How Many Lessons Do I Need Before I See Improvement?

This is a question I hear all the time. The short answer is: “Only one, but more than you think.” More on why that is shortly, but first let’s talk about that word “improvement.” 

Improvement is an interesting word because it can mean different things to different people. Students will say “improvement” when “end result” is what is being described or implied. Somewhere in this idea of improvement and results there is another word, “expectation,” that adds a further layer that we need to understand. 

If a student comes to me and says: “I need to improve. I can’t seem to make solid contact every time. I'm so inconsistent.” That student has now communicated to me their goal, their result. In their mind, “improvement” equals solid contact on every shot. 

When I hear that I now have my instructions. I know what they want. They want a result. I want them to get the result and so I get to work.

The first thing I do is to assess their movement so that I can identify why they currently do not have solid contact. This assessment is always the first thing I do and it involves watching their swing and using 3D motion measurement tools to help identify their movement errors. I call my teaching approach Movement Matters because how a player moves is how their golf club moves, and how the club moves is how the ball moves. 

During that assessment I identify their movement errors. Common movement errors that cause poor contact include: 

These four movement errors do not exist in isolation, meaning that all four of these movement errors are common in every student I work with. Their sway movement is bad, their turn movement is out of sequence, they try to keep their head down and so their bend movements are compromised, and their elbows and wrists have to try and compensate for all of these errors. 

My job is to spot these errors, identify the movement priority to correct the errors, and to create a personal plan for that player’s improvement. Now, if “improvement” equals “outcome,” then this student will need 15-20 hours of instruction and coaching at minimum to see that “improvement.” That often comes as a surprise. 

Using the same student scenario above, the movement priority I would typically choose to fix is the sway movement. Bad sways cause all sorts of problems. 

During that first lesson I would give information about how to fix sway movement. I would demonstrate how to fix it. I would have the student start to correct their movement. And I would document those efforts so that the student has a very clear “before and after” that clearly shows that they are, in that particular movement priority, improving. 

And that movement improvement happens in one lesson. 

I am not a neurologist or some kind of brain expert, but I do know that any action we repeat becomes a pathway in our brains so that we can better repeat that action. The more we repeat, the “stronger” that pathway gets. Repeat it a lot, and that pathway can become like a highway and we can make the action without having to consciously think about every movement associated with the action. 

When a student comes to me, they already have pathways in their brains for how they move. If those pathways are contrary to movements that form good golf shots, then they have to reprogram those pathways or learn new ones. 

That change cannot be accomplished in one lesson. We can start to see progress and improvement in one lesson. But the result or outcome will take practice, repetition, and time. Time doing work on their own, and time doing work with me. 

And that brings us back to: “How many lessons do I need before I see improvement?”  

“Only one, but more than you think.”