Has this happened to you? You made a swing change, it worked great for a few rounds, and then it stopped. Not only did it stop, all of a sudden you had a new problem you never had before and now you don’t know WHAT to do. I’ll tell you what went wrong.

Whenever you make a swing change, the thing you’re doing differently feels, well, different. It feels new. You work on the new technique to get it right, and since you can’t SEE what you’re doing, you rely on the FEEL of the new move to recreate it. So far, so good.

But after you get the new move down pretty well, it starts to feel natural and not like it did when it was new. Here’s where the trouble comes. You keep trying to make it feel the same way it did when you first tried it. The only way you can do that is to do the same thing, but too much of it. You go too far. You over-correct. By chasing the feeling, which is now obsolete, you create a swing problem you never had.

So here’s what to do. Get a full-length mirror. When you learn your new move, learn it by looking at it in the mirror. That way you can see what you’re trying to do. It will have a new feeling, but DISREGARD the feeling. Trust only what you see.

Work on that new move daily, just for a few minutes, in front of the mirror, until you find that you do the new move right the first time you try it. I would not be surprised if at the time it takes for that to happen, the feeling you had when the move was new will be gone.

There will, unfortunately, be a period when you are adrift between the old way and the new way. Best not to play golf during that period, unless you don’t care what your score is. This is all the more reason to work on this new move every day, to hasten its assimilation.

That’s the key, though. Even though golf is a feel game, learn to rely on what feels right, not what feels new.