Being a former World Long Drive Champion, the first question golfers ask me is, “How do I hit the ball farther?”

Once you get past the non-swing issues like physical fitness, core strength and a well-fitted driver, there is really one answer.

Do nothing that causes parts of your body, especially the arms, to slow down. Even better, create a situation where they can speed up. And the best way to do that is to make room for things to speed up and try and keep everything in sync and rotating together.

That sounds simple enough — the only problem is the morass of power inducing clichés and catch phrases that get thrown around actually prevent my simple scenario from happening. Things like:

• Widen the arc.
• Complete your backswing to parallel.
• Restrict the hip turn for maximum coil (the X Factor).
• And my very favorite, hold the lag.

All of those things, one way or the other, disconnect the arms from the turn too much. Without getting too technical or too in-depth about all of the problems these actions cause, here are a few simple examples.

Let’s start with the most infamous of distance inducing pursuits, “hold the lag” and its even more evil twin brother, increase or maximize lag. The people who decided to promote this got poor verbal scores on the SAT. You remember those questions:

If Joe is a boy and wears a red hat, then all boys wear red hats. 

Most people who read this would answer either false or not enough information. Why then do we all buy into, “All long hitters have lots of lag, so all people with lots of lag will be long hitters.” I hear the Family Feud buzzer.

Let’s put aside for a second that holding the lag is not physically possible as the club weighs more than 100 pounds at the point where people start to throw it away early, and throwing away lag is the body’s natural reaction to a backswing that is too long or too steep. But let’s assume you can hold the lag. Guess what you just did? You slowed the club down, but at least it looks pretty on slow-motion video, so you’ve got that, which is nice.

How about adding lag or creating maximum lag by float loading, or some variation of pulling the handle to the ball? Pulling the handle to the ball is using the hands (most often the case), arms or body turn to pull the club to the ball with way too much force and not allowing the body to link up and unwind in the proper sequence.  Some call this an “over-active hit impulse” and is the definitive action when the phrase, “I (or you) got quick.”

Float loading is one popular example of pulling the handle. It’s when you delay the setting of the hands and wrists in order to give you the ability to really download the club in transition, and it creates lots of lag. Some really good players do this — Phil Mickelson and Lucas Glover to name two — but they do it naturally. This act is done and preached by hordes of golfers and instructors to create lag when not enough exists as part of a dynamic motion. Below is a dual-photo sequence where I purposely float loaded. It looks pretty, but what you don’t see is the 40 yards of distance I lost from a poor transition sequence, poor timing and awful feel. I have a snapshot of the sour look on my face, but the angle of the camera made me look fat.

This handle-pulling action and others like it almost always creates a steep shaft and steep angle of attack. The hands get isolated from the turn, which delays the rotation of the club and disconnects it from the turn and path. The path can also shift to the right (or left), and the upper body may have to move laterally toward the target so golfers have room to get the club to the ball. The hips have to stall and the hands have to flip, which throws all of the lag away and usually results in a snap hook. Either that, or you get another total disaster — the hips thrust at the ball to shallow the shaft and you dead shank your irons and lay the sod over all your short wedges, pitches and chips when the leading edge digs because you are downloading too much. But at least you have all sorts of lag and forward shaft lean, just like Ben Hogan and me.

The irony was when I was winning long drive titles (even when I compete now), I was doing my best to throw the lag away, as too much doesn’t allow me to hit the ball solid and online.

Here’s the truth: Each individual will have a requisite amount of lag they will produce with a well linked-up swing, and some will have more than others.

At best, lag has an indirect correlation with distance. At worst, having more than you can control and unwind properly will rob you of distance and accuracy for sure. Lag is not thrown away because you are not holding it or not doing some sort of contrived move like float loading to create it; it is the body’s reaction to something else going on. Things like the upper body moving laterally toward the target in the downswing (which steepens the angle of attack and the body throws the lag away to compensate), or too long of an arm swing (as a result of trying to complete the backswing to parallel), which often creates a situation where there isn’t enough rotational speed to get all the way through the ball.

I understand the fascination with lag because long hitters seem to have lots of it, but I am dumbfounded how many people think they must get their backswing to parallel. Other than some meaningless symmetrical connotation, I just ask: why?

John Daly goes way past parallel and long hitter J.B. Holmes is well short of it. So why is parallel so important? It doesn’t get any simpler than everyone has a different optimum backswing and the odds that parallel is the correct one is actually very small. Flexibility is the biggest factor, and if you go all the way to parallel or past it, you are most likely over running your turn with your arms. That gets them disconnected, and means a golfer will have to slow down their turn at some point for them to link up.

Widening the arc has very much the same effect as trying to randomly get to parallel. It will most often disconnect the arms from the turn and force a slow down at some point to link up. Another common residual problem is a change of posture that shifts the path and plane. Late wrist set often accompanies widening the arc, which leads to very narrow downswings and sometimes steep angles of attack. In other words, float loading by accident.

Some will say that a wide arc, float-loading no-handset backswing with a narrower downswing leads to lots of lag and power. I say, try and hit half shots, pitches and wedges that way. You may hit an occasional bomb off the tee, but the other 13 driving holes you are going to be playing from atop someone’s gazebo and you are going to have the short game of Spaulding Smails (you’ll get nothing and like it, too).

Another myth: If you want to have a really good time partying on all parts of the golf course in order to get your money’s worth, restrict the hip turn to maximize X-factor and coil. Let’s put risk of injury aside and just examine what this does to the swing. Now I realize that many of the young PGA Tour stars seem to have very short backswing hip turns and they do. Rory McIlroy, the No. 1 player in the world, is a big one. Let me put it this way: If you are barely out of your teen years and achieve No. 1 status, I won’t make fun of you. But until then, it again causes a disconnect of the arms — are you noticing a pattern with these clichés and arm disconnection? — among other things.

Almost always, it gets the right elbow too far behind the right hip for it to ever recover. The result is an over-the-top move, or a stall of the hips and flipping of the hands at impact. And I know GolfWRXers are not standing in line for either of those swing patterns.

I could go on and on about the catch phrases, how they are implemented poorly and all of the technical errors that result even when done correctly, but I can already hear the snide questions now, “OK genius, if we aren’t supposed to do those things you claim are nasty, what are we supposed to do?”

The short answer is make your swing better, more efficient, have everything match and get transition to work in the proper sequence.

“Well, thanks for that Monte. Using that logic, cold fusion is possible and my 9-year-old will be able to do it as his 4^th grade science fair project.”

What I am about to suggest takes time, effort, dedication and often, the assistance of a good pair of eyes helping you. This is how you actually get better at golf and by default, hit the ball longer. I’ll assume proper “individual” setup, although, that might be a mistake on my part.

1. Make a backswing where the arms, hands and club stay linked to, and match the turn of the hips and shoulders.
2. Shift to the front side with the lower body while keeping the upper body back, giving your body time to transition to the downswing, unwind in a proper sequence and create tilt (yes, you are supposed to have tilt on irons too . . . even wedges).
3. Swing as hard as you want, because of the tilt and proper sequence, you are linked up and have all the room in the world to speed your arms up and have them rotate around your body.

Obviously, Nos. 1 and 2 are some of the hardest things to do in golf. There are many ways to do both of them, and it’s what separates great ball strikers and long hitters, from the mere mortals hitting it 210 off the tee and shooting 90.

The point is if you are wasting time trying to accomplish things that can actually be detrimental to distance and excellence, how can you do the basic building block moves that all good players and long hitters have?