improvement, swing changes

The Importance of a Golf Lesson

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There are lots of right things to do in a golf swing. If your swing isn’t working, you’re missing a few. Or maybe just one that would fix everything. So you go looking for fixes on YouTube or in books.

The problem is that you really don’t know what it is that will fix your swing. Trying out this or that can easily lead you in the wrong direction, or distract your attention away from what you need to change to get to the promised land.

That is why you should get a lesson. The pro can see right away what it is you need to change, and thereby save you from going down one dead end after another.

Winter is a good time to get that lesson. You can spend a few months working on it so that when the season opens in the spring, you will be ready.

putting

Two Putting tips

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1. Practice two-foot putts. Practice hitting two-foot putts so they roll into the hole dead center. Yes, you’ll get good at two-foot putts, but you’ll get good at six-foot putts and eight-foot putts, too.

A short putt that tumbles in from the side will miss from a longer distance, but a stroke that sends short ones in dead center will send the ball in from longer distances as well. That’s the point of this kind of practice.

I suggest two feet because that is a distance you should be successful at EVERY TIME. If it isn’t, move closer until you get it right every time, and then you can move back just a bit.

2. You’ve heard that it is a good idea to find a spot on the green on the starting line a few inches in front of your ball, and to roll the ball over that spot.

But the putter, which creates the rolling, needs to be travelling along this line, too. That means the imaginary line you visualize in front of the ball needs extend behind the ball, as well.

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The Sole of the Club

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A lot of attention gets paid to controlling the clubface during the swing so it returns to the ball as square as it was at address. I’m all in favor of that.

Just as important is the sole of the club. Where it strikes the ground is uber important.

The one thing that makes golf hard is the ground. You can hit a tennis ball an inch or two off center of the racquet and still get a good shot.

If the sole of the golf club is that high (whiff) or too low (chunk), you’re screwed. Even a quarter of an inch matters, and that is with a club travelling, say, 80 mph.

What this gets to is the depth of the swing—where the bottom of the swing is. You have to get that right and fortunately it is really easy to do. At least I think it is.

Here’s how. Just keep the sole in mind when you swing the club forward. Learn to feel where the sole is and visualize the sole sliding underneath the ball, which directs your subconscious mind to direct your body to do just that.

I don’t mean the leading edge. I mean the entire sole.

When you chip, you take a few practice swings and just brush the grass with the sole of the club, right? Then you step up to the ball and make the same stroke, brushing the grass underneath the ball (at least I hope you do). That’s the expression I’m suggesting.

Joyce Wethered, one of the greatest female golfers in history, explained it this way in her book, Golfing Memories and Methods: “It is as well to visualize the iron club, not as a spade with which to dig into the ground…nor, on the other hand as a kind of scoop with which to lift the ball into the air. Rather the clubhead should be thought of as a knife, a cutting instrument with which to sever the ball from the ground, dividing the two clearly apart at their point of contact.”

When you do this, the club will hit the ball cleanly at just the right height on its clubface—the height that the clubface was designed for.

You will also find that striking the ball this way encourages you swing the club through the ball (good) instead of hitting at the ball (bad).

playing the game

Golf is a Game You Play

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Most of the stuff on this blog, and almost everything you see on YouTube, is about one thing: how to hit the golf ball. And you go to the practice range to practicing hitting the golf ball. You need to do that. It’s important.

But golf is not about the shots you hit. You can hit good shots and still not be able to score. Golf is a game you play, and you have to know how to play the game to shoot low scores.

In his book, The Elements of Scoring, Raymond Floyd says “if somehow I was given your physical (golf) game and we had a match I would beat you 99 times out of 100 because I know how to play the game better than you do.”

I read a interview with from Miller Barber in which he mentioned leaning when he got on the tour. He said he got lots of help on how to manage his game, shot selection, course management. “I thought I knew how to play, but I didn’t.”

I’m not going to say that if you learn how to play the game you could save X number of shots because I don’t know what that number would be. But I know you would save more than you think you would.

There’s a guy on YouTube called the Golf Sidekick. He’s South African and somehow he’s playing golf in Southeast Asia and if you haven’t seen his videos, you should, because how to play the game is all that they’re about. He gives you hardly any instruction on how to hit shots. It’s all about how to play the game.

How to play the game is a huge subject and I’m not going to go into that here. I’ll give you two teasers.

I have posts here and here on the number one game playing flaw of a recreational golfers. You never use enough club to get to the green. You always think you can hit it farther than you actually end up doing, and those posts will explain that.

The other major part of knowing how to play the game is knowing how to play from different lies. The first thing you do assess your lie to determine what kind of a shot you need to/can hit. Distance is probably the last thing you want to check.

Don’t be content with being a golfer. Move up to being a player.

golf swing

How to Shallow Your Forward Swing

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When you swing the club through the ball, you want the club to be approaching on a low trajectory. This is called shallowing out the swing path. It is something you should want to do.

You can go to YouTube and watch videos that take ten minutes of your life to explain something they could have said in one, but fortunately The Recreational Golfer comes to your rescue.

In Byron Nelson’s marvelous instruction book, Shape Your Swing the Modern Way, there is a little section that gets right to this point, so I’ll quote it in full:

“I can’t emphasize too much the fact that your lower body must lead the downswing while your head remains relatively still. You must create the sensation of swinging past your chin, of keeping your head back while your hips and legs swing past it toward the target. The best way I can describe the feeling is that you swing completely out from under your head. Your body moves clear past the point of your chin and your arms swing into the follow-through before your head moves.” [Nelson’s emphasis.]

Watch this video of In Gee Chun’s swing to see what Nelson means. Go to 1:50 and play the video. Put a toothpick or something very thin on your screen so it bisects her body at address from top to bottom in two equal halves.

Watch that through impact, her head stays in the same place, but her hips and torso are well ahead of the line you set up.

She is swinging completely out from under her head. She has shallowed out the swing path.

golf swing

Width in the Backswing

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Width in the backswing is important. Real important. All that means is preserving the space between your hands and your chest that you have at address when you swing the club back.

There are lots of videos on YouTube that say why this is a good thing. I have no disagreement.

What I do disagree with is how they tell you to get it. My way works just as well and is much easier to do.

Take the club back by pushing your right hand straight back with your left hand. Lefties, push your left hand with your right. A gentle push, not a muscular one.

That, combined with your turn, gets the club up there where you want it to be, and at the width that everyone tells you that you need to have.

This move also sets up the speed of your swing, makes the flow forward to the ball almost happen by itself, and best of all for many of us, creates a swing that is easy on your lower back (at least it is for me, and my lower back talks to me right away if my golf swing is abusing it).

Practice this a bit until you get it to work. I promise you that you will hit the ball better.

golf swing

Clubhead Speed – 2

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Several months ago I published a post on gaining your maximum distance by swinging with relaxed arms. Let me more specific here about what that means.

In 1969, a British engineer named David Williams published a book titled The Science of the Golf Swing. In this book, Williams analyzed a stroboscopic sequence photograph of Bobby Jones’s downswing.

Among other things, Williams determined that the speed of Jones’s hands in the first part of the downswing, from the top of the backswing to hip-height, was 34 feet per second, and in that interval the clubhead moves from nothing to 50 feet per second.

From there to impact, Williams found that the hands continue to travel at 34 feet per second. They do not gain any speed. The clubhead, however, increases its speed to 165 feet per second, or 113 miles per hour. This change is not all due to the arm swing. The effect of a hinge and of centrifugal force count, too.

But the point here is that, since the acceleration due to gravity of a falling object is 32 feet per second, all you need to do is drop your arms from the top as a gravity move. You don’t need to add force of your own.

Relaxation? The more relaxed your arms are, the easier it will be for your hands to drop by the force of gravity alone.

None of this means that you let your arms go limp; that’s the wrong kind of relaxation. Your arms maintain the shape of the swing while letting them be pulled downward by an outside force. Once you get it, you might be amazed at how fast the clubhead is swinging through impact with so little effort on your part.

playing the game

Leave Your Rangefinder at Home

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Yesterday I went out to play nine holes and found when I got to the course that I had left my rangefinder at home. And this is a course that doesn’t have yardages on the sprinkler heads.

So after a few holes of getting my eye for distance adjusted, I found that I ended up taking more club than usual, thus hitting more greens instead of being short, and was passing the flag.

When you have a rangefinder, you try to match the yardage to the distances you hit your irons on paper, but that only works if the shot you actually hit goes that far. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Try it sometime. Leave your rangefinder at home and pick your club according to your eye. You might well get conservative in your club selection and end up picking the right club more often than you usually do.

improvement

Review Your Round

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Here is one thing of many that help you shoot lower scores and have nothing to do with hitting golf balls. Review your rounds. In detail.

When I get home from having played, I write a brief description of every shot I hit. For every shot that worked out, I write down the conditions, what I did, and my opinion of why it worked. You can’t take success for granted. You repeat success by knowing how to be successful.

For every shot that didn’t work out, I write down the same thing, and my opinion on why it didn’t work out. What should I do if I faced this shot again? Sometimes you have done everything right but you just made a bad swing. That happens. But most of the time you have the skills to hit that shot, but you didn’t think it through, or your mind was on something else

In other words, learn from what you did, both good and bad. In other words, keep on doing this, but next time, do that.

If you play a round and don’t learn anything from it, you just went out for exercise, which is OK if that is what you want out of golf.

But you spend all that time playing, so you might as well get as good as you can. Here is one way to do it.

playing the game

Play Within Yourself

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When I play a round of golf, I always learn something or remind myself of what’s important. This is what came up today.

Swing. Don’t try to hit the ball hard. Just put a swing on it and take what you get. Trying to hit hard just ruins everything unless you are a very talented golfer and your name is Bryson.

Professionals golfers live on the center of the clubface. You can, too. Before you take the club away, say to yourself, “Center hit” and carry that thought with you. Uncanny how this works if you trust it.

Trying to reach every par 4 in two and every par 5 in three is sometimes too much, especially the par 4s. On those holes, back off. Plan the hole so you end up near the green in regulation for an easy pitch and maybe a putt, but no more than two. Trying too hard is what gets you doubles and triples.

When you’re close in, say 80 yards or under (you pick the distance), just get the ball on the green. A putting green is a huge target. Just hit that target so you can start putting.

Chunking or topping pitch shots? Odds are that your stroke is all arms, with no lower body movement. You have to turn your hips as you swing back, and turn your hips as you swing through.

If you have a really short putt, say two feet, that has break in it, ignore the break. Aim for the center of the hole and hit the ball hard enough (but no harder) that it runs straight through the break. Practice this before you try it on the course so that you see that it really is a better way.

Little Differences That Make a Big Difference in How Well You Play