jc21539

That's a really good point. We will never know how our practice swings would actually perform when hitting a golf ball. I'm not exactly sure if the amount of clubhead speed they create would really be of any worth. Also, sometimes I notice when I take practice swings that I don't actually swing over the same spot that I started the club in. That would make it a fairly useless real swing.

I think it is quite a valid point that there is a huge difference on the instructor side between a player who is just starting and a player who has already had a hundred lessons courtesy of Golf Digest. I actually left my first instructor who taught me the "throw the club down the fairway" swinging imagery, because when I wanted to talk about the technical aspects of my backswing plane, he told me it didn't matter and I should focus on the part of the swing that actually hits the ball. I pretty much wrote him off as a flake. Little did I know that when I left him, I was also leaving behind my ability to hit a consistant draw. Who's the flake now. We could get into analyzing individual molecules and atoms and what their role is in each of our golf swings. That doesn't mean we should. By the way, the "throw the club down the fairway" drill, which was practiced by following it quite literally, is a great drill for getting some feel back into your game, for anyone who has struggled with technical mind-fudge like I have. First lesson I ever had on swinging a golf club, and probably the best one too.

I have indeed videotaped my practice swings on numerous occasions. They are almost always better than my real swing. And I have spent many hours in front of a mirror trying to build muscle memory. The process that I used? Failure. You are never going to be able to physically fix a mental flaw. The only way to approach your problem is to find the root mental cause for your two different swings. If you can physically do it in your practice swing, it's not a physical problem. Jack Nicklaus picked out a spot a few feet in front of the ball to line up to. This is not just an alignment aid. If you are able to pick out a target that you can see at the same time as the ball, this will allow your mind to better understand where it wants the ball, and thus the club, to go. When I was about 5 years old, I was given my first real instruction on how to swing a golf club. I was given a single drill. My instructor had me set up in my normal golf stance, but without a ball. Then, from the address position, he had me quite literally throw the golf club down the driving range. I cannot emphasize enough how helpful this drill will be to anyone who is concerned about their swing technique. The best part about this concept is that it is one thought, and it is so simple. The bottom line is, the reason the best golfers in the world all have good looking swings is because they define what a good looking swing is. And the way they swing the club is with an incredible focus on their target and their target line. Even the ones that don't know it do it subconsciously - they just never learned otherwise.

I don't use a line to line up putts because I can't do it on every shot. I would rather force myself to learn how to make a mental image of the target line. When I putt, I put my ball down so I can see nothing but white.

Does anyone else ever wonder if maybe all this technical stuff about the golf swing, albeit perfectly valid, is just not the best way to learn how to play? I've heard a lot of golf instruction about elbow position, club face positions at impact, shaft direction at the top of the swing, etc. But nobody, and I mean nobody, can think about any of these things while they are actually swinging and expect to hit good shots consistently. Maybe a tip will work for a day, or a week, or a month, but eventually it seems to wear off and the same old mistakes seem to magically reappear. So maybe it's not actually the instruction that is making the difference, but it's simply that thinking about something specific lets everything else happen naturally without our own minds interfering. If history proves one thing, it's that we are always wrong. There will always be new theories, new ideas, and new techniques. But the fact of the matter is that in the entire history of golf, the basic idea of how to hit a golf ball has remained the same. Some can call it a matter of what is considered the same and what is considered different, but if you do some research, you will see that things haven't changed all too much. Check out this site: http://www.printsoldandrare.com/golf/ . Some of the pictures are from before the 19th century, and yet they probably look a lot like many of our own swings. Another example: babies having better swing planes than your average Wednesday night leaguer. This baby has definitely practiced his elbow positions - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1IZrT8SVA . I'd like to hear everyone else's opinion about this issue. Maybe I'm completely nuts. Or maybe we all are.

If the ground was frozen, I could get there in one.

Always glad to see the game is still growing. I think that maybe, for someone who has only been playing for a few months, you are focusing a little too much on things that you haven't yet learned to control. I am willing to bet that plenty of people on this forum, myself included, who have been playing the game for many years still struggle with the direction of their ball flight. That's just golf; even Tiger struggles with his ball flight, all the time actually. It's just a matter of the amount of error we are willing to accept. A fading ball flight is more than common for a beginning golfer. What you should be focused on is perfecting all of the positions before your swing, e.g. grip, posture, alignment. If you haven't perfected, and I do mean perfected , these positions, then you are virtually doomed for failure before you ever swing the club. If you are worried about a fade and lack of distance, I would pay particular attention to your grip. A stronger grip may help you learn to make a more powerful pass through the ball. Aim to have atleast 3 knuckles showing when you look down at your right hand (because he's a lefty, for any righty readers).

No, I am not by any means implying that you should literally start playing golf without watching the ball, that would just be silly. It's a radical idea that is more just an exercise in thought than anything else; I'm not banking on it catching on anytime soon. But the theory behind it is along the lines of what hukdizzle was saying. I would predict that most likely, your practice swing never had the faults that you have been fighting in your real swing. If you are "stuck" on the ball, it won't matter if you fix your current swing faults, because new ones will develop. The famous golf plane arc that is illustrated in ben hogan's book (where he looks like he is inside a giant hoolahoop) is 100% relative to the target line. Without a sense of target, there would be no reason for that arc to naturally develop. The best golfer I ever had the opportunity to know on a good-friend basis was a +2 point something handicap. He had a solid, on-plane swing, and it's safe to say that my grandmother knew more about the golf swing than this guy (no offense grandmothers). The lesson I took from him was that there is something fundamentally instinctual about the golf swing that isn't really talked about all that much. Think about it. Would you go pay a professional golf instruction $50/hr to tell you to hit a ball with a stick at another stick? Don't forget, the modern golf swing was born before computer video analysis was. Golfers were creating these angles and impact positions before anyone even knew they existed. Just some food for thought.

The physics of ball flight are pretty simple. If the ball starts right, your path is from the inside. If the ball starts left, your path is from the outside. If your ball spins right, your club face is open in relation to your swing path, and if the ball spins left, your club face is closed in relation to your swing path. If your ball is now shooting straight right, then you are sort of correct in saying that you are lining up there. I don't know where your body is aligned, but your swing path is aligned to the right of where you want it. Unless, of course, you are coming down on the ball so severely steep and open that any flight of the ball that starts to the left is not even noticeable. But from what you've said, this does not sound like the case. If your swing is oriented to the right of your target, this can only mean one thing: you are not orienting yourself with the target. What this means is to have a conscious, but "invisible" awareness of where your target is as you are swinging. However, most people do not have this awareness, and areyour mind will be indiscriminatory as far as path and club face, as long as you are hitting the ball. So here's the golden drill - it's easy, and you can incorporate it into every shot you hit on and off the course: Before every shot, take two practice swings, but instead of looking at the ground or your club, look directly down the fairway at your target. Your mind cannot resist swinging towards it. Play two full rounds doing this for every full shot you hit. I think you will notice a big difference. And remember, when you get around the greens, just forget about it and use your feel.

Actually, I hope you have not lost interest becaues the point you have brought up is an excellent one. I and others I have played with have experienced the exact same phenomenon that you are talking about. I think the key issue here is swing orientation. When there is a ball in front of you, your swing is oriented to hit the ball. But when there is no ball, your mind naturally searches for something to orient itself with. The next logical choice after the ball - the target. The answer you are looking for is not to forget about the ball - it's to think about the target. I like to think of the golf swing as an underhand pitch, like in softball. I believe that Ben Hogan actually took a photograph once where he was throwing a golf ball underhand to illustrate the motion of a swing. Of course, to throw a ball and hope for it to go anywhere near a target, we would need to be looking at the target, instead of watching our hand and analyzing the exact moment that we would need to release the ball. I have even gone as far as to contemplate why we look at the ball at all, and not instead at the target. We are required to have an awareness of the location of both to get the ball to the target. Is it easier to develop a mind's eye for something 3 feet away, or 300 yards away?

My friend, you are attempting the impossible The goal is not to "keep" the club head square at impact, it is to get it there. My point is, you can't build your golf swing in segments - it's a dynamic, fluid motion. What would you tell me if I asked you for drills to help me release a baseball at the right time to throw from second base to first? Maybe you'd say, I don't know if drills are exactly what you need, but I can teach you the basic idea of throwing a baseball - although you probably can figure it out just by watching other people do it - and then you just need to practice. What is so different about golf that gets everyone all up in arms? I have put together a collection of images to illustrate how the dynamics of golf are no different than any other sport. http://swingdynamics.blogspot.com/20...ollection.html