Category Archives: rhythm and tempo

Tempo + Rhythm = Timing

In the old days when cars had carburetors, getting the ignition timing just right was critical to the engine’s performance. If the spark came to soon, the explosion collided with an upward-moving piston, making the engine work against itself. If the spark came too late, the explosion pushed on a piston well on its way down, applying power where there was no work to do. 

A golf swing is designed to put the clubhead in the right orientation at the moment it meets the ball. Given the mechanics to accomplish that, consistent tempo and rhythm ensure that happens at the right time, swing after swing.

Let’s be sure we understand the difference between the two words. Both terms originated to describe music.

Tempo is the overall speed of a musical piece. Rhythm is the varying duration of the tones being played. You can play “Stars and Stripes Forever” at two different tempos, but they will have the same rhythm.

In the same way, two golfers might move through their swing at different speeds, but the rhythm of the swing should be the same.

In December, I posted this comment on tempo, which explains the importance of swing tempo, and why it is slower than you might feel is right.

I also posted this comment on rhythm, which gives you an explicit method of finding the right tempo for your swing and what the right rhythm feels like.

Learn to groove the right rhythm first, using the procedure described in the aforementioned post. Then go to the range, with your metronome, and hit balls with that rhythm but at different tempos until you find the right one. It’s the swing that lets you hit your best shots and stay in balance throughout the swing.

Believe me, when you find it, you’ll know.

Spend a few weeks drilling this critical fundamental into your swing, and refresh yourself once a week or so during the golf season. You’ll love the difference it makes.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

A Winter Improvement Program – Tempo

A few days ago, I found this comment on an Internet golf forum: Slow down your swing and learn to live with the extra distance you get.

Exactly.

Whenever I’m at the range and I get into a patch of poor ball-striking, the first thing I do is slow down my swing. Most of the time that is all it takes to get back on track. I do the same thing after a couple of bad shots in a row on the course, too.

I hit straight again, and the ball jumps off the clubface and flies out to the full distance I expect from that club, with what seems like no effort at all.

Now I grant you that clubhead speed contributes to distance. You can’t chip the ball with a 7-iron as far as you hit it when you swing. But. . .

What is far more important to getting the distance you want, and the accuracy, is square, centered, in-line contact. You might be surprised how far you can hit the ball with just a half swing when all those factors are lined up.

Or let’s look at it from the other end. I was at the range with my son a few years ago, trying to show him why he needn’t swing so hard. I took out a mid-iron and swung as fast as I could without falling down.

Then I hit another ball using my usual swing speed. The second ball landed less than five yards short of the first ball. All that effort for just a few extra yards and the risk of a poorer shot.

There is just no percentage in swinging hard. You do want to hit hard, but that happens when you have the clubface all lined up at impact. You give yourself a much greater chance of that happening when you swing smoothly, which means slower.

Here’s one way to figure that out. When you’re on the range, assume that your task it hit one thousand golf balls without taking any big breaks. You would having to be saving your energy on every swing in order to get that done.

On the course, same thing. Assume you’re going to play 72 holes today. If you swing for the fences every time, you’ll never make it. You need to figure out how relaxed you can be when you swing the club.

Many people think that to be relaxed is to be out of power, lacking in strength. This is not true. What it means is to be using only the necessary amount of muscle power to get the job done. Just like cracking a whip, or casting a fly rod, the center must stay relaxed in order for speed to multiply outwards along the full radius of motion.

I am finding lately that the best way to monitor and keep your tempo under control is by the speed at which you rotate your hips. It should be the same speed going back and swinging through. You absolutely cannot control your tempo with your hands and arms.

Take a lot of swings without a ball, just to build up a sensitivity for the right tempo. When you do put a ball in front of you, be careful, because that by itself makes us swing faster. We don’t clobber the ball, we just swing the club.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

Five Tune-Up Tips For Your Golf Swing

These five tips are little differences that will make a big difference literally overnight in the way you swing a golf club. One hour of practice is all you need to install them in your swing. They will give you a feeling of confidence, control, and ease, three characteristics of good golf.

There is a natural balance point for every club. This is where you hold the club and it feels light, and as if it were an extension of your hands and arms. For most clubs this will be felt when you grip down about 1″-1½” from the end of the grip. When you hold the club at this point, you will feel relaxed and at ease. Swing the club the way this feeling suggests.

Take your stance slightly open to the intended line of flight. Just a little bit. No more than 5 degrees. Being slightly open will let you get your left hip cleared better, and allow you to come into the ball with the right side a little more “underneath” the ball. The first gets the club down the target line more easily, and the second gets the ball in the air more easily.

Swing the club easily. There is no need to rush going back, and certainly no rush going down. If anything, swing more slowly than you think you need to. Make it almost like an easy practice swing. The speed that such a swing will build up is greater than you feel. Combined with the design of the club, you will hit the ball a long way. If your ball-striking gets off during a round, check the speed of your swing first. Odds are that you are swinging too fast, especially at the start of the downswing.

You might have heard the phrase, “finish your backswing.” What does that mean? For every club you swing, from driver to wedge, and even when pitching, it means to finish turning your body before you start your downswing. Get the left shoulder as close to your chin as you can, and your right shoulder turned away as far as you can, without straining. It is not necessary that your arms go to a particular place, but that your turn be full. When our mind begins to wander on the course, this turns gets shorter, and our ball-striking worsens.

One difference between the professional swing and the amateur swing is that professionals do not allow the clubhead to pass their hands until after the ball has been struck. That means when the clubhead is impacting the ball, the shaft is tilted toward the target, not vertical, or worse, tilting away from the target. You ensure this happens by maintaining the wrist set you have at the top of the backswing until your hands get back down to hip height. At that point, the momentum of your swing will release the set, but continue swinging and let the hands win the race with the clubhead to get to and past the ball.

Tour Tempo

In an earlier post I talked about the importance of tempo in your golf swing. Most instruction books mention tempo, but go no further saying they’re in favor of it and end up wasting two or three pages with contentless blather that teaches you nothing useful about making good tempo part of your game.

John Novosel explains, in his book, Tour Tempo, how he discovered through video analysis of elite golfers’s swings that the golf swing consistently breaks down to 3 units of time going up, to 1 unit coming back down to impact.

He also noted that while different golfers have different swing speeds, they all swing with this same 3:1 ratio between the backswing and the forward swing.

Novosel then developed a program of instruction so golfers can learn to swing with this 3:1 characteristic. This program is contained in a disc that comes with a book that and video and audio tracks. Let me recommend this book to you with several caveats.

First, Novosel uses the word tempo to refer to two different things. Tempo is the overall pace of your swing, which varies from player to player. The 3:1 ratio he found is the rhythm of the golf swing. Because of his emphasis on it, the book should have been called Tour Rhythm

Second, the audio track ratio is 2:1, not 3:1. The sound tracks on the disc are precise 2:1 intervals. Watch the videos to learn the exercises, but don’t listen. You’ll get the wrong rhythm in your head.

Third, the sound tracks coach you through only three discreet tempos. If the tempo that feels right for you and lets you hit the ball the best is between two of these tempos, you won’t be served by using the disc as a training guide.

Keeping those things in mind, this book has had and continues to have an enormous impact on my game. I worked hard to find the tempo that is right for me and to maintain it. I hit the ball really well when I swing at my tempo with the right rhythm. When I start hitting poor shots this is the first thing I check, and getting back to my preferences is usually all it takes to start hitting the ball well again.

Building the correct rhythm and tempo into your swing, will be the best thing you ever did for your golf game.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

The Best Golf Swing Lesson I Ever Had

I have a list that I look at before I go golfing. It’s a list of things I need to take to the course. I put the list together because on different occasions I have forgotten, at least once, most of the items on it.

For example, one item is “14 clubs.” I left my putter at home once. Took it out of the bag to practice with and forgot to put it back in. I’ve left my sand wedge home. Same reason. Forgot a towel once. It’s pretty hard to hit a decent shot with dirt all over the clubface. Forgot my golf shoes several times. That wasn’t too critical, I got by with it. After a while I stopped looking at the list because I thought I had it all down. Big mistake.

I’ve been playing golf lately with my wife and sons on alternate Sundays. We go to an 18-hole executive course, bat the ball around, and have a great time together. My wife drives, I take a nap along the way, and we meet our boys there.

When we arrived at the course the last time we played, I got out of the car and walked back to the trunk to get my golf shoes. As I did, this terrible feeling came over me that I had left them at home. Sure enough, they weren’t there. The reason that I had a terrible feeling, and not just a feeling, is that the shoes I had on weren’t really shoes.

They were a pair of moccasins.

That would be OK, I thought. I could walk around the course if we didn’t go too fast. You see, I got the moccasins on sale and they were a size too big, so I can’t walk fast in them without walking right out of them. But I could manage.

So we all teed off on the first hole, which is on a hill about a hundred feet above the green. We walked down a gravel path to the ground below, and it hit me. It had been raining lately, and the ground was soaking wet. Not only that, it was early in the day and the grass was covered with dew.

I just thought if I walked carefully, my moccasins wouldn’t get too wet. Silly me.

By the eighth hole my socks were soaked through and by the twelfth the moccasins were entirely soaked. It was not comfortable. Did I mention it was less than 50 degrees out and my feet were kind of cold?

But in the midst of this travail, I found the cloud with the silver lining. Since I had no spikes on and was supported by wet socks inside wet shoes that were too big, and the ground was wet and slick, I couldn’t take my usual swipe at the ball. I had to swing . . . easy. Of course I had to, or I would have fallen down.

And you know what? Out of eighteen full swings I took that day, there were seventeen beautiful shots and one, just one, clinker. Seventeen shots that took off straight, high and with authority. Shots I might hit half the time on a good day, I was hitting every time. I had not hit the ball that well all year. All because of the easy swing which I had no choice but to make.

After the round I bought a new pair of socks from the pro shop and had a pleasant ride home with my feet jammed up against the heater vent. When we got home I put the moccasins out to dry. Mistake #2.

Wet leather shrinks when it dries out. I had forgotten this. I should have put some shoe trees in them. By Wednesday the moccasins were completely dry and one size smaller. But that’s OK, because remember how they were too big? Now they fit just right.

Somehow, even after pulling two real boners, I came out smelling like a rose. Just goes to show you. Someone up there must love me. Even so, I’m back to checking the list before I leave for the course.

The Fates forgive honest mistakes, but they don’t suffer fools, especially ones who don’t learn from the best golf swing lesson they ever had.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

The Importance of Tempo in Golf

The golf swing has many actions that all have to happen in the right sequence and need their own time to develop. The way for all that to occur is to swing with the right tempo.

Tempo is the measure of the overall speed of your swing, the elapsed time it takes to go from takeaway to impact.

Unless your tempo is the same from swing to swing, and is the right tempo for you, your technique, no matter how well you have learned it, will not be repeated consistently if your tempo is inconsistent from swing to swing or even during the swing. Parts of your swing will be rushed, some will be delayed, others might be skipped over entirely, all because you’re swinging at the wrong speed.

The tempo that suits you best is the one at which you hit the ball off the center of the clubface most frequently. This might be slower than you’re swinging now.

This tempo is not limited to your swing. Hit every shot with the same tempo, from drive to chip to putt. Using the same tempo for every shot builds in a constant that links up all your shots and has the effect that each shot reinforces the success of the others.

If you find your swing breaking down in the middle of a round, or any other shot not performing well, especially your putting, check your tempo. I would guess get it has gotten too fast. Slow it down to where it suits you, don’t speed it up going into the ball, and you should be fine again.