All posts by recgolfer

Gold Post, grip

The Natural Placement of Your Hands on the Golf Club

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NOTE: A Basic Golf Swing is now available that develops the comments below in full, and more, in both words and video.

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Golf instruction books speak of three orientations of the hands when taking a grip: strong (the Vs between your thumbs and forefingers point outside your trailing shoulder), neutral (the Vs point at your trailing shoulder), and weak (the Vs point at your chin).

These are grip categories, however. They should not be taken as actual ways to set your hands on the club. How you do that is an individual matter that should reflect the natural orientation of your forearms. *

Instructors often talk about the clubface getting out of alignment because the hands turned the clubhead, but they do no such thing because they can’t turn. It is the forearms that turn, carrying the hands with them. This is not a trivial distinction.

When the forearms start out in their natural position, they will stay there (unless you disturb them) and return the clubface to the ball square. If you address the ball with them out of position, they will return to their natural position during the first few feet of takeaway, very likely without your being aware of it. There goes your shot when it has just barely started.

Stand with your arms hanging naturally by your sides. Notice where the backs of your hands are facing. They must face the same way when you put your hands on the club, which in turn puts your forearms in their natural position.

If you have trouble with the clubface being either open all the time at impact, or closed, and have tried everything to fix it without success, consider that the only problem is with your grip. It’s not your grip, but someone else’s.

You might find as well that the swing feels kind of effortless because you are not forcing your arms to move in a way they don’t like. That’s not a bad thing!

* The only instruction books I have found that mention this point is the chapter on the grip in Al Geiberger’s book, appropriately titled, Tempo, and Phil Galvano’s Secrets of the Perfect Golf Swing.

playing the game

Notes From a Round of Golf

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To hit a good opening tee shot, look at your grip to be sure you have placed your hands on the club correctly. When you swing, make sure you apply good rhythm and tempo. Do just those two things and you should be O.K. Actually, do this before every swing for the first two holes while you’re getting settled in. Actually, do this all day.

Two hundred and sixty yards from the green? Put away the fairway wood. You’re going to take two shots to get there no matter what, so make them easy shots: two 8-irons, a 7 and a 9, etc. Unless you are really good with them, I don’t know why you would hit a fairway wood from the fairway anyway.

Do you have a five-foot putt that looks like it will run straight into the hole? Walk to about thirty feet away and look again. Now you can see that the green is a little higher on the right than it is on the left, and only from back there can you see it. A putt that looked straight really breaks left, and now you know.

You know how some of the pros take the club part way back and look at the clubface? They’re looking to see if the face turned out of square in their takeaway, which is easy to do. Checking yourself this way might be a good habit for you to adopt.

playing the game, practice

Take Your Course Game to the Range

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Yesterday I went out to play nine holes. That might not sound like an earth-shaking statement, but because my immune system is compromised I haven’t played, except for a few rounds on an executive course, since February of last year.

I have been practicing all along, and can hit the ball pretty well, but that is different than playing. Which is the subject today’s post.

What I have been practicing are the mechanics the swinging the golf club, chiping, and putting. But I had not been practicing the act of making a golf shot. Those are two very different things.

When we complain that we can’t play like we practice, not understanding that difference, I believe, is the likely cause.

When we hit a shot on the golf course we have to pay attention to these things:
– Focus our mind what we are about to do
– Decide where we’re going to hit the ball to
– In many cases, decide how we’re going to hit it
– Decide which club we’re going to use
– Set up: grip, aim, stance, posture, ball position
– And finally, hit the shot.

Do you practice all of that at the range? Or just the last one, hitting one ball after another?

If practice is just ball-striking, we are not preparing ourselves to play the game.

Yesterday I hit five bad shots that turned a 40 into a 46. None of them were the fault of bad ball-striking. The fault was in not paying attention to the things that surround ball-striking, because I hadn’t practiced them enough.

I know how to do everything on that list. But I had not practiced doing those things enough, and in sequence, so they had become habits. I would forget to do one or two, or not do them correctly.

If you just want to go out and bat the ball around and have fun in a pleasant surrounding with your friends, go right ahead. There is value in that.

But if you want to shoot low scores, you need to practice in such a way that you make a habit of all of golf. Not just the hitting-the-ball part.

practice

A Half Hour at the Range

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(…or thereabouts)

I went to the range today, to work on hitting the ball on the center of the clubface. That’s not something you just do. You do a lot of things right and then you get that result.

So the two right things I made sure I did were to have my hands ahead of the clubface at impact, and swing with the right rhythm and tempo for me.

I bought a bucket of 33 balls. I had brought a 52-degree wedge and a 6-iron.

I started off with the wedge, hitting with a half swing. I made about four or five practice strokes before I hit a ball. After hitting three balls, I sat down to take a break. I figure that if you keep hitting ball after ball you fall into a groove and stop concentrating. Learning stops.

After having hit about fifteen balls, I picked up the 6-iron and went through the same thing—lots of practice swings, hands, rhythm and tempo. The first shot was fabulous, the second shot was awful because I got ahead of myself, so I reined in my mind and hit two more beauties.

That was enough so I gave the rest of the bucket to someone else. When you’ve accomplished was you set out to do, there is no point in going on.

Over to the practice green, where I was all alone as I usually am there. I hit four chips with the 52 to a target 9 yards away, which is the calibrated chipping distance for that club. Then I went out with my putter and putted them out.

Putting practice: one three-footer (dead center), one 30-footer using TAP (the ball stopped one foot past the hole), and it was time to call it a day.

It had been 117 degrees in Salem the day before, and even though it cooled down to 91 today, that’s till too hot for me.

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I’ve been coming up with some new things I have never seen before that are working out well, so I’ll be making videos to share them with you.

NOTE: A Basic Golf Swing is now available that develops the comments below in full, and more, in both words and video.


golf swing

Weight Shift in the Golf Swing

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From time to time you read about shifting your weight during the forward swing.

Stand up with your feet the same distance apart as in your stance. Now turn to your right, keeping your feet in the same place, and “shake hands” with someone standing at your right side, using your left hand. Your can lift your left foot so only the toe stays on the ground.

Now turn to the left and do the same thing with your right hand.

Did you notice that the first time your weight moved to your right foot and the second time your weight moved to your left foot, and that you didn’t deliberately shift your weight, but it just happened?

That’s all you need to know about weight shift.

tournaments

2021 U.S. Open – 4th Round

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Winner: John Rahm (-6) by one stroke over Louis Oosthuizen

The fourth round of golf’s premier tournament looks like it will be the best one in years.

Thirteen golfers are close enough to win as the round starts. Five of them are previous major winners (Oosthuizen, McIlroy, DeChambeau, Johnson, and Morikawa) and two others (Rahm and Schauffele) are in the brink.

If I were one of the leaders at -5 (Hughes, Oosthuizen, and Henley) I would force everybody else to take chances to catch me by my shooting for the center of the green, playing for pars all day, and taking birdies when they come.

-7 wins.

Don’t miss this one.

mental game

The Whole Swing Feeling

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We practice our swing to learn the parts and how to put them together into one swing. During that practice, we might come to believe that one of those parts is the key to making the entire swing work, and get stuck on referring back to that one feeling when we play.

While the swing is composed of identifiable parts, the feeling of the whole swing is not of each of these parts as they parade by in succession from takeaway to finish. The whole swing has a feeling of its own, one feeling in itself.

The whole swing feeling is bigger than any of the smaller parts, but it is the same in that like the parts, it too is one thing with its own one feel. That whole swing feeing is the feeling you play golf with.

Every touring professional, or any high-performing athlete in any sport, is a technical player in practice, but a feel player in performance. They practice their technique, but then trust what they have practiced when they play, and just perform.

Uncategorized

Longer Than Bryson?

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I saw this browsing through the golf pages this morning and just had to show it to you.

This is the Trackman data for a Korn Ferry Tour player named John Somers.

For his 6-iron.

Somers’s average driving distance is 331.5 yards, ten yards longer than Bryson.

Good grief.

practice

Golf Practice Needs to Be Specific

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When I practice, I practice the things that make the shot work. Just a few.

Right now, my swing things are to have a wider stance at address (it was too narrow), swing the club away with my forearms (not my hands), start down at the same speed I came up (a constant struggle), turn fully (I get too arm-oriented and forget to do this), and keep my tempo under control (everybody’s weak spot).

Those are the things that if I don’t do them seem to be what fouls up the shot, so I’m working on them a lot until they become my habits.

I practice them, one at a time, adding the next one on until I am satisfied with the way that they are all functioning correctly and then I hit a ball.

Repeat 29 times.

Maybe a year from now there will be something else that is causing me problems so I will work on that.

Find yours. Work on them. Don’t just go the range to hit balls. Work on something specific.

tournaments

U. S. Women’s Open – 2021

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Winner: Yuka Saso in a three-hole playoff against Nasa Hataoka
Lexi Thompson was five over par on the back nine to miss the playoff by one shot.

The U.S. Women’s Open will be played at the Olympic Country Club this weekend. See my preview of the 2012 U.S. Open for course details. There is also a link to a hole-by-hole description of the course, by Ken Venturi, on that page.

You should see Sports Illustrated’s preview of the 1966 U.S. Open at Olympic. The table-top models of its key holes are a work of art.

Here’s a fact sheet about the history of the course.

And this is the link to the USGA’s official site for the tournament.

Just to get ahead of the first two links, the course has doglegs on which the fairway slopes away from the bend, it has small, no, tiny greens, and there is the wind coming off of the ocean nearby.

And there is no first cut off the fairway. Off the fairway, you’re in the deep stuff, period.

The hardest part of the course comes early. Anybody who plays holes 2-5 in even par has stolen strokes from the field.

Here’s the take from LPGA veteran Angela Stanford.

Shooting par for the four days will be no mean feat.

You have to watch.