The coach who could not coach himself

My name is Ray Calder, and I teach golf for a living

I have been a teaching professional for 22 years.

I have taught everyone from tour hopefuls to men who took the game up at 60 because their knees gave out on the tennis court.

I am good at it. I can watch someone hit three balls and tell you what is going on.

And then, about four years ago, I stopped being able to do it for myself.

My own ball striking fell apart. Not the swing. The strike. Fat, thin, fat, then one out of the middle that made it worse, because it proved the swing was fine.

I knew more about the golf swing than anyone at my club. And I could not hit a 7 iron twice in a row.

Let me tell you about the day it stopped being funny.

THE MORNING I WANTED TO WALK OFF THE FIRST TEE

It was the Pro-Member. First Saturday in June.

Sixty odd members. Most of them people I teach. Standing behind the first tee with coffee, waiting for the pro to hit.

Nice morning. No wind. A hole I have played maybe two thousand times.

I hit it fat. Not a small one. A proper one, two inches behind the ball, turf everywhere, and the ball went about ninety yards.

Somebody laughed. Somebody else said something kind, which was worse.

I teed another one up. Thinned it.

And I stood there on the tee I have stood on for eleven years, thinking one thought, over and over.

I cannot fix this. And I fix this for a living.

That is the part I could not get past. Not the shot. The fact that I had every piece of information a golfer could possibly have, and none of it made any difference at 90 miles an hour.

I had already tried everything you have tried

And then some, because I had access to all of it for free.

• Lessons with two coaches I genuinely rate
• Launch monitor sessions, hundreds of them, all the numbers you could want
• Impact tape and foot spray, so I could see exactly where I was hitting it
• A towel behind the ball, the head cover drill, the whole catalogue
• Video, slow motion, side by side against tour players
• New irons. Twice.

Every single one of those told me what was going wrong.

Not one of them stopped it happening.

I would leave a session striking it beautifully. Two days later, first tee, back to fat and thin.

Everything I owned measured the mistake. Nothing I owned prevented it.

Around that time one of my oldest members said something to me in the bar that I have not forgotten.

He is 58. Plays three times a week. Been a 19 handicap for eleven years.

He said: "Ray, I think this is just my level."

He was not upset. That was the awful part. He had made peace with it.

And I realised I was about eighteen months away from saying the same sentence about myself.

That is how it ends for most golfers. Not with an injury. Not with a decision.

It ends quietly, with you deciding that this is as good as you get.

I was not ready to say that. So I went back to the beginning.

Four months of impact frames

WHAT I FOUND WHEN I STOPPED LOOKING AT THE SWING

I spent the next four months doing something I had never done in 22 years of teaching.

I stopped looking at the swing.

I went through every impact frame I had. Mine, my students', tour players'. Hundreds of them, lined up.

I was not looking for a good swing. I was looking for the difference between a pure strike and a fat one, on the same swing, by the same golfer, four minutes apart.

There is only one.

It is not the shoulders. It is not the hips. It is not the takeaway, and it is not the follow through.

It is a joint about three feet from the ball, doing a slightly different thing every time.

Let me show you.

The root cause

WHY YOU HIT IT FAT AND THIN (AND WHY IT IS NOT YOUR SWING)

Your golf swing is a circle.

The club goes up, comes down, and passes through the bottom of that circle before going up again.

The bottom of the circle is called your low point. It is the lowest the clubhead gets.

Here is the whole game in one sentence.

If your low point is in front of the ball, you strike it pure. If it is behind the ball, you hit the ground first.

That is fat and thin. That is all it has ever been. Two inches, one way or the other.

So what moves the low point?

Your lead wrist. The one wearing the glove. Left wrist if you play right handed.

Through the swing, that wrist wants to bend backwards. Golfers call it cupping. Your palm rolls back toward your forearm.

And when it cups, your hands fall behind the ball. The bottom of your circle moves backwards with them.

Cup it a lot, and the club hits the turf first. Fat.

Cup it a little, and you catch the ball on the way up. Thin.

Hold it flat, and your hands arrive ahead of the ball, the low point moves in front of it, and you catch ball first, turf second.

Here is the part that makes it click

You do not cup your wrist the same amount every swing.

Nobody does. It moves. A bit more when you are tired. A bit more when there is water left. A bit more on the first tee with people watching.

Your swing is not inconsistent. Your low point is. And your low point is inconsistent because one joint is moving a different amount every single time.

That is why you flush it on the range and chunk it on the course.

Nothing about your swing changed. Your wrist did.

And this is why you cannot just fix it

The downswing, from the top of your swing to the ball, takes about a quarter of a second. Tour players average 0.25. Most amateurs are around 0.3.

Now here is the number that ends the argument. Simply reacting to something you see takes a healthy adult about a quarter of a second too.

Your entire downswing is over in the time it takes you to notice one thing. And noticing is not fixing.

You are not inconsistent because you are a bad golfer. You are inconsistent because you are being asked to control a joint at 90 miles an hour using a thought.

That is not a skill problem. That is a physics problem.

And it is why the last ten things you tried did not work.

The villain

THE FATAL FLAW IN EVERY LESSON, EVERY VIDEO AND EVERY $345 SENSOR

I want to be careful here, because I am a coach and I sell lessons.

But this needs saying.

Almost everything in golf instruction is an information device.

A lesson gives you information. A video gives you information. A launch monitor gives you information. And a $345 wrist sensor straps to your arm, connects to an app, and gives you the most precise information of all: your lead wrist cupped 27 degrees at the top.

Then you swing again. And it cups 27 degrees again.

Information tells you what went wrong. It does not stop it happening.

That is the whole trap, and it works like this:

Round and round. For years.

One golfer put it better than I can:

"Hackmotion does give you a bunch of data, but frankly I don't want to wrestle with the whole calibration process and dealing with an app to work on swing mechanics, not to mention the $350+ price tag."r/whygolf

He is right. And notice what he is actually complaining about.

Not the accuracy. The accuracy is fine. He is complaining that after all of it, the job is still his.

You cannot learn a feel by being told about it. You have to be put in it.

That is when I stopped looking for better information.

THREE THINGS HAVE TO HAPPEN, OR NOTHING CHANGES

Once I understood the problem was physical and not mental, the answer got very narrow very quickly.

To actually fix your low point, three things have to happen at the same time.

1. POSITION. The wrist has to be physically held flat. Not described, not measured, not shown to you on a screen. Held.
2. FULL SPEED REPETITION. It has to happen on your normal swing. Full shots, full speed. A drill you do at half pace teaches your body a half pace feel, which is why the drill never survives the first tee.
3. HANDOVER. And this is the one everybody misses. It has to stop being needed. If the fix only works while you are wearing it, you have not fixed anything. You have bought a crutch.

Miss any one of those and you are back where you started.

Lessons fail on point one. They describe the position, they cannot hold it.

Sensors fail on point one. They measure the position, they cannot hold it.

Drills fail on point two. Half speed feel, full speed swing.

And a lot of golf gadgets fail on point three. They do the work for you forever, so your hands never learn to do it themselves.

You need something that holds the position, at full speed, and then gets out of the way.

The mechanism

THE THING THAT ACTUALLY DOES ALL THREE

I want to be honest about this part, because it is where most stories like this go silly.

I did not invent anything. I am a golf coach, not an engineer.

I found it.

It is a rigid plate on an adjustable strap. It sits over the back of your glove, across the lead wrist, and it physically will not let that wrist bend backwards while you swing.

They call it the Flat Wrist Lock. That is it. That is the entire mechanism.

Think of it like a splint for a feel you have never had.

Your body has never once been in the correct impact position. Not properly. So it has no memory of it, and no way to hunt for it, because you cannot search for something you have never felt.

The plate puts you in it. On your first swing. At full speed.

And here is the bit that matters most, the bit that is different from every gadget you have been sold:

It is designed so that you stop needing it.

The plate is not the fix. The plate is how your hands learn what the fix feels like. Once they know, they can find it without the plate on.

A rigid brace makes you dependent. This does the opposite. Its whole job is to make itself redundant.

That is why nearly every review of it uses the same word.

Feel.

WHAT HAPPENED THE FIRST TIME I USED IT

I took it to my own range on a Tuesday afternoon. Empty bay, nobody watching, 7 iron.

Strapped it over my glove. Took about ten seconds.

First swing felt strange. Not uncomfortable, just unfamiliar, like the wrist was somewhere it had never been.

Second swing, I caught it. Properly caught it. Ball first, turf second, that dull thud you get when it comes off the middle.

Third one the same. Then the fourth.

By about the tenth ball I had stopped being pleased and started being annoyed.

Twenty two years. Two coaches. Hundreds of launch monitor sessions. New irons, twice.

And the thing that did it was a plate that costs less than a sleeve of decent golf balls.

I hit a full bucket. Then I took it off and hit ten more.

Seven of the ten came off the middle. Not because I was thinking about my wrist. Because my hands finally knew where they were supposed to be.

That is the difference between being told and being shown.

The product

THIS IS THE TRULINK WRIST TRAINER

It is a rigid support plate on an adjustable strap, worn over your glove on your lead wrist.

Here is exactly how it maps onto the three things that have to happen.

Position. The plate sits across the back of the wrist and physically blocks it from bending backwards. Your hands stay ahead of the ball. Your low point moves in front of it.

Full speed repetition. You wear it and make your normal swing. Full shots, full speed, driver down to wedge. No half swings, no special drill, nothing to remember.

Handover. Ten minutes before you play, or a bucket at the range. Then take it off. Your hands keep the feel because they have now had it.

And what it does not have is the point.

No batteries. No app. No pairing. No calibration routine before you are allowed to hit a ball. No phone propped against your bag. Nothing to charge, nothing to break, nothing to interpret.

A $345 sensor tells you your wrist cupped.

This one does not let it.

HERE IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO

1. Strap it on, ten seconds. Over your glove, on your lead wrist. Adjustable strap, so you set it once and it stays.
2. Hit balls, your normal swing. Full shots, full speed. You will feel your hands arriving ahead of the ball, probably for the first time.
3. Take it off and hit ten more. This is the step people skip and it is the important one. The plate showed your hands the position. Now let them find it on their own.

What most golfers report

Session 1: cleaner contact almost immediately, because the plate is doing the holding.

Weeks 1 to 2: the feel starts turning up without the plate on.

Weeks 3 to 4: fewer of the really bad ones. The fat shot stops being your miss.

Ongoing: ten minutes before a round, then it goes back in the bag.

This is not a swing change. You are not learning anything new.

You are just stopping one joint from moving, so the bottom of your swing arrives in the same place every time.

THE TWO VERSIONS OF YOUR NEXT SEASON

Version one: you keep going. Range swing on the range, first tee swing on the first tee. Another set of lessons that work for a fortnight. Another handicap year that finishes where it started. And at some point, in a bar somewhere, you say the sentence my member said to me. This is just my level.

Version two: your hands find out what impact is supposed to feel like. Ball first, turf second, on a swing you already own. The fat shot stops being your miss. You stand on the first tee expecting to hit it, not hoping to.

The swing is not the difference between those two.

Two inches is.

HERE IS WHAT TO DO NOW

1. Click the button below.
2. Choose left or right handed. It goes on your lead wrist. Right handed golfers wear it on the left. Left handed golfers wear it on the right.
3. Check the sizing on the product page before you order. It sits over a golf glove on an adjustable strap. If you have larger hands or a thicker wrist, take ten seconds to check first.
4. Enter your details.
5. Put it on before your next range session.
6. Hit ten balls with it. Then take it off and hit ten more.

Do not close this page telling yourself you will order later.

Later is another bucket teaching your hands the wrong position.

Later is another round where the good swings and the bad swings are the same swing.

You have already got the swing. You just need the bottom of it in the same place twice.