Is it a bad idea to occasionally try practice-swinging out of my shoes?

[Hacker James]

1 minute ago, Lihu said:

They kind of work, and I have two of these types of units. I would just let the ball tell you rather than a bunch of intermediate numbers. The reason is so you don't end up doing something bad like coming OTT or flipping your wrists or whatever just to see higher numbers on a radar.

I hadn't thought about that. I can see how bad form could lead to good numbers.

[nycgopher]

I know JB Holmes recommends doing so for adolescents especially as (he claims) it is easier to dial it down most of the time and then have more experience on the rare occasion you need to hit it a bit further. I'm not entirely sure if there is any merit to it but it sounds logical. That being said, the issue for a lot of golfers is just getting clean contact and hitting the ball on line. Swinging harder wouldn't necessarily help with that. If you are to the point to where you make clean contact and aren't regularly blasting the ball way off line it could be valuable if you were able to not pick up any bad habits in the process.

[Buckeyebowman]

I'm going to have to reside in Arnie's and Jack's camp here. Both of them were taught to go for distance before accuracy. I remember watching an interview with Arnie where he said his Dad told him, "Hit the ball HARD boy! Then go find it, and hit it HARD again!"

I've also heard many comments from Hank Haney where he maintains that how far you hit the ball, provided you can keep it in  play, will determine just how far you can go in the game of golf.

Most interesting to me was that I found this post right next to one about Martin Hall. I saw an instructional vid by him where he advocated just "going crazy" on the practice tee. Not trying to hit balls, mind you, just taking practice swings as fast as you can! Trying to "adjust" your body to swinging faster!

[iacas]

I often encourage people to take a few swings now and then just for the heck of it. Full swings, flop shots, swings at the edge of how fast you can swing… whatever.

They're not going to set you back, they can reset or refresh you so you can get back to work. And learning to swing fast and control it is valuable, too.

1 hour ago, Buckeyebowman said:

I'm going to have to reside in Arnie's and Jack's camp here. Both of them were taught to go for distance before accuracy. I remember watching an interview with Arnie where he said his Dad told him, "Hit the ball HARD boy! Then go find it, and hit it HARD again!"

They recommend that to kids and when you're first learning golf. That doesn't apply so much here.

[freshmanUTA]

Every good golfer takes a refresher swing, or even spends a whole 15 minutes refreshing. It can be stressful working long and not seeing any results yet, so why not do something enjoyable every now and then? Maybe this drive I'll see if i can blast it over the 290 sign, then I'll get back to work. It makes practice more enjoyable and isn't detrimental

[Buckeyebowman]

On 2/11/2017 at 1:06 AM, iacas said:

 

They recommend that to kids and when you're first learning golf. That doesn't apply so much here.

Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't! I was in my 40's when I and my buddy joined a golf league. I had more than one guy tell me that I had a beautiful swing, but the ball just didn't seem to go anywhere! I hit it much shorter than they, or I, expected.

What I discovered was that I had fallen into the habit of putting some goofy little "steer job" of a swing on the ball, I had gotten so afraid of hitting it where I didn't want to. I had simply stopped "going after" any shot.

I thought I had gotten over this, until I saw your video of the TST outing at Eagle Creek last year. Holy crap, it was back! Just a constipated little swing, bunting the ball out there hoping it ends up OK.

All I'm saying is, this kind of thing can creep into anybody's swing at any time in their life!