putting

Distance Control On the Green

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I was browsing through the blog just now and read a post from 2010 about finding the speed of a putt. That is, if it’s X feet to the hole, how hard do I hit it?

There was one comment in that post that not only gets you in the ball park, it puts you right next your seats, to extend the metaphor.

Go the practice green and learn how to hit putts of 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, and 40 feet. Learn to feel the stroke that puts the ball right next to the hole from each of these distances.

Take touch, which can vary from day to day, out of the picture by making the length of your stroke your sole distance generator.

If you are between distances, say 25 feet, make a practice stroke with the 20-foot stroke, another with the 30-foot stroke, and then one in between, which you will use for the putt. You would do the same if the putt is 20 feet but uphill, or 30 feet and downhill.

The more you calibrate your golf, the easier it gets.

golf swing, mental game

Relaxing the Arms

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NOTE: A Basic Golf Swing is now available that develops the comments below in full, and more, in both words and video.


I hope everybody knows by now that a relaxed golf swing generates more swing speed and thus more power than a muscular effort. Relaxation as a general rule goes only so far, though. We need to know how to apply it.

As always, The Recreational Golfer to the rescue. It’s in the arms.

When you are at address, let your arms hang down freely from the shoulders in a state of complete relaxation. So far, so good, but anybody can do that. The trick is to maintain that kind of relaxation throughout the swing.

It can be lost the instant the club gets taken away, or if it survives that, the instant the club is brought back down.

Maintain that calmness, and that relaxation, by relaxing your mind. Before you take the club away, think to yourself, “One, half, half, half…” and feel the relaxation appearing in both your mind and your body.

Then you can take the club away and let that freely hanging feeling continue throughout the swing, instead of your arms and shoulders tightening up as when the arms and hands are full of “hit.”

That will generate more speed than you thought possible.

If you ever have a chance to swing with a launch monitor, you will find that you get a higher swing speed when your arms are relaxed than if you try to muscle your way to swing speed.

One more thing. You need to swing with a tempo that lets your arms stay relaxed. If your tempo is over your red line, your relaxation will be lost.

golf swing

I Give Up On Swing Changes

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One thing the vast majority of golfers have in common is the continual search for improvement. No matter how well you play you could always do better—make your good shots great ones and make your poor shots good ones.

Even the greatest players are not immune.

“Ian Baker-Finch, who won the 1991 British Open, decided he wanted to hit his ball farther. So he changed his swing—and stopped making cuts, much less winning tournaments.” (Jim Flick, On Golf)

“[Hogan] surely knew that all serious golfers are prone to come up with what they think to be ‘the secret’ but which usually turns out to be a snare and a delusion. I know that I had many of them, some of which I briefly thought were so valuable that I would keep them strictly to myself until I had won all the tournaments and money I wanted to.” (Cary Middlecoff, The Golf Swing)

I even think if I said I can show you how to play scratch golf for the rest of your life but you have to give up sex forever, a good number of golfers we find that an easy choice to make.

I have been playing golf for over 60 years. I have a good swing. It’s reliable. It hits the ball straight. Yet I keep wanting to make it better. (What that would be, I’m not really sure.)

I tried putting more width into my swing by extending my arms and getting my wrists hinged at the end of the backswing. All that did was put me into an unfamiliar position that left me wondering, “No what do I do?”

I tried starting the forward swing with a strong movement of my left hip but all that did was leave the club playing catch-up.

I watched film videos of the best golfers tried imitating the positions they got into. And I think I did but none of that made a positive difference and most of it made things worse.

And that is barely getting started on the list of things I tried to hit the ball even better.

All along, when I would get frustrated because my Fix-of-the-Week wasn’t working, I would say to myself, “Bob, just relax, stop thinking about how you hit the ball, and put the swing it you have been using for years. Decades. The one that is You.” And I would hit the shot I had been chasing for the last half-hour.

That swing is in there, I just have to learn to stop doing things that prevent it from coming out.

Looking back on all that effort there are only two things I have ever put into my swing that are of any benefit—the emphasis on tempo and rhythm, and the emphasis on the hands leading the clubhead through impact, two things of which this blog is filled to overflowing.

I know that if I keep my swing speed under my redline, and swing the club through impact with my hands working as one unit leading the clubhead, I can play a satisfying round of golf. I’m human, so I will make bad swings from time to time. But those don’t mean I need to install a patch.

So I’m finished with swing changes. The swing I have now I wouldn’t trade for anyone else’s. I’m going to stick with it and enjoy the ride.

Now if only I could putt better…

practice

A Day at the Range – One More Thing

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In 1965, I was watching the U.S. Open on television. I remember watching Gary Player, who won the championship that year, hit a 6-iron from the fairway. What came across so clearly, to a 14 year-old kid, was that he was putting every bit of golf knowledge he had ever acquired, every practice ball had ever hit, every 6-iron he had ever hit, all that had been done so he could hit this one shot.

That is grinding. That’s how you play the game.

How do you learn to do that?

By taking every practice shot seriously. From the practice tee, to chipping, to putting, make very practice shot count. Visualize what you want to have happen, then do everything you can to make it happen.

Never touch club to ball without having that intention in mind.

This how you create a positive habit that comes out when you play.

practice

A Day at the Range

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…well, not an entire day, more like 90 minutes, but you know what I mean.

1. Swing practice. Practice hitting the ball straight. I say that because that is really all you can practice. Unless you are under the guidance of an instructor, it is very hard to practice hitting the ball farther. Most likely your attempts will take you in the opposite direction.

Missing the green to the right or left is what you want to take out of your game. If you’re always too short, solve that problem by using more club or move up a set of tees.

Start out hitting some decent 9-irons. Now use that swing with the rest of the clubs you hit to hit the ball straight. The longer shaft and lower loft will send the ball farther.

2. Practice the things that make your swing work. Practice the parts. Put them together and hit a ball. Repeat many times.

3. Save about 20 balls and practice hitting long chips/short pitches, whatever you want to call them, of 15-40 yards. This is the shot pros are insanely good at and that we are insanely bad at. And it’s not that hard to get good at it if you practice. Down in two from that distance is an attainable goal you should have for yourself.

4. Green reading. I read putts from about 30-40 feet behind the ball. That way, you can see the overall tilt of the green very easily. You can sees slopes in ground that up close looks flat. I even look at two-footers this way. You can miss two-footers if you think they all go straight in.

5. Green reading. I start by imagining where the putt would go if I hit it straight at the hole. I follow it across the green in my mind and notice how far to the left or right I think it will pass by the hole. My aim point then is that distance on the other side of the hole—if my mind’s eye sees it miss three inches to the left, I start the putt three inches to the right.

6. Watch this Phil Mickelson putting video. Was he says to do WORKS.

rhythm and tempo

Tempo, One More time

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Say you know what to do with your swing, and you know how to do it, but you still aren’t getting consistent results.

I will bet dollars to donuts that your swing is too fast.

I don’t mean to say you are swinging out of your shoes, but that your swing is too fast for you to get everything to line up.

Even though you don’t feel like you are swinging too fast, the results indicate that you might be doing just that.

So slow it down. Slow down your swing to the point where it starts working like it should.

I’m not saying swing slowly. That’s different. I’m saying to find the speed that lets your swing work, which might be slower than you are swinging now.

Not a lot slower, just slower enough.

Then one thing flows into the next, seamlessly. The parts disappear and all you have left is one swing, a swing that works.

Try it.

short game

Short Irons For Your Short Game

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Every time I go out to play golf I learn something. I hope you do, too. Today I learned some thing about pitching and long chipping.

Yesterday I was at the range with a driver and a 9-iron. I use the 9-iron to help me maintain a controlled swing with the driver. If my driver swing is getting out of hand, a few swings the 9-iron brings it back down to earth.

But I put the 9 to use, too. I hit pitches to distances where I would normally use different wedges. They worked out OK. I used a longer or shorter swing, and it was easy to get the distance right.

Today when I played I thought I would use the 9 to pitch on two shots from 89 yards and 59 yards. They worked out pretty well. I got close enough to the hole where the putt was makeable if I could putt worth a lick and the greens hadn’t been sanded a few days earlier.

Then there are those long chips from 20-30 yards off the green. I had a few of those. I thought, what the heck, let me try the short irons here, too. They worked really well. By short irons, I mean 8, 9, and pitching wedge.

The upshot is that I hit short irons to good effect in situations where I would have normally gone straight to my wedges. In addition, I found the short irons easier to hit than the wedges would have been.

Try it for yourself. See if you like the results. There’s no need to be wedded to wedges (but no need to drop them, either). Give yourself options.

rhythm and tempo

A New Look at Rhythm and Tempo

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The marriage of rhythm and tempo is the foundation of the golf swing. If this part isn’t right, nothing else matters.

Rhythm is the relative duration of different parts of the swing. Tempo refers to the overall duration of the swing.

The rhythm and tempo that suit your golf swing are personal matters, to be determined by yourself for you alone, by this simple procedure. Take a stance with your feet together, heels touching. Swing the club fully a few times. That’s your rhythm, that’s your tempo.

Now we apply them.

You know that taking the club away from a dead stop can cause you to jerk it off course. Taking the club away smoothly is not easy to do.

Many golfers solve that problem by having a forward press of some kind to give the takeaway a rhythm to play off of so the taking away movement does not begin from a dead stop.

Other golfers solve it by staying in constant motion, with their hands, their feet, all the way up to the point of takeaway. But there is a better way.

The real state of affairs is not that the body starts from a stop, but that the mind starts from a stop. Mind leads body. We get the mind moving and the body follows that movement.

We divide the rhythm of a golf stroke into four parts.

The count of One is a small movement in the mind toward the target. That gives the body the feeling that it is moving, even though it does not move.

The count of Two is a movement in the mind away from the target which the body follows by taking the club away from the ball. This real movement follows the imaginary movement of count One without a hitch.

The count of Three is a movement in the mind back toward the ball which the body again follows.

The count of Four is the mind coming to a calm repose following the completion of the swing.

Tempo is the same. It exists in your mind and gets expressed by the body. The speed of the swing in the heels-together exercise was set not by your body, but by your mind telling you this is the fastest you can swing from this position.

In your normal swing, all you have to do is repeat that tempo in your mind and your body will follow.

Little Differences That Make a Big Difference in How Well You Play