How quickly you break 90 is determined in your first month

Your body is smart. Give it enough golf balls and it will work out a way to hit one. The trouble is that whatever it works out is what you keep, and if the grip and the setup were wrong at the start, you’ll top out shooting around 100 on the course and then spend a couple of years undoing it. I’m Ed, one of the founders of Grady, and I know because that’s what I did.

I should say up front that I’m not a coach. What follows is what happened to me and what I’d do differently, and I think a lot of it is personal to each person. The pros in the Learning Lab teach the swing. What I can tell you is that the start matters, and how early you invest in it.

I started in my teens and, like a lot of people, I borrowed clubs from a relative. In my case it was my uncle, who was much taller than me, and his set was not a great fit. There was no YouTube, and no online coaches giving their advice away for free. So it was hard to even picture what a good swing looked like, or what a grip was supposed to be. You pick up the club, you go to the range, and you hit away.

And your body figures it out. That’s what I mean by smart. It found a way to get the ball in the air with an ill-fitting club and no technique, and the way it found was wrong. I didn’t know how to use the ground, my feet and my hips to turn, so I built a giant out-to-in swing that cut across the ball with the face open, and a slice that went a long way right. The driver became a club I was afraid of. I knew what was going to happen every time I picked it up, so I mostly didn’t.

I got my slice from the thousands of balls I hit without the proper technique. That’s the part worth sitting with. There was no single mistake to point at, just many small ones, repeated until they became bad habits.

I picked golf up again properly as an adult, tried to fix it myself, and realised that wasn’t going to work. So I paid for lessons. It took about two years, and a lot of them, to relearn what actually happens in a swing that’s predictable and easy on the body. I’d say it was harder than starting from nothing.

The reason is that your body doesn’t just carry the old habit, it defends it. A coach may tell you to relax your grip, but your body won’t let it. It’s holding on for dear life, because your grip and your release are wrong and your hands are compensating for it. You tell your body one thing and it does another. Every fix has a fix underneath it, and you work down through them one at a time.

That’s the whole argument, really. Habits get built into the body, and the ones from the start are the deepest. That’s true of skiing and tennis, and I think it’s especially true of golf, where almost nothing about the swing is something you’d work out naturally on your own.

Building a solid foundation at the start is what matters. Your grip, your setup and posture, and a solid backswing are the keys that set up everything else. None of them needs a coach to get roughly right, and all of them are hard to change once they’ve set.

The difference between now and when I started is that you can see what good looks like before your body decides for you. Rick Shiels’s short video in Swing Basics gives you the one idea I never had. The swing is a circle around your body, powered by the shoulders and the hips, and not the up-and-down arm chop most people start with. That’s the exact thing my body never learned.

Then thirty-six seconds of Butch Harmon in Backswing Basics on the full shoulder turn. Watch it, then stand in front of a mirror at home with a short club and see whether your lead shoulder is actually getting behind the ball or whether your arms are faking it. Mine faked it for years.

The mirror is where I’d do most of this. Build the move at home where you can see it, then go to the range and try to recreate the same steps with a ball, to find out whether it feels right. The range is still where you learn, because your body needs to feel hitting the ball. It just shouldn’t be where you find out what you’re trying to do.

One of my greatest joys of golfing as an adult is sharing that time with my son. I’m thankful that he’s taken such an interest in the sport and wants to join me at the range and on the course. Determined not to make the same mistakes again, I wanted to invest early so he’d build the right technique and habits from the beginning.

There was a balance to strike between keeping it fun and learning it properly. He started joining me when he was seven. For the first few sessions I gave him easy guidance, showing him what the swing looks like and a few simple drills we found, and then let him hit away and have some fun. He’s a natural athlete and picked it up pretty quickly. But rather than just letting him figure it out, we found the right group lessons and instructors so he’d learn properly. Now he has a great swing and excellent sequencing, better than mine. He’ll be a far better golfer than me, and a lot of that has to do with the effort we put in early on.

So invest early, but smartly. Balance the fun, the cost and the discipline, and put the effort where the habits form, which is the start.

If the first month decides how soon you get a round under 90 strokes, the fair question is what to get right first. For both of us it was the grip. Mine was wrong for years and his for one, and it’s where the next story starts.