short game

The Short Game in One Rule

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The Tour golfers you see on TV have marvelous short games. Ridiculous short games, actually. There’s no way anybody can be that good. But they are, and they’re all that good.

You’re not, and you probably never will be. That’s OK. You don‘t have hours daily to devote to the short game.

What you can do is learn some basic shots that do one thing: get the ball on the green in one shot.

This is the one rule, and the only rule, of the short game for recreational golfers. Don’t get cute. Just get the ball on the green so you can start putting.

Once you’re putting, you might sink the first one and get an up and down. If not, you’re almost assuredly going get down in two putts, which closes out the hole.

I would guess that were you make doubles and triples is not in getting the ball up to the green, but from around the green. It’s when it takes you four (or five!) shots to get the ball in the hole from under 50 yards that you rack up the big number.

All you have to do that is to learn a basic pitch, a half-pitch, and a running chip, to get the ball on the green from this difficult range.

Look. The green looks small from a distance away, but once you get on it you see how big of a target it really is. It’s huge! How can you miss?

Here is how you hit the green with these little shots and keep the ball on. Plan to have the ball land about fifteen feet past the front of the green.

That gives you enough room for error so that if you chunk the shot a little bit (but see this post on how not to) your ball will still land on the putting surface.

The ball will run out, and if the pin is in back, that’s what you want. If the pin is in front, you’ll have an approach putt coming back.

In fact, here’s how to think about the pin. Unless the green is really deep, pay no attention to where it is, front to back. Play for the ball to land well on the green and run where it may.

Side to side, hit the ball in its general direction, but don’t zero in on it if that constricts your landing area. You want to be hitting at a fat part of the green.

Once you’re good enough to get your first short shot in the green every time, then you can start zeroing in on the pin.

drills

An Invaluable Swing Exercise

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When you go to the driving range, go there to work on something in particular. Don’t go just to hit golf balls.

The next time you go, try an exercise to learn what I believe to be the most valuable swing technique you can have: your hands lead the clubhead into the ball.

This video shows you what I mean, and gives you a drill to learn the rudiments of the motion.

Assuming you’ve learned that, here is a practical exercise for teaching yourself how to install that movement throughout your bag.

Go to the range with just two clubs, your driver and your 8-iron.

Warm up, then hit two or three balls with your 8-iron. The point is to feel the hands leading the clubhead into impact. Feel that your hands are dragging the clubhead through the ball.

I use the word drag advisedly, as it is not quite the right word, but you will get the feeling right if you regard the dragging as a movment that flows smoothly and with speed as a natural continuation of the swing movements that precede it.

Now take your your driver and hit one (1) ball with it, using the same swing feeling that you had with your 8-iron.

Maybe the swing will be bigger, but don’t put any more “hit” into it, or be concerned at all about how far the ball goes. The point here is to learn a swing detail with this club: the hands lead the clubhead into impact.

Put your driver down and hit another 8-iron shot, using an easy swing in which the hands lead the clubhead. Switch to your driver again and copy that 8-iron swing, with the same feeling. One shot.

Keep switching back and forth, one shot with each club, each swing being a copy of the other, each swing focusing solely on the hands leading the clubhead through impact.

By the middle of the bucket, you should be hitting brilliant shots with each club, seemingly without effort. That will do two things for you.

First, it will provide you with convincing evidence that this approach is right. Second, it will provide you with repetitions of a new habit in replace of an old one.

As well, it would not hurt at all to use this exercise as the centerpiece of your pre-round warm-up.

rhythm and tempo

Golf Swing Rhythm Illustrated

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Here’s one more way of looking at it. Literally.

Swingrhythm

This is Bobby Jones’s swing, with a tracer on the clubhead. The points of the swing rhythm are marked.

1 is the instant of takeaway. 2, 3, and 4 are the backswing, 4 being the end of it. 5 is impact.

Again, it looks like you would have to rush to get back to the ball in one count over the same distance it took you three counts in the backswing.

But you don’t.

Try it.

fundamentals

The Golf Club and the Japanese Sword

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For almost 35 years, I have studied and taught the martial art of Ki-Aikido. Part of the advanced training involves a wooden sword called a bokken. We use the sword to learn how to apply the principles of the art while holding an object (although there is lot to be said about what that statement really means).

What applies to the bokken applies to a golf club.

Of the several principles for using the sword is always to move the sword from its tip. Instead of moving the sword from our hands, we think all the way out to the tip, and move that.

The reasons why are too involved to go into here, but that is the principle that I want to talk about in relation to a golf club.

When we move the golf club, we want to move it from the tip as well. Percy Boomer says in his important book, On Learning Golf, “…our strivings to attain a good swing will have been largely in vain unless at the end we have learned to feel our clubhead.”

We can refine that statement by saying not the entire clubhead but the tip of the golf club, which is on the clubhead. That tip is the sole of the clubhead.

A few week ago I posted an essay on how to stop chunking chip shots. The idea was not to think, “Hit the ball,” but, “Brush the grass.” Well, what is it you brush the grass with? The sole of the clubhead. The tip.

Now the tip of a sword is small and pointy. The tip (sole) of a golf club is broad, long, and flat. But it is a tip in its own way.

You always read, correctly, to hit the ball first and the ground second. You hit the ball with the clubface. What do you hit the ground with? Not the leading edge of the sole, as might seem obvious, but the entire sole.

You control the sword by controlling the tip. It’s the same with a golf club. When the sole goes to the right place, the rest of the club will too. After all, they’re attached!

They key to consistent ball striking is to hit the ball on the center of the clubface every time. We control that in large by delivering the sole of the club to the ground in the same way every time.

You might spend some time working with chips, short pitches, longer pitches, and moving up to a full swing with this thought in mind — swing the sole of the club to a consistent point with each swing. Everything else will fall into place.

mental game

The Only Swing Thought You Need

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I haven’t said much about this recently, but those of you who have read my books and followed my blog for enough time know that I am not at all a fan of swing thoughts. Instead of helping us, they cause us to doubt ourselves at a time when the completest confidence is needed.

But still, your mind is awake and has to be thinking about something. You can’t turn it off.

There is one, and only one, thing that should be on your mind while you’re hitting a golf ball, from drive to putt. I go into length about it in my book, The Golfing Self, but I’ll give you its flavor in this post.

When your mind is calm, it is moving very rapidly. A spinning top or a gyroscope achieve their stability by the speed they rotate. When they slow down and stop, their stability vanishes.

Our mind is the same. The faster our mind moves, the more stable it is. This should not be confused with the mind jumping from this to that at breakneck speed. That state of mind is definitely unstable.

What I mean is the mind is stable when it is dynamic and has a sense of movment so rapid that the feeling of movement turns into one of great calm, but with this solid foundation.

Before your shot, you evaluate your options, pick one, pull a club, take a practice swing, and step into your stance. At this point, everything you need to know for the shot has been dialed in. You don’t have to think about it any more.

What you do need to think about is the feeling of calmness based on the infinitely rapid movment of your mind. Feel that and maintain that feeling without interruption from before takeaway all the way through the finish.

If you can learn to do that, I guarantee your shotmaking will be the best it can be because doubt has no room to enter your mind and do its damage.

Work on hitting different shots. You need them to get the ball around the course, obviously.

But work on your mental game, as well. Work on this one thing. Whenever you hit a ball, using any kind of stroke, get your mind moving before you take the club away and maintain that feeling all the way to the completion of the stroke.

rhythm and tempo

Advanced Tempo and Rhythm in Golf

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This is my third post on rhythm and tempo in a month. Maybe you think I’m obsessing on his subject. I’m not. It‘s that important and it can make such a big change if you get it right.

A month ago, I talked about the meaning of tempo and rhythm, and went into greater detail two weeks ago. Nothing I said in those posts needs to be changed. But there was something I left out. Here it is now.

This 3:1 rhythm looks like a mechanical formula, but it is anything but that. There is a personal dimension to this rhythm, which you must figure out for yourself in order to make it work for you.

Let me give you an example from music, where the notion of rhythm comes from.

Most of you have heard classical, orchestral music. Most of you as well have heard jazz. The rules of rhythm are the same for each genre. The expression of rhythm is quite different in each, though. One swings, the other doesn’t.

To play jazz in an orchestral style would fail. So would trying to play orchestral music in a jazz idiom.

We all have our own feeling for rhythm built into the way we think and thus the way we move.

For example, some people perform their backswing in strict time, at a steady pace from start to finish. Other people might accelerate a bit as the backswing develops.

Some people might move from the backswing to the downswing without pause. Others would allow the backswing to come to a brief rest before it falls into the downswing.

In other words, the 3:1 rhythm does not confine your swing to one mechanical style. As long as you stay within that external framework, you can, and should, express it in your own way.

A good way to discover your expression is to swing in the air, about halfway between a horizontal plane, like baseball players do, and near vertical, like golfers do. Split the difference. Swing back and forth at that middling angle looking for the way of expressing the 3:1 rhythm in a movement that feels right for you.

I know you’ll find it, along with a tempo that’s comfortable.

Now try hitting a few golf balls. You might find it to the the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

chipping

Stop Chunking Chip Shots

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I don’t think anyone will disagree that the most maddening mistake in golf is to chunk a simple greenside chip shot. Just a little swing with a 9-iron, the hole is about 40 feet away, couldn’t be easier, and you lay up sod three inches behind the ball. #@9!!

Even the pros do this (Hunter Mahan in the 2010 Ryder Cup) though they do it much less often than we do. Here’s how to reduce chunking to a once-in-a-blue-moon mistake — instead of something you worry about every time you chip.

Put your mind on the sole of the club, from the moment of takeaway and through contact. Just think of where the sole is and slide it across the top of the grass when it gets to where the ball is. That’s how you get the club to brush the grass the same way every time when you make practice strokes.

Forget about the ball, forget about where you want the ball to go. Think only of sliding the sole across the grass.

I figured this out at the range a few weeks ago. Whenever I go to the range I am always looking for ways to make 2 and 2 equal four. The hard part is in realizing that 2 and 2 are right there in front of you so you can put them together.

My practice strokes throughout the session had all been identical. I mean identical. I practice this shot a lot, so I know what I’m doing. Each time, the sole of the club brushed top of the grass in the same place and at the same depth. What more needs to be right?

But sometimes whenever I moved on to hit the actual chip, I started thinking, “Hit the ball,” and my stroke would change, and sometimes I would hit a little behind the ball. It took me a while to figure out how to correct that.

I thought that if I stayed with my practice stroke and played “Brush the grass” instead of “Hit the ball,” I would hit these beautiful chips, one after the other, and chunking was never an issue. And that’s exactly how it worked out.

You can use this thought any time you’re hitting a short game shot, from the fairway, greenside, or even from a bunker.

It’s the sole that matters.

[Update] A few years after I posted this idea, I was reading through Seve Ballesteros’s comprehensive instruction book, Natural Golf. This is how a short game magician said to hit chip shots–to slide the sole of the club along the grass as the club swings through the ball.

health

Sitting Is the New Smoking

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This post has nothing to do with golf. Let’s call it a Public Service Message from TRG.

I am tangentially connected with the health industry. What I heard last week makes perfect sense and I want to pass it on to you.

Sitting is the new smoking.

A raft of modern health problems have their origin in sitting too much. Sitting at the computer, in front of the tube, anything that lures you into sitting for hours a day.

The solution in one word. Move.

Get up and move. Get up often and move. Be active. Move. Throughout the day, every day.

Move.

Thank you. Now back to golf.

rhythm and tempo

The Difference Between Rhythm and Tempo

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I just talked about this a few weeks ago, and I wouldn’t normally revisit the subject for another few moths at the earliest. But a few things came up after that most recent post was published that made me realize the difference between rhythm and tempo is not clear in the golfing world.

Either people get rhythm and tempo mixed up, or think they are the same thing. You must understand the difference if you are to build them into your swing.

What came up? Two things. First, I was talking to one of my sons about his swing. He was telling me his rhythm was very good and when I asked him more about it, it became clear he was really talking about his tempo. And when he mentioned tempo, it turned out he was really talking about his timing. And when he mentioned timing, he was talking about rhythm.

Then I went to a post I wrote earlier in the year about Ernie Els’s swing, in which the embedded video by Andrew Rice talks about how to make your swing faster (good advice) but says to do that he wants us to have three counts to the top of the backswing and one count back down to the ball (more good advice).

He wants you to speed up your swing and tells you what the rhythm of the swing is. Oh, my.

Even the experts get confused.

So let me be very clear here. Rhythm and tempo are words taken from music. Tempo is the overall speed of a composition. Rhythm is the relative duration of its component parts.

You can play Stars and Stripes Forever at a quick pace or slower pace (tempo) but the quarter notes stay quarter notes, and the eighth notes stay eighth notes (rhythm).

If the golf swing were music, the backswing would get three beats, and the downswing would get one beat.

Count out your swing, starting at 1 when you take the club away. Then count 2, 3, 4 to the top of the backswing, and 5 back down to the ball. That’s your 3:1 rhythm laid bare.

The tempo of the swing is how long it takes to make those five counts. It takes Els 1.0 seconds to execute a 3:1 rhythm. It takes Price 0.8 seconds to execute his 3:1 rhythm.

So if you want to speed up your swing, just take less time to execute the 3:1 rhythm.

OK?

ball position

Ball Position

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An easy way to hit the ball consistently well is for it to be in the same place every time you take your stance.

As easy way to be an inconsistent ball-striker is to move the ball all over the place.

Which one do you do?

You can hit fat or thin with a perfect swing if you keep moving the ball around in your stance. These two videos show you how to put the ball where it belongs.

Golf instruction books by some pros tell you to play everything off your left heel. That’s really beyond the capability of most recreational golfers.

Other books tell you to put the ball opposite your left heel with long clubs and move the ball toward the center of your stance as you move down to shorter clubs. That’s asking you to have a different swing for each club. Again, no.

One spot for your driver, one spot for a ball on the ground. You really can’t go wrong that way.

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