"Balance Daniel son, must learn the balance!" For those of you old enough to remember the movie "The Karate Kid" you remember those infamous words of Mr. Miagi teaching his student the importance of balance. I feel like Mr. Miagi on the lesson tee sometimes as I stress balance to all my students. Balance is a fundamental you will find in all great golf swings. The swings may look different, but they all seem to finish like they are posing for the camera.

Your vestibular system and your nervous system equip you with tools for balance. Solid swing fundamentals also lead to better balance. Try this next time you go to the driving range. Don't make a backswing and simply swing from your set up into a perfect, balanced finish position. Hold it there for ten seconds to allow your brain to understand the feeling of a balanced finish. Now set up and try to swing into that finish. It's amazing how your swing plane and body motion starts to come around. Often times, as players, we get caught up in the minutia of the different parts of the swing. There is not enough time during the swing to think about all those details! Make it your goal to finish in balance and a lot of the swing faults will start to melt away.

Do you know what a old golfer once told me , slowing down your swing is not the solution to your balance problem. Slowing down may help your balance but now you are hitting it shorter.
 I have taught golf for 36 years and I have never had a student who wants to hit it shorter. Lets fix your golf swing and then speed it up! The average PGA Tour Player swings his driver at 112 mph. Have you noticed, they all pose at the finish while in perfect balance. Mr. Miagi would be proud!

I can always tell when a student has practiced well between lessons. The improvement is noticeable and that does not happen by chance. Golfers call mistakes in their golf swings "bad habits." These bad habits are just learned behaviors that have been ingrained through repetition. For better or for worse, the frequency of these behaviors encodes neural pathways forming habits.

Unfortunately, you cannot change a habit, but you can build a new one. Just think about how you tie your shoes. You have learned this behavior and although you may learn a better way to tie your shoes, your brain will not forget the old way. The key is how do we make the desired motion the dominant habit.

Practicing the new motion will eventually make it the dominant habit. Just make sure you are practicing correctly because you don't want to ingrain the wrong habit. There is a fabulous book entitled The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle that talks about "deep practice". Deep practice involves going slowly, understanding mistakes and overcoming them on your path to building expertise. It helps to have an instructor give you feedback as you perform the new motion in order to understand what the mistake is and how to make the proper adjustment.

So in the meantime, what can we do yo make the new motion appear on the golf course? Students often are frustrated because they can't take the swing they performed in the lesson or practice tee onto the golf course. This is because the old dominant habit takes over. The only way to get the new habit to appear is to rehearse the motion where you can see and feel what you are trying to do, and then hit the ball within a few seconds. In other words, as my mentor Jim Hardy says, "recency will trump frequency" if you hit the ball within 30 seconds of the rehearsal. It is also crucial that no extraneous thoughts enter your mind between the rehearsal and the execution of the shot. There are many distractions on the golf course and if your brain wanders, you will revert to the dominant habit.