The motto of this blog is, Little Things That Make a Big Difference. Here are two tips for your setup that do just that.

First, your arms. They must be at full extension and stay that way throughout the swing. But they cannot be that way throughout the swing if they are not that way at the start.

Hold a club in one hand, with the clubhead resting in the air just off the ground. Notice that your arm feels to be pulled a bit, straightening it. Not a lot, not so the arm is rigidly straight, but straighter than it is when you are not holding the club (try it).

That is full extension. Address the ball with this feeling in both arms and maintain it throughout the swing. Why?

The momentum of the forward swing will by its force lengthen your arms as they swing the club through the ball if they are not already at full length. The rest is hitting fat.

Also, keeping your arms at full extension helps keep the clubface square. Don’t take my word for it, listen to Mickey Wright and Ben Hogan. They both regarded this as a key fundamental of their swing.

When you try this, your arms should still feel relaxed, never stiff to any degree.

Second, the line across your shoulders is the line you will take the club back along. It is the easiest way to move your body and it will want to do that. If you try to swing the club back on a different line your shoulders will fight you and your swing will be a struggle.

So if you want to hit the ball straight, start with your shoulders parallel to the target line. You will find it very easy to take the club away straight and on a plane that is aligned with your target line. That will also prepare you to swing the club back through the ball along the target line.

If you want to fade the ball, open your shoulder line a bit (aim it to the left of your target line) and swing back along that line, which will be the way your shoulders want to guide your arms. If you want to draw, do the opposite. Aim the shoulder line to the right of the target line.

But whatever, pay attention to this detail. It is easy to forget about as the round goes on.

Oh, yes. Happy New Year!

A few weeks ago, and article appeared at GolfWRX with the title, “Top 4 reasons why most golfers don’t get better“.

It was written by Terry Koehler, a golf club designer and golf industry veteran.

The first reason echoes my favorite Ben Hogan quote: “The average golfers’s problem is not so much a lack of ability as it is a lack of knowing what he should do.”

Reasons two and three involve pre-swing fundamentals and the setup.

Reason four repeats the old saw, It’s a swing, not a hit.

Read his advice and see where it fits into your game.

I got a call from The Golf Channel a few weeks ago saying they liked my blog and would I like to be a guest on The Golf Fix. I said, sure. They said bring three things to talk about. I said that would be easy.

So when Michael Breed asks me what I have for the viewers, I will mention three things that if every golfer could do them, the sound of a nationwide crash of handicaps plummeting would be enough to put the National Guard on alert.

Faithful readers of this space should already know what two of them are.

The first one is rhythm and tempo — 3:1 rhythm from takeaway to impact, at a tempo that lets you get the center of the clubface on the ball.

The second one is the hands lead the clubhead into impact. This leads to mastery. The clubhead getting to the ball first leads to one disaster after another.

The third one is to replace your urge to hit the golf ball with the joy of swinging the golf club. If there’s a ball in the way of the swing, so much the better.

Then I would show drills you could use for each point.

To get rhythm and tempo right, just count as you swing. 1 is the moment of takeaway, 2, 3, 4 to the top, and 5 at impact, performed at a pace (tempo) that, to you, feels unhurried.

For the hands leading the clubhead, I demonstrate drill from Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book on swinging down slowly to hip level three times and on the fourth, at the same speed, continuing down and through the ball.

For the third point, I would say take practice swings, as many as you like, with a ball in front of you, but a few inches farther away so you can see it, but won’t hit it. By seeing the ball but never hitting it, you gradually replace “hit” in your mind with “swing.”

I would say, Do each of these drills for two minutes every day (six minutes, total), and see what you get after 60 days.

Then I would look at Michael, who for once would be speechless. After all, what more would there be to say?

This is what I’ll present for my guest spot on The Golf Fix. But you don’t have to wait. Start doing these three things right now, and let me know in 60 days how it came out.

So when will my fifteen minutes of fame be on the air? Well, unfortunately they had the wrong number. When they realized who they were really talking to, they apologized and hung up.

I guess all this will remain our little secret, and my little fantasy.

[April 2018 note: Now that The Golf Fix is no longer on the air, it’s even more important that you read this blog, because where else are you going find instruction that speaks to your game?]

For almost 35 years, I have studied and taught the martial art of Ki-Aikido. Part of the advanced training involves a wooden sword called a bokken. We use the sword to learn how to apply the principles of the art while holding an object (although there is lot to be said about what that statement really means).

What applies to the bokken applies to a golf club.

Of the several principles for using the sword is always to move the sword from its tip. Instead of moving the sword from our hands, we think all the way out to the tip, and move that.

The reasons why are too involved to go into here, but that is the principle that I want to talk about in relation to a golf club.

When we move the golf club, we want to move it from the tip as well. Percy Boomer says in his important book, On Learning Golf, “…our strivings to attain a good swing will have been largely in vain unless at the end we have learned to feel our clubhead.”

We can refine that statement by saying not the entire clubhead but the tip of the golf club, which is on the clubhead. That tip is the sole of the clubhead.

A few week ago I posted an essay on how to stop chunking chip shots. The idea was not to think, “Hit the ball,” but, “Brush the grass.” Well, what is it you brush the grass with? The sole of the clubhead. The tip.

Now the tip of a sword is small and pointy. The tip (sole) of a golf club is broad, long, and flat. But it is a tip in its own way.

You always read, correctly, to hit the ball first and the ground second. You hit the ball with the clubface. What do you hit the ground with? Not the leading edge of the sole, as might seem obvious, but the entire sole.

You control the sword by controlling the tip. It’s the same with a golf club. When the sole goes to the right place, the rest of the club will too. After all, they’re attached!

They key to consistent ball striking is to hit the ball on the center of the clubface every time. We control that in large by delivering the sole of the club to the ground in the same way every time.

You might spend some time working with chips, short pitches, longer pitches, and moving up to a full swing with this thought in mind — swing the sole of the club to a consistent point with each swing. Everything else will fall into place.

There are six things you need to do in every stroke you make at the ball, from drive to putt. These constants should appear in your longest drive and a six-foot putt, and every shot in between.

1. Start the club back straight — the body turn takes it inside.

2. Start the through-swing with a gravity move.

3. Have the left hand lead the clubhead into the ball.

4. Hit the shot with both hands — one does not take the major role.

5. Swing through toward the target.

6. Use the 3:1 rhythm.

Over the next six weeks, I will explain each one of these points. If you already know what they mean, please start working right away to make them part of the way you play golf.

There are certainly more things that need to be done to hit good golf shots consistently, but if you make these your new habits, you’ll be doing a lot of things right.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

Millions of words of golf instruction have been written, including thousands on this web site. There is so much information to distill and absorb, it’s hard for anyone to make sense of it all. That’s what this post is for.

Below are eighteeen words that tell you exactly what you need to do to become a shot-maker — someone who hits the ball well consistently and accurately. Everything I have read, heard, and been taught, boils down to these eighteen words.

1. If the ball is on a tee, think: square face, center hit. (4)

2. If the ball is on the ground, think: ball first, ground second. (4)

3. In addition for the short game: weight left, stays left; left hand leads through. (8)

4. Putting: sweet spot. (2)

Numbers 1 and 2 are mental skills, not physical skills. Let your mind lead your body. Think these things just before you take the club away. Give the order once, then stay out of your way and let the right things happen.

Number 3 means start with your weight on the left side and let not one ounce of it shift right; the right hand never passes the left. These principles are common to every short shot. You can practice this in your living room without a ball.

Number 4 is the soul of the putting stroke. Listen and feel. Contact on the sweet spot sings a different song and is so soft in the hands. It’s what gives you control of the ball.

Devote your practice to only these things. This is what to repeat 10,000 times. If I wanted to create a good golfer from scratch, this is all I would have him or her work on.

Write these eighteen words down on a card to carry with you when you play. Look at the card before you hit any shot.

Trust me. This is it. If you want to hit the ball as well as you can, it’s these eighteen words. It is that way, it always was that way, it will always be that way.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

I hope your game is going well for you this year. Hopefully you are doing better than last year and are learning to be come a better ball-striker and a better player.

I would nonetheless like to remind you of a few things to check on that might help you move a game that is “close” to “just right.” They are things that don’t take a lot of practice, can be learned quickly, and will yield immediate benefits.

Most of this is buried in earlier posts, but rather than you having to dig it all out, here is the 2012 version of Ways to Play Better Without Practicing.

1. The prime rule of good golf is: Be at peace with the shot you’re about to hit. If you’re not completely convinced that this is the right thing to do, step away from the ball and do some more thinking about what shot you want to hit.

2. Tempo and rhythm affect every shot. Sometimes we get too quick. The way to slow yourself down is to remember at what speed you made your last swing and swing slower than that on this swing. It will come out at the same speed, most likely.

3. These three parts of the setup will improve your shotmaking more than you can imagine. They’re easy to practice, and they require no skill to master, just careful attention before the shot:
a. Grip pressure – If you hit a bad shot, full swing or short shot, there is a good chance your grip pressure was too tight. Hold the club more lightly next time.
b. Aim – If your aim is off, odds are you’re aimed right of your target.
c. Ball position – Hogan and Nicklaus can put the ball inside their left heel for every shot, but you can’t. Put it in the center of your stance for every shot off the ground or an iron on a tee, and one ball forward of that for a driver on a tee.

4. On the course, play a shot that will put the ball in the best position for the next shot. If you can’t hit that shot, play one you can that leaves you a workable next shot. Apply this rule off the tee, off the fairway, and around the green. Another way of saying this is to play the shot you can hit, not the shot you want to hit.

5. From the fairway, figure out how far your shot is playing (actual distance to the pin, adjusted for wind, lie, elevation changes, etc.) and add five yards. Now pick your club. That plan can easily let you hit three more greens per round.

6. Strive to play well, but don’t let that become more important than making the people you’re playing with glad that they played with you.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.