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For golf nerds, last month’s PGA Show leads to a specific type of sensory overload. To go with acres of new clubs and techy innovations, there are countless training aids professing to solve every known golf problem, plus a bunch you didn’t even know about.

The surplus of options—from helping you shallow the club; to increasing your swing speed; to lining up putts accurately and then starting them on line—speaks to the extent golfers have come to rely on these products to get better. And yet, if so many different new ideas pop up each year, it’s worth asking how much any actually help.

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The answer might not lie in the training aids, but in how we use them. As David Orr, a Golf Digest top 50 teacher at Pine Needles Lodge & G.C. explained in a PGA Open Forum Tuesday night of Show week, there is nothing wrong with a training aid that can help ingrain a new feel or movement—provided the golfer can replicate the move when it’s gone.

“I am a minimalist when it comes to training aids,” Orr said. “I want to teach the player what it looks like and feels like, and to use feedback, recognition and recall.”

Orr’s perspective relates to a topic I’ve broached about the disconnect between how we practice and how we play. It sounds obvious to say we need an acquired skill to hold up on the golf course. But athletes tend to overestimate their ability to adapt to competition. That challenge deepens when elements from practice prove to be more of a crutch than they realize.

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For example, at home I use a contraption to try to ingrain a shallower path, and it’s been generally effective in countering my over-the-top tendencies. But on the golf course, especially under pressure, old habits die hard. To follow Orr’s advice would be to use the training aid just enough to create the specific feel I’m looking for, then spend sufficient time forcing myself to do it when it’s gone. If I can only manage the first part, then I don’t have much chance of winning anything beyond my side yard.

My colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen has even invented his own U-shaped device that helps him have a square clubface at setup, and then at impact. Luke says it helps create a visual of what those positions should be, but he’s able to recognize the wrong positions when the device is gone. To Orr, this is an important distinction.

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“Personally, I tried to get the student to acquire a visualization, feel, and or sensation from the training aid and remove it,” Orr said.

In other words, a training aid can be a step in the direction of the swing you want. But finding that swing when you need it really depends on the bread crumbs you leave behind.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com