Two Swing Moves Every Golfer Needs

[August 2019. Actually, there are three. See My Conception of Golf Technique.]

I looked over my blog, which I have been posting to more than weekly since early 2009.  There are 152 posts about the golf swing.  I’m going to give you one more.

This post is something of a distillation of two principles I have written about many times.

It contains all the advice you will ever need about your golf swing.  If you learn to do these two things, your golf swing will transform itself and you will move to a new level of play.  I guarantee it.

First, slow down your swing.  I say in my Living Golf Book that “Your optimum tempo is the fastest you can swing through impact and consistently hit solid shots off the center of the clubface.”   That’s very likely slower than you’re swinging now.

By “consistently” I mean three out of five times.  We don’t need perfection.  But right now I would be surprised if you’re doing that three out of ten times.

The way you achieve this is to slow down your swing.  Try swinging at thirty percent of your normal speed.  You should start connecting with the center of the clubface and hitting brilliant shots with startling frequency.

Now move up a bit to maybe fifty percent of your normal swing speed.  Are you still connecting?   Three out of five times?  If so, go to seventy percent.  If there’s a drop off in shot quality, resist the urge to figure out how to hit the center at seventy percent.  Go back to the swing speed at which you found your greatest success and stay there.

Go back to the place where you make beautiful contact and hit the ball straighter, much more often, without losing any appreciable distance.

Second, swing so your hands get back to the ball before the clubhead does.  Your hands lead the clubhead.  No good golfer fails to do this. No bad golfer ever does it.

Learn how to do this by making half swings with a sand wedge, with only your left hand on the handle (right hand if you play left-handed).  That will give you the feeling of what your left hand and wrist are supposed to be doing as they swing through impact.  Practice this over and over.

Combined with your slower swing, it will be easy to keep doing this when you put both hands on the club.

That’s it:
Slow down your swing to get centered hits
Have your hands lead the clubhead into the ball

Work on these two things.  Don’t get distracted by anything else. Make them your winter golf swing workout.

Now, I didn’t make all this up in my backyard this morning.  You can read about these two things all over the place.  I’ve been talking about these two points for years on this blog.

Teaching professionals have their own ideas about a lot of things, but no teaching professional will disagree with these two.  They might be the only swing universals there are.

And when I get it through my thick head to actually do them they actually work.

My purpose in writing this blog is to point you in the right direction.  I cannot point you in a better direction than I have today.

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