Effortless Golf

Unless you are born a natural golf player, you will need golf instruction if you expect to improve your game. Employing a professional golf pro can help you target the weaknesses in your swing and diagnose your hooks. A professional golfer will be able to share with you some of the secrets of the trade and show you simple mind games that will help you focus better, before and after every shot you take on course.

Even the best amateur golfers out there, although they probably don’t want to admit it, take tutoring from the pros. Natural born athletes like the Michael Jordan’s and Michael Schmidt’s of the world need help from the pros every once in a while to improve their game by pointing out the slight faults in their back swings or how they look up in their short game. Even the elite of golfers seek out advice from those who are considered the gurus for golf instruction when they are in a decline or losing distance on their drives.

In other words, it isn’t a bad thing that you want golf lessons. That is exactly what the golf pros are for. That is the reason why they have trained hard and become certified by the PGA. It isn’t easy to be certified as a golf pro. It takes years of hard work, studying and training to obtain that qualification. Part of their learning process is to learn how to, not only teach golf but to plan a club tournament, deal with club members and even run the club hop. Even after they have qualified as a golf pro, they still enrol in the occasional seminar or course to brush up on new taching techniques.

Of course, golf instruction is a crucial aspect of this training and their work. This is the reason, after all, why English and Scottish golfer first came to America at the start of the twentieth century. Several decades after they had established the PGA to spread the word of golf and teach Americans how to play, golf is now played and taught all over the world. Those Scottish and English players sure made tough competition for themselves.

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Golf tournaments are great competitive events where you can both have fun as well as challenge your golf game along with others. There are hundreds and hundreds of golf tournaments held all over the world both for professionals as well as amateurs. Even local organizations have golf tournaments.

For male professionals, there are four major golf tournaments that are held each year. They are:

1. The Masters 2. The U.S. Open 3. The British Open 4. PGA Championship

Female professionals have their own four major golf tournament each year. They are:

1. Kraft Nabisco Championship (formerly the Dinah Shore Tournament) 2. LPGA Championship 3. U.S. Women’s Open 4. Women’s British Open

Of course, amateur golfers will have golf tournaments as well including the U.S. Amateur Championship for men and women as well as juniors. Amateur seniors and amateur professionals also have specific golf tournaments they participate in to gain experience and even notoriety.

Professional golf tournaments are almost all held the same way. There are two days of qualifying rounds after which the bottom players are cut. Then there are two more days of competition. Each round is 18 holes.

Open golf tournaments, such as the U.S. Open, are held to try and give amateurs the chance to break into the field of professional golf. Golfers participate in a series of smaller tournaments to qualify for the Open where they proceed to the big tournament where they compete against professionals. The last amateur to win a U.S. Open was back in 1933.

Amateurs also get the chance to play in the big golf tournaments. The Masters Golf tournament invites the winners of several prestigious events to participate in the big one. That includes the winner of the U.S. and British Amateur Championships.

Most local golf tournaments are held to raise money for specific organizations or for charities. Anyone can participate and they can be quite fun. Most of the local golf tournaments are one, maybe two, day events and consist of one 18 hole round. Prizes maybe awarded for skins, long drive, and long putt, to name a few. A lot of local golf tournaments are flighted – meaning that participants are separated into classes according to ability. Many are also scramble or best ball format.

When you are a regular participant in golf tournaments, you can see why the pros love them so much. Although you won’t be receiving the same big paycheck that they do, you can sure have a lot of fun!

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As with any other sport golf also does have a professional level. The difference between playing professional golf and amateur golf, however, can be a very fine line. There are a lot of amateur golfers that can score at the professional level, however, they are unable to do it consistently and often miss out on the tournaments that can qualify them to get on the tour.

Nonetheless, it is a dream of many golfers to play professional golf one day and make a living doing something that they truly, truly love. Your office is the course, and your co-workers are people who love the game just as much as you do. You share common interests at the professional level of golf and it can be a very satisfying career. But isn’t that obvious?

Qualifying to play professional golf is another story altogether. The field is very competitive and it can be extremely difficult to break through. Some people try their whole lives to qualify and always come up short. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of dedication, and an ability to take a lot of disappointment to play professional golf, so know what you’re in for!

To get started playing professional golf, you will first have to qualify for “Q School” or Qualifying School. Q Schools are annual qualifying tournament for leading golf tours like the PGA and the LPGA. In Q School, a fixed number of players win membership to the tour for the following season. In professional golf, this is referred to as your “tour card”. You will then be able to play in most of the tour’s events without having to qualify.

Getting through the Q school is very competitive and most professional golfers never achieve it. There can be up to four stages to negotiate each of them like a regular golf tournament with only a small number of players going on to the next state. The final qualifying school may be played over up to six rounds compared with the standard four rounds in a professional golf tournament. However, players who are successful at Q school can reach the elite level of competition very quickly.

You can also qualify to play professional golf in other ways. Finishing near the top of the money list on the tour’s developmental tour, winning a tournament on the tour after qualifying or as a sponsor’s invitee, or winning enough money on multiple events on the tour to meet whatever criteria the tour may lay down for promotion to full membership. This last one was how Tiger Woods gained his first tour card.

Playing professional golf is not an easy career to pursue, but it is a great way to make a living! Persistence, patience, and a great game of golf can all get you on your way to playing professional golf, but be realistic and know that it will take time.

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Why do we find a move that seems so easy to the professionals so incredibly difficult to perform?

Recently I discovered that psychologists believe that we learn differently as adults than we do when we were children. And I believe this may be the key to explaining why we have such a difficult time of it.

The large majority of professional golfers will have taken up golf when they were kids – Tiger Woods was swinging a club well at 3!

But, I would imagine the majority of amateur golfers took golf up when either in their late teens, early twenties or even later in life – as adults.

The psychologists believe that as children we learn from repeating the model that we see – we know that kids are very trusting of what they are told. Yes, they ask lots of questions but they trust the answers given. They see, and are told, and DO.

Now as adults we learn differently. We have already formed opinions about how the world is and how things operate. So when we learn something new we actually test it against the rules that we have already built up in our heads as to what is right and wrong.

Unfortunately for us, the golf swing is actually illogical. That’s where the problem stems from. In our heads we can’t actually accept or believe that that is how the golf swing works. We then trust our instinct and test it against our rules and go back to what we believe is logical.

Here is what is illogical about the golf swing:

A Golf Swing without Effort = A Powerful 300 yard drive

It’s been said before that the secret to the pros swing is that it achieves ‘Power WITHOUT Effort – how illogical is that!

It’s a bit like saying we’re going on a 200 mile car journey, but we’re not going to turn the engine on! No ones going to believe you.

That’s how our brains interpret it – we think there’s no way you can hit a golf ball 300 yards without LOTS of effort.

So next time we coil up on the backswing our brain tells our muscles ‘right guys we need plenty of effort if we’re going to send this ball long and straight’.

Pro’s do actually put effort into their swings to get the ball to go that far (look at Tiger Woods face just before impact and you’ll see what I mean) BUT they put it in at a completely different point in the swing to amateur golfers. They also know the technique that allows them to produce such great results – and it doesn’t involve power, certainly not how the amateur golfer understands it.

Amateur golfers think you need to start the golf swing powerfully BUT the pro golfers know that you put the effort in at the bottom of the swing.

If you try and take this point on board this will start the process of adjusting your mind.

Over the next few pages I’m going to OPEN your EYES to how the golf swing actually works – much of which us amateurs don’t appreciate.

Understanding is the 1st key to unlocking your golfing potential.

Towards the end of my book I’ll show you where to get a piece of software that will by-pass your conscious mind and reprogram your sub-conscious mind to believe what you will see and start to understand about how the pro golf swing works. How YOU can swing powerfully without effort.

EYE-OPENER No. 2

What part of the body contributes the most to generating the maximum speed of the club head?

This single answer allowed me to make a huge leap in my understanding of the golf swing, and in everything I had seen and read about the golf swing none of it emphasised it enough.

I carried out a survey on the Internet over several weeks and asked visitors to my web site the question:- What part of the body contributes the most to generating the maximum speed of the club head?

Only 20% got the answer correct – That’s only 1 in every 5 golfers! And these golfers had a wide range of handicaps down to single figures.

Interestingly this figure corresponds to another golfing statistic – Did you know that only around 20% of golfers have a handicap of less than 18? It made me wonder whether the misunderstanding of the fundamental aspect could be the one thing that is holding so many golfers back.

Which part of the body do you think creates the maximum speed of the club head?

Is it:
Shoulders
Arms
Hands
Hips
Legs
Torso
wrists

(Graphics and explanations omitted here)

….So the answer to the question that I posed above is that it is the hands (or wrists) that contribute the most to generating the maximum club head speed. The club is moved through over 180 degrees whilst the arms move through less than 60 degrees – all of the rest of the movement of the head of the golf club is generated by the movement of the hands. Unfortunately the large majority of golfers think that it is with the shoulders and arms.

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Jon Barrett WAS a frustrated golfer who studied the golf swing for 5 years in search of information to make his scores tumble but without success… UNTIL he discovered what only 1% of golfers know. Read about his eye opening concepts: www.golfswingeureka.com