We’ve all been there. A simple Par 3 with a little water and a big green. “Just don’t hit it in the water and you’ll be okay,” you tell yourself… right before your ball is donated to the lake. You did the one thing you told yourself not to do, and it happens more often than you’d like. But why? One of the most common mistakes you can make in practice is giving yourself commands your body cannot actually use. You’ll hear it all the time, and you’ve probably said it to yourself: “Don’t swing with my arms,” “Don’t lift my head,” “Don’t come over the top,” or “Don’t hit it left.” The intention behind these thoughts is logical. You’re trying to avoid the pattern that has been causing poor shots. The problem is that negative commands are not very effective movement instructions. Your nervous system can understand the word “don’t,” but it cannot organize movement around an absence. In order to avoid something, your brain still has to identify it, picture it, and bring attention to it. That means the very thing you’re trying to eliminate becomes the center of your awareness. If you think, “Don’t swing with my arms,” your attention is now directed toward your arms. Instead of freeing up movement, you often become more aware, more tense, and more controlled in exactly the area you’re trying to change. This is where you get stuck. The issue is not that the thought is wrong. In many cases, your diagnosis is accurate. You might absolutely be overusing your arms, early extending, or swinging across the ball. But knowing what you don’t want to do is not the same as giving your body something useful to execute. Golf is not a game where your body responds well to avoidance. It responds to clear direction. When you stand over the ball with only a negative command, you are essentially asking your body to solve a problem without giving it a solution. “Don’t swing with your arms” removes one option, but it does not replace it with a better one. Under those conditions, your body almost always defaults back to your most familiar pattern.

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.

At first glance, the Swing Pros Process can look unusual. Two instructors. Two lesson types. One overall plan. Golfers tend to be traditionalists, and historically, amateurs have taken golf lessons one way for a long time. That doesn’t mean it’s the right way. As humans, we evolve and adapt. Why can’t golf instruction? Why do it this way, you might ask? Because after more than 11 years in business, we know our process works better than traditional lessons. We tried those too, and in our opinion there is no comparison. We did not build this process to be different or unique. We built it because the more we tested it, the more it worked. We kept seeing the same thing over and over again: golfers improve faster, have better concepts, and hold onto changes longer when learning happens through structure, reinforcement, and multiple perspectives tied to the same message. Just as importantly, they improve more efficiently when golf is taught in the correct order. One of the biggest mistakes golfers make is not always working on the wrong things, but working on them in the wrong sequence. A lot of people hear “two instructors” and assume that means two opinions and two sets of conflicting information. That is not what we do. This is not about contradiction. It is about clarity. At the highest levels of golf, players do not rely on one voice for everything in their game. Professional golfers often have swing coaches, short game coaches, mental coaches, and more. That does not make their game more confusing. It gives them a team. Different perspectives. Different ways of understanding the same goal. The message is not fractured. It is reinforced. That matters because ultimately, golf is hard. It is one of the most counterintuitive sports and motions there is to learn. It is not like riding a bike, where once you have it, you always have it. In golf, you can have it one day and feel like you lost it the next. The players who get good are not just the ones who can do it when things feel easy. They are the ones who begin to understand what broke, why it broke, and how to fix it.

Every year at The Masters, we watch the best players in the world pull off shots that almost don’t feel real. Drives shaped on command, irons landing exactly where they’re aimed, putts rolling into the hole from over breaks that seem impossible. And then, what looks like a simple 10 yard chip suddenly has a player second guessing themselves at address. Because at Augusta, one of the toughest shots all week isn’t a long iron or a pressure putt. It’s a chip from right off the green. Augusta doesn’t even allow the use of the word rough. Everything is referred to as the “second cut,” and even that is relatively tame, around 1 and 3/8 inches off the fairways. It’s nothing like the deep, penal rough you see at a U.S. Open. The real challenge isn’t the longer grass, it’s how short everything else is. The fairways are cut to about 3/8 of an inch, which is incredibly tight. For context, a typical course is closer to half an inch. That difference sounds small, but it completely changes how the club interacts with the ground, and leaves no room for error. Around the greens, that same tight cut continues. The ball sits directly on the turf with no cushion, and now the club has nothing to work with except the ground itself. That’s what makes these shots so demanding. You have to control exactly where the club meets the ground. Not close, exact. And at Augusta, you’re rarely doing it from a perfect lie. The course is full of subtle, or sometimes severe slopes and undulations, which means even these short shots are often played from slightly uphill, downhill, or sidehill lies. That adds another layer. Now you’re not just managing contact, you’re adjusting to the ground under you. These shots aren’t about compressing the ball into the ground like an iron. With a wedge, the bounce is designed to let the club interact with the ground right under the ball, not in front of it. The goal is for the club to meet the ball and the turf together, using the bounce built into the wedge to keep the club moving through impact. On a course with a little more grass, there’s space for that to happen. At Augusta, there isn’t much.

Robert MacIntyre spent most of the week in Texas doing something that’s hard to do on the PGA Tour. He controlled a golf tournament, leading the Valero Texas Open by four shots after the second round with an opening 8 under, and carrying that lead deep into the weekend before being passed late by J. J. Spaun. The easy takeaway is that it was a missed opportunity, but that is not really the part that matters heading into The Masters Tournament. What matters more is the type of player he is, and why that profile has quietly worked at Augusta for a long time. Left-handed players have had somewhat disproportionate success there. Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, and Mike Weir have combined for multiple green jackets despite some limited success across the other three majors. (Disclaimer: Yes, Phil has 6 and that’s hard to categorize as limited success, until you factor in that half of those were at Augusta National.) That is not random, but it is also not because Augusta was built for left-handers. It is because Augusta was built around a shot shape. Many of the key holes at Augusta call for a right to left ball flight. For a right-handed player, that means a draw. For a left-handed player, that means a fade, and those are not equal shots under pressure. A fade is generally easier to control. It holds its line better, lands softer, and is less prone to overcurving. A draw requires more timing and carries a higher risk of turning into a hook when the pressure increases and the hands speed up, which becomes a much bigger problem on a golf course like Augusta. That difference is magnified by the greens. Augusta’s putting surfaces are firm, fast, and severely sloped, which makes spin control extremely sensitive. A few hundred RPMs of extra draw spin can be the difference between a ball finishing next to the flag or releasing into a collection area or even into the water. A left-handed player hitting a fade can slightly overcut the ball and still stay within a manageable window, while a right-handed player who overdraws it is often dealing with a much more penal miss. This is one of the main reasons tour players prefer to hit cuts and fades into greens when they can, as it provides a more predictable landing and roll out pattern. Augusta simply presents more situations where that preferred shot is required.