Instruction

How good is your balance? Take this test

Published

6 years ago

Apr 29, 2018

In your golf swing, maintaining your balance is often the difference between consistency or lack of it. If you are able to maintain good balance, you will have a better chance of being able to make an efficient swing where you can transfer energy more efficiently throughout your body’s different segments. That will help you to generate more speed and more distance.

The bottom line is that without good balance, golfers are relying on compensations from coordination… and a little bit of luck. So the question is, do you feel lucky (punk) or are you going to do something to improve your odds?

Balance is more than a necessary fundamental in our golf swing; it’s a necessary fundamental in life, too. We don’t usually take into consideration that balance is a gift we have earned through evolution, as well as one we have spent our whole lives mastering. What is given can be taken away, however, which means our balance can only be improved or maintained through continual development from challenging it on a regular basis. Routines that aren’t challenging us to maintain our balance will eventually cause it to diminish.

There are three things that we have acquired through evolution that allows us to maintain good balance: our vision, the vestibular system (between our ears), and proprioception. Proprioception is our sense of touch that sends a signal to our brain allowing us to know where we are in space during any given movement. During the golf swing, we use our proprioception sensory receptors located throughout our body to send impulses to our brain to help maintain balance and coordinate a stable movement. We tend to lose our ability to maintain good balance through our adult lifestyles and the aging process, however, which can leave us in a bit of a predicament when we need to rely on our ability to maintain good balance in our golf swing.

In the video below, I share with you a simple test that challenges you to look at just how good your balance is. It also give you some exercises to help you regain good balance if you are lacking the ability to maintain it.

Now that you have tested yourself, how did it go? Was your balance poor? Don’t panic if your balance stinks, because the beautiful thing is that you now have the ability to improve it.

The great thing about finding your weaknesses is that you now know what you have to do to improve, as opposed to wandering around hopelessly unaware that you have poor proprioception. This is great news, but regaining your skills to maintain good balance won’t happen right away. There is no magic snapping of the fingers that will improve your ability to maintain good balance — only good old-fashioned practice.

The two exercises in this video will challenge your balance and help you to regain it, though you have to do them regularly, which means a minimum of three times a week if you want to see any significant improvement. There are actually studies that strongly suggest that for every decade you have lived, you should be challenging your body in all ranges of movement at least once a week. That means, if you are in your 30’s, then three times a week is good. If you’re in your 60’s, though… well, I think you get the picture.

As an added bonus to regaining and training good balance again, you will be regaining improved muscle activation so that you can re-learn how to fire the correct muscles to create stability. In doing so, you will be opening up a whole new cabinet of possibilities such as improved movement and potential power, not to mention reduced chances for injury.

If you’re fighting yourself to maintain your balance, then I guarantee that you are perhaps unknowingly fighting yourself to improve your golf game. And I know that you don’t want to be doing that… I mean, who doesn’t want to improve their game, right? Improving your balance is going to help. You’ll have one less thing to try and coordinate in an already challenging sport.

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Instruction

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

Published

10 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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