Last fall I wrote about the whoosh–the sound the clubhead makes when you swing it fast. I want to review that, and add on another comment.

Swing a golf club, maybe a 5-iron or longer, without a ball in front of you. Listen for the whoosh. That’s the sound of your club travelling at its maximum speed.

The whoosh gives you an indication of what your clubhead speed is. While you won’t get a precise measurement, obviously, we can say that the higher the pitch, the faster the club is travelling.

And more speed is always better. The Internet is full of pages, and YouTube if full of videos, about how to increase your clubhead speed. But many of them fail to make the most important point. Your maximum clubhead speed has to appear at the right moment. Otherwise, it’s no good.

You should hear the whoosh at or just past where a ball would be. If you hear it before the clubhead gets to the ball, you are releasing the club too early and using up your clubhead speed before you really need it.

Most likely, if that is the case, you’re letting go of the angle between your left forearm and the clubshaft too soon on the downswing. Play with holding on to that angle a little bit longer until you hear the whoosh placed directly in front of you.

This shouldn’t be a big adjustment to make. Just be sure you’re only adjusting your release and not trying to force this to happen. Light grip pressure will help, too.

Be careful, though. It is entirely possible to give up your angle too early and still place the whoosh in the right spot. This is a two-part exercise: retaining the angle and placing the whoosh.

And don’t go expecting miracles once you’ve accomplished it. You only hear, “I tried this and now I hit my drives 40 yards longer,” when somebody is trying to sell you something. If you get 7-10 more yards out of this, you’ve done the job.

It is said that only two golfers have ever owned their swing — Ben Hogan and Moe Norman. Actually, Lee Trevino had a pretty good idea what he was doing, as did Sam Snead, Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Bruce Lieztke, and about a hundred other players I could name.

You can own your swing, too. A – it’s not that hard to do, and B – you need to do it to play consistent golf.

By owning your swing, I don’t mean you know what you’re doing down to the gnat’s eyelash. I do mean that when you’re not striking the ball well, you have some checkpoints you can review to get back on track.

The Six Fundamentals are my checkpoints. They don’t have to be yours, but you should know something about your swing along the order of, “I forgot to do this,” and when you get back to doing “this”, the problem is solved.

The goal is to bring the club into the ball on a path toward the target, with the clubface square to that path, on the proper trajectory, and making contact on the center of the clubface.

Everything you do contributes to all that happening, or not. So you have to investigate how to do those four things, one at a time, and also what you do that gets in the way of doing those things.

This takes careful study. It means breaking down your swing into parts that move the club correctly and learning what the feeling of those correct movements are.

Then you develop your own keys — the checkpoints you have to hit to make it all work.

Don’t expect to have this figured out in a few weeks. It might take a lot longer than that, and a few lessons along the way won’t hurt.

But it’s like this. If you hit a really good shot and you can’t explain to yourself how it happened, you have some work to do. And I know you can do it.

I didn’t post last Sunday, like I usually do, because I could’t think of anything to say. While not having anything to say doesn’t stop some people from saying it anyway, I’m not one of those.

I got out a golf book this morning and started reading through it to see if I could find some inspiration. Which I did. Here are a couple of things that crossed my mind.

1. When you start the club back away from the ball, do so slowly at first, and smoothly. Do not snatch it away. The reasons are, one, that if you take the club back too quickly, you can pull it off the desired plane. Then you have to get it back on plane sometime before you hit the ball, which complicates the swing unnecessarily. And if you aren’t aware that you’re off plane, well, good luck.

The other reason is that jerking the club away makes you reflexively tighten your grip. That puts tension in your swing from the very start which will only build as the swing progresses — something you do not want to happen.

2. Everybody has their own swing. It is based on your strength, your flexibility, your athleticism, your physique, and your basic conception of how to swing a stick to hit a ball. Because of these factors, there are things about your swing that are less than ideal but which you cannot change. These are not swing flaws, these are just you.

There are, however, mistakes you can be making that you don’t have to. They need to be corrected, and they can be. Your improvement will accelerate when you have figured out the difference between your natural tendencies and your plain old errors. Then you can fix what can be fixed and leave what cannot be fixed, alone.