golf swing, short game

The Importance of the Golf Swing

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Sometimes I make a shot-by-shot record of a round I just played. I dug into those sheets and found four complete rounds and a nine-holer from about ten years ago that averaged 90 (93, 87, 88, 91, 46). These are the average numbers of long shots, short shots and putts in those rounds (there were also four penalty strokes).

Long – 34.7; Short – 21.8; Putts – 32.7

Then I found notes on 45 holes where I averaged 79 (80, 76, 41), from seven years later.

Long – 36.0; Short – 12.0; Putts – 30.8

This is a small sample, and you could put +/- a stroke or two behind each one.

The biggest change by far is the number of short shots, dropping by almost ten strokes. The reason why is the improvement in my swing, which led to more greens hit, and, therefore, no short shots on those holes. I hit about the same number of long shots, but they were better shots.

There was a secondary contribution due to short game improvement in that I would not take more than one short shot to get the ball on the green so often. But most of that ten-shot difference is swing improvement.

Heck, a few weeks a go, I played nine holes and on the last four, hit every fairway and every green and got four pars. Who needs a short game when you hit it that straight? (And yes, I know you don’t always hit it that straight. Just sayin’.)

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golf swing

Building an Ideal Golf Swing – Left Hand Leads at Impact

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[August 2019. Better yet, go to The Hands Lead the Clubhead – IV.]

There is a race in the downswing between the left hand and the clubhead to get to the ball first. The left hand ALWAYS has to win that race.

For any shot hit off the ground, the golden rule is hit the ball first, the ground second. Getting the left hand to the ball before the clubhead gets there is the surest way for that to happen.

What most recreational golfers do is the opposite. The clubhead gets to the ball first because they hit with their right hand. More often than not the clubhead is coming upward, which frequently leads to hitting the ground first.

In addition, the right hand is flipping the club through the ball, taking the clubface out of line. The result is shots hit fat, off line, or both.

Those rockets you hit occasionally come when, by accident, the left hand does get there first.

Watch this video on how to learn this move, and practice what it tells you. I feel this move is the biggest difference between a consistently good ball-striker and everyone else.

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golf swing

Building an Ideal Golf Swing – Transition From the Top

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The second transition in the golf swing (the first being the takeaway in which we transition from a static to a dynamic state), is not the start of hitting the ball, and golfers who think it is ruin everything they have done right up to that point. We are still preparing for the hit, even when we are coming down into the ball. We do this by making the start of the downswing a gravity move.

By that, I mean the club drops down without any direct effort applied to it, being only carried by the body turn. Do not ring the bell (pull down with the last three fingers of the left hand). Certainly, do not push the club down with the right hand. Remember what we said in a previous post about pushing things.

By letting the club go along for the ride, we let it begin accelerating naturally, so when the moment comes to swing the club into the ball, it will already be ripping through the air. To push the club downward at the start actually slows the club down.

A good way to coach yourself to let the club fall on its own is to monitor the feeling you have on the inside of your hands, the part touching the club. When the club reaches the top of the backswing and is suspended momentarily, the grip feeling should be quite light, and should not change when you start down. The right thing to do is to carry that light feeling into the downswing–well into it. That way, the club cannot be forced into the ball.

Another drill you can do, even more extreme, but certainly not wrong, is to swing to the top of your backswing, and, as you start down, relax your grip and let the club fall out of your hands as you continue your swing motion with your body and arms. You can get no more effortless than that. Try this a few times, then swing one more time and keep hold of the club, but swing through the ball with the same light feeling as you had when you let go of the club.

I believe you will shortly find your clubhead speed increasing, and it might even be scary fast. Because you are not forcing anything, you will not lose accuracy, and might instead gain some.

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playing the game

Play Golf Your Own Way

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I am not shy about taking golf lessons. I don’t over-do it, but I have one when I need one. I read things on the Internet (I can already hear you saying, “Uh, oh.”) and give them try if they make sense on the face of it. But enough is enough. Enough might even be too much.

I have been playing golf for over 50 years. In that time, I’ve gotten a pretty good idea of how I want to swing a golf club. But I was pushing shots, mainly drives, so I had a lesson to fix it.

Also, I lost distance because of my back surgeries two years ago, and I wanted some of it back. I saw a video on the fact that touring pros take one second to go from takeaway to impact. That’s pretty fast, so I spent a few weeks building up the tempo of my swing because I thought it might help.

We had a big snowstorm, so I couldn’t play for a while, but today I was finally able to go out and try out my new (!) swing over nine holes. Oh, brother!

In the first five holes I had one good shot. I was six over par after five and even that was because I was chipping and putting like a champion. This is not how I play golf, so I decided on th sixth tee to quit all that nonsense.

The position the pro had put me in was technically correct, but from that position at the top of my backswing, I couldn’t find the ball again. Know what I mean? As for the one-second swing, it didn’t add speed, it subtracted speed because all the speed was in my body. I had no time let my swing accelerate the clubhead.

So on the sixth tee, I decided to play golf the way I wanted to, to swing the club the way I wanted to. The result? I hit the next four greens in regulation and walked off the course with four straight pars. That’s a bit more like it.

When you buy clothes, you’re buying clothes that fit a generic model. Many times you have to have them tailored to fit you. Golf instruction is the same. The pro can get you close, but the instruction has to be tailored, and you are the tailor.

There comes a point when you have to take all of the advice you have sought out, and the lessons you have taken, and re-package them into something that fits you — how you move, how you think, how you feel that the golf you play is your golf, and that it works (there’s no point in being possessive of something that doesn’t work).

Golf instruction points you in a general direction. From there, find the exact direction on your own. It’s the only way you’ll play your best.

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fundamentals

Six golf stroke constants

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There are six things you need to do in every stroke you make at the ball, from drive to putt. These constants should appear in your longest drive and a six-foot putt, and every shot in between.

1. Start the club back straight — the body turn takes it inside.

2. Start the through-swing with a gravity move.

3. Have the left hand lead the clubhead into the ball.

4. Hit the shot with both hands — one does not take the major role.

5. Swing through toward the target.

6. Use the 3:1 rhythm.

Over the next six weeks, I will explain each one of these points. If you already know what they mean, please start working right away to make them part of the way you play golf.

There are certainly more things that need to be done to hit good golf shots consistently, but if you make these your new habits, you’ll be doing a lot of things right.

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playing the game

How far do you hit your irons? – 3

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You really need to know how far you hit your irons so that you can start zeroing in on the pin. Hole-high beats short or long all day. There are several posts in this blog about ways to determine this question. It’s such an important issue, I keep coming back to it. Here’s my latest hot idea that I had fun with one day.

Go to the course by yourself. Tee off, and when you get to your ball, decide which club you would use. Take out that club, and one more, such as if you decided a 7-iron would do, take out your 6, too. Hit a shot with both clubs and see which one does better for you. The longer club might not be the better one, but you’ll know, because you tried it, at least from this distance.

Write down those results, and do the same on holes that follow. Feel free to drop the ball at different distances from the flag on different holes, if you have to, to get a broad sample of club combinations to try out.

Pay special attention to par 3s. You might find you hit the ball a different distance with a given club when the ball is on a tee rather than on the ground.

Take advantage of elevated and depressed greens, too. Most golfers know they have to make an adjustment, but how much is something they never figure out.

If you do this enough times, from distances where you can compare all possible neighboring club pairs, you will get a good idea of what club to use and when. Having a firm grasp of your iron distances is how you start hitting them close, which is the real key to shooting low scores.

My earlier posts on this subject are found at:

How far do you hit your irons?

Golfers: How to know how far your clubs carry

Johnny Miller’s article, “10 Rules for Sticking Your Irons,” speaks to this subject, too.

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playing the game

What I learned on the course – 4

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1. Hit the shot as if you didn’t care. I mean just take your swing, without any idea of where the ball is supposed to go, or what trouble might be lurking if you make a mistake. Make a carefree stroke at the ball is about the best I can describe it. The calmness that approach creates allows your body to flow into the swing without tension causing deflections from its proper course. This applies to putting, too.

2. Hit short shots with an easy, flowing swing. Putting tension in the swing, jabbing at the ball, trying to hit it sharply, all these things are what cause mishits. So does not paying attention to item 1, above.

3. When chipping onto the green, focus on the landing spot. Pick the club that will release from there to the pin, but your target is the landing spot, not the pin.

4. There is nowhere that the idea of having your hands lead the clubhead into the ball will pay off more than with your driver. It seems you are taking all the power away when you do this, but what you are taking away is the powerful feeling of the right hand hitting, which is actually a power drain, and which pushes the clubface out of alignment.

5. Do you use the alignment mark on your ball when you putt? If you line it up with your starting line (and don’t take all day to do that), you will sink more makable putts than you have been, and miss far fewer of those shorties.

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supporting your golf

Golfers: How to Know How Far Your Clubs Carry

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To play accurately around the course, you have to know how far you hit each club. Here’s how to find that out.

Driver: Step off the vertical distance between your ball and the 150-yard marker for drives that stay in the fairway. By vertical distance, I mean the distance along a line connecting your ball and the green.

Irons: If you have a laser rangefinder, find the distance to the pin. Select your club and hit the shot. If the ball lands on the green, step off the vertical distance between the pitch mark and the hole. Here, vertical distance means the distance along a line parallel to the axis of the hole between perpendiculars at your ball and the hole to that line. Write down the club and distance, and after a few rounds, you will have a pretty good profile to work with. Bonus: from the same spot, take one more club, grip down one inch, and make another shot. By recording these gripped-down shots, you will come up with two working distances for each club.

Wedges: Do this at the range. Pick a flag and hit different wedges to it, using your standard pitching swing, until you find the wedge that hits the ball closest to it. Use the same swing every time. Move to different places until you find a place where that wedge gets the ball right to the flag. Then measure the distance to that flag with a laser rangefinder. That’s your distance with that wedge. Continue to this procedure until you have a distance for all your wedges. If you want to get finer, you can measure what you get when you use a standard shorter swing and standard longer swing. Or a standard faster swing and slower standard swing.

Chipping: Take out your lob wedge and hit five chips, with the same swing, and step off the distance you get. That’s how far a chip with your lob wedge goes. Do the same with each club in progression down to your 7-iron. Important! Use the same swing for all the shots you hit with all the clubs. You want the club to be the only variable.

Putter: This more subtle. You’re looking for a way to putt the ball different distances. You do that by taking the club back to spots where you feel different muscles get strained. That’s the stopping point for that particular swing. For example, if I take the putter back to the point where my left forearm touches my abdomen, that stroke will hit the ball 15 feet. If I take it back farther, to a point where I feel a slight strain on the right side of my lower back, that stroke will send the ball 22 feet. And so on. These distances were determined on a medium-speed green. If the greens you play on run faster than the ones on which you calibrated your stroke, just increase the distance of your standard strokes by an appropriate amount.*

None of this is to say that you play strictly by formula. Feel counts for a lot, but you need some place to anchor your feel. It can’t be out there by itself. And, on days when your feel isn’t working, you can still play well.

* This is the first mention of a concept that in 2017 became Triangulated Approach Putting (TAP).

mental game

Good golf is all in your head

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Three days ago I played in an end-of-the-year scramble. I hit the ball flawlessly for about the first six holes, then had a small collapse, but got it back again for the finish of the round. There was nothing wrong with my swing. It was all in my head.

At first, all I thought about was swinging the club, just letting the ball go where the swing sent it. But I started thinking about hitting the ball little farther, or a little more intentionally somehow, and that’s when the problems started. Only until I went back to letting the swing do the work did things get better again.

Part of it is that when you swing the club, you don’t have the satisfaction of you hitting the ball, of you making the shot happen. Golf is paradoxical in that way, that we have to cause a very precise thing to happen, but we have to give our entire body, not our sensitive hands and fingers, the job of getting it done. That means giving up controlling the club and the ball, something we find hard to do.

So when I said to myself, just swing the club, because that is enough, things go better again. A lot better.

So many golfers, especially at the start of their golfing career, think that hitting the ball is the object of the game. When they learn otherwise is when they start to get better, and in a hurry.

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