Last fall I wrote about the whoosh–the sound the clubhead makes when you swing it fast. I want to review that, and add on another comment.

Swing a golf club, maybe a 5-iron or longer, without a ball in front of you. Listen for the whoosh. That’s the sound of your club travelling at its maximum speed.

The whoosh gives you an indication of what your clubhead speed is. While you won’t get a precise measurement, obviously, we can say that the higher the pitch, the faster the club is travelling.

And more speed is always better. The Internet is full of pages, and YouTube if full of videos, about how to increase your clubhead speed. But many of them fail to make the most important point. Your maximum clubhead speed has to appear at the right moment. Otherwise, it’s no good.

You should hear the whoosh at or just past where a ball would be. If you hear it before the clubhead gets to the ball, you are releasing the club too early and using up your clubhead speed before you really need it.

Most likely, if that is the case, you’re letting go of the angle between your left forearm and the clubshaft too soon on the downswing. Play with holding on to that angle a little bit longer until you hear the whoosh placed directly in front of you.

This shouldn’t be a big adjustment to make. Just be sure you’re only adjusting your release and not trying to force this to happen. Light grip pressure will help, too.

Be careful, though. It is entirely possible to give up your angle too early and still place the whoosh in the right spot. This is a two-part exercise: retaining the angle and placing the whoosh.

And don’t go expecting miracles once you’ve accomplished it. You only hear, “I tried this and now I hit my drives 40 yards longer,” when somebody is trying to sell you something. If you get 7-10 more yards out of this, you’ve done the job.

It is said that only two golfers have ever owned their swing — Ben Hogan and Moe Norman. Actually, Lee Trevino had a pretty good idea what he was doing, as did Sam Snead, Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Bruce Lieztke, and about a hundred other players I could name.

You can own your swing, too. A – it’s not that hard to do, and B – you need to do it to play consistent golf.

By owning your swing, I don’t mean you know what you’re doing down to the gnat’s eyelash. I do mean that when you’re not striking the ball well, you have some checkpoints you can review to get back on track.

The Six Fundamentals are my checkpoints. They don’t have to be yours, but you should know something about your swing along the order of, “I forgot to do this,” and when you get back to doing “this”, the problem is solved.

The goal is to bring the club into the ball on a path toward the target, with the clubface square to that path, on the proper trajectory, and making contact on the center of the clubface.

Everything you do contributes to all that happening, or not. So you have to investigate how to do those four things, one at a time, and also what you do that gets in the way of doing those things.

This takes careful study. It means breaking down your swing into parts that move the club correctly and learning what the feeling of those correct movements are.

Then you develop your own keys — the checkpoints you have to hit to make it all work.

Don’t expect to have this figured out in a few weeks. It might take a lot longer than that, and a few lessons along the way won’t hurt.

But it’s like this. If you hit a really good shot and you can’t explain to yourself how it happened, you have some work to do. And I know you can do it.

I didn’t post last Sunday, like I usually do, because I could’t think of anything to say. While not having anything to say doesn’t stop some people from saying it anyway, I’m not one of those.

I got out a golf book this morning and started reading through it to see if I could find some inspiration. Which I did. Here are a couple of things that crossed my mind.

1. When you start the club back away from the ball, do so slowly at first, and smoothly. Do not snatch it away. The reasons are, one, that if you take the club back too quickly, you can pull it off the desired plane. Then you have to get it back on plane sometime before you hit the ball, which complicates the swing unnecessarily. And if you aren’t aware that you’re off plane, well, good luck.

The other reason is that jerking the club away makes you reflexively tighten your grip. That puts tension in your swing from the very start which will only build as the swing progresses — something you do not want to happen.

2. Everybody has their own swing. It is based on your strength, your flexibility, your athleticism, your physique, and your basic conception of how to swing a stick to hit a ball. Because of these factors, there are things about your swing that are less than ideal but which you cannot change. These are not swing flaws, these are just you.

There are, however, mistakes you can be making that you don’t have to. They need to be corrected, and they can be. Your improvement will accelerate when you have figured out the difference between your natural tendencies and your plain old errors. Then you can fix what can be fixed and leave what cannot be fixed, alone.

[August 2019. the right way to create a golf swing is found at The Hands Lead the Clubhead – IV.]

There is a basic approach to the swing that many golfers take because it seems so obvious to do. And yet it is the wrong approach and is what prevents them from doing with the ball what they set out to achieve.

Percy Boomer, in his essential book, On Learning Golf, calls it Golf Bogey No. 1. It is “the natural urge to act in an obvious way to achieve the desired result.”

He takes a phrase from F. Matthias Alexander, who calls it end-gaining. This is thinking about what the desired result to the exclusion of the best way to attain that result.

How does this relate to the golf swing? It comes out as making movements which we feel will put the ball in the fairway off the tee, or on the green from the fairway. And they never work.

In golf, Boomer points out, the obvious way (to us) is seldom the right way. Very little of the golf swing is natural. The golf swing is a learned art, which must be trusted to deliver the desired result.

This is why you see so many weird-looking swings out there. People are trying to hit the ball with the club in a way they think will work and it does just often enough that they mistake luck with skill.

Golf is not about hitting the ball. It’s about making the right swing with a ball in the way.

You don’t play well by thinking about what you have to do to hit the ball in a certain direction or a certain distance. You play well by thinking about how to make the right swing. You must concentrate on the means, not on the end.

So when you are on the practice tee and not hitting the ball too well, do you say to yourself, “Maybe if I try this,” and two indifferent shots later you think, “How about trying this?”, getting yourself deeper and deeper into trouble because you’re trying to guide the club into the ball. That’s end-gaining.

Instead of being in control of where the ball goes, we must be in control of what our swing does. Then, when we sweep the club through the ball in the proper way, it will go where it is supposed to go.

What then is the proper way to swing the club? It’s most likely what your pro taught you in your last lesson (you do take lessons, don’t you?). Learning my Six Fundamentals won’t hurt you, either.

Let me try to seal the argument this way. Do you remember the shots you made, and I know you’ve made them, that went long and high and straight and it was because your mind went blank for a moment and you just swung the club? You weren’t thinking about how to make the ball go to a certain place, it just went there?

That’s what I’m talking about. If you can take that momentary lapse in concentrating on the wrong thing, and make that your habit, and combine that with good technique, good golf will be yours.

Every year, when golf season is over, I work on my swing, starting over from the start. I go through my bag, from 9-iron to driver.

If you have seen some of my recent videos on YouTube, you know I have a little practice station in my back yard. I went out to my practice mat with my 9-iron, and hit just that club. Over and over. When I get 3 out of 5 shots just right consistently, and the other two aren’t bad, I’ll move up to the 8-iron. And then one club at a time when I’m ready for it.

I probably won’t be up to the driver before the rainy season hits. We’re having warm weather with clear skies, but in Oregon that won’t last too long this time of year.

I’m dedicating myself to building the Six Fundamentals into every swing. I review them all before I hit a ball. One thing I’ve added is to sweep the club through the ball, and not to hit at it. That is making a world of difference.

Aside: If you get the latest Golf Digest, with Beef Johnston on the cover, you’ll find an article inside by Bob Toski about swinging with your hands, and not with the big muscles that is so much in vogue nowdays. This is exactly what I said in SF. I advise you to get this article and read it carefully. A lot of what pros say about the risks of your hands being in charge of your golf is baloney.

But back to my program. If you want to be better ball striker, take the swing you have and work your way through your bag, one club at a time, demanding a quality hit with every ball before you move up. Really. This works.

The other part of getting my game back in order is hitting two to four-foot putts in my back room. I am getting REAL good at these. Sinking these putts is how you avoid three-putt greens or not getting up and down.

My multimedia essay on the golf swing, Six Fundamentals of the Recreational Golf Swing, I outlined six principles that lead to a better swing and better ball-striking.

Last week I posted a link to a video by Vivien Saunders where she presents a different way of looking at the swing.

Instead of saying, Do these things with your body and you will swing the club correctly, she turns that around. Swing the club correctly and the body will respond correctly.
The club tells the body how to move, not the body tells the club how to move.

Let’s look at Six Fundamentals from this point of view to see how they are still relevant.

1. The First Fundamental is about rhythm and tempo (my favorite subject). Only if these two points are under control will you be abel to feel how the club is supposed to move, and can you let the club guide your movement.

2. Swing with both hands. Definitely you want to do this. The club transmits its directions to the body through the hands. If you start emphasizing the right hand (left hand, if you play left-handed) you’re telling the club what to do.

3. Take the club straight back to control. You still have to aim your swing, and if you take the club back only as far as the control point, you don’t introduce extraneous movment to the cub that it has to recover from.

4. The right knee moves left (or left knee moving right, for lefties). This is the essence of the pivot, which you will do correctly if you are letting the club be in control. A sign that you are not doing that is if your knee does not move and you hang back.

5. The hands lead the clubhead through impact. This the chicken and the egg part of the swing. You have to do this for the club to move correctly, and if the club moves correctly, you’ll be doing this. This is the moment of truth, your pass-fail exam.

6. Swing straight through toward the target. Why? Because that’s where the club wants to go. Just follow it there.

To sum it up, Fundamentals One to Three are what allow you to let the club guide you, and Fundamentals Four to Six are what happens if you do.

This new way of thinking about these Fundamentals might help you apply them to your swing more effectively.

Finally, here’s a tip. When you watch a good golfer’s swing, do not watch what they do with their body. Watch the golf club.

In this video, I‘m not asking you look like I do when I swing the club, but to move the club like I do when I swing. Big difference.

If you haven’t already heard of her, I would like to introduce you to Vivien Saunders, a great teacher who lives in the U.K.

In this video, she turns around everything you have heard about how to swing a golf club.

Swinging a golf club is not what happens when you do the right things with your body. It is what happens to your body when you swing the golf club correctly.

Watch this.

Now you don’t have to watch the Golf Channel anymore.

There’s a guy I play golf with occasionally who is in his 50s and new to the game. He’s small, but strong. His swing is, wind up the upper body and swing through as hard as you can with your shoulders and arms. When he connects, it’s really impressive. The other ninety percent of the time, it’s not.

He told me once that he read Ben Hogan’s book (Five Lessons) and mentioned the part where Hogan said he wished he had three right hands. Having read that book so much I almost have it memorized, I agreed that Hogan did say that.

I think my friend interpreted that as a green light to hit the ball as hard as he could with his right hand. That sure looks like what he’s trying to do.

What I didn’t say, because I don’t give unsolicited advice on the golf course, is my friend needed to read the whole sentence rather than just that part.
 Hogan at that point (p. 101) was talking about the left wrist. I won’t give you the entire quote, but he said,

“…the left hand will not check or interrupt the speed with which your clubhead is traveling. There’s no danger either that the right hand will overpower the left and twist the club over. It can’t. As far as applying power goes, I wish I had three right hands!”

That’s it. You can hit as hard as you want to with your right hand IF THE LEFT WRIST IS IN THE PROPER POSITION (illustration below).

Hogan was not saying to hit the ball as if you had three right hands, period. There is a catch, and the catch is the shape of the left wrist.

The right hand turning over the left was my problem exactly for many years. I solved it by changing my grip and by giving my hands less responsibility through impact.

What I have is a flat left wrist at impact. Having that wrist bend outward like Hogan showed is beyond my ability. If you can get your left wrist flat (Hogan) and facing the target (Trevino) at impact, you’re way ahead of the game.

But back to the book. Hitting hard only makes sense if you are sure you can keep the clubface aligned while you’re doing it. Hogan showed you in Five Lessons how he did it.

A shorter way of saying it is, square first, hard second.

If you get a chance to go to a professional golf tournament, men’s or women’s, go to the practice ground and watch the golfers warm up. You will be stuck by the apparent ease with which they swing the club.

No one is pounding the ball. Everyone is just swinging the club. There is no hint of forcing the shot in any way. You could watch this all day.

Here’s the difference between us and them in a nutshell. We think the swing ends when the ball is struck. They think the swing ends when the club stops moving at the finish. That difference makes all the difference.

Golf swing instruction in almost any book you read, instructional videos and Internet videos you see, breaks down into four areas: pre-swing fundamentals, backswing, downswing, and impact. There is little, if any, instruction on the finish.

So, I’m going to give you some. It’s in the form of a drill that focuses on the finish.

Make shortened swings with your driver, no ball, in this way. Take the club halfway back and swing smoothly and slowly (emphasis on “slowly”) to a full finish, just like you see the pros do. When you get there, hold that pose for a few seconds to let your mind absorb the process of your swing leading you to this place.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. This drill makes you aware that the finish is a part of the golf swing, not residue of what came before.

When you play, instead of taking your stance and thinking about how you’re going to hit the ball, send your mind to the end of the swing, and beyond that. Let impact be another thing you breeze right through on the way to your finish.

In a sense, it feels like you’re giving up control of the shot. What you’re doing is getting more control. Try it.