As a golf instructor for more than 20 years, I have gone through my own professional maturation when it comes to my instructional style and the way I have chosen to help my students.

Golf instruction is like any other occupation; it takes time and experience in order to become the very best. And no one has all the answers from day one. However, I will tell you that with the advent of 3D Motion Analysis and club and ball-flight launch monitors such as Trackman and FlightScope, the answers are becoming much easier to find. We all know that perfecting your communication takes time and experience, but the hardest thing I had to learn during the years was taking the correct route to success based on the goals of the student.

Every golfer has different goals when it comes to what they want out of the game, as well as different coordination capabilities and basic time constraints to deal with while trying to practice. It is up to the instructor to understand these issues in order to create a practice plan that will allow the student to improve as quickly as possible. It’s also the instructor’s job to get a student from point A to point B with as little aggravation as possible!

I want to share with you a lesson I had with a friend of mine the other day. During the interview process, Ed told me that he was an 11 handicap, always aimed a touch right and hit the ball low and left when he missed with his driver. He said that he hit the ball far enough for the tees he plays, but when there is trouble on the left he gets very uneasy. He also mentioned that he never practiced, but played three times per week and that was not going to change at his age. Finally, he said that if he could rid himself of the left shot he would be happy as a clam.

I took the time to put him on the Trackman to see what we had to work with, and here is what we saw:

• His angle of attack wasn’t too far off, at almost 1-degree up at impact. It could have been a touch higher, but distance wasn’t that much of an issue in his world.
• His swing path was almost 9 degrees from the inside. That indicates that a golfer’s driver could be too long or that his or her pivot could be faulty, etc.
• His face-to-path ratio was a touch high (-4.2 degrees), but not too bad. Thankfully, his heel-impact tendency helped the ball stay a touch more right than would be expected for this face-to-path ratio.
• His ball speed, spin rate, launch and dynamic loft all looked reasonable for a golfer of his level.

So what can we deduce from his goals and the data listed above?

• His aim tended to be slightly right, which I confirmed through observation on the range.
• His driver was fit for length. It was 43.5 inches, which fit him in a perfect manner based on his arm length, etc.
• Ed tended to be a touch too far away from the ball at address.

Now as an instructor armed with this information, my data and my observations on video, how should I proceed? This is where experience comes in from the instructors’ side. I thought the easiest thing to do to help Ed was to fix his propensity to aim right. The farther left he aimed, I imagined, the better his path would be if everything else was constant. So I experimented with that first.

Ed tendency to be a bit “outstretched” at address was also a likely a cause for his in-to-out swing path, because it leads to an overly rounded swing. And that change was next. It’s my belief that it’s in a student’s best interest not to change too many things at first, particularly for a non-practicing golfer who has played at a high level his whole life. Ed basically had one issue, so there was no reason to reinvent the wheel for. However, I still had to test my hypothesis.

So I took the time to explain to Ed that his swing was moving too much in-to-out, and by aiming too far right he was tending to aid this process. So I wanted him to audit and monitor his aim with a few practice sticks and hit a few balls. I let him hit about 10 to 15 balls so that his body had a chance to figure out where it was, and watched him to make sure he was lined square to slightly left of the target line.

As he did that, this I was checking the Trackman and his numbers to make sure his path did indeed change to something that was less from the inside. If the ball flight was up to his standards and the numbers agreed, then we would have been done. However, if the path didn’t change enough, we’d move him a touch closer to the ball.

So after a few shots, the path was better, but it was still a touch too in-to-out for my liking, not to mention that his shots were still a touch off line. So I moved him up closer, which will cause a golf swing to become more vertical. I hoped that second change would cause the path to fix itself, but if it didn’t, we’d have to focus on more full-swing fixes.

Luckily, we didn’t have to. By lining him up a touch more square to open, as well as moving him closer to the ball, his numbers and subsequent ball flight was fixed to his liking.

As you can see from the data above, several things improved:

• His attack angle went up slightly, from 0.8 degrees to 3.2 degrees, which is perfect. Sometimes when you fix the right thing, others follow.
• His swing direction moved from 9.7 degrees in-to-out to a very manageable 4 degrees in-to-out.
• Ed’s path was 0.3 degrees from in-to-out, while his face angle was dead down the line at 0, giving him a very tight face-to-path ratio.
• The only negative we saw was that his spin rate that went up slightly, and he tended to have an impact point on the heel of his club that pushed the ball a touch too much to the right.

Ed proceeded to hit some more balls, testing this “fix” with a few different clubs. At that time, it was up to the student to let me know if we had indeed moved him into a more manageable position and one that he felt he could play from in all situations. But what did we do about the higher spin rate and slight heel impact, you might be asking? At that point, nothing. I know it’s tough to swallow, but sometimes saying less is better.

What did we learn from this lesson? Simpler is always better than a more complex “fix” for a player who does not practice. Based on what goals this player expressed to me — stop the left shot and everything else is OK — I helped him do exactly what he asked for.

Since we didn’t really fix anything mechanically during the lesson, I asked that he come back to see me in a few days that that we could double check his spin and impact point. If the numbers for the path and face stayed reasonable, and he wasn’t missing the ball left any longer, we could then we can move forward to improve the higher spin rate and impact point. In my opinion, those problems were being caused by an impact point that was too low on the face, and that the arms were running away from the body through impact, usually a byproduct from the old pivot.

Remember that golf instruction and technology is here for students in order to help them reach their goals easier and quicker than ever before. Take the time to ensure that you are not making things too complex on the lesson tee. Only change the things that need to be changed, and pick the ones that will make the MOST difference. You will find that your students will be much happier golfers because of it!