aim, ball position, rhythm and tempo

Three Ways to Hit Better Golf Shots Without Practicing

Leave a comment

Do you want to hit better shots without practicing? Well, maybe one small bucket of balls. Here are three things you can do that are guaranteed to improve your ball-striking in just minutes. Promise.

1. Slow down your swing. When you swing too fast and don’t give yourself a snowball’s chance in H-E-double hockey sticks to strike the ball on the center of the clubface. With your small bucket of balls, slow down your swing until you do. Then speed up gradually until you don’t. Then slow back down again until you do and resolve never to swing faster than that.

Slow.

Down.

If you aren’t hitting well on the course, try slowing down. Many times it’s the quickest fix there is.

2. Put the ball farther back in your stance. Maybe just a half inch. Many golfers play it too far forward because it feels powerful to be cranking into the ball from behind. Ease the ball back until you start making real good contact (you will). Then believe it and keep it there.

3. Aim yourself.

Aim, unfortunately, is not something you can learn once and you have it forever. It takes constant renewal. Go through this process before you hit practice balls at the range or at the course. Every time.

equipment

Why I Have Blades in My Bag

1 Comment

Blades vs. cavity backs=”game improvement” irons.

There is an article on the GolfWRX site by Terry Kohler about the matter. I was going to write a response, but some guy in the Comments column beat me to it.

What he said is exactly my story. Every word. EVERY WORD.

“I have found that my scores with blade irons are the same or better as cavity backs. Could be because I learned to play with blades nearly 60 years ago because that was my only option. Could be that they just plain look better to my eye because of that old historical tie. Or it could be because I get sloppy with a cavity back relying on that supposed forgiveness. So at this point I simply select a blade because it makes me happy. It makes me think about all the things I need to do to hit a pure shot, and when I don’t I only blame myself. Handicap 9.”

As you know, I play Hogans. Either 1999 Apex or 1989 Apex Red Line.

golf swing

How the Arms Swing the Golf Club

1 Comment

There are many ways to swing a golf club, many movements that can be made to work. Some things that are not optional if a swing is to be maximally efficient. Swinging the arms the right way is one of them.

The arms swing, and they swing from the shoulders. That fact is not as obvious as it sounds.

Stand up and bend over a bit so your arms hang down in front of you. Gently swing them from side to side. Notice how they move freely inside the shoulder joint. That is how arms are designed to move.

Pick up a golf club. Swing it back and forth from about 3:00 to 9:00 while concentrating on the arms moving freely in the shoulder joint like they just did. Your body needs to turn some, too, so let it.

When this exercise gets easy and familiar, move on to making full swings, back and forth without stopping, with the arms swinging freely in this way.

The golf swing is made of the arms swinging, the body turning. This is how the arms swing.

commentary

The USGA’s Distance Insights Report

Leave a comment

After years of hand-wringing about how far touring pros are hitting the ball, the USGA s**t has finally hit the fan.

Their report, including recommendations, is titled Distance Insights Report and is available here as a 102-page pdf.

The Report has six chapters:
1. Scope
2. The evolution of hitting distances
3. The factors which impact hitting distances
4. Analysis of golf course lengths
5. Impact of increase in hitting distance and golf course lengths
6. Golf stakeholder perspectives and opinions on hitting distances

If you don’t have anything to do, you might want to read it. It really is pretty interesting, especially chapters 2-5.

After having assembled all their data, what does the USGA now want to do about it? Mainly, tweak equipment. For whom?

The answer depends on where you think the problem lies. Believe it or not, when stakeholders were asked, If distance is a problem, who [sic] is it a problem for? five percent of the respondents said it is only a problem for recreational players.

When comes the day that I can drive the ball 280 with one hand, I’ll agree.

There is even talk of bifurcation of the rules, which the UGSA likens to asking them all to drink a quart of rat poison, though there is baseball and softball, tackle football and touch/flag football, pro ice hockey and amateur no-checking ice hockey. Why not golf?

Rory McIlroy put matters into perspective a few days ago, saying that distance is a problem for only about 0.1 percent of golfers in the world. He said the solution is not to tweak equipment, which OEMs can find a way around, but to make golf courses harder for them.

The USGA says it is doing this because it says it wants to protect the game. But golf is not the professional game. Golf is way bigger than the professional game. It’s our game and if it needs needs protecting, it’s not from how far you or I hit the ball.

I feel like I’ve just said the same thing three times. If distance is a problem, it’s a problem because of and for Rory and Bryson and Dustin, not you or me.

So enough ranting. What to do? The Recreational Golfer knows exactly what to do.

Long hitters on Tour bomb it because if the ball ends up in the rough, even thick rough, they can still get par and birdie isn’t out of the question. The solution is to line each side of the fairway from 310-350 yards not with thick rough, but with a bed of pea gravel ten yards wide and two inches deep. If they figure out how to hit out of that, we can change it to 3/4 minus.

You have to think outside the box.

health

Does Playing Golf Prolong Your Life?

1 Comment

A recent study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports concluded that playing golf regularly may increase your life expectancy by five years.

Actually, it’s not a recent article, it came out in 2008. But it caught someone’s attention recently.

Unfortunately, the full article is available only for a price, and you can buy access if you want to here.

The study’s abstract is here, but you have to have some experience reading abstracts to make sense of it.

You can find a discussion of the article here, and that should be all you really need to read.

The study did mention the full effect of prolonging life occurs in low handicap golfers, which should give all of us a new incentive to get better.

So you see, all long I have been adding add years to your life and you never knew it.

You’re welcome! Now start practicing!

commentary

Sorenstam and Player Accept Presidential Medal of Freedom

2 Comments

In a ceremony yesterday at the White House, Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump in a private, secret ceremony.

How this is even possible given the events of the previous day is almost impossible to understand.

Maybe you could say that both of the recipients are foreign-born (Sorenstam is a naturalized American citizen) so the assault of the United States Capitol, fomented by the very president they would be seeing, doesn’t register the way it otherwise might.

Maybe they could say, like Justin Rose said when he went to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi, “I’m not a politician.”

We don’t know yet why they went to the White House.

But whatever excuse they come up with won’t be good enough. These two people have blackened their reputation and their legacy in my eyes forever.

What they did was inexcusable. Period.

mental game

The Hardest Thing to Do in Golf

Leave a comment

Golf is hard. Not because the technique is hard to learn, though that does take some work.

It’s that even after you have learned the technique and gotten pretty good at it, you still have something left over to deal with.

The ball.

The ball just sits there, waiting for you to hit it, mocking your technique because technique is one thing, but can you do it when it counts is another.

And the ball makes you think you can’t do it.

Not letting the ball make you lose confidence in your ability is the hardest thing to do golf.

We all have very good air swings. We do. Put that swing on a ball and away it goes. But when there really is a ball in front of you, it gets tricky.

You can relate to the ball that way, and a lot of golfers do.

I read a long time ago about a teaching pro who would glue a piece of string to a golf ball. He would get down on the ground, and ask his student to hit the ball.

Every now and then the pro would pull on the string at just the right moment, when the student’s swing was committed to hitting the ball, to yank the ball away.

This was his way of teaching his students not to get caught up in hitting the ball, but rather to just swing the club, because they never knew when there was going to be ball there or not, and when the ball did get yanked away it didn’t make any difference because the job was to swing the club, not hit the ball.

Great for the range, but that wouldn’t make sense on the course. The solution is to find a way to turn a negative into a positive.

Hitting a golf ball isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Life throws you much bigger problems and if you have been around the block a few times you know what I mean.

The way you get through those times is to find a way to live through that negative time without having that negativity affect the way you think and speak and act.

Not easy.

So let’s start small. With a golf ball. Find a way to turn doubt and worry into confidence.

My way is to think of the club and the ball as my partners and the three of us are going to hit the ball where it needs to go this time.

Sound silly? Yes, but it’s easier said than done. It requires changing a mental habit and that takes honest work.

The process you go though to not be intimidated by the ball, and actually welcome the chance to hit it straight and far, is the same process that you need to go through when something really important comes your way and you have to find a way to perform.

I’ll bet when you started reading this post you didn’t think it was going to turn in to a life lesson. But, take ’em where you get ’em.

And along the way you’ll become a better golfer. Can’t say no to that!

golf swing

The Meaning of External Focus in Golf

3 Comments

The concept of external focus, that is, putting your mind on what the club is doing rather than what you are doing, pays off brilliantly when applied to golf.

I have worked with it for several years and finally spent last summer hitting balls two and three times a day to work it into my golf swing for good.

It makes things so much easier, and so much better.

But it is important that you understand what the concept really means. This video, featuring Vivien Saunders, a champion golfer and legendary teacher from England, explains it.

Watch it several times. She makes key points, but says them only once. The more times you watch it, the more you will understand what she is really telling us.

driver

Nailing Your Driver

Leave a comment

There is an easy way to hit the ball square in the center of the clubface with your driver. Would you like to know what it is?

No changes in your physical technique are required. It’s strictly in your mind.

Your mind, that is, your unconscious mind, is very good at understanding orders and seeing to it that your body carries them out.

To do what I proposed, as you stand at address, and before you take the club back, think to yourself, “center hit.”

Then swing the club and stay out of its way. Anything your conscious mind adds to the swing to help make that center hit happen only “fouls” it up.

It will take some practice, because you have to teach your unconscious mind what “center hit” means.

But it shouldn’t be too long before it starts working.

You’re welcome!

takeaway

Practice Your Takeaway

1 Comment

Everything that wants a good ending needs a good start.

Arnold Palmer once said that if you take the club back the right way for the first eighteen inches, not much else can go wrong after that.

Well, maybe if you’re Arnold Palmer, but the importance of a good takeaway cannot be ignored. A mistake here can ruin a swing that has barely begun.

A good takeaway has these characteristics:

  • The club starts back slowly. A golf swing is not a drag race.
  • The club goes straight back for the first foot.
  • The clubface stays square to the clubpath.
  • No tension enters your body, anywhere.

Get a club, set up, and practice this over and over and over this winter. Every day. Just the first two feet or so of your swing.

You cannot practice this too much, and you cannot practice anything that will have a bigger payoff.

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