Major Golf Lesson

Remember, my job is to educate you as a golfer to help you move forward. Then it’s up to you the golfer to focus on the difficult characteristics of your swing and repeat certain moves until it feels more natural. It’s important to provide you with a solid foundation of the basics and to motivate you to such an extent that you take on the responsibility to work on your game.  In practical terms, that involves designing drills and exercises. That’s the best thing about drills and exercise, they not only spice up your practice time but they amplify that obscure component of “feel” and so speeds up your improvement.

Many of you are puzzled when I suggest you practice at home without a ball, simply rehearsing your swing and doing drills. So many of my students are under the false impression that constructive practice has to involve pounding thousands of balls. On the contrary, the majority of golfers would improve their game extensively if only they would set aside a few minutes during the week to run through some chosen drills at home. Without the concern of making a “hit at the ball”, it’s easier to focus on the finer points of technique, develop a repeating method and build so-called muscle memory through repetition of good moves.

Part of the skill in learning the game of golf is to understand your own tendencies and weaknesses, and using your practice time wisely. When you are making contact with a ball and working on a new move, try to focus on the execution of the new move at hand and not so much on the result of your shot.

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Thin shots, fat shots, no distance or just plain inefficient contact could be due to a dreaded reverse pivot. If you reverse your body pivot your golf balls flight shouldn’t go up in the air. It will be struck with an ascending approach up into the ball, giving the ball top spin and staying very low to the ground or even worse, nose diving into the ground. The reverse can be caused from a beginning golfer thinking incorrectly that they’ve got to get the club under the ball to help it up. A faulty set up can also encourage a reverse. And the more exaggerated the reverse the worse your miss can be. Even golfers who have been playing for years can display a tendency to creep in the old “reverse tilt”.

Your bodies pivot is crucial to consistency. And if you want to get the most out of your swing you have to know what your body is doing.

Here are some quick tips to make sure you are pivoting correctly. Look in a mirror or on camera to see what your body is doing……..

in the Back Swing:

• Let your head swivel behind the ball a little.
• No swaying of the hips in your rotation back.
• Hips rotating on a fairly level plane.
• Chest and upper body weight over your right thigh.
• Left shoulder over your foot.
• No straightening or buckling of the right knee.

in the Forward Swing:

• Start your forward swing from the ground up.
• Your weight moves over to your left thigh.
• Head is staying behind the lower body.
• Hips, lower torso, upper torso, chest, shoulders and arms are rotating or pulling to the left and in that order.

Making the correct body pivot will promote proper weight shift, encourage acceleration of the club head and induce proper release of the forearms and club. These principles will result in better consistency and longer distance in your shot.

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I’ve had several students ask me whether they should wait until after January 1, 2010 on purchasing new clubs with the new grooves or buy clubs now that have the sharper edged grooves which induces a higher spin rate on your golf ball. It will depend on whether you play in Major/USGA events or on the PGA Tour. I’m sure you would love getting paid to exhibit your game of golf regardless of how good or bad it is, but have a more efficient means of making a living than taking your chances on qualifying for USGA events or the PGA Tour. But if you would like to try and qualify you will have to use the new grooves because the USGA has decided to regulate the size of the grooves on the club face. They’re reducing the maximum groove capacity by around 25% from what is currently allowed while also limiting the groove edges that are considerably duller than what is now allowed. The intention is to limit the effectiveness of shots from the rough.

Either way, it’s still remarkable how particular some golfers are concerning the level of club design. Grooves are the horizontal canals engraved into the clubface. During those valuable few microseconds at impact when the ball and the clubface actually meet, grooves amplify the friction, and impart more spin to the golf ball.

Well, before to long, club makers started to experiment with the depth, width and sharpness of those grooves in an effort to claim that their grooves spin the ball more than any of their competitors clubs could.

It’s been a proven scientific fact that the U-groove induces more spin than their V-groove predecessor does. The USGA has finally stepped in and on January 1, 2010 the USGA will implement the new limits on edge sharpness for all grooves manufactured after 1/1/10. These limits will decrease backspin and increase launch angle and ball roll out. If you want more backspin you can continue to play with the square or U-grooves until 2024 or could be forever. However if you purchase clubs manufactured after 1/1/10 it will have grooves with spin performance at or below V-groove levels. Those grooves will limit you to average spin performance.

Here are some performance implications:

• Spin rate is reduced by 30 to 50%
• Launch angle increases 7-20% or up to 5º higher
• Roll out of the ball after impact on the green is increased from 9 to 15 feet

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