When a golf lesson is worth the money, and when it isn’t

A lesson is worth the most after a certain stage in your learning, and a lot less before it. I’m Ed, one of the founders of Grady, and I say that as someone who paid for a lot of lessons before I understood where that stage was.

I think this is a complicated topic and probably personal to each person. But in my opinion, and in how I approached it with my son, there are a few things that matter, and they come in an order.

Right at the start, a lesson isn’t worth very much, because you can’t hit the ball yet. Your body has to discover on its own how to make contact with a long club and a small ball, and no one can do that discovering for you.

The other thing to get past early is the ground. Most people want the ball teed up, driver or not, because hitting the turf feels like a mistake. What worked for me was the opposite. Get used to hitting the ground on purpose with a half swing, a pitch, so your body learns how the club meets the ball and the ground, and how the arms, the body and the feet connect in a small swing. I’d work on the pitch before I tried anything like a full swing. It isn’t only me. In What I Wish I Knew, Rick Shiels’s list of what he’d tell his younger self puts the short game ahead of the full swing, because you’ll take more putts than full swings in any round. Working on the short game from the start gets you off faster than trying to hit bombs.

You do need some guidance at this stage, and this is the part a video does well. Because what the instructor is going to tell you in that first lesson is exactly what the video would have. Then they’ll hand you a bucket of balls and you’ll hit away. That isn’t the best use of your time or your money, and the Lab’s first chapters are the guidance I’d take instead.

I don’t want to be too down on early lessons, though, and there’s a reason for them that has nothing to do with the swing. Group lessons are a good way to meet people who are starting at the same time as you, and that makes the beginning more social and a lot more fun.

The middle stage is where the money starts to be well spent, and where you have to know something about yourself first. You’ve been at it a while and you’ve seen some videos. And you’ve run into the concepts that are easy to say and incredibly hard to explain to your own body. How to shallow the club. How to create lag. How to shift your weight without sliding your hips. Part of learning here is absorbing the same idea from different angles until one of them lands, and the angle that lands for you is the one to look for in an instructor.

I learnt this from a friend who was always good at sport. When we started, instruction like “weight onto the right side, hips this way, extend the front leg” just worked for him. His body knew what to do with it. I’m not that kind of learner. Tell me the same way and I can’t make any of it happen. What worked for me was imagery, an analogy. Holding a heavy bucket of water out to the side, to stay balanced in the backswing. Or Rick Shiels describing the swing as throwing a ball down at the ground, with the whole body and not just the arm. Neither of us was wrong. But the instructor who was right for him would have wasted my money, and I think that’s true for most people more than they realise.

The point where a lesson pays for itself is regular instruction, once or twice a month, with someone who tells you the thing you can’t see yourself. A golf swing is too fast to analyse from the inside. You feel one thing and do another. The best instructors I’ve had say something like this: here’s what I can see, here’s what’s causing eighty percent of your problems, and the one thing to fix next is this drill. You’ll have heard ten different fixes on YouTube by then. A good coach tells you which one is yours.

The clearest example I have is my son’s grip. His shots had been going right for the better part of a year, and I couldn’t see why, standing next to him at the range. His coach saw it in one look. The grip. His lead hand had drifted too far round, and his body had built the rest of his swing around it so he could square the club at all. It took about a month of “grip check” before every swing to undo, and then everything fell into place. A diagnosis I couldn’t have made, and a drill we could do at home. That’s what the money is for.

I want to be fair to coaches here. He’d been in group lessons, and it took a while for them to reach that level of detail. A coach has more to work on than one session can hold, so it comes in pieces, and the piece you need most doesn’t always come first. That’s true of everyone’s swing. The more of the basics you bring in with you, the shorter the queue.

Don’t leave a lesson without a drill. If you’re only hitting balls with an instructor watching, you aren’t really going anywhere, and that’s not a golf thing. It’s the same in any sport. If the only practice you do is at team practice or in the lesson, you don’t get better. The lesson hands you the thing to work on. The getting better happens on your own, in between.

So the sessions worth paying for end the same way: here’s the problem, here’s the drill, go and do it. Then you do it at work, at home in front of a mirror, and at the range, until the motion is yours. It’s work. It’s also immensely satisfying when it finally holds, and you start to see the consistency you were paying for.

If you’re booking one, there are a few things worth doing the week before so you’re not paying a pro to teach you what a video would. That’s the next story. And if the question is where, Where to Play is the place to start looking.