Improving your swing doesn’t have to be an uphill battle, or should it be?

Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?

Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!

Clement: Why your practice swing never sucks

Mitsubishi Diamana WB: Club Junkie takes a technology deep dive

Published

7 years ago

Nov 10, 2016

Adam Stevenson

Think the golf swing should be easy? Think again. The best golfers in the world often make it look that way, but the golf swing is a ballistic movement that requires athleticism, rhythm, speed, mobility, stability, timing, and perhaps a little luck.

So, for the golfer looking to improve, what’s the most important of all of them? Answer: none! All of those things require balance, which is the foundation of building a better golf swing.

Creating good balance in your golf swing is an absolute must if you want to hit the ball solidly and consistently. If your body doesn’t have the ability to work around a stable platform while moving in the golf swing, however, you’re at a disadvantage. Without stability, you not only lose your ability to transfer energy efficiently through your body, but your body will be strained. That can lead to injury.

Golfers who lack stability, and ultimately balance, often struggle with swaying in their backswing. A “sway” is when a golfer’s hips move out over their trail foot in the backswing, often causing a reverse spine angle. To prevent the hips from swaying in the backswing, golfers needs to create stability in the trail leg as they turn the hips back and load into the trail glute.

Below is a video that demonstrates a simple exercise that uses a hill to help you create better stability in your golf swing, while at the same time helping you to maintain good dynamic balance so that you can make a more efficient golf swing.

Using hills is an amazing way for your mind to intuitively help your body swing the club more efficiently. Hills can offer great feedback so that you can rapidly make the necessary adjustments to create the stability needed to maintain balance while making a golf swing. With this drill, you will also learn to swing the club on a plane that’s not too steep (you’ll bury the club in the hill) or too shallow (you’ll duff or even whiff the ball).

For the drill, I recommend alternating between hitting shots from both uphill and downhill lies so that you create the stability needed to have a good balance in both sides of your body, because the golf swing works in a lot of dimensions. Do this enough, and you’ll become an expert at playing shots from different terrains, too.

Of course, a golfer may lack stability due to a physical issue, causing an inefficiency in how the body moves throughout the swing. In order to identify bodily flaws that lead to these inefficiencies, visit a fitness expert in your vicinity and get an assessment. This might show you that your body has limitations that are preventing efficient movement, thus affecting proper balance.

Specifically, I’d recommend a TPI fitness or medical expert simply because they understand how the body needs to function in a golf swing to produce better results. If they do find any limitations, they’ll be able to give you correctional exercises to get your body moving efficiently again, and build better balance. If you don’t have an expert in your local area, or just don’t have the time, I’d recommend you purchase a copy of my book, the Golfers Handbook. There is an easy to do assessment in the book that you can do at home.

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Instruction

Clement: Laid-off or perfect fade? Across-the-line or perfect draw?

Published

18 hours ago

Apr 24, 2024

Shawn Clement

Some call the image on the left laid off, but if you are hitting a fade, this could be a perfect backswing for it! Same for across the line for a draw! Stop racking your brain with perceived mistakes and simply match backswing to shot shape!

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Instruction

The Wedge Guy: The easiest-to-learn golf basic

Published

4 weeks ago

Mar 29, 2024

Terry Koehler

My golf learning began with this simple fact – if you don’t have a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, it is practically impossible for your body to execute a fundamentally sound golf swing. I’m still a big believer that the golf swing is much easier to execute if you begin with the proper hold on the club.

As you might imagine, I come into contact with hundreds of golfers of all skill levels. And it is very rare to see a good player with a bad hold on the golf club. There are some exceptions, for sure, but they are very few and very far between, and they typically have beat so many balls with their poor grip that they’ve found a way to work around it.

The reality of biophysics is that the body moves only in certain ways – and the particulars of the way you hold the golf club can totally prevent a sound swing motion that allows the club to release properly through the impact zone. The wonderful thing is that anyone can learn how to put a fundamentally sound hold on the golf club, and you can practice it anywhere your hands are not otherwise engaged, like watching TV or just sitting and relaxing.

Whether you prefer an overlap, interlock or full-finger (not baseball!) grip on the club, the same fundamentals apply. Here are the major grip faults I see most often, in the order of the frequency:

Mis-aligned hands

By this I mean that the palms of the two hands are not parallel to each other. Too many golfers have a weak left hand and strong right, or vice versa. The easiest way to learn how to hold the club with your palms aligned properly is to grip a plain wooden ruler or yardstick. It forces the hands to align properly and shows you how that feels. If you grip and re-grip a yardstick several times, then grip a club, you’ll see that the learning curve is almost immediate.

The position of the grip in the upper/left hand

I also observe many golfers who have the butt of the grip too far into the heel pad of the upper hand (the left hand for right-handed players). It’s amazing how much easier it is to release the club through the ball if even 1/4-1/2″ of the butt is beyond the left heel pad. Try this yourself to see what I mean. Swing the club freely with just your left hand and notice the difference in its release from when you hold it at the end of the grip, versus gripping down even a half inch.

To help you really understand how this works, go to the range and hit shots with your five-iron gripped down a full inch to make the club the same length as your seven-iron. You will probably see an amazing shot shape difference, and likely not see as much distance loss as you would expect.

Too much lower (right) hand on the club

It seems like almost all golfers of 8-10 handicap or higher have the club too far into the palm of the lower hand, because that feels “good” if you are trying to control the path of the clubhead to the ball. But the golf swing is not an effort to hit at the ball – it is a swing of the club. The proper hold on the club has the grip underneath the pad at the base of the fingers. This will likely feel “weak” to you — like you cannot control the club like that. EXACTLY. You should not be trying to control the club with your lower/master hand.

Gripping too tightly

Nearly all golfers hold the club too tightly, which tenses up the forearms and prevents a proper release of the club through impact. In order for the club to move back and through properly, you must feel that the club is controlled by the last three fingers of the upper hand, and the middle two fingers of the lower hand. If you engage your thumbs and forefingers in “holding” the club, the result will almost always be a grip that is too tight. Try this for yourself. Hold the club in your upper hand only, and squeeze firmly with just the last three fingers, with the forefinger and thumb off the club entirely. You have good control, but your forearms are not tense. Then begin to squeeze down with your thumb and forefinger and observe the tensing of the entire forearm. This is the way we are made, so the key to preventing tenseness in the arms is to hold the club very lightly with the “pinchers” — the thumbs and forefingers.

So, those are what I believe are the four fundamentals of a good grip. Anyone can learn them in their home or office very quickly. There is no easier way to improve your ball striking consistency and add distance than giving more attention to the way you hold the golf club.

Clement: Stop ripping off your swing with this drill!

Published

2 months ago

Mar 4, 2024

Shawn Clement

Not the dreaded headcover under the armpit drill! As if your body is defective and can’t function by itself! Have you seen how incredible the human machine is with all the incredible feats of agility all kinds of athletes are accomplishing? You think your body is so defective (the good Lord is laughing his head off at you) that it needs a headcover tucked under the armpit so you can swing like T-Rex?

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