Here’s another brilliant idea that might help you, or maybe not, but try it out anyway.

When we swing a golf club at nothing we make a flawless swing. When we swing at a golf ball, well, that’s a different story, isn’t it? The ball makes us do crazy things and we just can’t help ourselves.

Here’s this week’s expert advice guaranteed to solve that problem. Don’t look at the ball when you’re swinging to hit it. Look somewhere else.

If you’re hitting an iron from the fairway, you know you’re trying to hit ball first, ground second. So be looking at a spot perhaps an inch in front of the ball. Hit that spot with the leading edge of your iron and you will make outstanding contact.

Fairway wood? Same thing. Look at a spot on the ground an inch or so ahead of the ball. There’s a trick to it, though.

When you swing the club back, it’s a fairway wood. You’re looking at it. You can’t deny it. But just before you swing the club forward, think “7-iron,” and swing forward to hit that spot with the much sharper edge of your “7-iron.”

Works like a charm.

What about balls on tees? Be looking at the spot where the club would hit the ground were the ball not on a tee, and that is about an inch behind the ball.

Pitches and chips are a bit different. In these shots, you slide the sole of the club across the top of the grass. So look at the ground underneath the ball. It takes a little imagination to focus on the ground under the ball without noticing the ball, but you can teach yourself to do it.

Looking at a different spot does two things: it stops you from being ball-bound, and it helps you aim your stroke to where it should be aimed.

No beating down on the ball! And remember, swing with good rhythm and let the handle lead the clubhead.

There was a time not too long ago that my driver was my go-to club. I felt as good about hitting it into a narrow fairway as I did standing over a 6-inch putt on a slow green. But because of my health issues I haven’t played that much in the last five years and and I lost that swing.

So now I’m trying to simplify my swing to to make it easy to perform and easy to remember. Though I hit my irons okay, I hit one duck hook after another with my driver. The ball lands about 120 yards away then rolls into the left rough. You can’t play golf like that.

I changed my grip. That didn’t help. I change my takeaway. That didn’t help. I worked on my turn to square up the clubface. That didn’t help.

One of the things I had done to simplify my swing was to start the swing by pulling the club back with my right hand. I figured pulling something moves it more accurately than pushing it. So I pulled the club back with my right hand rather than pushing back with my left.

That, it turned out, was the problem. It was in the takeaway, but I had been looking in the wrong place.

Two days ago I decided to find out where in my swing my clubface was closing because that is what was causing those duck hooks. Every place I checked the clubface was closed. It got to the point where I saw my clubface had closed no more than two feet after it had been taken away from the ball. And then the solution hit me.

By pulling the club away with my right hand I was not allowing the club to rotate open. I was closing the club face from the very start. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

So I tried doing the opposite and started the club back by gently pushing with my left hand. Problem solved.

The club face remained square and I began hitting drives just like I used to. Straight, up in air, and while maybe not as far as before, the ball still got out there.

I’m telling you this because sometimes it doesn’t take a wholesale change in your swing to correct the problem you’re having. If you just spend time investigating your swing in detail you can find out what the problem is. And if you don’t find it, keep looking.

I have always recommended lessons, but much more often you can figure out what the problem is and find the solution yourself. When your golf is based on knowledge that comes from you, that’s one step closer to owning your swing.

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.