Subtle breaks can easily be read if you know how to look. This new video shows you.
The sound isn’t too good at the start. I say at 0:12, “I’m going stand right behind the ball and the hole, take a step to the left and look at the intervening ground. It looks kind of flat.”
See the rest of my YouTube videos at my YouTube channel.
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.
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).
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.
See what I have to put up with when I try to practice putting at home?
It’s cold where I live, too cold to even go outside for much time at all. Forget about playing, how do we practice? Well, it’s not too hard, and you can end up practicing some things you should have been practicing, but never do.
Putting on the carpet. Everybody knows that one. I like to putt at a tin can lid. You need something to align the putt to, to know that you’re not pushing or pulling the putt, but hitting the lid isn’t the important point. Making a smooth stroke is. In fact, don’t even watch the ball until you know it has gone past the lid.
You can practice your chipping stroke, off a carpet remnant so you don’t damage the good carpeting. Plastic golf balls make good targets, and you’re practicing making good contact with a consistent stroke. Chip with a number of clubs, too, from you 5-iron to your lob wedge.
Your swing? You can swing inside the house. You won’t hit the ceiling. Use a 7-iron or less, and there won’t be any problem.
As for those things you should practice, but don’t? Get a block of wood to practice your takeaway. The club should start back straight for the first few inches. Toe the club against the block of wood and take the club back. You should hear a quick scraping sound, like striking a match. No sound, you’re taking it back inside. Long sound, you’re trying to take it back outside.
Practice keeping your hands ahead of the ball at impact. My YouTube video on this point shows you how.
Invent. Think of something. There’s lots you can do.
To hit the ball straight, the clubface must be returned to the same position it had at address. From what I see, the two things recreational golfers do to ensure that does not happen are these. They start the club down with the right hand, in an effort to hit the ball, and their clubhead is the first thing that gets to the ball.
You must start the swing down with a gravity move. Start turning your body and just let the club start moving by falling. It floats down to the hitting position supported by your two hands. It does not get pushed into the hitting position by your right hand.
When your swing passes through impact, it must be led by the hands. There’s a race between the hands and the clubhead to get to the ball first, and the hands have to win. If they do, the clubface will be square.* If the clubhead wins, a square face is iffy.
You can see that these two factors are related. Starting the club down by letting it and your hands fall gracefully sets up a natural pulling action, energized by centrifugal force, that lets the hands get to the the ball first. Result: square clubface, straight shot, powerful shot.
I believe that if you practice these two things and make them a habit, you will hit the ball straighter, and straighter more often, than you believed possible.
*Assuming a proper grip, of course.
1. This is old knowledge, but I needed a reminder. I hit the ball very straight, but I often push it. The fix is to finish the turn so my belt buckle faces the target.
2. Leaving putts short is an insidious habit. The way to cure it is to leave your head down for a few seconds after you have struck the ball. Don’t look, don’t peek. The ball will get to and past the hole.
3. When chipping, take the club back and let it fall back into the ball in a controlled way — a gravity move guided by the hands. This gives you surer contact and more control over the length of the chip, which is determined solely by the length of the backswing. I use three clubs to chip with: 7-iron, 9-iron, and 56-degree wedge.
My newest YouTube video is now posted. It is titled, “Unfreezing Your Golf Swing.” It concerns the habit of stepping up to the ball and waiting far too long to take the club back.
Learn also about the sequence of using the conscious mind and the subconscious mind when hitting a shot, which applies to everyone.
You, however, don’t have to go to YouTube. You can watch it right here.
I’ve written a few times in the past about aiming your shot when you take your stance. What I want to talk about in this post is aiming your swing, and that’s different.
You’ve likely heard about swing plane and all that. What I’m going to get at here is where that plane is aimed. Your swing traces an arc going back and another one going through the ball. That second arc is relevant to aim, and to hit the ball at your target, that arc must be aimed at the target.
In one meaning of the word “swing,” the golf swing is the totality of movement away from the ball and back through, all the way to the finish. Another meaning is that something literally swings. What swings in the golf swing are the arms and golf club. The body doesn’t swing. It turns.
From the shoulders on down to the clubhead is the part of your body (consider the club to be an extension of your arms for this argument) that swings. What you want is for the swinging of this unit to be headed toward the target at impact. It will not do to imagine a line on the ground and have the clubhead travel along that line. That quickly turns into steering the clubhead, which interrupts the smooth, connected flow of your swing, in both sense of the word.
You must instead think of the entire swinging portion of your body headed for the target, and you must be thinking that long before the arms and club actually arrive at the ball. It is true that they will only be lined up for the briefest moment, but you must start thinking that they are lined up that way just after the club starts down from the top of your backswing. At that point, your hip will be sliding toward the target. Then, when the hips turn, your mind continues to lead toward the target what is coming next, which is your arms and the club. That unit, because of your mind’s direction, swings through the ball straight toward the target. If your grip is one that keeps the clubface square to the club path throughout the swing, the result is a straight shot.*
Now all that has been a complicated description of a rather simple move. But I believe you will find it is true. You will correct a lot of swing problems by aiming your swing in this way. You can learn this movement by making half swings, and gradually moving up to full swings.
* There is also the part about your hands leading the clubhead. If your hands follow the clubhead into the ball, which they do if you persist in trying to hit the ball rather than swinging through it, none of the above is of any use.