6d • General discussion
Uncomfortable? Good.
Why Golf Changes Feel So Dramatic, and Why That Can Be a Good Thing
One of the hardest parts of improving at golf is that real progress often feels strange before it feels trustworthy.
Not strange on camera. Not strange in reality. Strange to the player making the change.
A small grip adjustment can feel foreign, because it’s your only connection to the club. Better posture can feel too bent over because you previously had no pelvis bend. A shorter backswing can feel far too short because you’re no longer breaking your arms. Having an inside to out clubpath for the first time almost feels wrong, because you’ve never done it before. In golf, even small changes can create very strong, strange sensations. If we keep labeling those feelings as “wrong” just because they’re new, the changes never get a fair chance to stick.
Instead, in a game of opposites like golf, we need to trust that sometimes right feels wrong.
Golf is a game of small margins; tiny differences in face angle, swing path, center of gravity, or sequence can change strike and ball flight in a big way. When those small changes interrupt something familiar, they often feel far more dramatic than they really are.
Many players get tricked right there. They assume that because a change feels dramatic, it looks exactly as dramatic as it feels. Usually, it is not. It just feels big because of how unfamiliar it is.
Many golfers are not reacting to the change itself as much as they are reacting to the loss of familiarity. The old motion may have had flaws, but it was still theirs. They knew how to time things up and make it work. When a better pattern is introduced, it can feel like someone else’s swing for a while.
Dr. TJ Tomasi used to tell us that if a change feels right, it is probably wrong. There is a lot of truth in that. Most golfers are trying to replace an ingrained habit with something they do not yet trust. So the new motion feels strange. It feels unfamiliar or even uncomfortable. That does not mean it is bad. Often, it means the player is finally moving away from the pattern that caused the problem in the first place.
This becomes even more challenging when several improvements are happening at once. The grip may be better. Posture may be improving. The player may also be learning, perhaps for the first time, what the clubface should be doing. That can make it feel as though everything is changing at once.
Usually, though, the issue is not the amount of change. It is the player trying to manage all of it at the same time.
Mindfulness becomes our best resource here.
Players who handle change well tend to narrow their focus. They are not trying to rebuild their entire game in one bucket of balls. They focus on one piece at a time. One goal that allows all of the other pieces to fit more freely. That keeps change from turning into chaos. Part of that process is learning the parameters as well. A player who understands both too much and too little has a much better chance of recognizing neutral when they find it.
Golf also becomes harder to practice well because it is such a result-oriented sport. Players naturally want the ball flight to confirm that the change worked, but unfortunately that is not always how improvement looks in real time. There are so many moving pieces in a swing that a player can do the piece they are working on perfectly, and still hit a poor shot because something else broke down around it. If we aren’t careful, frustration can take over right here. Instead of staying with the work, the player often bails on it because the result of the change did not reward them quickly enough.
In reality, the change itself may have been correct.
The discomfort of doing something unfamiliar is often what causes another part of the motion to unravel, and then the player blames the wrong thing. It could be as simple as a golfer being so eager to see if the change worked that they start looking up before or through impact. Productive practice has to be judged by more than just the immediate result.
Proper practice is mandatory here. Part of improvement is learning what too much feels like and what too little feels like, because both help define what neutral actually is. If a player has never lived on both sides of the pattern, it becomes much harder to recognize the middle. Change requires proper repetition and structure. You are not just learning a fix. You are learning the boundaries around it.
Feel is useful, but it is not reliable enough to be the final judge. A neutral grip can feel weak to a player who has always held it too strong. Better posture can feel excessive to someone used to standing tall. A backswing that is finally under control can feel much shorter or slower than it really is. More often, these feelings are signs that the player is moving beyond the same old pattern.
Coaching, feedback, and proper repetition matter so much because of this. Early in a change, players are not very good at judging what they are actually doing. They judge based on comfort, and comfort is a poor coach. Without correct feedback, many golfers abandon good changes simply because those changes do not feel natural quickly enough.
The hardest part of change in golf is not always doing something new. It is trusting it long enough for it to stop feeling new. And that is exactly why feeling different is not always a bad sign. Sometimes it is simply the doorway to a motion that will serve you better.
What is the first fix you received that felt completely backwards but immediately gave you better results? Mine was "hit it to first base" and all the sudden I was coming from the inside and hitting draws for the first time. Let us know in the comments!
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Uncomfortable? Good.
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