[August 2019. I’m keeping this post here for historical purposes, but you are better off reading The Hands Lead the Clubhead – IV.]

In their book, How to Become a Complete Golfer, Bob Toski and Jim Flick tell this story:

“There was once a pupil at our golf schools who, when he was instructed to release the clubhead through the ball, threw the whole club down the practice range. So we have to be very careful to define what we mean by release.”

Well, releasing the club is one thought, but today’s thought is throwing the club and it isn’t a bad idea. Or, at least, swinging as if that is what you were going to do, but not letting go of the club.

This does four things for you:

1. It gets you off your trailing side and onto the leading side during the forward swing,

2. It guarantees the hands will lead the clubhead into the ball,

3. It gets your mind off hitting the ball and puts it on swinging the club,

4. And because of that, it evens out your rhythm and tempo.

Those are four very good things to have built into your swing because they are the solutions to four prevalent swing problems.

If you would like to give this a try, it is easiest to do at first with a driver swinging at a ball on a tee. You don’t want the ground in the way on this one right now.

The idea is to feel like the function of the forward swing is to throw the club directly at your target downrange, but without actually doing it. Get the feeling of a smooth throwing motion and then try hitting a few balls.

Shawn Clement has a really good, and short (for him) video on this very idea.

So try it out. It’s a different way of thinking about how to swing the club, and maybe something will click for you.

I was talking with my son last week about golf and his problem hitting the ball straight.

My son said he could hit the ball straight sometimes, but too often hit a huge banana slice, and the conversation went from there straight into talking about lag.

Lag is the Holy Grail of recreational golf. The more the better. Get that clubhead way behind you and whip it into the ball and your tee shot will go for miles.

I’m a right-to-left player, and when I hit a huge slice it’s because I forget myself and do what I just described. Only when I do it, my body gets way ahead of my hands and arms and the clubhead gets left too far behind. It has no chance to square up and comes into the ball wide open. Hello, adjoining fairway.

You see, when you TRY to create lag, creating it artificially, bad things can happen.

Lag is created by the hinging of your wrists, and the flexibility of your wrists in the process.

You want all the lag you can get at the top of the backswing, and maybe starting down. But once your hands get to about hip height on the way into the ball, the lag starts disappearing NATURALLY and the hands lead the clubhead by a few inches.

Trying to hold on to your lag for too long doesn’t work.

Many of today’s touring pros have with their body way out in front at impact, but they get away with it, because they don’t out-swing their arms. We’re not them and we can’t get away with it.

Forget about lag. Just pretend you never heard the word. If you hit the ball with the hands leading the clubhead in the way this drill teaches you , you will have all the lag you need and can use.

This conversation occurred between me and my wife after I got back from hitting a golf ball around the big field near my house with a 6-iron.

Me: I learned something today, for the umpteenth time, and maybe this time I’ll remember it. But I’m never sure.

Wife: And what would that be?

Me: We, and by that I mean every golfer living, wants to hit the ball a long way.

Wife: What’s wrong with that? I would want to do that if I played golf. Which I don’t.

Me: But which you will someday, knock on wood. The thing is, we keep thinking to hit the ball far, we have to hit hard. That means swing hard. In reality, all we have to do is put a swing on the ball, with the distance the designer built into the club, and we get all the distance we need.

Wife: In other words, stop trying so hard to make it happen.

Me: Yep.

Wife: And you’re still learning this after having played golf for how long?

Me: Sixty years this coming June, but that’s beside the point. It just seems natural to want to hit hard, We try not to, but we can’t help ourselves. It’s like we don’t trust the swing and the club to get the job done. It’s so effortless when you do it right that we really can’t believe it.

Wife: So why don’t you just say to yourself you’re going to swing easier, then do that?

Me: I do. And I suppose other golfers do, too. I take the club back easy, but when I finish my backswing and am about to start the club forward, I think, “HIT THE BALL!” and all my self-restraint goes out the window.

Wife: Maybe you could tell yourself something at that point other than “Hit the ball.”

Me: That’s right, and that’s what I did. Right before I started the club forward, I said to myself, “Center of the clubface.” Or rather, I thought that, because it’s quicker to think that than to say it. But it worked out the same. In this shorthand way, I replaced one conscious thought with a different conscious thought. You have to be thinking about something, and it’s just as easy to think about the right thing as it is the wrong thing. What this did is prevent me from adding that little extra something that doesn’t add, but subtracts. Now my swing was slower, but it wasn’t deliberately slow. I let my unconscious mind take over and it made me swing only so fast that I would be able to get that center hit, which is slower than my “hit” instinct wants. But, boy, did it work. Straight, great ball flight, and all the distance I want out of my 6-iron. It turns a power swing into a finesse swing that has power.

Wife: So you finally have it figured out? This time for sure?

Me: Yes, at least until the next time I hit golf balls. When I’ll have to “discover” this all over again. And I’ll come home and tell you all about it like it’s the first time. Again.

[August 2019. Actually, there are three. See My Conception of Golf Technique.]

I looked over my blog, which I have been posting to more than weekly since early 2009.  There are 152 posts about the golf swing.  I’m going to give you one more.

This post is something of a distillation of two principles I have written about many times.

It contains all the advice you will ever need about your golf swing.  If you learn to do these two things, your golf swing will transform itself and you will move to a new level of play.  I guarantee it.

First, slow down your swing.  I say in my Living Golf Book that “Your optimum tempo is the fastest you can swing through impact and consistently hit solid shots off the center of the clubface.”   That’s very likely slower than you’re swinging now.

By “consistently” I mean three out of five times.  We don’t need perfection.  But right now I would be surprised if you’re doing that three out of ten times.

The way you achieve this is to slow down your swing.  Try swinging at thirty percent of your normal speed.  You should start connecting with the center of the clubface and hitting brilliant shots with startling frequency.

Now move up a bit to maybe fifty percent of your normal swing speed.  Are you still connecting?   Three out of five times?  If so, go to seventy percent.  If there’s a drop off in shot quality, resist the urge to figure out how to hit the center at seventy percent.  Go back to the swing speed at which you found your greatest success and stay there.

Go back to the place where you make beautiful contact and hit the ball straighter, much more often, without losing any appreciable distance.

Second, swing so your hands get back to the ball before the clubhead does.  Your hands lead the clubhead.  No good golfer fails to do this. No bad golfer ever does it.

Learn how to do this by making half swings with a sand wedge, with only your left hand on the handle (right hand if you play left-handed).  That will give you the feeling of what your left hand and wrist are supposed to be doing as they swing through impact.  Practice this over and over.

Combined with your slower swing, it will be easy to keep doing this when you put both hands on the club.

That’s it:
Slow down your swing to get centered hits
Have your hands lead the clubhead into the ball

Work on these two things.  Don’t get distracted by anything else. Make them your winter golf swing workout.

Now, I didn’t make all this up in my backyard this morning.  You can read about these two things all over the place.  I’ve been talking about these two points for years on this blog.

Teaching professionals have their own ideas about a lot of things, but no teaching professional will disagree with these two.  They might be the only swing universals there are.

And when I get it through my thick head to actually do them they actually work.

My purpose in writing this blog is to point you in the right direction.  I cannot point you in a better direction than I have today.

Several weeks ago I described the golf swing in two pieces.  I said if I could describe the swing in one piece I’d let you know.  Well, here it is.

The title of this post is it: two turns and a swish, credited to legendary teacher John Jacobs.

But what does that phrase mean?  That part isn’t so easy.  From Jacobs we go to Jim Flick and his book with the most to-the-point title ever, On Golf.

In this book, Flick makes the clear statement that the golf swing is composed of turning motions and swinging motions.  They are different, and are performed by different parts of the body.  Some parts turn, other parts swing.

The turning elements are the shoulders, torso, hips, legs, knees, and feet.

The swinging elements are the club, the mind, the fingers and hands, the wrists, the forearms, the elbows, and the upper arms and shoulder sockets (in which the upper arms turn).

He makes the key point that the turning elements support and respond to the swinging elements.  Swinging comes first, turning comes second.

Let’s move to Manuel de la Torre, who refines this concept in his book, Understanding the Golf Swing.  He says (writing in broad terms) the hands produce the backswing, and the arms produce the forward swing.

On that second point, he uses the anatomical definition of the arm, which is the upper limb from the elbow to the shoulder.  The limb from the elbow to the wrist is the forearm, and that is not used to produce the forward swing.

How do you integrate these two motions, the turn and the swing?  For the recreational golfer, Flick advises “to let his feet and legs support him and move in response to the swing.” (I’ll assume that applies to women, too.)

de la Torre says the body turn takes place in response to the swing, and says nothing more about it.  As far as the weight shift goes, which you hear about so much, the swing will produce it.

Both instructors are in firm agreement that the underlying concept in all of this is that what is swung is the club, not any body part.  The club.

Let me throw in one idea that helps keep the swing and the turn working together.  Flick calls it, “letting the air out.”  The first move forward with the arms is a gravity move.  The arms begin to drop in response to the pull of gravity.  “Tour players will tell you they want to soften their arms precisely at the change of direction.”

Centrifugal force will build up the necessary speed by the moment of impact.  By not forcing things at this critical instant, the swinging and turning elements integrate.

So there you have it: two turns and a swish (swing).  Part of the body turns, part of it swings.  Get those two parts straightened out and you’re on your way to hitting beautiful golf shots.

The finish of the golf swing is not just a position we arrive when the swing is over.  It embodies the entire swing.

The swing is the sum of its parts.  All the parts must be linked up together, as Percy Bloomer described it, so the golfer can proceed to the finish, and it is by swinging to the finish that the parts are linked up.

What I mean by this is understanding that what happens after the ball is struck counts as much as everything you did beforehand.  You hit the ball with all of your swing.

Instructors have lately emphasized impact as the most important phase of the swing, and they are right, in a way.  That is when the ball is struck, and how the strike turns out is everything.

But it will not turn out well if the pursuit of a good strike makes the activity of the swing end at impact.

The direct pursuit of a good strike leads to end-gaining*, inconsistent ball-striking, and the inability to improve.  A good strike is the residue of a good swing, from start to end.

I know you wish you had a dollar for every time you have heard, “It’s a swing, not a hit.” (It used to be in dime, but inflation, you know.)

To become the player you want to be you need to internalize that maxim.  Getting an A on the written test doesn’t count.  To play good golf you need to get A on the practical exam.

Train yourself, and this is a mental exercise, by swinging without the ball in front of you, over and over, not thinking of any mechanics, nor of a backswing and a forward swing, or hitting an imaginary ball, but rather of one motion that connects the start (address) with the end (finish).

One motion, over over, from the start to end.

When there is a ball in front of you, here’s a reminder (not a swing thought).  As you’re about to take the club away, you usually have a feeling of hitting the ball.  Replace that with a feeling of swinging the club.  Actually feel the entire swing, especially the part that sails through the ball and continues to the finish.  Now you can go.

If you’re an OK golfer and want to become a good golfer you need a new conception of the golf swing.  Ending your golfing activity at the finish, using the entire swing to hit the ball, is that conception.

*The natural act of doing what seems obvious to achieve a result instead of doing what is right to achieve that result.

I have a video on YouTube that talks about the straight left arm–what that term really means. It is by far the most popular of all my videos for some reason.

It’s really good advice to keep your left arm straight, because if you bend your elbow you introduce another lever into your swing. Two levers, the wrist and the shoulder, are enough. No need to add a third.

But I found out a few days ago that’s exactly what I do when I’m swinging at my best. I bend my left elbow.

For years, the major thrust of all my personal golf swing research has been to figure out how to keep the clubface square from takeaway to impact. It’s pretty hard to do, because the forearms can rotate too much or not enough, and the wrists can do almost anything. Getting these two to behave isn’t easy.

And then there’s who knows what else.

When I was playing very well, back in 2011 before things started happening (long-time readers know what they are), I always had this feeling at the tail end of my backswing that my wrists were bending a bit extra because of the momentum of the swing.

They seemed to always get back into line in the forward swing, though, because one of the hallmarks of my game was and still is that I hit the ball very straight.

But I never felt that extra bending of my wrists was the right thing to be happening, so I tried hard to eliminate it by deliberately doing things to prevent the bending feeling from coming up.

The problem was, those corrections didn’t improve matters, and they turned a free and easy swing into a lot of work.

So in the past few months I decided to go look for that swing feeling and get it back again. I found it last week, and when I did I quickly realized I had been all wrong all this time.

It wasn’t my wrists that were bending. It was my left elbow.

My left shoulder isn’t flexible enough to get my hands to where the momentum of my backswing wants to take them, so my elbow bends to get them there. The feeling in my wrists is caused by the weight of the club, not by any extraneous movement in them.

On the forward swing, the elbow straightens out again and I’m still in business with a square clubface.

I’m going on about this because it is a perfect example of what I wrote about a few weeks ago . Something so fundamental as a straight left arm is something I do NOT do, and when I try to do it, I don’t hit the ball well. That swing is not ME.

Gary Player once said something along the lines of, “Name me any swing fundamental and I’ll show you a championship golfer who doesn’t do it.”

I doubt Player had me in mind when he said that, but it’s true. Fundamentals get you in the ball park, but if they mess you up, modify them until your swing is YOU.

There is only one way for you to swing a golf club, and that is YOUR way.