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.

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.

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.

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.

For a while I have been adrift as concerns my golf swing. I try doing all the right things, but they don’t come together to make a swing that is worth two cents for hitting a golf ball.

But I have an answer. In 2010, I made a video for this blog on learning how to swing so your hands lead the clubhead into the ball. At the time was playing single-digit golf.

So what I do when I hit golf balls like I picked up a club for the first time last week, is look at that video and do what I see.

That is the swing that has been inside me for over 60 years. Watching that swing unlocks the skill I once had and brings it all back.

That swing times at 1 second from takeaway to impact. I can’t swing that fast any more, so I have to slow down to about 1.25, but everything else I can do. (That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it really is.)

So I would recommend to you, that if you are playing well, video-tape your swing. That video will be your life-saver, when you start wandering, for the rest of your golfing life.

Do not be in a hurry to start your downswing.

Here’s something to think about and maybe try. You have heard of swing concepts based around the hands (really old guys), the arms (somewhat old guys), and the body (nearly everybody nowadays).

How about a swing based on the club? (See Ernest Jones, Manuel de la Torre, Vivien Saunders).

Watch this video of In Gee Chun’s golf swing. Start it at 2:25 to see it in super slow motion. Don’t watch her, though. Watch the club. Watch how the club is moving and you will see how a golf club is supposed to move. Go to full screen see it best.

Now figure out how to make your golf club move the same way. Hint: You don’t do that by copying how she moves. When you swing, keep your mind on your image of how her club moves.

All this has to do with applying the principle of external focus, as developed by Dr. Gabrielle Wulf.