Many recreational golfers rely on feel, natural talent, and repetition to hone their technique and lower their scores. Or, if they're really old school, they may use swing thoughts developed many years ago. Not surprisingly, these players don't see much improvement over the years in either their scores or their golf handicaps. The improvement they do see results mostly from technical advances in equipment and better course conditioning.
Modern golf instruction combines an understanding of swing mechanics with an emphasis on creating an athletic, natural motion. To create this motion, you must eliminate whatever mechanical thoughts you've developed over the years and replace them with simpler, more effectives ones that help your swing become more natural, athletic, and repetitive. Once accomplished, you'll amaze yourself at how much more athletic your swing is and how quickly you lower your golf handicap.
Setup It's critical to have a good setup. If you start off poorly, you have little chance of executing a solid swing. To achieve a more athletic setup, your shoulders, hips, and knees must be level and your weight spread evenly between your feet. Two key thoughts for a good setup are "stay level" and "be athletic." You could even think "bouncy" since your legs must feel that way in an athletic setup, with flexed knees and relaxed muscles.
Takeaway The takeaway is another critical move in the swing, as I've mentioned in my golf tips. You need a solid, one-piece takeaway powered by your shoulders, not your arms, wrists, or hands, to initiate a fundamentally sound swing. When your arms, wrists, and hands move independently of one another, trouble ensues. Independence forces the club off plane and jeopardizes the square alignment of the clubface. Think "all together" at the takeaway and you won't go wrong.
At The Top If your backswing is off during your swing, you lose all the angles you create with a good setup. That means you lose any chance of creating a leveraged, dynamic attack into the ball, inhibiting your ballstriking and short-circuiting power. The thought of "squatting" (your butt toward the ground) is the key for creating the right move into the ball. A telltale sign of a strong squatted pivot away from the target is the backside being close to the ground and pointing at the target.
Transition The transition from backswing to downswing is extremely critical, as I've said in my golf tips. A common misconception of recreational golfers is that the club should stay in front of the body during the swing. While this is true on the backswing, it is incorrect on the way down. A proper transition occurs when the body drags the hands and club into the swing. You want the club to be trailing the body up to and past impact. A good swing thought here is "body leading arms."
Impact While it's natural to think "hit the ball" at impact, it's not the best approach. In fact, it's a bad approach. The desire to "hit at" the ball initiates the use of the hands during the downswing, breaking down the proper sequence of the body first, club and arms second. Instead, think "squeeze the ball on the club face." What many recreational golfers don't realize is that accomplished players don't think about hitting the ball. They think about swinging through the ball at a point several inches past the ball. It's what I encourage players to do in my golf lessons.
Finish Golfers who swing the club at the ball invariably finish poorly. These players generally stop their swings at the point of impact. Golfers who swing the club through the ball generally have a correct finish. Your thought at the finish should be "get the back shoulder to the target." This thought forces you to keep working past the ball and changes the ultimate destination from the point of impact to well beyond it, generating more power and a balanced finish.
Old School vs. New School Old school teachers often used specific images to create the proper feel for a correct swing. Unfortunately, these images sometimes breakdown at key points, leading golfers astray. For example, a popular old school image for assuming the proper grip of a club was for the player to think of holding a small bird in his or her hands. What if you've never held a bird in your hands? How can you know what the feeling is like?
Today, golf teachers try to combine an understanding of the proper mechanics of the swing with the feeling of a natural athletic motion. Try substituting the swing thoughts we discussed above for some of those mechanical swing thoughts you may have developed over the years. Use the new swing thoughts at the range and on the course. You'll be surprised how effective they are and how much they'll improve your swing and golf handicap.
Copyright (c) 2007 Jack Moorehouse
Now no teacher can tell you in exact words how it feels when you make a certain movement correctly. You will have to use your imagination to interpret what he says, and if he is wise he will encourage you to use it.
Let me give you an example. I want to teach you to pivot from the hips. Now I can show you how it is done and issue the usual mass of detailed instruction, but that does not call up your imagination and it gives you no conception of how it feels to pivot correctly.
From the shoulders our power travels down through the arms, and as to arm action also I believe the common conception to be erroneous. Most people think they lift their arms to get them to the top of the back swing. With a modern controlled swing they do not lift them . . . the arms work absolutely subjectively to the shoulders, that is why they are controlled.
So far so good; we can learn to feel the body turn to the right and round to the left, beautifully fixed in space by the hips. Now carry the image a stage further: first, as you pivot sink down from the knees?you will feel that if you sink down, even ever so little, you will become stuck in the barrel. This will not do, so you must feel that you keep your hips up on a level with the top of the barrel. Do this and you will develop the feel of keeping your hips up as you pivot'a thing which unfortunately for our golf very few of us do.
Now do not think that we use imagination in teaching golf in order to evolve new theories. Oh no?there are too many theories already! What we use imagination for is to translate theory into feeling, and to keep our minds awake and our circle of golfing sensations expanding. Every new golfing sensation (if it is to be deliberately induced and not left to happen by accident) may need an introduction through the imagination in this way?but once the image has done its work of introduction it can be put on one side and the feel that it has made known can be relied on. But put your images on one side'do not abandon them, because if you do lose the feel, the image through which you learned it will bring it back.
Now the golf swing is a connected series of sensations or feels and when you get all these feels right and rightly connected you will swing perfectly. I have just given you the feel of the pivot?the movement on which the modern swing is based.
Now to that one basic feel, the pivot, we will add other feels, and every new feel gives you a new control until your whole game is controlled and you can play it as you will. But do not think you cannot play until you have this whole series of controls established. Lots of players go through their golfing lives and get a lot of fun out of the game without building up any controls at all! But the more controls you can build up and link together, the better for your game, the finer the conception of the swing you will evolve.
Let us get back to the visualizing of our swing. We have laid our foundation by getting the feel of the pivot from the hips. This movement goes up through the body to the next control point?the shoulders. And here I believe that wrong imagination does a great deal of damage to many people's swings.
We think that in the fine swing we see the left shoulder come down as we come back and the right shoulder come down as we come forward; so we feel that this shoulder movement is right and tend to encourage it? to the detriment of our swings because it is wrong. And I say it is wrong, cheerfully certain that it is wrong in spite of its almost universal acceptance. How much the shoulders actually dip depends upon how erect we stand when addressing the ball. We should stand as erect as possible and I contend that we should not feel our shoulders go down but should feel that we are keeping them fully up.
As we address the ball we look at it a little sideways ?we peep at it. The head is fixed (because you "keep your eye on the ball), and the movement of the shoulders is not an independent movement of the shoulders at all, but is due to the shoulders being moved around from the pivot.
We can only keep the shoulder movement in a fixed groove and make it repeatable time after time, by keeping the shoulders at the limit of upness in whatever position the turn from the hips may have placed them. Any excess of upness (that is, actual shoulder lift) will result in the ball being lost sight of. In short, the fixed head determines the limit of lift and dip of the shoulders.
You will see that this is why you must feel you keep the shoulders up to the same degree with, say, a driver and a full swing and a mashie niblick (a more upright club) and a half swing. The closer you stand to your ball the more upright the swing and the more directly downward your sight of the ball . . . also, the less extensive the swing you can make without losing sight of the ball.
Now try this conception of the shoulder action without a club, and link it to your feel of the pivot from the hips. Feel how the two become connected. This is the first connection in our building up of a controlled swing?and a very important one. You cannot take too much trouble in understanding it and building it up.
So, instead of explaining all the mechanical and anatomical details of the pivot to you, I show you how to pivot and then tell you to do it yourself imagining that you are standing in a barrel hip high and big enough to be just free of each hip but a close enough fit to allow no movement except the pivot. At once you get the feeling of the pivot. Incidentally nine out of ten golfers would improve their games if they would use this image to the fullest degree in practice.
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Jack Moorehouse has sinced written about articles on various topics from Golf Guide, Recreation and Sports and Physical Therapy. Jack Moorehouse is the author of the best-selling book "How To Break 80 And Shoot Like The Pros." He is NOT a golf pro, rather a working man that has helped thousands of golfers from all seven continents lower their handicap immediately. He has a free wee. Jack Moorehouse's top article generates over 49500 views. to your Favourites.
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