that change that we're trying to make. So so many coaches I see though totally go off ball flight. And that's wonderful. Like I get it at the end of the day, for most people playing a game, ball flight is king, and this is what we want to see. But if we're working with better players who are great at compensating, that's not going to lead to that consistent change that they're looking for. That's not going to lead to creating more distance like a lot of people think they need to do. It's really just kind of fool's gold, if you will. But when we measure these things objectively, now all of a sudden it's not about my preference. It's not about what I think looks right. It's more about is things changing or aren't they? And that's where we kind of have to live when we're in this performative state, when we're in performance culture, when we're in performance coaching. We have to make real change and we have to show our work. So I think by getting more objective data into the situation, that's always going to be best case. Now, do you need the force plates? Do you need the 3D? Do you need yes and no, right? I don't think you need a track man if you're a 20 handicapper and you're working on Club Path. There's a lot of devices you can buy that are significantly cheaper than a track man that can tell you Club Path. But we do need to look at numbers other than speed and other than distance. And so many people think that that's what we use this technology to do. It is a big part of what we use this technology to do, but it also allows us to have objectionable, I'm sorry, object, I keep saying that. It allows us to have objective data that actually shows us what the club path is doing. I, for one, am not great at seeing a club path with the naked eye because we tend to see what we want to see. And then we're always kind of tricked by the ball flight. So I really think it's important that if you're seeking golf instruction, if you're looking into this, I think you want to make sure that there is some kind of objective data being collected and compared to. So when you walk into a golf lesson, for example, when they have technology there, you should be getting a baseline when you walk through the door. You know, whether they give you some time to warm up or not, whatever the case may be, we need the ability to spend a little bit of time on the front end of this understanding kind of where our baseline is. Then, based off the conversation and the concepts that you cover, it's like, okay, we're going to focus on these couple of data points. And these are how we expect to see them move throughout this session. And if they're moving that way, then you're probably in the right hands. But if you're there and the data is staying the same and the ball flight is changing, that's all through positioning and wrist angles. And that's not going to lead to sustainable change on the golf course. That much I can promise you. So I think it's important we have these baselines. I think it's important that we track and periodize these baselines. And then we can kind of look at how the golfer is changing over time, whether that be the correct way we want him to move or even the wrong way. Because I like to collect data both cases. I like to see, hey, when you're swinging it really, really well, this is what it looks like. When you're not swinging it very well, this is what it looks like. Because when we understand what the bad looks like, then we can start reverse engineering how we got there and try to be a little bit more preventative in the long run with them. So by understanding both sides of the coin, it allows us to develop a better strategy for how we're going to keep them on the straight and arrow. So probably the biggest thing that I think really holds people back when it comes to quote unquote traditional golf instruction is that, and I've mentioned it a bunch of times, but we we tend to get lost and focused on the shiny thing on the stick, right? And we worry about the face and we worry about the path and we worry about the club, but the club doesn't move the body, the body moves the club. Now, there's a lot of people who are probably going to come after me for that statement. And let's talk about this a little bit. When you move the golf club, okay, when you put it into motion, yes, the golf club does create forces, it creates linear forces and it creates angular forces or torques. Now, that doesn't mean that the golf swing can do that. I'm sorry, it doesn't mean that the golf club can do that without you moving it first. Okay, so I want to be clear about that. The golf club does act on the body. I want to be clear about that. However, the golf club is an animate object that cannot move itself. So what we have to recognize is the body is a key contributor in how this golf club is going to move, not a bystander. And for so many golf coaches that are out there, they're still in this modeling and methodology that the golf club is king. And quite frankly, it is not. And I think the reason that so many golfers are bad at golf and make bad golf swings that don't work well is because there's almost no thought given to how we move the body to change the club. Now, before we get too far into talking about why the body is ignored, I would like to also add that it's important for people to understand that I don't love the screening processes that a lot of these quote unquote golf experts and body experts are doing. So one of the things that bugs me the most is people come in and we do our own screening kind of thing on them. But one of the biggest things that I'm looking at when I screen people is okay, how do you do this movement? Are you good at it? Are you bad at it? But then I'm also asking, like, hey, do you understand how you would go about doing this? And the thing is, is if somebody is moving poorly, a lot of times it's because they think that's how they're supposed to move. It's not because that's the way their body is designed to move, nor is their body stuck moving only that way. It's just they believe that that's how it's done. So the funny thing is, is like a lot of the screening that we do, if they score poorly on that screen, what we'll do is we'll revisit that concept with them and explain to them how we go about making that particular motion or what goes into it. Then we retest. And almost 90% of the time we find that people that we retest after explaining some things to them do it much, much better. So the idea that people are, you know, stuck with a swing or stuck with a movement with the body, I completely disagree with. I don't, I don't care which screening system it is, uh, which methodology you believe in, but generally a lot of people are poor movers because of poor concepts. So when it comes to the concepts and the way the body moves, the big discrepancy that I see with traditional golf coaches is that they just don't understand how the human body moves and works and operates. So my swing philosophy has been the same for several years now, which is a human being making emotion on planet Earth. So planet Earth is pretty simply explained. We've got physics, which is generally tied to gravity. Uh, when we talk about motion, okay, that is in three planes. Okay, we've got the frontal plane, excuse me, we have the transverse plane, and we have the sagittal plane, and we have to understand how those three interact with one another. And then we have the human being, right? That's the body. And the thing is, is the reason we have a hip surgeon is because a hip surgeon really understands how the hip is designed to move and how it shouldn't be moving. And when it's moving, how it shouldn't be moving and causing pain on the human, then all of a sudden he goes in there and he fixes it because he knows how it's supposed to move and work. Well, I'll let you in on a secret. We know how the human body moves and works and operates within these constraints of physics and geometry and gravity. We understand that. So if you understand the human body and you understand how the bones and the muscles and the myofascial system come together to create motion, then you really can start kind of looking at where the big discrepancy is between what we need to happen and what is happening. And once we kind of address the big discrepancy there, then it's almost like the golf swing becomes much, much easier because if we get the body to move correctly, then it's much easier to manage this club and counter the linear and angular force that the golf club creates, because it does create force. I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm not saying that the body's all you got to move and you don't have to pay attention to the club. That's not true. But what I am saying is that if we understand that the club is gonna act on us and our body has to counter how the club is acting on us, then we understand how the body needs to be moving through time and space during the golf swing. And that is really going to be seismic for a lot of people. And the biggest comment that I get from people that work with me is like, dude, I've I've never even like thought about how my arm works or how my pelvis moves or, you know, the importance of what my legs are doing in the golf swing. And I think that most people kind of glance over that because it's difficult to learn this. I'm not the smartest, you know, smartest guy in the world. It's taken me my entire career, and I'm still doing it to this day, but I've had to learn and learn and learn about how this body works. Uh, and I can't thank uh, you know, Dr. Joe Lacaz uh from Rotex Motion enough. He's taught me just a ton of stuff about how the human body works and moves and the pieces and parts that go along with it. But more importantly, I would have to say that Dr. Thomas Myers uh in his book Anatomy Trains has really just blown my mind because when you start understanding the meridians of the myofascial system and the ways it can and cannot move, that really makes golf a lot more simplistic. Because once again, if we can get the body into the correct sequence, okay, that's the key thing, not position, but sequence. If we can get the body sequencing correctly, the golf swing gets much easier. And and look, people tell me all the time that, you know, well, I you know, I don't move well and I still play good golf. Well, they're they're telling you the truth. There are people out there with terrible sequences and awful movement and just basically no ground reaction forces at all who hit really nice golf shots. Now, with that being said, when they don't time it up well, it doesn't go very well, right? So it's almost like they're playing Russian roulette with too many bullets in the chamber. And what I'm getting at here is that if you think back to maybe your best round you've ever played, okay, we've all had one, right? We've all had that magical day where we go out there and it's kind of like the bishop and Caddyshack, if you're old enough to know the reference, and like he just can't miss, right? He's having the round of his life. But when we when we get to the car and when we think about this after the round, generally the word that comes to mind is easy. Man, that was easy today. That was so I've never had it so easy, just everything worked. Well, that's the day that we timed everything up. And even though maybe you have bound bad ground reaction forces or you have bad sequencing or you have a bad golf swing, you have a way of doing this to where if you time it up just so, the ball flies on target. And that is kind of the joy of golf. You can hit whatever club you want off the T. You can hit whatever club you want to hit into the green. So if you kind of roughly know how far your clubs go and can get the ball to land on target, you can play some really good golf. And on the occasions that you time everything up well based off the way you're doing it, it works beautifully. But once again, that's probably a rare occurrence. And on the occurrences that it's not easy and it's not all timed up well, it really is rough out there. We're missing greens, we're missing fairways, we're hitting shots that we think we should never hit. You know, I had a guy in earlier this week that told me he's like, you know, I'm a five, and the other time the other day I went out and played, and I felt like I played like a 20. Well, if we're a five, we shouldn't feel like a 20. But that's when that timing element isn't there, and that's when golfers really struggle. So I think that if we can get the sequencing of the body better and we can create a better overall motion with the body, we require less timing. And the less timing we require, the more consistent we can be. And I think there's not a better example of that than Scotty Scheffler. And a lot of people think golf traditionalists think that his golf swing is, you know, breaking a lot of the traditional rules. You know, he early extends, he drags his trail foot, all of these types of things. But if you look at Scotty's data kind of underneath the hood a little bit, which I know most of us don't have the opportunity to do, he really moves pretty well. And he's an athlete. Like, believe me, the guy is an athlete, but he moves really well. And more importantly, his sequencing is very, very good. And that's why I believe you see Scotty Scheffler generally competing week in and week out on the tour. He doesn't have these like hot streaks and cold streaks to where you know he gets it timed up for a bit of time and then kind of loses it and then gets it timed up. We've seen a lot of players that kind of play that way. Scotty's very, very consistent, but once again, he's not necessarily satisfying the traditionalist kind of perspective in golf. He's kind of doing something maybe a little bit different, which I think is great because I think the only thing the golf industry has proven thus far is that nobody, including me, has all the answers because nobody is having a hundred percent effect success rate with every player that they touch and work with, not even me. So I really think this is important. And I think that without having this objective data, uh, without having some speciality within the thing that we're trying to do, and I think most golf coaches need to really study on the body because we need to all be specialists within that, as that's the primary engine to the golf swing. But without creating this safe space to learn and do some implicit learning and take some ownership of their golf swing, without having these things in place, it's gonna be really, really difficult to get our players on a pathway to playing better golf consistently. And that's all anybody's asking for, right? Is like, hey, you know, I'd like to hit it a little better and I'd like to hit it a little bit farther, but I just like to hit it a little more consistent. That's the word you hear in every single golf lesson is I want to be consistent. Well, if we get the sequencing of the body correct, it's gonna be a lot easier for said golfers to be consistent. You know, I it's it's not, you know, teaching a golf swing, and and this is gonna be uh probably a hot, hot take, but in my opinion, you know, teaching a golf swing and teaching sequence isn't that difficult. It really isn't. Getting people to play better golf, that's really hard. And the reason is is because it requires a plan. Um, and that's where a lot of golfers really come up short, right? And I think a lot of people, you know, for various reasons, they're gonna give that golf coach maybe one chance, they're gonna take maybe one lesson, and if that doesn't make them Scotty Shuffler by the end of it, then they're out. And if that's kind of the thinking that you're applying to this, then I would just simply tell you to save your money because not one golf coach is gonna be able to fix everything in one lesson. And I think so many of us as golf coaches are trying to do that and selling that, right? So I kind of alluded to the the online only golf coaches that are out there, and you know, they have to sell themselves, like there's a million of them, and they're all trying to get the same clients, and they're you know, really making grandiose claims, like, oh, if you sign up for a lesson with me, I'll fix your early extension, I'll fix this, I'll fix that, and it'll forever be fixed. And I just think that's very much like trying to sell a used car and very disingenuous. So, one of the things that I always try to help people with is, you know, if you want to come in and kind of get a good concept and understand like where your deficiencies are and kind of start thinking about how you're gonna move forward from this, I can do that an hour. I can help kind of point you on your way and get you going down that path within an hour. But if you actually want to get better quicker, if you want to become consistent quicker, it's going to take more than one visit. And it's not because it's a business model, it's because that's how the human body learns and operates. Uh, that's how we develop is over time. We're evolutionary. So we have to have this plan kind of set up for people to where they understand how this is gonna go. So, generally speaking, if you come in and work with me, I kind of tell everybody this in the beginning, but you know, the first half of the first session, I'm just gonna guinea pig you to death. Like, that's what I do is I'm gonna have you warm up and hit some balls on track, man. And I'm gonna, you know, let you hit probably 10, 15, 20 shots there on track, man. Um, and then we're gonna look at that data and we're gonna benchmark it and we're gonna talk about like, hey, is this what you're seeing on the golf course? Or are you seeing something different? Like, whatever the case may be, we're going to at least start understanding what the benchmarks are to our club delivery and how the golf ball is behaving based off that club delivery. And now that we kind of understand a little bit of what's going on in terms of how the club is being delivered in the ball flight that that creates, now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go over and get on the force plates and we're gonna check this out and we're gonna see how the body's moving and if that matches what's happening, or if it's working against what's happening. Because generally, one of the two things is happening, right? Either the pattern matches up really well and we got to change the whole thing, or maybe they just have the club delivery not matching how they're trying to move. That happens too. So we need to know kind of which one of those things is going on, but people want to know and they need to know the plan that you're going to apply to them before you start. And that's the thing. We've got to let people know hey, this is kind of how it works. We're gonna kind of look at it, we're gonna lab rat you to death or guinea pig you to death the first half of this lesson. Then in the middle of the lesson, we're gonna spend some time down in the gym. We're gonna work on making some motor pattern changes with you and try to get you to feel these new things that generally people aren't gonna just feel by swinging a golf club and digging it out of the dirt. And then we're gonna go back over here and we're gonna hit some more shots. And when we hit those more shots, we're gonna see if the pattern's changed any in terms of the club delivery and the ball flight. Now, if it has, great. If it hasn't, that's okay too. Because just because we changed the motor pattern and how the body's moving doesn't mean it's going to fix everything. And generally, if you're changing the motor pattern, you're gonna have to change the delivery as well because we can't have the kinetics without the kinematics. So if I change how my body moves, but I try to deliver the club the same way. Generally, I'm probably not gonna have that timing element like we talked about earlier. And now the golf ball is kind of going crooked again. So we have to understand if we have changed that motor pattern or not, or if we just move the club around differently once again, like I was talking about earlier. And then the last thing we do is we go and we retest on the force plates and we look to see if we change that motor pattern. Because I firmly believe and have seen throughout my time with the force plates since 2018, that if we can get the motor pattern to change in terms of the movement of the body, that's when we've set the stage for the golf swing to change. And now it's going to need to change because if we're moving the body different, once again, we're gonna have to move that delivery around a little bit. So getting that objective feedback is key for me as a coach because it's very easy for my eyes to see what they want to see. And obviously, I want to do a good job. So, you know, I've had it happen to where people have, you know, kind of went through that process and on the back end of it, they're hitting the ball way better and they're very, very excited. But then we put them on the force plates and we see that not much has changed. Well, that doesn't mean that we failed, but it means that we need to look into doing this a different way. And like I said, there are people that do everything you know how to do. It's very hard to get them to change a motor pattern. And that's why, like I said earlier, it's a good thing to have other coaches, other specialists kind of in your Rolodex who you can reach out to and you can explain your situation and Hey, what would you do with this person? How would you go about making this change? And now all of a sudden, once again, we're putting the client first, the athlete first. We're making sure that we're getting them their best care possible. And that's important to me because I don't like to call myself a golf professional anymore. I don't like it at all. I try to call myself a golf fiduciary. Like I'm supposed to do what's right for the client, not what's right for me. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that I'm incredibly grateful to Dave Kendall, who recently passed away. I miss him terribly. But I would be remiss to not mention Dave Kendall for telling me that. And he didn't say it that way. He said that he was his player's agent. And he always had to do what was right for them. And God bless him for that, because it's true. We, you know, are fortunate to get to work in golf, but we're only fortunate as long as we're helping the golfers that we're supposed to be helping. And it shouldn't be about propping ourselves up and it shouldn't be about proving ourselves right. It should be about getting it right instead of being right. And so many of our golf coaches that are out there just aren't in that headspace because they're very transactional and not transformative. So I understand why a lot of people don't take golf lessons. And I understand why a lot of people, when I explain to them what I do for a living, they're like, well, you're a snake oil salesman because I took a lesson and it made me worse. And I think that happens to a lot of people. And it's sad and it makes me unhappy. Um, I want people to love golf the way I love golf. I want people to get from golf what I get from golf. And I believe that we can do better, but we need to learn about the human body. We need to create safe space for people to do the implicit learning. We need to have objective feedback. We need these things because if you look at how we teach and coach other things, these things are always kind of at the core of the people who are good at it versus the people who struggle with it. And that's just the way it is. And a lot of golf coaches have reached out to me and, you know, they, you know, they're very, they're very sensitive about the fact that, you know, we have a lot of tech and they have none. And I always tell people what Mr. Mike Adams told me back in 2019. Just because you're a golf coach doesn't mean you don't have to invest in yourself. Uh, and you do, and and that's not just a money thing, that's uh that's a time thing, that's a commitment thing, it's a learning thing. And I think if you're going to sign up to be a golf instructor, I think you need to realize that it's a lifestyle, a continual learning lifestyle, because we learn just as much from our clients and our peers as we do from ourselves. And that's really, really important, right? Is we want to make sure that we're on this pathway to learning because there's something that comes through the door at least once a week that I haven't seen before. And it doesn't mean that I can't fix it or I can't make it better, but I need to be open and objective enough to recognize that this isn't like everything else, and not every problem isn't now, which is why I have more than just a hammer to solve these problems with. And that's the thing that makes it fun for me, is like I said earlier, being on my toes, having to be creative, having to come up with new things. And that's what keeps it fun and engaging for me as a coach. So I get it. Like I trust me, I just had a conversation with somebody who wanted to know about signing up for some golf lessons. And, you know, I I think that he had been kind of burned a few times through this process. And I more or less kind of said a lot of the same things I just said here on the podcast, and I think it opened his eyes a little bit, and he definitely hadn't had a lot of experience with a lot of the things that I've mentioned here on the podcast, and I think that's why it hasn't been successful for him. Um, but I think the golf lessons, by and large, can be successful, and I do think they help. Um golf, you know, I spent most of my golfing career trying to figure it out on my own because, you know, I didn't have the money or the resources to to take lessons and whatnot. So I've done that, I've been there, um, digging it out of the dirt, as they say. And the problem was is that I could I can make the golf swing move however you wanted the golf swing to move, but I never really changed the motor pattern, nor did I understand it. Um, and because of that, like it just would always resort back to what it was, which was not good enough, which is why eventually I had to stop playing uh competitive golf at a high level, because you don't really get to pick when you stop. It's just you find out that your skill set isn't good enough to continue. So, you know, I don't I don't think that, you know, most of the people that I work with, um, you know, at least 60, 70% of them are never gonna play golf in a tournament. Like that's just not what they're gonna do. They're not trying to be professional, they're not trying to play in this this competitive uh landscape. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't train and teach and coach the same way that we do with those players, because they're paying us good money just like those players do, and they have goals and they want to get better. And I I really don't teach my professional players any differently than my amateur players. Um, the only real difference I would say is that if you're fortunate enough to work with a tour player, generally you spend most of your time working on more human skills than you do golf skills because they already have the golf skills or they wouldn't be there. So to like be on tour, there are you know requirements. You've got to be able to scramble at 80% or better, you've got to be able to, you know, create 115 miles an hour club speed. You've got to be able to do all these, all these benchmarks, right? Or you wouldn't be out there in the first place. So these people that are playing professional golf, you know, they have golf skills. So a lot of times what they don't have are the people skills or the human skills, and that's where you really can make a difference with them in regards to like, hey, like let's work on your emotional regulation, let's work on your breath work, let's work on these things. Once again, not my expertise, but the truth. And I'm a fiduciary, so I have to tell them these things. I can triage, I can explain why these things are important, I can maybe show you a couple techniques. But once again, I'm just here to stop the bleeding until we can get you to the surgeon who's going to be the specialist in this case. So, with a lot of the tour players, I think that's why you see the teams growing and growing and growing, and less and less of their like old school swing coaches out there. But when it comes to teaching amateurs, maybe they don't have those golf skills, right? There are no prereqs to going out and playing golf. So I spend most of my time with my amateurs working on golf skills, and they already have the human skills, right? Because they're successful in something else, and then you just teach them to take that thing they already know how to do and transfer it to this new skill. So it's really not different though, in terms of the structure, the feedback, the plan, all these things because they exist because they need to to see growth and continual evolvement within the game of golf and their golf game on their own. So long story short, um, if you're one of those people who doesn't think the golf instruction works, um, by and large, I don't think you're really wrong. Um, I think that the days of the traditional old school golf lesson to where you show up on a range and a guy's standing there with his arms crossed and just watching you hit golf balls, I think I think that's on the way out. And um, I'm kind of glad to be honest, because I think so much of that does more harm than good. But, you know, if you if you know somebody who has a launch monitor, if you know somebody that is investing in themselves and and has some education and understands how the body works, and honestly, like there's a lot of great like PTs and things like that who can really help your golf game just by looking at how you're trying to move, uh, because they understand the body really well and the sequencing of the body really well. So I think you're gonna see more and more of this kind of melting of like the gym space, quote unquote, PT space, quote unquote, in the golf space, because you you really can't have this golf swing without understanding how it relates to the motion of the human body and the sequencing of the human body. So to those that say it doesn't work, I kind of agree with you. And I would challenge you to maybe look outside of golf for some help, uh, or you know, find somebody uh not unlike us that maybe has invested in the force plates, has invested in a nice launch monitor, um, and has some kind of understanding somehow, somehow of the human body. Uh, I don't have a lot of formal education on the human body. I've been to quite a few workshops and quite a few uh symposiums on different aspects of the human body and human motion, but I did not go to medical school, which if somebody would have told me early on that if I went to medical school, it would have made me a better golf coach, I probably would have done it. Uh, but they didn't tell me that. They just told me that if I went to medical school, I had to be a doctor, and I didn't want to do that. So uh I love coaching golf, privileged to coach golf, and I enjoy learning, which golf has really taught me a lot. So uh very appreciative of everything. So I think that's probably gonna wrap us up uh for this episode of the podcast. Uh I was a little apprehensive to do it, to be honest, in the beginning, but I'm glad I did because I think it's been a great conversation. But, you know, find that person who's transformative, you know, find that person who makes a difference for you and find that golf fiduciary, you know, that would be my advice. Find the find the person that, you know, is is secure enough and and confident enough and capable enough of of referring you to somebody if it's not working. And, you know, I've I've given a lot of free golf lessons back in the day. I I try not to anymore, but um, you know, there's just there's certain times it doesn't line up. And uh every now and then you, you know, maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's uh you don't you just can't see it for whatever reason. But you know, I've told people like, hey, I think this guy's really good, and I or this gal's really good, and I think you should go give this a go because I'm not getting it done. And as a golf fiduciary, I have to be honest, not only with my clients, but I have to be honest with myself. So that's that's the objective part to it, right? Is you know, keeping myself honest. That's why I've uh invested in force plates in the first place was I wanted to know was I making a real change or was I just changing positions? So it's worked out well. Um, I don't think it's for everybody. I think a lot of people that have the force plates, um, I think it's messy. Uh, and the reason I think it's messy is because they just don't understand how the body moves in these three planes, and we try to explain everything through the ground. Um, I did that when I first bought force plates. I messed a lot of people up. That's probably when I was giving the most free golf lessons. Um, but I've learned, you know, it's there's two ends to the chain, right? I've got what's happening at the ground, what's happening at the hands, they're connected, uh, it's a closed system. And the nice thing is, is I understand the relationship between the kinetics and the kinematics. And if you understand that, then you can actually be a pretty, pretty good golf coach and and help people because you can change the ground force with what they're doing with their hands. Uh, and as golfers, we're always going to be distracted by the shiny thing. So we're always going to think through our hands and how the club is moving. And now that we're able to kind of measure this and look at this and kind of see the whole chain together, now we understand that we can still make changes at the ground level by changing the kinematics or how the hands are moving. So, long story short, it's been a great, uh, great episode. I've enjoyed it. I hope you have as well. Uh, one favor to ask if you haven't already, please download. I'm sorry, please subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. Uh, we do a video, which sometimes is better than others because sometimes I'm showing things and all that fun stuff. So we have a video element to this podcast as well, which we host on our Measured Golf YouTube channel. You can find that by going to YouTube, clicking on Measured Golf. There's a whole lot of stuff there, guys. It's not just the podcast. Uh, we make a lot of content discussing the golf swing. So if you're somebody who's interested in maybe getting into some of these concepts, maybe learning how the human body moves a little bit. I think we've got over 50 videos on our YouTube channel. Feel free to check that out when you're there. Please subscribe as well. Uh, comments are great. We love them. We try to answer all the comments within 48 hours. So if you can, please subscribe, please uh interact, leave comments. It's great for us and it really helps. Uh so just to be clear and uh clear with you guys, I'm asking you to do me a favor, and that is to interact with our social media. So we've got the YouTube, we've got this podcast here, which you can find anywhere you download your favorite podcast, YouTube, and then we've also got the measured golf on Instagram, as well as if you want to interact with me, uh, you can find the force plate guy on Instagram as well. And lastly, if you can't remember any of that, the only thing you have to remember is you can find us on the website at measuredgolf.com, and we have links to everything there as well. So thanks so much. Uh, really appreciate everybody who listens. Uh, we have been getting a lot of feedback here lately, and it means a lot to me. I would have never in a million years believed that this many people uh would be interested in what we have to say, but let alone here we are. So I'm incredibly grateful for it, and I will continue to be the best golf fiduciary that I can be and bringing this information to you. So thank you again, and until next time, and as always, uh keep grinding.

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Michael Dutro, PGA

Host