Archive for the 'Golf Swing Tips' Category

If you watch swing vision on CBS and study what the pros do you’ll notice that one thing they don’t do is take a full back swing. They stop at the top or even half-way up to the top. And this isn’t probably why you think they do.

For one, they are resisting and building power in their midsection and hips by keeping them pointed straight ahead and not rotating out of position. They don’t turn the golf club around their body by rotating their hips. They rotate their upper body.

Doing this requires them to stop towards the top of their swing making them have more control of their downswing. You, probably having less control than a professional golfer, should take this swing tip and run with it.

It takes a lot of practice but this is something you can do in your spare time watching TV. Just take the club back half way, and keep repeating. Repeat until your tired and you’re not thinking about taking the club back. Just make sure the golf club only goes half way.

This can be a great golf practice tip if you’re looking for something to do off the course and help you get to playing scratch golf.

Everyone knows its drive for show and put for dough. Most of your golf score comes within 50 yards of the hole with more than a third coming on the green. Most of the time it can be half of your score. So how do you easily lower your score? Your putt better.

How you putt better can be a difficult egg to crack, but we have a tip that can really help, without having to put in a ton of practice.

If you watch the pros putt there is one thing they consistently do, they repeat their same setup every time. Watch Tiger Woods or Phil Michelson sometime, they both have almost identical timing on there set-up to each and every putt.

What we suggest is a simple way to remember and go about doing this. It will get you into a routine that can easily take several strokes off your game and help you get to playing scratch golf even faster.

1. Look at the lie from the opposite side of the whole
2. Look at the lie from the side
3. Look at the lie from the behind the ball
4. Address the ball
5. Place one foot to the back of the ball
6. Place the other foot to the left of the ball
7. Take 3 practice strokes
8. Make sure you take 3 practice strokes getting a feel for the speed
9. Repeat 5 and 6 now placing the putter face in the correct angle behind the ball
10. Repeat the correct stroke you practiced in 7

If you follow a routine, like this, or one you make up on your own, you’ll be able to easily shave strokes off your game.  It keeps you thinking about something besides the shot you may miss.

It’s winter and you’re driving past your favorite golf course wishing the snow on the ground would disappear. You pass by hole number eight, the long par 5 where you were blew an eagle attempt with a 4 foot whiff of a putt. You think about heading to the nearest indoor putt putt to perfect your game, jokingly.

But should that be such a joke? Why do you have to be on real grass to perfect your putting game? Chance are you missed that 4 foot eagle putt, not because of a bad read, but because of a breakdown in your putting stroke. Sometimes getting back to the fundamentals of your stroke is all you need.

Putting doesn’t have to be done one real grass to perfect it. You need to be able to reproduce your swing stroke over and over again. The greens change speeds from day to day and from course to course, why not use your carpet at home. Your living room carpet can be the perfect place to work on your putting game and you can do it even if there’s 30 inches of snow outside.

You just have to think reproducible. Setup a cup at varying distances and try to putt the golf ball into it. Sure you’ll wear a line in the carpet that the ball will eventually follow but you’re not worried about reading putts. Just the speed and form of your putting stroke.

Try and hit that same line 100 times a night and you’ll be ready to attack any par 5 eagle putt, from 4 feet or 40.

In an article at golfonline.com Peter Kostis explains how the X-Factor can give you distance in your shots.

It’s a great article that takes you through the basic fundamentals of a good down-swing. What every great golfer and every aspiring golfer that follows proper swing mechanics knows is that you need to start the downswing with your hips to give yourself the best possible chance of hitting it far. A lot of players try and muscle the ball with their arms and shoulders, but this isn’t how to maximize distance.

This helpful golf swing article takes you through both the hows and whys of the downswing and how initiating it with your hips can build enough momentum to keep you driving with those younger muscle heads. The article calls this the “New X-Factor” because it looks at a different point in your swing relating it to the letter X.

The old X-factor thought was at the top of your back swing look at the difference between your hips and your shoulder planes and the more of a stretched X you have the more power and torque you’re creating for great swing speed. If you create a cross that’s even better!

The new X factor looks at the X you created throughout the downswing and shows you that you need to keep your hips turning before your shoulders to keep the X formed in the two planes. The longer and more you can keep the X formed, meaning the less parallel your shoulders and hips are throughout the downswing the more torque you have, the more power you have for swinging and the further your ball will go.

Check out the article, there’s lots of great pictures on the New X-Factor to help you better visualize what they’re talking about.

Are you looking for a few free golf tips? Need help with your tee shots your getting out of the sand? You’re in luck. About.com, the massive resource for just about anything has a long list of Free Golf Tips that will help players of all ability levels tweak their game. The list includes:

Golf Basics, for beginners

Getting out of Bunkers

Putting Tips

Wedges

There are many more than just this and I suggest heading over if you want to work on your game and drop your scores.

technorati tags:Golf, Tips, Swing, PGA, Lower, Scores

David Leadbetter coaches some of the best players on tour, has numerous instructional tapes, as well as the training tool, the Leadbetter Swingsetter. One of his students is Michelle Wie who is a 16 year old girl from Hawaii who regularly drives the ball 300+ yards.

What does he tell his students to help them out? Create a shorter compact swing. And he shares this secret with you in a recent article in golfdigest that you can find online at his Instructional Section. He points out the advantage to taking the club back only to 10 o’clock rather than a full rotation. Check out the article and get some good golf tips.

technorati tags:David, Leadbetter, Swing, Coach, Golf, Driver

Are you looking for quality golf tips? Aren’t we all?

Golf Tips Magazine has a great site where they publish, PDF style, all their old golf tips right on their site. If you don’t need to be on teh leading edge of the latest golf tip (which most of them have been around for ever) than you don’t need to purchase the magazine, just head on over to their website and download them for free. You can keep them on your computer for some quality golf reading on those long business flights.

They cover all swing topics, and all different aspects of your game, equipment and even golf travel related topics. Swing tips categories include: Driving, Iron Play, Putting, Sand, short game, and more. We can all use a little help on our game and free advice from experts is a great way to go.

Have you ever heard someone watching golfers on the driving range say “Look at all the lumber jacks chopping wood.” Do you know why they say everyone looks like a lumber jack or like they’re chopping wood?

It’s because that’s what people look like. They’re using their arms to literally chop at the ball. Tightening their wrists, tensing their arms and swinging down at rather than through the ball.

The golf swing isn’t supposed to be tense or stressful on the arms, leave that for your mid-section and back. The arms are more or less along for the ride, swing as a pendulum would. Think of your arms as a string and wrists holding onto a your hands. If you were to swing that string around your body the string would go tense and the force felt at the hands is just that caused by the weight of your hands and the speed at which you swing the string. You don’t need to add force to make this happen.

That’s what you should feel like when you swing!

Now on to the wrist hinge. As you hold onto the golf club, your grip should be very loose. Just enough to keep the club from rotating in your hands, no more. Now think of that string again as you hold onto the club and your wrists should just go along for the ride. Keeping this in your mind as you take the club back you shouldn’t need to flex your wrists much as your bring the club to the top position, they’ll naturally flex.

Now when you bring them down, resist every temptation you have to tense your wrists. If you allow them to flex naturally and freely they’ll come back to square automatically. It’s physics my friend!:). As you continue through your swing don’t resist as you draw the club through. This is a big problem point where people will leave the club face open causing a slice. Keep your wrists loose and let them flex back and turn over. The club will come back around and might whack you in the back of the head but that just means you’re doing it right.

Just think loose, loose, loose.

Does anyone remember this guy from the Big Break II? Remember the guy who always played without shoes? What a goof, Right?I guess the real question is are you allowed to play a round of golf with no shoes on? Are golf shoes required in the game of golf during play? Well the answer to the second question is no, as far as Getting to Scratch can determine. You don’t need to have regulation golf shoes to play a round of golf on almost all golf courses. Now I’m sure there is a course out there that requires them but most all courses allow you to play in some type of sneakers, or maybe your penny loafers if that’s all you have.

A lot of course do require soft spikes if you are going to wear some sort of spiked golf shoe. Those metal spikes really do a number on the greens.

As for playing the game barefoot. If you don’t see a sign that says no shirt, no shoes, no service out on the course, Getting to Scratch would imagine that it’s alright for you to go ahead and let those dogs breathe. Sam Snead used to play practice rounds without shoes on, and Charles Howell as well. Playing without shoes on makes you keep your lower body from moving around a lot because you have less stability in your bare feet.

A proper swing should have little movement from about your knees down and you should try and restrict movement as much as possible. Going barefoot at the tee forces your body to slow down because you are not used to the easy rotation of your bare feet. This also helps build muscle in your feet creating a more stable swing should you go back to wearing your Footjoys.

Next time out at the range try it out and you might just move towards a more stable swing yet. For more information on the guy from Big Break II that played barefoot check out The Big Break II website at the Golf Channel.

While driving some golf ball today on the range, Getting to Scratch author Erik, noticed that his grip was too tight. On every shot I felt like I was chopping at the ball rather than trying to swing at it. Of course I didn’t notice until after I was done with my second basket but there it was plane as day. Chopping at the golf ball rather than rotating my body and swinging through the ball.

To practice the loose grip you should take a light club, possibly your 5 or 3 wood and head out to the driveway. Then grab the club with the tightness of a 2 out of 10, 10 being the tightest and begin to rotate your body with your club and arms following their normal swing plane. The difference you should be trying for is imagine your wrist to be a loose hinge that you have no control over. When you get to the top of your back swing begin to rotate your body allowing only your body and shoulders to take your club through its swing path.

Don’t worry about where the club head goes. If you swing with the correct amount of tension in your grip the club head will actually have an easier time coming back to square. Continue on with your swing, imagining your wrist is an unrestricted hinge and finish by nearly letting the club fly off into the distance. It should actually whip around and almost hit your in the back of the head.

Continue to do this with the your wrists just free floating. Don’t try and hit a ball. Do this 10 or 20 times until you get the feel. Then the next time you are at the range try this same motion. Don’t worry about where the ball goes just fling your wrists without controlling them.

The reason for loosening your grip and ultimately your wrists is because if you have a tight grip on the golf club that means your wrists are going to be tight and when you bring the club to the bottom of your swing, where you contact the ball, you’re going to have that much more of a difficult time bringing the club around to square. You are actaully going to use your arms and your strength to re-square the club rather than using the momentum of the club head as it swings around.

With a tight grip you are more than likely slowing the club head down to allow your wrists and forearms to play catch up and thus reducing the momentum of the club head and therefore hitting shorter shots as well.

It should also be noted that this type of loose grip technique works best with a neutral grip.Â

Just remember to keep your grip loose and your wrists and arms will follow. More to come on drills to practice the proper and loose grip.