Antidote Concept — When a Good Swing Feel Turns Bad
You know that feeling.
You find something simple in your swing and suddenly everything works.
You’re striking it pure.
You’re confident.
The game feels easy.
And then…
You run cold.
Not for one hole.
For weeks.
So you search.
And usually, that makes it worse.
The Problem Isn’t the Feel
The feel wasn’t wrong.
It just traveled too far.
Most swing feels live on a spectrum.
If you exaggerate them slightly, they improve your tendency.
If you exaggerate them too much, they turn into poison.
That’s where most golfers go wrong — they abandon the feel instead of understanding what it did.
The Tour Version — Light Antidote
At tour level, this happens in a refined way.
Nicklaus trained his draw even though he played a fade.
Tiger in ’97 talked about feeling a fade — while producing push-draw structures most of the week.
Wyndham Clark alternates fade and draw training depending on tendencies.
At that level, the engine is stable.
So they use path stimulation as a light antidote to keep the motion centered.
They aren’t rebuilding anything.
They’re nudging the spectrum.
The Normal Golfer Version — The Spectrum of Tendencies
For the rest of us, it’s a bit more obvious.
Every golfer has a dominant tendency.
Mine? I drag my hands too much.
If I’ve played well for a while and fall out of it, I don’t search YouTube.
I exaggerate the opposite.
I cast.
Not because casting is “correct” — but because it re-centers my spectrum.
The point isn’t to replace one flaw with another.
It’s to understand where your tendency lives — and apply the correct antidote.
Backtracking Instead of Searching
Most golfers go cold and immediately search for advice.
But advice is often built on a completely different swing style.
So now you’re applying someone else’s medicine to your pattern.
The antidote concept is simpler:
Identify the feel that made you good.
Understand what it did internally.
Then apply the opposite when it travels too far.
You’re not rebuilding the swing.
You’re rebalancing it.
When This Applies — And When It Doesn’t
This concept works best when the engine is already functioning.
If your motion is fundamentally unstable, you need structure first.
But if your swing is solid and you just ran cold?
The answer is usually on the other side of your own tendency.
The Point
Good swing feels don’t suddenly stop working.
They drift.
When you understand that your motion lives on a spectrum, you stop panicking.
You stop searching.
And you start applying the correct antidote.
That’s a much more powerful way to manage your golf.
Check out the Forgotten Master Moves homepage here.
In the FMM Academy I teach differnt patterns and it’s all about fit – has it’s overview page here.