Swing Thoughts
Have you ever been struggling with part of your golf game for a while, then a single “swing thought” suddenly makes it disappear? The swing thought that suddenly has you hitting your driver perfectly straight, right down the fairway? Unfortunately, from our experience, that’s going to disappear. No one can tell you exactly when, but your new found confidence off the tee is going to fall apart leaving you frustrated, and once again, looking for answers.
Nothing is forever in golf.
We can’t begin to tell you how many times we have figured out something about our game that led to amazing results on the golf course, putting us on cloud nine. Feeling with absolute certainty, that we actually had finally figured it out forever. That we could go ahead and cross it off our list of golf things to work on. Golf is easy. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, we would hit one bad shot and once again, the seed of doubt was planted. Then maybe a round or two later our bad miss would start returning again with more frequency. Just like that, our fix, our swing thought was gone. We were back to square one, with our confidence shattered.
It’s simply a reality of golf.
Probably everyone reading this can relate if they’re honest. We figure things out, they work for a while, and then they disappear. We believe this happens for a couple of reasons. First, as we’ve alway heard, golf is 99% a mental game. When we believe in something it often leads to success on the course, even if we can’t understand why we have this supreme confidence. Once a few bad shots are hit, the confidence wavers and so do the good shots.
Secondly, the golf swing is an extremely complicated movement that requires so many things to happen correctly with our body in order to hit the ball squarely, consistently. Small changes in our swing, that we don’t even detect, can just happen. You can’t even feel the new “bad movement” , but you know it’s there. The harsh reality is that we’re then forced to evaluate and once again, fix our swing.
Nothing Is Forever
Now don’t get too discouraged from believing that parts of your game can improve forever, because they can. Through club selection, and figuring a few things out in your swing, you can partially eliminate these blunders. Because nothing is forever in golf, you can also rest assured that if things aren’t going well for you, there is hope and that this too shall pass! It can be temporary, but only if you believe it is.
When we get into these deep ruts we start to think to ourselves, have I lost it forever? You seriously wonder if you’ll ever play well again. Golf is such a mental game that you must believe in yourself to overcome these types of thoughts. What we’re trying to say is that by its nature golf is an erratic game, and things will constantly be changing. How we react to this will largely determine how well we play. We just have to roll with the punches in this crazy game called golf and try to remind ourselves that nothing is forever.