Tiger Woods’ Former Instructor Says Golf Is a Throwing Sport. So Why Are We Still Teaching Body Positions?

I nearly fell off my chair.

Sean Foley, one of golf’s most recognizable teachers and a former instructor of Tiger Woods, has publicly described golf as predominantly a throwing sport.

Yes. Throwing.

Not a complicated sequence of body positions.

Not a collection of hip rotations, shoulder turns and wrist angles.

Throwing.

For someone who’s spent the best part of 20 years challenging conventional golf instruction, this caught my attention.

Because I agree with him.

I believe the golf swing is fundamentally a two-handed, throwing-like action. We hold a club, rather than a ball, but the underlying intention can be remarkably similar.

We want to send something toward a target.

And the human movement system is extraordinarily good at organizing itself around that kind of objective.

So when I heard Foley describing golf as a throwing sport, I thought:

Bloody hell. He’s got it.

But then I looked at what he actually teaches.

And that’s where things got interesting.

He recognized the throw. Then came the body parts.

In a 2024 Golf Digest article about tour professional Byeong Hun An, Foley explained that the golfer’s altered arm position gave him more room to throw the club effectively.

So far, so good.

But the same account discusses changes to arm position, wrist hinge and body rotation.

And this is hardly unusual for Foley.

In another article, Swing Like a Powerlifter, he described how golfers should initiate the downswing with the lower body, push into the ground and rotate the pelvis.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with the body doing those things.

None.

The legs matter. The hips matter. The torso matters. Ground forces matter.

They all contribute to a powerful golf swing.

But here’s my question: Why do we have to consciously manage them?

If golf is a throwing sport, why don’t we start by coaching the throw?

Why do we immediately return to telling golfers where to put their body parts?

Think about throwing a ball

Imagine I hand you a tennis ball.

There’s a target 30 yards away.

I ask you to throw the ball as far and as accurately as possible.

What happens?

You organize yourself.

Your feet find a position. Your body prepares. Your arm moves. Your torso rotates. Your weight shifts.

Perhaps you take a step.

Perhaps you don’t.

The exact movement will depend on your experience, strength, mobility and the demands of the task.

But you’re not consciously calculating all those movements.

You’re throwing the bloody ball.

And if I ask you to throw it harder, your movement might change again.

You don’t necessarily need an instruction about your pelvis.

You need a task worth solving.

Description is not instruction

This is where I believe golf instruction has gone off the rails.

Modern technology lets us examine almost every aspect of a golf swing.

We can measure forces beneath the feet, record rotational velocities and analyze movements frame by frame.

It’s fascinating information.

But we have to be careful.

Because there’s a huge difference between describing what the body does and establishing what the golfer needs to consciously do.

Suppose we analyze an elite thrower and discover that their pelvis rotates at a particular speed.

Does that mean we should tell everyone to rotate their pelvis at that speed?

Of course not.

Perhaps the movement emerged because the athlete was trying to throw something powerfully and accurately.

Perhaps the body found that solution through years of experience.

The movement is real.

The measurement is real.

But the conscious instruction doesn’t automatically follow.

We’ve confused the mechanics of movement with the process of learning it.

And golfers may be paying a significant price for that confusion.

What happens when you stop managing the body?

This is the question I’ve been exploring through my coaching and my own golf.

What happens when the golfer stops trying to manufacture a collection of positions?

What happens when they simply commit to throwing the club toward the ball and target?

Not delicately steering it.

Not rehearsing six technical thoughts.

Actually swinging the thing.

For many golfers, something quite remarkable can happen.

They move more freely.

They stop trying to control every little detail.

Their body begins to organize around the task.

And speed becomes their friend.

I’ve said for years that speed can help organize a movement. When you commit to a fast action, you don’t have much opportunity to consciously micromanage it.

That doesn’t mean every fast swing is efficient.

But it gives the movement system a meaningful problem to solve.

And perhaps that’s a much better starting point than trying to build a golf swing one body part at a time.

I think Foley is asking the wrong follow-up question

To be fair, Foley has helped some exceptional golfers, and his approach clearly includes more than mechanical instruction.

I’m not pretending to know everything he says to a player on the practice tee.

Nor am I suggesting that throwing intention is the only way to coach golf.

But his published comments reveal an interesting tension.

He recognizes the throw.

Then much of the explanation returns to organizing the body.

I want to ask a different question.

If golf is predominantly a throwing sport, why not investigate how much of the movement a golfer can organize simply by learning to throw the club effectively?

What happens if we coach the action rather than prescribe the positions?

What happens if we give the golfer an objective, let them experiment, observe the results and help them adapt?

What happens if we stop assuming every less-than-perfect shot needs a mechanical diagnosis?

I believe those questions take us somewhere much more interesting.

The body isn’t the enemy

I want to be clear about this.

I’m not saying the body is irrelevant.

I’m not arguing that the legs do nothing or that powerful golfers generate speed with their hands alone.

That’s not my position.

The whole body participates in a golf swing.

But participating in a movement and consciously controlling that movement are two completely different things.

And that’s the distinction I wish more golf teachers would explore.

Sean Foley has recognized the throwing connection.

Good.

Now I’d love to see what happens if we follow that observation all the way through to the way we coach golfers.

Because recognizing the throw is one thing.

Trusting the golfer to learn to throw is another.

And I suspect that’s where the real opportunity lies.