Aim is critical to success; how do you develop it?

I have given thousands of playing lessons in my career, and not once have amateurs aimed where they said they were trying to. There are hundreds of reasons for this, but by far, a lack of understanding of the design of the golf club and how it is intended to be used is where it all begins.  I didn’t learn this until many years after I started playing the game.  It is just one reason why I developed a passion to learn everything about the game, the golf swing and how to teach golf to others.  

There are hundreds of training aids and YouTube videos.  Books and magazines that all cover aim in the game of golf.  So why do players still have issues with proper aim?  The only easy answer is they swing the golf club in a way that doesn’t match its design.  The ball flight they see then develops into a set of moves they adapt over time to correct for the ball going right or left.  Subconsciously, players begin to alter the setup and aim to try also to affect change.   Most of the time, these adjustments are incorrect, unfortunately. 

Without understanding the intended use of the golf club and how the ball goes left and right with the various inputs we can provide with the hands, a player can’t make the proper corrections.  Instead, most amateurs use other life experiences in sports or just the natural environment to figure out how to fix things.  However, golf is a game of opposites, so players’ normal corrective actions are working against them.  They believe a hand placement change or an aim change will help when, in fact, it forces the player into even bigger manipulations that lead to the error in ball flight.  

Aim is by far the biggest and most overlooked fundamental in the game of golf.  Without proper aim the golf club does not work consistently.  For every player, something gets affected by solid strike, centeredness of contact, angle of attack, face and path combinations or energy transfer inefficiencies.  The game of golf is a challenge of distance and direction.  On day one, I explain the most basic angles of the golf club to players because they have to start understanding the intended use to develop aim.  It can take some players up to 3-5 months to finally crack the code for proper aim.  

In playing lessons, aim is the first thing I check, even with students I have been teaching for 15 years.  Every year at the PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit, the presenters were constantly asked the same question at the end, “If you could give everyone here one key thing to take back to their lesson tees what would it be?”  It was never fancy stuff like Trackman, ground force mapping, or MOCAP movement. No, it was always the same three words: Grip, aim and setup. 

Using alignment aids is a great start, but do you know how the club is designed to be used in relation to proper alignment?  That is the bigger question.  And if so, are you applying the swing motion to match it?