THE VALUE OF TRAINING AIDS

With some students, words, demonstrations, and even drills aren’t enough. In these cases, the use of training aids can provide the teaching professional with an additional option to help improve a student’s understanding. Training aids are just as the name implies: An aid to assist in teaching and to assist the student in learning. The myriads of training devices available seemingly address every aspect of the golf game. These aids come in all types, from inexpensive and homemade (such as a cut-down broom, a towel under the arms) to expensive and elaborate. In the minds of some, teaching devices fall in to the category of gimmicky, running from questionable to worthless. True, there are some bad teaching aids, which tend to drag the good ones down. In using a training aid, the student should have enough repetitions until they truly feel what the aid is teaching them. At this point, the student can then make some practice swings and hit some balls without the aid.  Your job as the teaching professional is to make sure that the student is incorporating what they learned from the training device. The most effective training aids have proven to be the ones where the student actually gets to swing a club and hit shots. Training aids that do not involve a student in swinging a club have proven to be less effective, but nevertheless can still provide some merit. Training aids that do too much of the work for the student do not teach the students as effectively as training aids which require the student to do his/her fair share of the work.