Do Coaches Talk to Much?

As a golf coach who is always interested in developing my understanding of the swing and coaching techniques I am always researching and developing new ways to do the things that I do during a golf coaching session. This curiosity is what led me to undertake my post graduate university studies and is what drives me to continue to learn and develop as a coach.
One thing that I have always believed as a coach is communication is extremely important part of the coaching process. There is no point having lots of knowledge about the golf swing and coaching if you can’t get that information across to your student. How we communicate in a golf lesson can make a lesson great or awful.

One of my faults as a coach when I first started giving lessons was giving too much information during a lesson. I would feel like I had to talk for the entire time to give my student “value for money”. This led to a lot of students becoming overwhelmed during my lessons and leaving more confused.

After spending time watching other coaches give lessons and reading more about communication I started to realise that a golfer can’t take on very much new information at any one time. I started to reduce the amount of new changes I gave to a student and I started to see their ball flight improve during the lesson. I would give two or three points only per lesson and I had a lot happier customers.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time on the Ted website watching some amazing videos. If you haven’t checked out this site, I would encourage you to take a look by clicking here. On this site, I came across the video below. Take a few minutes and watch it.

This experiment made me think about how we give lessons as golf coaches and I wondered if we spoke too much. I had had some success in lessons by allowing students to “work it out for themselves” and this video opened my eyes to a whole new possibility as a coach. If I allowed my students to experiment, with guidance from me, would they develop better skills and have a better understanding of their own swings? Would they be less reliant on me for technique information? Could this lead to me being able to coach “playing skills” rather than technique all the time?

I have never been courageous enough to use all of these strategies in my coaching but I have used varying degrees of it in different lessons. My junior programs evolved into more of this type of coaching with good success, although I had to explain the reasoning to a lot of parents along the way. I also used guided training with Trackman to reinforce feelings with some willing students. I found that I had to pick my marks a little as some students just wanted to be told what to do.

I certainly feel that this style of coaching is much better for long term development and I think that golf coaching will move further down this path in the future.

I would love to hear from you if you use this type of coaching or have had lessons from people in the past that use this type of coaching. Leave your comments below.

Until next time,

Brent