playing the game, practice

A way to take your game from the range to the course

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One of the biggest problems in golf is taking your game from the range to the course. Here’s why I think this is such a problem.

When you’re on the range, you have a bucket of balls and you hit them one after the other. Maybe you take a few practice swings in between, or maybe do a drill, and then you hit the ball to see how it went, and then you hit another one and you don’t really mind if the shot you hit is not your best because that’s what the range is all about. You’re here to learn, you’re here to correct mistakes, and mistakes are OK at the range.

But they’re not OK on the golf course. And the difference between the course and the range is that on the course you get to hit one shot, then you move on. And it might be three or four minutes since you hit your last shot. You don’t get to hit one maybe every 30 seconds and get into a groove like you do at the range, with lots of practice swings in between, and so forth.

That puts a bit of pressure on you when you play, and I understand that because I feel it myself. I only have one chance to get this right and then I have to live with the consequences.

So here’s how you minimize that problem over time. At the range, when you’re finished with most of your bucket, and you’ve accomplished what you sent to accomplish, leave about five balls.

Hit one. And sit down for about three minutes. And get up and hit another one, just like you were on the course. Align your shot, maybe take one practice swing, and then hit the ball. And then sit down again for another three or four minutes. Repeat.

Don’t limit yourself to full swings. Maybe hit a 75-yard pitch. Hit your driver one time. Mix it up, because that’s what you do when you play.

Now, you’re simulating the way you have to hit the balls on the golf course, one shot at a time, with a significant amount of time between shots. This kind of practicing gets you used to that, so on the course you’ll be a lot more at ease when it’s your turn to hit. It will just be business as usual.

I think if you make this procedure a regular part to your trips to the range, you’ll start feeling free to put your best swing on the ball more often than not when you play.

books

Four Golf Instruction Books

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I like to read golf instruction books, especially ones that feed my confirmation bias. You know, they describe what I think is right.

But I want to suggest four books that set me off in the right direction and get me back on track if I get seduced by some tip on YouTube. You might find them to be valuable too.

1. Five Lessons, Ben Hogan
2. Shape Your Swing the Modern Way, Byron Nelson
3. Bobby Jones on Golf, Bobby Jones
4. On Learning Golf, Percy Boomer.

The Hogan and Nelson books say mainly the same thing. The difference is in how they are written. Five Lessons is not a casual read. You have to be paying attention and even then you still might not get it. Nelson is written in a more chatty manner, much easier to follow than Five Lessons, but it is still worth gold. You should have them both and read them both. They compliment each other. One of the problems with Hogan’s book is that he says there are only eight fundamentals, but he makes reference to a number of other fine points that are just as important and you have to be a very careful reader to notice them.

The Jones book is a joy to read just for being in the presence of writing that reflects a command of English equal to golf writers who were professional writers. Much of his swing advice, I think, is based the demands that hickory shafts made on a golfer. Some of the details might be obsolete. His higher level descriptions of swing technique are spot on, of course. But it is the feeling of command that he had on the course, and that he wants us to have, that pervades the book and is its greatest value.

The Boomer book, which you may never have heard of, is the first book published (1946) on how to be a feel player. You can read this every year before the start of the season (I do) and find something new that makes you a better golfer. If I had only one golf book, it would be this one.

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.

I think you can apply this tip to every shot you hit, too.

golf swing, impact

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.

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