Feel Players vs. Technical Players

• January 7, 2008

I am going to be straightforward early in this post: the title is a bit of a misnomer. Because I am going to explain why there is no separation between feel-based and technical golfers.

Some people say Tiger Woods is a technical player, even though his golf swing was fundamentally sound at age two. Sergio Garcia calls himself a feel player, despite claims by top teaching professionals that technical knowledge is the key to owning your golf swing. So what’s the deal?

Well, let’s ask ourselves: what does “feel” and “technical” mean? Technical is usually the term used to refer to the explanation of what is happening in the golf swing. This may mean swing plane, club head position, velocity, torque, angles, etc. Feel is the term used to refer to players who learn golf without this technical knowledge. But is that actually true?

Let me ask the question in a different way: Is there anything that can be technically explained in the golf swing that cannot be felt by the golfer making the swing? This is the key point that I am making. Technical explanations are merely explaining what the feel player is feeling. Does the feel player need that?

The technical player, however, after coming to a full understanding of what should be happening in the golf swing, still needs to feel it. So the ultimate goal of technical knowledge is feel. If feel can be taught on its own, then it doesn’t seem logical to learn technicalities just for the sake of learning feel.

The argument that to understand what we are feeling is necessary to be able to make improvements on the concept of the golf swing is valid. Certainly, the golf swing of today is not perfect. Custom, professional influence, and corporate marketing have all helped to mask some of the instinctual capacity we have for the game. The thing is, we don’t need words to understand physics. We understand torque and power without needing to know the formulas for determining them. We understand vectors and angles because we live in a world built on them, and if we didn’t, none of us would survive a day.

By making a golf swing, we all know what we feel, and by watching one, we all know what we see. To try to separate golfers into categories based on their use of words to describe it is at best, pointless. The real key is to distinguish between what we see and what we feel, and to better align the two.

Written by John at 4:35 pm. Theory x Send to a Friend: Your name: Your email: Friend name: Friend email: (No Ratings Yet)  Loading ...

Leave a comment