Five things to do the week before your first golf lesson

The most expensive hour in golf is a first lesson spent on things you could have learnt at home the night before. I’m Ed, one of the founders of Grady, and I’ve paid for that hour more than once. A coach shows you how to hold the club, how to stand, which club to start with, and then hands you a bucket of balls. All of it is useful. None of it needed a professional in the room.

I’m not a coach, and I think a first lesson goes differently for everyone. But if I were booking one this week, these are the five things I’d do first, so the hour goes on the part only a coach can do, which is look at your swing and tell you what they see.

You don’t need fourteen clubs for a lesson. The first few lessons, and realistically a lot of them, are spent on the 7-iron. Mine were. My instructor wouldn’t let me hit the driver until I’d fixed my iron. What matters more than how many clubs you bring is whether the ones you bring fit you, rather than whoever you borrowed the set from. A 5-iron, a 7-iron, a pitching wedge and a putter is the whole list. That’s close to what I started with, and it’s what What I Wish I Knew tells you to start with too.

This is the one I’d put the most time into, because it’s the thing a coach will fix first and the thing you can get roughly right on your own. Meandmygolf build the grip in four steps in Grip Essentials. Club at eye level, lead hand on first, the club running through the fingers rather than the palm, then look down and count the knuckles. Two or three showing. Do it every evening for the week. It will feel strange, and it will drift back to whatever your hands find comfortable, which is why you check it again the next day.

Arrive with a grip that’s close and the coach spends the hour on your swing. Without one, they spend it on your hands, which is the video again, at an hourly rate.

Posture is the other thing you can learn from a mirror. The shortest video in the Lab is a Titleist coach on posture, two and a half minutes, made to be done at home. Hinge from the hips rather than the knees, let the arms hang, a little flex in the knees, weight even between the feet. Once you’ve seen it, you can check it in any window you walk past.

Some people want the instruction. Weight onto the right side, hips this way, extend the front leg. A friend of mine was like that, and it just worked for him. I’m not, and telling me the same way gets me nowhere. What lands for me is a picture to copy or a feel to chase. The Lab sorts every lesson into those two ways, step by step and by feel, and it’s worth knowing which one is yours before you meet a coach. Finding the right coach means finding someone who teaches the same way you learn. The one who was right for my friend would have wasted my money.

Right at the start, a lesson isn’t worth much because you can’t hit the ball yet, and your body has to discover on its own how to make contact with a long club and a small ball. So go to a range before the lesson, not after. Take the 7-iron or the wedge, not the driver, and make half swings until you’re hitting the ground on purpose and the ball is going somewhere. It won’t be pretty. It doesn’t need to be. What it gives the coach is a swing to look at, and what it gives you is a feel for what they’re talking about when they start to fix it.

Do those five and the lesson changes shape. Instead of an hour of instruction you’ve already had, you get the thing you can’t do for yourself. Someone watching a swing that’s too fast to feel from the inside, telling you what they see, and handing you one drill to take home. That’s the hour worth paying for. The week before is how you make sure it’s the hour you get.

If the question is where, Where to Play lists the ranges and clubs by city. And what happens after the lesson, in the hours nobody budgets for, is the next story.