Try skipping a progression of learning with a beginner and go right to passive hands and pure body release, or better yet tell them to simply "hold the club" and NOTHING good will happen.
Tiger Woods or any expert will work hard to take the hands out of their swings to create power and consistency, but only because their hands were trained 30 years ago and needn't feel like they're doing anythig.
High handicap and beginner golfers who read instruction for advanced-expert golfers only are doomed to not improve,and risk getting worse.
Thanks for this.
In the 1970's the was a book called "We learned to Ski" that amazingly broke out of the sports market and spent many weeks in the national UK book lists. It broke down the steps you needed to do to move from snow plough through parallel skiing. The forward was by Jean Claude Killy who at the time was easily the most famous skier in Europe. It was brief and to the point saying something like ‘I am amazed to see what I’ve been doing all along, I learned so young I never had to understand it.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Killy
So Jeff here’s the question
Recommend one book for the 20+ handicapper and one book for the improvers 10-19?
I'll preface this by stating I've spent the last 13 years organizing and building a club, filling a membership, running an operation including F&B from the ground up, and most recently a 3 year in house course reovation, so I've not studied what's happening on the cutting edge of the teaching world recently (not nessessarily a bad thing as there's a lot of baloney out there)
Prior to that for 15 years I spent 12 months a year studying, researching, spending time with great past and present teachers, and implementing what I had learned in golf schools and private lessons.
My point being there may be some recent publication that does a better job than the ones I list.
There are certainly more great teachers now than ever before, but there are more quacks than ever, who put their trust in fancy machines and software rather than experience, study, and an understanding of how different students develop.
19 + John Jacobs "Practical Golf" great preview online if you google it
10-19 John Jacobs "Practical Golf", Jim McLean "8 Step Swing"
0-9 Jim McLean "8 Step swing"
Short game-All levels
Paul Runyan "The Short Way to lower your Scores"
Jeff Warne "Shrink Your Handicap" (read only the chapters on short game with pictures-the rest is publisher induced hooey and filler because they had no interest in a short game book, which I did-fortunately I was paid an advance and snuck it in;)
)