There are three ways to play golf.

1. Do what you think you have to do to hit the golf ball.

2. Learn what the right way really is and do that when you swing.

3. Learn what the right way really is and mold it into a swing that feels like yourself.

Number 3 is best.

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.

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.

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.

Bobby Jones gave us these two thoughts as the basis for building our golf swing.

“Very often, what a man feels he is doing is more important than what he does. The feel, the experience, is so much easier to remember and repeat.”

And what is that feeling?

“The downward or hitting stroke is intended to culminate in a well-timed, powerful contact between clubhead and ball. There is no way to argue that the successful accomplishment of this purpose is not the most important part of the stroke; but the backswing has for its purpose, the establishment of a perfectly balanced, powerful position at the top of the swing from which correct actions of the downstroke can flow rhythmically without the need for interference or correction. In the end, on the basis of consistent reproduction of the successful action, the preparatory movements become just as important as the actual hitting—the entire swing, a sequence of correct positions, following naturally and comfortably one after the other.” [emphasis added]

If you’ll allow me to be poetic, find a backswing from which your forward swing can flow through the ball like a clear, running stream.

Bobby Jones on Golf, p. 212 and p. 41-42.

There is so much out there about how to swing a golf club. One instructor/book/video says do this, and another instructor/book/video says that. Not to mention what this other instructor/book/video says to do.

You know how it goes?

So I’m going to tell you about another video. But. It’s simple. It’s easy to do. And it makes everything fall into place.

1. Pay attention to the spots where he talks about hitting one-handed wedges.

2. Pay attention to the spots where he says grip down and hit a wedge shot–even with your driver.

If you understand what he is saying, and figure out how to do what he’s telling you what to do, I promise that you will hit better golf shots almost instantly.

From time to time I write a post about what I work on with my swing to produce the results I want. You know, down the middle, reasonable distance. Not asking a lot.

For most of 2024 I worked on these things and take them into 2025 fully installed.

I see no reason why they wouldn’t work for you, too.

1. Backswing. All I want from the the backswing is for the clubface to be square when the backswing is finished. Because there are so many ways to get the clubface out of square, I have no guidance on how to achieve this other than to say swing back, check the clubface alignment, and if it isn’t square, figure it out. Hint: start with your grip. How do you check the clubface alignment? If you set up facing north, swing back, leave your hands where they are in space as you turn to the east, and lower the club to the ground.

2. Transition. Start the forward swing at the same speed you swung back.

3. Your head. Everything is moving toward the target in the forward swing: legs, hips, torso, arms, hands, club. Except your head. It stays put until after the ball has been struck. This is a very important point. Another way to say it is, stay behind the ball. See Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, pp. 75-76.

4. Lag. At the end of the backswing there is an angle made by your trailing forearm and the clubshaft. In a light, graceful way, swing forward so that angle does not straighten out, but do not lock it in place. You could straighten it out, you just choose not to. The momentum of the swing will straighten it out for you at the right time.

5. Tempo and rhythm. Swing at a walk-in-the-park tempo that allows you to feel everything that is happening in your swing and that none of it is rushed. Your swing should have a dance-like rhythm to it. Remember you are trying to swing through the ball, not hit at it.