[lendaddy]

Originally Posted by McLovin

Well, with an 18 handicap, you likely can't do any of those things very well.

So the upside is there is a lot of areas for improvement!

My educated guess would be, like most 18 handicappers, the lowest hanging fruit for you to lower scores would be chipping and putting. And then iron play, next. Really, at all levels, scoring is done from 30 yards and in.

For sure, when you are practicing, you need to have a coach looking at your swing. I spend a good deal of time on the range, and 99% of people there are just wasting their time, or actually making their game worse. It doesn't help to keep repeating a defective swing over and over again.

But if you can't see your swing, you don't know what you are doing wrong. All those hackers on the range with a swing that looks like "an octopus falling out of a tree" in their mind think their swing looks like Ernie Els.

So to improve an 18 handicap swing, you need someone looking at it, for sure. Coaches are really expensive, but the set of eyes and instantaneous feedback is really the only way for 99.9% of people to get better.

To supplement that, if you have an iphone, there is a great program called iSwing, to record and instantly analyze your swing.

Yep, dead on. First time I saw my swing on film I think I actually threw up.