The 18M Golf Programme created By Derek Laird Macdonald
The Practise Dichotomy
A good swing involves coordinating around 18 independent yet simultaneous movements (hence the 18M) to consistently hit a golf ball straight.
To achieve this, you need to teach your body the correct positions, swing path, and hand-eye coordination.
This is accomplished through repetitive practice, which takes time to commit to muscle memory.
The challenge is that most people don’t have the time for the necessary practice.
Even when they do practice, they often don’t know what specifically to work on.
Simply swinging without a clear goal does not help develop good muscle memory.
In fact, it can easily achieve the opposite and make their swing worse.
The Golf Lesson Dichotomy
During a golf lesson, learners tend to focus on hitting the ball, without really considering their swing mechanics.
Too much emphasis is put on just hitting as apposed to understanding.
They hit shot after shot and ask the professional to explain its flight path, only to repeat the same question without truly understanding the reason.
This behaviour seems to stem from a belief that hitting more balls provides greater value in the lesson.
However, this approach detracts from the fundamental learning process.
By concentrating more on the swing mechanics and fundamentals, rather than hitting ball after ball, learners will develop a good swing quicker.
Complex Movements
One of the most complex movement patterns we learn is how to walk and run.
This is achieved through a series of baby steps, where we essentially learn in incremental stages , each one gradually increasing our stride length building on the previous one.
Golf also involves a series of complex movements.
Traditional lessons with a golf professional often don’t align with our natural learning process.
Instead of starting with baby steps in stages, many teach the entire swing all at once, akin to teaching someone to run before they learn to walk.
Since it doesn’t mimic our natural learning processes, learning and developing a new swing can be significantly harder to comprehend and more time-consuming.
What’s wrong with traditional lesson with a PGA professional?
Fundamentally nothing. The only real way to get better is with a lesson from a PGA professional.
However, for beginners or high handicappers, a lesson can be unproductive due to their comparative lack of swing mechanics and fundamentals.
learning a swing takes lots of lessons, with many people giving up because they find it so difficult or make little progress.
There can be a huge difference in the quality of teaching between professionals, which affects how quickly you develop a good golf swing and indeed if you persist with lessons and the game.
The biggest problem is either the lack of focused practise at the practise ground, or in most cases, the lack of any practise between lessons.
You cannot develop a swing unless you practise. If you don’t have a swing, then how do you practise effectively.
If you are having weekly lessons the information you have learnt will degrade, especially if you are not practising between lessons.
The 18M Programme
Perfect for beginners as well as single handicap golfers., as well as golfers with little time to practise.
The first stage focuses on teaching your body how to get into the correct positions and how to develop the correct movement patterns.
You start by learning isolated leg movements, then isolated shoulder as well as the isolated arm movements.
The first stage is completed by combining them together.
No club is used as the focus in purely on the position and movement patterns.
The second stage focuses on developing a swing. The swing length is gradually lengthened in incremental stages.
It goes from takeaway, to mid point, to three quarter, all the way to full.
The focus is on learning and feeling the correct swing path, understanding and controlling the golf clubs weight and centrifugal forces as well as learning the correct arm and body sequences.
The third stage focuses
How is the 18M golf programme different to other programmes
Most of it is done at home.
Learn the correct movements and learn the correct swing path first, before you hit a golf ball.
Body parts trained individually to make them easier to learn and help feel the right position and movement patterns
Correct feel taught from the start, as apposed to hoping to find it over time.
Swing taught in stages to make it easier to learn., replicating the natural way we learnt to walk and run.
Swing taught in stages with each one building on the previous one, so only one thing to think about and learn at a time.
Swing taught in an upright position as well as normally hinged, as it feels more natural and thus more able to feel and see the correct swing path.
Developing and learning muscle memory is the primary focus. This is achieved through little and often practise that can be done anytime any where.