Earlier this week, I took the first lesson I’ve had in years. As always, it was a slightly unsettling experience to have someone watching and critiquing my swing, but one that I hope will eventually result in more consistency and lower scores. Regardless, it’s definitely got me thinking about the golf swing.
I didn’t take lessons as a kid. I just started hitting balls around, had about ten minutes of instruction from a friend on the high school golf team the first time I played a course, and that was pretty much it for the first 20 years I played. I’ve just experimented on my own and found things that worked (or didn’t). I’ve read golf books and picked up tips from playing partners. Again, some worked, and some went horribly awry. Some of them worked for awhile, and then went horribly awry. It’s a fun game, isn’t it?
Recently, I’ve also been helping a friend of mine try to pick up the game in his 40s. He’s not quite ready to shell out a wad of money for lessons, so I’m trying to help him along while doing no harm. We worked on basic setup and grip, and then he started swinging away.
As I tried to help my buddy learn to get the club on the ball (let alone make solid contact), I was prioritizing the myriad helpful little tidbits I could pass along. But I didn’t want to throw too much at him at once. So I started compiling a list. I was thinking something in the line of “The Universal Truths of Golf.” But, honestly, I don’t have the pedigree to pull that off.
What I ended up with are the following five (mostly) unbreakable rules. They’re as close as I could come to useful truisms of golf. These are concepts that have proven to work for me over 30 odd years of experimentation with my golf swing. They may or may not work for you.
Number Five: Inside Out
Golf is a game of seeming contradictions. You hit down to make the ball go up. You swing easier, or at least more smoothly, to hit it farther. You score low to move up a leaderboard.
OK, I don’t know anything about that last one. But I do know that to hit the ball straight, I have to swing from inside to out, at least slightly. Several articles I’ve seen have advocated imagining that the ball is sitting on a clock face with 12 o’clock facing the target. Then you should swing from 7 o’clock to 1 o’clock(that’s 5 to 11 for you lefties). That’s a pretty good visual to remember.
If I’m not swinging from the inside, I know I’ll be hitting pulls, hooks or slices all day, depending on whether the clubface is square, closed or open. That’s because if the club is not coming from the inside for a righthander and the face is square to the target line, the ball is going to start left, or start straight and draw a little farther left. And worse, if it comes over the top (outside in), the ball will go well left if the clubface is square, hook wildly left if the clubface is shut, or start left and slice back to the right if the clubface is open.
Suffice it to say, inside out beats outside in hands down.
Number Four: Down Means Up
All iron shots (and some woods shots) require a descending blow for consistent results. Some “sweepers” might disagree, but to make solid contact in the middle of the clubface with any consistency I think you have to be hitting down to some degree. The only true exception for me is the driver, which should be hit with a slightly ascending or level path through impact. Fairway woods can be played with any of these three path types, but I personally have better results hitting them with a slightly descending blow that lets the club’s loft get the ball in the air. Therefore, I hit down on the ball on all but about 14 shots a round, generally.
Number Three: Look Ma, No Feet!
True story: Playing in a scramble (which is where this kind of thing usually happens), I once hit a drive about 285-290 dead straight to the middle of a fairway with no feet on the ground! I just swung out of control and both feet slipped out (before contact, by all accounts). After I got off my rear end, I naturally accepted everyone’s congratulations on my unorthodox but effective technique.
Of course, that’s not the kind of thing you can incorporate (or would want to incorporate) into a repeatable swing.
If my feet are moving around in the follow-through or immediately following it, that means one thing: I’m not swinging balanced. While I have made good contact with poor balance, I’ve seldom done it twice in a row. When I have to step through with my right foot, like Gary Player, I know that means I’m probably reaching or lunging at the ball (which is also generally the reason when the dreaded “s” word shows up). I’ve been working on this by standing closer to the ball and by hitting shots on the range with my feet together. This drill helps me get the feeling of swinging under control. Try to hit it hard with your feet together, and you probably won’t stay on your feet.
Number Two: Think Smooth
Golf is a game of moderation. I know I cannot swing all out and hit more than one good shot in a row (and it’s usually less).
This was one of the hardest things for me to accept. It just seems to me that to hit a really good shot you should have to swing hard. Afterall, more effort should result in better results. Right? Of course, it doesn’t work that way. In fact, swinging hard is counterproductive. A smooth swing results in tighter dispersion and more distance than a jerky swing can produce.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that fast swing can’t work provided there is a smooth transition from backswing to foreswing. But in my personal experience, I can hardly go slow enough on my takeaway and backswing. The “low and slow” takeaway really works. And because I tend to make better contact with a smoother swing, the ball actually goes farther than it does when I swing hard. Go figure!
Number One: Step on It
There is no shot in golf that should be hit with a slowing clubhead. In other words, the clubhead should always accelerate through the ball. From drives, to chips, to wedge shots, to putts, the clubhead should accelerate on each. (I think this might be the only inarguable point in the bunch here.)
Sure, the clubhead is going to be accelerating more when you hit a driver than when you hit a three-foot putt, but it’s still going to be accelerating on that putt.
Some of the most unsatisfactory shots in golf result from not accelerating through a shot.
Care to dispute my “indisputable” truisms? What would you add or remove from this list? You can chime in below or in the forum topic.
Photo Credits: © South Herts GC.
Totally agree with down means up. I wish I saw the (camera company office machine) super slow motion swingvision footage years ago. That would have “nailed” the point down for me. You can see driver heads delofting after the ball leaves the clubface.
Nick Faldo made an interesting comment recently on how players more often now “come so close to hitting the bottommost dimple of the ball with the leading edge of the clubface” on wedge shots.
Great article-golf seems such a game of contradictions at times. I will be thinking of these truism’s the next time I practice.
It’s definitely better to swing inside out and accelerate through the ball. The secret for me is to just let my arms drop naturally and to accelerate through the ball. If I try to hit to hard I tend to come over the top with my right shoulder usually resulting in a hook.
The other key element for me is the grip and set up. If my grip is right I feel I can accelerate and release my hands through the ball and keep good balance. The set-up ensures I have good balance. I keep my legs aligned to the direction I want the ball to go bend from the hips and make sure my right shoulder is set slightly below the left and my shoulders are aligned. This way I can turn slowly and then swing down with my arms through the ball. My hips follow the movement of the arms as they accelerate through the ball.
A good article.
The hardest truism to follow for me is accelerating through short pitch shots. I take the wedge back and start thinking “I’m going to hit this too far…”, then of course end up hitting it 6 inches 😥
A nefarious little thing that happens to me–it used to derail me for months, and now I can catch it–is “don’t regrip.” You take your grip, and then in the process of setting up to the ball, fidgeting, waggling, etc., you end up changing your hand position a little before finally pulling the trigger. You can also regrip during the swing, often at the top. I try to maintain the hand position without moving a thing from the moment I take my grip, without taking a death grip on it.
I once had a lesson with Kathy Whitworth, and she said that this fundamental–taking the proper grip and not changing, milking, etc.–was her most important fundamental.
Something else my teacher likes to say is, “Feel ain’t real”. In other words, if I want to swing from 7 o’clock to 1 o’clock, I need to think about swinging from 8 to 2. It sucked at first because there were times when I could swear I was in the right positions. It felt right, but the tape doesn’t lie.
Now I really try to exaggerate any changes, especially at first, until I can get to a point where the ball flight is consistent (one way or the other) and I can gage things from there. If my ball flight is telling me that the clubface is open, I don’t just try to get it square. I almost have to try to hook a few to really get it squared up.
And the thing about accelerating is paramount. Especially with wedges.
As someone who just took up the game at 46, I can relate. Like you, I went at it alone, tweaked this, tweaked that, and finally found my swing. The biggest thing that helped me was getting a good grip, then focusing only on my target. I tried to make golf as easy as shooting a basket or throwing to 1st base. Now 48, I’m down to a 4.
Number six would have to be my first instuctor’s three favorite words TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO !
Two out of Three ain’t bad–and I would agree with 4 out of your 5. Great stuff.
For single digit players–inside out can be overdone and lead to a lot of problems. ( a 2-way miss with pushes and hooks). Inside to square to inside is the ideal swing path.
As my dear Mom would say, you, or your coach, said a mouthful! The longer I play, the more I think that “feel” is the single most important factor in determining how well one plays golf.
I too have had the “feel ain’t real” revelation.
Although probably everyone has some degree of “disconnect” between what we think our bodies are doing and what they are in actual fact doing, I think expert athletes have a much better sense of things than average people do.
The part of the nervous system I’m talking about is the proprioceptive system. I think expert golfers learn the correct moves, but are better at remembering how these moves feel, and are therefore able to repeat them more often.
I’ve played golf for nearly 20 years now. I’ve had my swing videotaped. I’ve hit every club in the bag as well as anyone with my size, speed, flexibility, etc., is capable of. Trouble is, I can’t ingrain the feeling, leading to unacceptably large, daily, shot to shot inconsistency. And, worse, over longer periods of time, I’m prone to big drifts away from good form, leading to periods where I can’t create the good shots at all.
Again, everyone goes through this pattern, but the better you are at feeling what you are doing when you are doing something correct, the smaller these variations will be. To answer the rhetorical question in my Thrash Talk from a few weeks back, the Holy Grail of golf instruction, however possible it is, will be based on proprioceptive training. If you can teach people to accurately feel where their bodies and the club are in space, how fast they are moving and accelerating, etc., there is the chance of creating the consistency needed to genuinely improve.
Well said.
You’ve got to know where you are before you know where you’re going and I think it’s much easier when you know what’s happening rather than taking someone’s word for it.
What you said about drifting is also true. No one can find the groove and hold it indefinitely. All of us are hovering around it and trying to correct something to get closer. As time goes on, a correction turns into an over-correction and we have to put the breaks on or go the other way. So, yeah, feel is everything in that case.
Stricker’s obviously feeling it right now and he’s riding it out, which is especially interesting because no one knows better than him that it comes and goes. That’s pretty much the way I’m starting to see it. If I’m in a good spot I need to let go and enjoy the good shots and when it’s over I need to accept that until I can figure out what’s wrong and get it back again.
I agree with tempo, tempo, tempo. Everytime, I think,”ok you need to crush this ball”, bad things happen…EVERY TIME! I suppose a case in point would be the womens tour. Watch their swings, slow take back and nice acceleration through the ball, and nice smooth finish. I’m good for at least 5-10 shots a round where the adrenalin is flowing and I think I need to hit the ball hard. But lately Ive become very cognizant of yardage and club selection on the PGA tour. It seems very very rare where they are hitting the exact club for the given yardage. The same can be said even with their tee shots in which the take back is slow and the swing is buttery smooth.
I play mostly woods and I generally ‘sweep’ but I have found that hitting down even with a fairway wood produces fantastic results.
I had a ball that I intentionally plugged with my foot so that it was in the muck so that the equator of the ball was recessed a tad.
I took out my 15 wood and hit down on the ball and could not believe my eyes with the ball popped out and actually ended up making it about 100 yard or so dead at the green.
I only hit down with my FW’s when the shot calls for it, but I have yet to see a bad shot doing so.
The other points of the article are just as good including the accelerating through the ball which really changed my game as a newbie.