Casting, or hitting over the top, means to release your wrist hinging at the very start of the forward swing. This is one of the worst faults in golf, and one of the most prevalent, because it is so easy to do.

The object of the swing is to swing the club, not to hit the ball. But that is not intuitive, so people try to hit the ball with their hands as soon as their hands start moving towards it.

That is what makes sense to almost everybody. It makes sense to me, too, which is why one of my major swing drills is in practicing how not to do it.

Imagine you have attached a ribbon to the end of a stick. If you were to swing the stick back and forth, the ribbon would trail the stick.

Now imagine your arms are the stick, when you swing then forward, let the clubshaft trail them like the ribbon would.

When it’s time, the clubshaft will catch up on its own and deliver the hit in spite of yourself.

There are lots of points you have to pay attention to in your golf swing. By that, I mean the points that make your golf swing work. There are likely more than one or two. I have six.

What I’m getting at today is that you don’t have to exaggerate any of them. Don’t overdo them. Just hit each mark in a relaxed way as you proceed through the swing, and you will be just fine.

Harvey Penick said it well when he advised us in his Little Red Book that if he asks you to take an aspirin, please don’t take the whole bottle.

The hands lead the clubhead going into the ball? Just by a few inches. Not by a whole foot.

Retain your lag at the start of the forward swing? Yes, just at the start. Don’t hold on for dear life all the way into the ball.

And so on.

Another way to put it is that when you swing the club, a beginner watching you should say, “That looks so easy to do!”

They shouldn’t think, “Oh, my. I could never do that.”

I think the hardest part of the golf swing is learning how to keep the clubface square. This is how I practice it.

I use a driver. This club is, in my opinion, the easiest club to hit because we are standing the most upright. It is therefore the club to use when you are learning how to keep the clubface square.

I pay lots of attention to my grip and to how I take the club away. From there, it’s figuring out how to swing without upsetting the clubface’s alignment.

How do you do that? Because everybody is different, I can’t say. Either make it your own exploration, or get a lesson(s). Hint: If the clubface is still square at the end of your backwing, you’re ninety percent there.

Once you have the matter figured out, transfer that swing to the rest of your clubs, always referring back to the driver as you do. Let you driver bleed into your 5-iron, not the other way around.

What you do with the club in the first two feet of your backswing makes all the difference between your best shot and your worst.

That is the interval where your clubface can get out of alignment without your noticing it. Open or closed, this is where it happens, and you can’t do a thing about it because you won’t feel it.

Practice this a lot: Take the club away using your normal swing and stop after the clubhead is about two feet away from the ball. Using your arms only, bring the clubhead back to the ball.

If it’s not square, you have something to work on, and it’s simple. Practice taking the club back those two feet so the clubface stays square. Learn what it feels like to do that.

When you play, do this takeaway drill before very shot. Remind yourself of the feeling, because the difference between right and wrong is hard to detect.

With that, and a soft grip pressure, you’re good to go.

When your hips and your arms are moving forward as you swing through the ball, there might be a tendency to shift your whole body forward. Avoid that tendency, if you have it.

When you shift forward, you shift the bottom point of your swing forward, too. Now your swing and the ball on the ground are in a different conversation.

All you have to do is keep your head from going forward, and that will take care of things. Bobby Jones called it “swinging out from underneath yourself.”

When you swing the club back and consequently up, you might have a tendency to rise up with it. That is, raise your body up a bit.

That gives your swing a new bottoming out point, and you have to go reaching for the ball as you go through impact. This is so easy to do without being aware of it.

Give this a try. Swing back and tell yourself to keep your head where it is. Don’t let it rise up.

If you do that, and it feels odd, then you have habit of rising up in the swing that needs to be broken.

How do you break the habit? Practice swinging without your head rising up.

The practice swing is a rehearsal swing. It should be the swing you want to copy when you hit the ball. I’ll show you how to make sure your practice swing is exactly that.

When you swing the golf club it is often true that your mind is not fully engaged. Your body starts moving and leaves your mind behind. And the swing doesn’t feel right.

Instead of swinging the club just once, swing the club twice without a break between the two swings. You make one swing all the way to the finish and with a continuous motion swing club back from there make a second swing to the finish. One motion, two swings. 1,2.

The purpose of the second swing is to let your mind catch up. You will find the mental feeling you have during that second swing to be very different from the one you had in the first swing. You will as a result feel a swing that is not only much different than the first one, but will be the one you want to hit the ball with.

When you have done this step up to the ball, take a quick look down the fairway or at the green. Return your eyes to the ball and without hesitation swing the club away while the feeling of that good swing is still fresh.

Doesn’t this take extra time, though? Everyone says in order to speed up play you should only take one practice swing. Well, you are. It’s just that your one practice swing has two parts. This two-part swing hardly takes any longer than a normal one-part swing. So you’re not really taking any extra time by doing this.

A pro once told me that this extra time, if there is any, will be more than made up by you hitting better shots which means hitting fewer shots, and that, friends, saves time.

The key point here is that a two-part practice swing lets you find your best swing. It is certainly possible for that to happen with a juzst one practice swing, but few people are capable of doing that. Give yourself a chance to get it right by taking one two-part practice swing.