Author: Erik J. Barzeski

Last fall, I began hitting the ball toward the heel a little bit. My swing felt fine, but I wanted solid contact and couldn’t find a swing thought that worked at getting my swing back in the groove. A week or two into my “heel funk” I found my high school golf diary: a hodge-podge of notes, swing thoughts, diagrams of holes, and more. I flipped through and found a perfect swing thought (this tip isn’t about that particular swing thought, so I won’t share it here).

The lesson here is clear: keeping a diary can save your butt down the line. Your golf diary may include information like swing thoughts for the day, information obtained at a recent lesson, general trends (i.e. “hitting slight fade” or “hitting lots of shots thin”), or more. Some golfers might even keep track of their hats so they can identify which is their “luckiest.”

Diaries aren’t just for little girls, you know.

Different clubs require different swings. Your wedge, for example, requires a “steeper” swing than your 4I. Your driver and 3W require the sweeping swing of all.

The bottom of a sweeping swing is very flat – the club is just above the ground for two or three feet. To ingrain the feeling of keeping the club low to the ground for a long period of time, imagine swinging your driver under a hedge – don’t clip the wood chips or dirt, and don’t clip the leaves or branches above.

This works well for your driver, 3W, and long irons, but is difficult to manage with mid and short irons.

I’ve long employed a simple trick to hit the ball further and straighter: I put the logo (in my case, “Titleist”) on the back inside quadrant of the ball when teeing up. Then, my sole swing thought is “hit the logo with the clubface.”

Obviously, hitting the logo with the clubface would result in a massive hook or a blocked shot 45° right of your target line, but the simple reality is that nobody is that limber. Trying to hit the inside of the ball forces the club to come from just inside the target line – a powerful position that adds accuracy and distance and counters the weak over-the-top move of a lot of amateurs. It can also help to encourage a longer wrist cock, creating more “lag” and thus more powerful shots.

In the fairway, where you’re not able to position the ball, focus on a dimple or a spot in the same quadrant. You won’t actually hit the inside back quadrant of the ball, but trying to may help your scores more than you could imagine.

The next time you’re at the range, experiment with your grip. I like to hit shots while I hover my right thumb above the grip. I find that this forces me to swing more with control and to use the bigger muscles of my shoulders, arms, and trunk to control the club, not the small muscles in my wrists and fingers.

You may want to try strengthening your grip. Or weakening it. Try gripping the club more in your fingers or try putting it further back into your palms (my grip tends to work out towards my fingertips sometimes, but that’s rare – most people grip too much in their palms).

Try swinging a club with only your left hand. Switching from an overlap to an interlocking (or vice versa). Jim Furyk uses a double-overlap grip, after all.

Play around with your grip, making minor swing changes you feel necessary. Don’t spend too much time practicing grips that don’t pay off or that feel too awkward, because practice makes permanent. And nobody wants a permanent grip that doesn’t work.

How does your swing stack up against the lash of Tiger Woods? Or the silky smoothness of Ernie Els? The Arnie-like swat of Chris DiMarco?

You can find out at http://redgoat.smugmug.com/. The site, by Brady Riggs, has video and still frames for hundreds of people ranging from tour pros to students and solid amateurs. It’s important to try to match your swing to an existing swing – not everyone is built for Tiger’s swing or Ernie’s swing – but by carefully studying the images and video, you may be able to learn something about the swing.

Hop on over to Riggs’ site and have a look.

Golf for Women has published a snippet of a book called Tour Tempo: Golf’s Last Secret Finally Revealed. The snippet outlines the 3:1 ratio that most tour players seem to have in their swings. Three beats to reach the top of the backswing, one beat coming down to impact.

You too can attempt to achieve “Tour Tempo” by counting in your head. Most music is in 4/4 time, so pick a song with a rhythm you like. Swing back to the top on the first three beats while humming the song or singing it (even if you do so quietly or in your head), and swing down and make contact with the ball on the last beat. If you have decent rhythm, simply saying “1 2 3 4” rhythmically will be enough.

Give the “Tour Tempo” a try the next time you golf. It’s not much of a swing thought, but then again, that’s the point.