Category Archives: golf swing

I’m Hitting Lots of Wedges

It has been quite lately on the blog. I haven’t been playing because it is so wet out here, but I have been practicing in my back yard between showers.

My practice is solely hitting wedges. Chips, half wedges, and occasionally a full wedge. What I am aiming for is perfect contact and hitting the straight at my target.

I’ve been hitting over 100 balls a day, those little golf-ball sized plastic balls that we called holey balls because they have holes in them.

This is what I have learned so far.

Consistent contact comes from controlling the swing with the hip turn. An arm swing is a crap shoot, and focusing on your hands is even worse.

Now the way I’m turning my hips and when, and what it feels like, is something I cannot describe it at all. It just came out of hitting more than 1,000 golf balls, and it’s easy for me to do the same way time after time.

A second thing is that you can only make that perfect contact when your grip is relaxed. I don’t want to say light, as in pressure. Relaxed is better because to relax your grip, everything else has to be relaxed, too, which is all to the good.

As for direction, aim is important, but not the whole story. You must have a idea of what path you want the clubhead to be following after the ball has been struck, and that path is straight at the target.

I find a spot on the ground about three inches in front of the ball along the target line, and telling myself to swing the club squarely along that line and over that spot. From there, it’s a subconscious mind thing.

I think I have a workable solution to those two problems. Now all I have to do is hit a few thousand more balls to make it automatic.

Then there’s distance. I’m saving that for last because there is no point is calibrating distances before the stroke is good enough.

Every now and then I swing a 6-iron, once, using the full wedge swing to see what happens. The same thing happens: perfect contact, ball goes toward the target.

As for all this practice, see this post, probably the most valuable on in the entire blog, and this one, quoting Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim.

How to Keep the Clubface Square

The key to hitting the ball straight (without curvature) is to keep the clubface square to the swing path.

There are three places in the swing where the clubface needs to be square: at address, at the end of the backswing,* and at impact.

Address. Step behind the ball, looking downrange. Visualize a line connecting the target and the ball. When taking your stance, place the club on the ground so the leading edge of its sole is perpendicular to the line.

Backswing. Swing back as far as you normally do, and stop. Remain coiled, and test the position of the clubface by lowering your arms straight down from where they are, to just above hip height. Turn your head to look at the clubhead.

If the leading edge of the sole is straight up and down, it’s square.** There’s nothing more for you to do but practice the feeling of that backswing over and over to make it your own.

If the leading edge leans either forward or backward a bit, this is the result of what feels normal to you, and you now have some work to do to replace your customary backswing feeling with one that keeps the clubface square.

The solution is in your hands and forearms.

Let’s say your clubface was closed. Swing back and rotate your forearms slightly clockwise as you do. Not too much. Just a bit. When your backswing is completed, perform the test. You can see right away if you got it right, if you went too far, or not far enough.

If you’re corrcting an open clubface, rotate your forearms slightly counter-clockwise.

Keep working until you get it right. Then remember what that backswing feels like and practice it over and over.

Identify a key feeling, too. What I have found is that when I am keeping the clubface square all the way back, the feeling of my hands on the handle that I have at address does not change. The feeling that clicks for you might be different.

Impact. You’ll need to hit golf balls to figure this one out. If your shots fly to where you are aimed, go out and break 80.

If they curve,*** or if they fly straight, but to the right (push) or left (pull) of where you are aimed, get a lesson to find out what you need to correct. Those errors can’t be fixed by reading a blog post.

* It is possible to play good golf from an open position or a closed position at the end of the backswing, but it so much easier to play from square.

** If you try this test when you have taken the club back only halfway, to hip height, a square leading edge will be leaning forward a bit. Performing this test from a different position gives you a different result.

*** To an unplayable degree.

The Relaxed Arms Golf Swing

All golf shots, from drive to putt, are made with the arms. The body provides support for the arms, but it is the arms that swing the club, not the body. The arms must be completely relaxed to do their best job. This lets the arm swing be a true swing, and not a hit.

Stand up straight and bend forward just enough so your arms dangle down in front of you. Now swing them from side to side, loosely, effortlessly. Notice how relaxed they feel. Notice also how relaxed your shoulder joints feel. Keeping your shoulder joints relaxed is what keeps your arms relaxed.

You might think this is all right for putting, because no power is needed in that stroke. But it’s the same for a drive. You don’t need power in your driver swing. You need speed. Speed comes from relaxation. Tense muscles feel powerful, but they slow down movement.

In all the different types of golf strokes, it is a given that the arms and shoulder joints should be completely relaxed throughout the stroke.

The Elbows In the Golf Swing

I would like to present to you a matter that isn’t emphasized in golf books or online, but which is a pretty important part of a golf swing. It concerns how you treat your elbows throughout the swing.

Your elbows are fairly close together at address, and you want you keep them that way when we swing. The major disconnection is the right elbow pulling away, either on the way up or on the way back into the ball.

The problem this causes is that the club wanders away from its address orientation. The shaft goes off in a different direction, or the clubface gets twisted out of square, or a new club path gets created.

When and how the elbows get “separated” doesn’t matter. Just keep the address feeling of spatial connection between the elbows the same throughout the swing and you have it.

But don’t listen to me. Ben Hogan, in his book, Five Lessons, and Mickey Wright, in her book, Play Golf the Wright Way, both advocate strongly for this point.

Hogan says, on page 48, “The closer you keep your two arms together, the better they will operate as one unit, when they operate as one unit, they tend pull all of the elements of the swing together.”

Wright says, on page 47 of her book, that a square clubface is an essential element of her swing and she attains it by, “maintain[ing] the relative position of my arms and elbows to each other throughout the swing. The tendency when we swing just let everything fly including our elbows. We want elbow control.”

Since elbow control as she calls it is a feeling, and not a technique, I can’t say how to do it. But when I do it, I feel that my elbows are connected in a way at address and they never leave each other’s company at any time during the swing.

Neither Hogan or Wright mentioned another benefit of swinging with the feeling of your elbows staying together, because I don’t think they had this particular problem, but in my experience it goes a long way to suppressing the hit impulse that ruins so many shots at the last moment.

The Left Foot

If you watch professional golfers these days, most of them keep their left foot (we’ll call it the leading foot so as not to leave out the left-handed golfers) planted firmly on the ground until after they have hit the ball.

There was a time when every one of them lifted their leading foot off the ground to some degree in their backswing. No more, it seems.

That doesn’t mean you should leave it on the ground in your golf swing. Here is one way to decide whether you should lift it or leave it.

When you have finished your backswing, how does your right side feel? By that I mean your trailing shoulder and the trailing side of your torso. Are they relaxed like they were at address? Or is there tightness or tension? Does it feel like that side is jammed up against something?

This might be the case if you are not expecially flexible, or if you are getting older and losing flexibility.

If you leave your leading foot on the ground and you feel something like this, you’re cramping your swing so it cannot flow freely. You need to let that foot come off the ground to loosen things up. How much to let it come up, you can figure out for yourself.

If you decide to lift your leading foot, the very first movement you need to do in the forward swing is to plant it back on the ground, not only to replace it, but to get your turn started. That gives you an unexpected bonus.

Power comes from hitting hard with your entire right side. Putting your leading heel back on the ground as the first move in the forward swing will, if you stay out of its way, unleash the turn and with it your entire right side coming into the ball. This is not a forceful power move. It’s a speed move that just happens. Let happen and see what you get.

Just a thought.

Picking the Ball Off the Fairway

This is something I have been doing from the fairway for a while now and which seems to be working pretty well.

Hitting out of a fairway bunker is a real easy shot for me. I just keep my lower body quiet and nip the ball off the surface of the sand. It always works out well. Really nice ball flight.

I got the idea, why not try that off the fairway, too? I mean just the picking the ball off the sand part.

So I tried it, and it’s working really well. Just nip the ball off the turf, not try to be hitting down and all that stuff, but hitting level.

Result? Beautiful ball flight, the club not getting into an argument with the ground, everything good.

Just thought I would mention it.

Staying Behind the Ball

A critical piece of the golf swing is to stay behind the ball, or as I like to say it, stay back. My latest video shows you what that means and how to learn it.

Byron Nelson, in his book, Shape Your Swing the Modern Way, said, “swing out from under your head.” Here’s the passage:

“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.]

Rhythm in Golf Revisited

For a long time, I though that the rhythm of the golf swing was 3:1. There is a book you can still get, called Tour Tempo (it should have been called Tour Rhythm) that says so, based on videotape evidence.

You can read it all over the internet, too. 3:1. Everyone has bought into it. The trouble is, it’s not quite true. Leave it to me to say so.

Let’s remind ourselves what rhythm is. It is the relative duration of the component parts of a movement.

3:1 is the rhythm of the clubhead’s movement. The clubhead takes three counts to go from address to the end of the backswing, and one count to get back to impact, all counts being equally paced. That part is true.

But the rhythm of the clubhead is not the rhythm of the golf swing. It is the result of the golfer swinging with the proper rhythm, which is 1:1.

The body turns toward the ball at the same speed it turns away from it. And since the distance turned through in each direction is the same, the result is a 1:1 rhythm.

The trouble with ignoring the rhythm of the swing is that you try to do whatever you can to get a 3:1 clubhead rhythm at the expense of an easy rhythm for your golf swing.

You try to time your backswing and forward swing so you get a 3:1 clubhead rhythm, when all you have to do is swing at a 1:1 torso rhythm and you’ve got it.

How easy is that?

Yes, I know there are professional golfers who don’t have a 1:1 swing rhythm. Hooray for them. But the large majority of pros do. The ones who don’t are highly talented athletes who can make it work.

Make your swing simple. Take your mind off getting the right clubhead rhythm and put it on what produces the right clubhead rhythm. Much easier.