Until very recently I was very sure it was important never to practise your mistakes. After all, you don’t want to ingrain bad habits, right? But I think this might have blinded me to something potentially useful.

If, when you’re typing, you’re forever accidentally typing ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’, a possible cure is to try forcing yourself to type ‘teh’ a few times, at least. It’s actually quite hard to do, and you kind of have to try. When you then revert to typing normally, you tend to find that incidences of ‘teh’ fall off.

Strangely, this seems quite a good way of forgetting.

I know you’ve talked about recognising what what’s going on with some of your errors, but I don’t remember whether you’ve mentioned actually trying to reproduce them. I know some people are afraid to try this sort of thing, for fear that it will become habit, but I think that’s a mistake. As you know well enough, making deliberate long-term changes to your basic swing can be very difficult indeed.

If you’re hitting a mixture of hooks and blocks, how about setting up on the range, aligning yourself straight at a normal target, and then picking a target around the place that your blocks tend to go? Try to produce ten ‘good’ blocks at that target. Despite the number of balls that fly out there when you don’t want them to, it might prove rather harder to do when you really try. Then, when you revert to just trying to hit up the middle, at your ‘proper’ target, you might just remember how easy it is.

If you have trackman set up, it might give you an interesting insight at the end of the session, but I’d be inclined to focus what you see and feel whilst you’re actually on the range. You could also factor in some deliberate hooks, but you’d have to be clear about when you’re going to hit at which target, and when it might be best to revert to your proper target. It might be better to keep things simple.

Still rootin for you, Dan. If you’ve tried something like this before, or try in the coming weeks, I’d be very interested to know.

Keep it up.

Dave

(1) Hands even with the back of the ball at impact for the driver, rather than hands in front of the ball at impact as for iron and for fairway wood shots. This gives the driver clubhead a chance to flatten out on the bottom part of the swing arc after traveling on the decending part of the swing arc.

(2) Visulize guide lines to swing the clubhead on path. Nicklaus in his video Golf My Way shows visulizing the drawing of a line from the ball to the ball landing point way down the fairway. He then select a point a few feet just in front of the ball along the visulized line as a target to swing the clubhead to and over. Similar to Nelson saying to swing the clubhead not only just to the ball, but swing the clubhead all the way to a precise target point far down the fairway. Names printed on balls can be set up on the tee as guide lines for swing path on impact, as well as for clubface angle at impact.