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In the course of a day’s teaching I always marvel at the utter uniqueness of each case I deal with. Each golfer that comes to me for help has an entirely different personality, physical makeup, personal history, level of athletic ability, and learning capability. Each hour I reboot the computer and start over with a fresh batch of swing flaws, which may start right with the grip and set-up, then proceed to takeaway problems, backswing problems, transition problems, downswing problems, and impact problems. The game is so difficult, and the technique so complex, that literally no one is without something in their swing, some movement or position, that they would like to improve. And while over the course of teaching thousands of lessons you might expect the same problems to occur in a significant amount of students, the degree to which certain mistakes crop up is quite surprising. I used to wonder whether the game itself made people do the same things wrong, that the mistakes were built in to the technique, but over the years I have found that not to be the case.
I have been teaching for over 20 years now, and since I feel as though I am improving all the time, if you went back to my beginnings you would probably find that I wasn’t very good, although I was at least an accomplished player and quite sincere in my efforts to help my unsuspecting students. One thing I have learned over time is that it is of great importance to go beyond what is physically happening during the swing itself in order to figure out how a student thinks about what he or she is trying to do, as well as how those thoughts evolved. To do this requires a bit of probing, and if you talk with someone who has taken a lesson from me you might prompt them to remember becoming slightly annoyed at my constant questions concerning what they are actually trying to do with the club.
Eventually I found that while I could fix most mechanical errors in the short term, or at least explain how to fix them, if the student had a poor underlying concept of what they were supposed to be doing and why, they might make a few better swings while I was watching and constantly critiquing each shot, when the lesson was over and they were out on their own the reversion factor was alarmingly high. By the time the next lesson rolled around they were inevitably making the same errors in the same sequence as before. In my early years I figured that the student simply didn’t know what they were supposed to do, and if they couldn’t do it correctly after having the proper technique explained to them then they just weren’t capable, either physically or mentally. As I began to gain experience and become a better teacher and began asking more students what they were up to, I found that a large number of them simply had the wrong idea about what they were supposed to be doing. Most times the thought was not conscious, at least not in an “up front” fashion. These misguided ideas seem to have entered into the deep recesses of the student’s brain almost subliminally, and only after pressing for answers did I hear something other than “I don’t really think about it”. The student recalled having “heard it before”, or recounted that “someone told me that in a lesson”, or “read it in a magazine once”.
We all know that if a statement is made enough times by reputable sources it takes on a truth of its own and becomes accepted or “conventional” wisdom, regardless of the truth or accuracy of the content. In golf much of this type of information is incorrect and damaging to the student’s chances of ever being a decent player. In the following paragraphs I will examine some of the most prevalent pieces of “conventional wisdom” that, if successfully applied, will most certainly serve to screw up any attempt to get better.
Myth #1: Don’t think too much.
Let’s say you have a bad swing, or at least you have elements within your swing that are not good and are keeping you from hitting the ball better. You know you have a problem, and you are yearning to fix the thing and improve your technique. One of the things you might do is sign up for a lesson, so let’s say you come to me to watch what you are doing. As the lesson begins you are likely to tell me what you think you might be doing wrong, showing me that you have invested some time in assessing your problems, although as of yet you have been unsuccessful in coming up with anything that works better. I ask you what you are thinking about before you swing, or during your swing, and you reply that you “don’t think about anything”, or that you “try not to think” while you are swinging, especially on the golf course. I hear this so often that I have to take a moment so as not to get too worked up, at which point I will give my little speech, which goes something like this: “OK, so when you don’t think about anything you swing a certain way. Let’s call this your “natural swing”, the one you make every time you don’t try to do something different on purpose. Now, you’re here at this lesson because your swing doesn’t seem to work as well as you think it should. You don’t hit enough good shots, your bad shots are particularly bad and get you in trouble, and when the least bit of pressure is on you fold up like a cheap tent. This is what you get without thinking about anything. You would dearly like to change and get better. In order to do this you are going to have to do something different from what you normally do. In fact, there is probably a progression of things you will have to do differently, as one thing does not usually fix a golf swing that has had years to build in compensations for multiple mistakes. How do you do something different, how do you change what you are doing, without thinking about it? If you aren’t going to make a conscious attempt to swing differently, what we hope will be better, then you are simply going to continue to make the swing you always do, which we have both decided is not good enough to make you happy.”
The student’s concern is always the same: “When I think, I get worse”. Ah, then we have to figure out what to think about, how many things you can think about at the same time, and which ones of those things work best on the course. This is what the best players go through, and it’s why even the best don’t play well all the time. No one said it was easy. If you don’t try to change, you will just stay the same or get worse. As for thinking about what you are doing causing major headaches, you will find more on this subject in the next section.
Myth #2: Slow down.
I want you to think about how many times you have commented to one of your playing partners after they have hit a bad shot that they looked as though they “got a little quick on that one”. How many times has someone said that about a swing of yours? And what is the inevitable follow-up to the diagnosis of “getting quick”? Well, of course, it’s “slow down”. The cure for all ills in golf! Just slow down! What if I told you that almost 100 % of all mediocre and poor golfers, and a large number of pretty good ones, are anything but too fast: instead, they are all too slow. In his book Tour Tempo John Novosel gives us an almost fool-proof method for measuring tempo, and the results are, in my estimation, quite astonishing. To measure tempo one only needs a video camera and a remote that advances the tape frame-by-frame. Counting the movement of the clubhead from the beginning of the takeaway to the point at the top where the club changes direction, then down to the point that the club hits the ball, the observer will come up with two numbers. As every video camera films at 30 frames per second each click of the frame advance moves the film 1/30th of a second, allowing every golfer to be measured and compared equally. Novosel started with Tour players and after counting as many as he could make a startling discovery. Almost all of the best players used a 3:1 ratio (backswing to downswing) to hit the ball. Most of the all the other players (which probably includes you) are far too slow in the backswing, and come up a ratio in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 to 1.
Making too slow of a backswing causes everything that follows to feel too fast. When the transition feels fast and the general thought after a shot was “I got quick from the top”, the natural instinct is to slow down even more, which, of course, was the problem in the first place, and will now proceed to only get worse. The answer would be to speed up the backswing so that the transition didn’t seem so quick by comparison, at which point your “tempo” would have improved immensely. My hypotheses as to why backswings are generally too slow are two-fold: first, golfers hear it all the time. “Slow down, you’re too fast”. Second, when any mechanical thought is introduced people like to give themselves more time to process the thought while they move in order to “make sure” they are doing it right. Thus, tempo and thinking go hand in hand, and since a faster tempo is usually better, and it is better to think about what you are trying to change, fitting thoughts into a time frame is an important facet in becoming more aware of what you are doing when you swing without becoming “too mechanical”. It most definitely is possible to think about your swing while maintaining good tempo. I use a metronome to help students time their swings, and we try to fit swing thoughts into the time allotted for the swing.
Myth # 3: Grip the club lightly.
If you have never heard that you are supposed to grip the club lightly (like you are holding a bird?) then you can count yourself as one of the few, and as one of the lucky ones. I probably spend more time each day fixing grips than on any other specific item, and the biggest culprit in all the lousy grips I have to deal with is a lack of sufficient pressure in the key points where the hands contact the club. When I see a loose grip (and I can tell right away when the hands do not look “soldered” together) I give a little interactive demonstration. Try this after I explain it: take a club and grip it the way you would to hit a full shot (iron or driver, doesn’t matter). Now, pretend that there is a wooden stake stuck lightly in the ground in front of you that comes up to about your waist. Holding your arms in front of you and using just your wrists try to pound the stake into the ground as far as you can in 20 seconds. As you make the short, hard up and down movements that would beat the stake into the ground assess your grip pressure. My guess is that it will feel quite firm, if not “tight”. Did that affect your wrists? No, your wrists were plenty flexible, as that is what you were using to pound on the stake. So, we have figured out that a tight grip does not lead to stiff wrists. For part two, take your normal grip and again hold the club in front of you with your arms relaxed. Picture me holding my own club and attacking you with it like I was trying to stab you with a sword (this gets pretty funny when I actually do it in a lesson). Defend yourself, and try to stab me back. I am moving pretty quickly, so you’d better be prepared to move your club with quick, sharp movements. Assess how your arms feel. My guess is that they are loose, because if they aren’t I’m going to impale you in about 2 seconds. Now, how about your grip? I bet it’s tight. Hmmm. Loose arms, tight grip. Flexible wrists, tight grip. How can that be? Doesn’t a firm grip cause all sorts of tension? Hogwash. If you are going to pound an iron shot into the ground and take a divot you better have your hands on the club. If you want to drive the ball as far as you can and swing the club as fast as you can you’d better have control of the golf club. The key word here is “control”. I don’t need to grip the club very firmly if I am only going to hit the ball 15 feet. But if I am going to hit it hard, which is what I do with every full shot, I need to have my hands in control of the club.
Once again, misinformation comes in small phrases. “You’re holding it too tight. Just loosen up and get rid of all that tension”. Golf is not tension free. It takes strength, and coiling, resisting, and creating speed all put tremendous strain on the hands. A loose grip at address will either have to firm up during the swing or it will let go somewhere. Grabbing the club in the middle of the motion is a bad idea. Not cocking the wrists because the club will move in the hands is a problem I see all the time, as is a grip that comes apart at the top of the swing. With proper grip placement and knowledge of pressure point applications a firm grip will allow you to take control of the club and swing as hard as you want to without any adverse affects.
Myth # 4: Swing the club straight down the target line.
If you are trying to swing the club straight to the target for any distance (I hear anywhere from “an inch or two” to “as long as I possibly can”) and you still hit the ball well, I can assure you that it is in spite of your attempt, not because of it. In fact, I can say with some certainty that if you stop trying to swing “straight out to the target” you will eventually hit the ball much better. The fact is that it is impossible to swing the club on a straight line with any speed whatsoever. You are standing to the side of the ball, swinging at a ball on the ground. The club swing up and around your body in an arc, and it returns to and past the ball while continuing to arc. The only thing that goes straight (hopefully) is the ball. The hands and the club move in an arc that is inscribed on an angled plane, and the only time the clubhead contacts the target line (which is always straight) is at impact. If you don’t believe me, hold your club up to waist high in front of you and swing as hard as you can. Now try to swing as hard as you can while making the club move straight as it passes in front of you. Can’t figure out how to do that? Well, that’s not surprising, since it’s impossible. There are no straight lines in a circle. The only way to move a club like that is to stop it completely and redirect it, and then start over again, hardly the way to increase your clubhead speed. Going along with the effort to move the club straight through impact is the attempt to keep the clubface square, again an impossibility, as the movement of the arms, forearms, wrists and hands in response to the body’s rotation guarantees that the face will open in the backswing and close continuously in the forward swing. Any attempt to keep the face square almost guarantees shots that fly directly to the right.
We all wish for the game to be easier than it is. You are not a terrible person because you want straight to equal straight, or up to be up. In golf, however, you swing in an arc to hit straight, and you swing down to hit up when the ball is on the ground. It is decidedly counter-intuitive, and not taking that into consideration can be ruinous to your efforts to hit the ball.
Myth # 5: You’re not turning.
Oh yes, you are turning, and there is a very good chance that rather than not turning enough, you are turning way too much. The obsession with a 90 degree shoulder turn and a swing that gets the club to parallel to the ground at the top is the culprit in a whole host of swing headaches, the end result of which leaves the golfer unable to get back to the ball in any sort of quality impact position. Anyone can swing the club back to parallel at the top with a huge shoulder turn if they allow their lower body to twist as much as it wants to. And trust me; the lower body wants to twist, because turning everything is far easier than turning the upper body more than the lower, which is exactly what you want to do. The lower body is the governor of the swing. When it does what it is supposed to do in the backswing, which is not much, the upper body movement becomes a coil as it tries to rotate back and the legs resist. Stretching the muscles of the upper trunk against the stabilizing action of the legs creates the stored up energy necessary to hit the ball far, and the proper connection between the upper and lower that is needed to give the player a chance to start the downswing in the proper sequence, in which the lower body leads the upper. If the legs stay in their proper shape turn of the upper body will be self-regulated. If you desire more turn, which would hit the ball further, you must keep the legs doing what they are doing. You cannot sacrifice lower body form for upper body length with sacrificing efficiency. You need to be well open with your hips in order to hit quality shots, and that is difficult to do when you move too much sideways or around with the lower body in the backswing.
Myth # 6: Swing easy and the ball will go far.
No, it won’t. Where this idea originated I don’t know, but it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. I swing easy when I don’t want the ball to go far. I swing easy on soft pitch shots and short pitches around the green. I never swing easy at a full shot. This doesn’t mean that I swing as hard as I can all the time: it just means that a full shot, to be struck with quality, must be struck aggressively. Easy is not aggressive. The “ease” with which some Tour players apparently swing is an illusion brought about by athletic grace and perfect rhythm combining to produce tremendous power without obvious effort. I encourage my students to swing hard, focusing especially on a snapping hip movement that rotates the truck with tremendous speed and produces large amounts of power.
So where did this particular gem come from? Most of these thoughts I attribute to two main sources: teachers who don’t play, and players who don’t teach. Focusing on the first, I have always believed that the only first hand knowledge of the game is gleaned by actually doing it. And since I believe that you can’t tell anything about the way you play until you compete, it follows that teachers who don’t compete are inherently lacking in knowledge that is gained from actual playing experience. When I see teachers on television waving the club back and forth espousing “tension free golf” I want to vomit. They aren’t helping anyone hit the ball better or farther, and yet there they are making their nice, easy movements as though that was creating any clubhead speed at all. Ernie Els is an illusion. The guy is 6’5”, 220 pounds and has technique to die for. He produces 125 miles per hour of driver speed and looks as though he’s barely trying. Now watch Tiger. Does he look like he’s swinging easy? Not to me he doesn’t. It looks more like controlled mayhem, and if you get a chance to be close to him when he hits one hard you’ll think you are going to be sucked up in vortex caused by his body movement. Players who don’t teach have no reference points to deal from except their own experience. They can’t know that when they feel like they “swing easy” their swings still produce huge amounts of clubhead speed, while if Mr. Havacamp swings easy he hits it 20 yards shorter than his already pathetically short drives. Sam Snead always said to “hold the club like a bird”. I saw a picture of Snead at impact once, and I couldn’t believe the guys arms. He had veins and muscles popping out all over the place. It looked like something out of Gray’s Anatomy. He had to be one of the strongest guys to ever hold a club. What do you think his grip pressure actually was when he held it “light”? The point being: beware when good players tell you how they “feel”. You’re not that good, and there’s a good chance that what they are saying has no meaning in your world.
Myth # 7: Why can’t I swing like that all the time?
I hear this one at least once a day: I’m watching my student hit some shots, and I see one balloon slice to the right, the next one dive 90 degrees dead left, then a half skulled thin one, followed by massive chunk. Finally one gets caught half solid, and the student says “There you go! Now, why can’t I just swing like that all the time? That’s the swing I want, right?” Unfortunately, that’s wrong. I hate to burst the student’s bubble, but the truth is he really doesn’t want to swing like that at all. Listen in as I explain: “You have to understand that the swings you make are all essentially the same unless you think of something and purposefully try to make one different. I can show you on the video that you will pass through exactly the same positions every time, and that your tempo will also be almost identical from swing to swing. The thing that can’t be measured is the movement of your hands as you hit the ball. The difference between the swings that hit those five shots is not measurable other than by the results. You just hit one out of five decently. If you hit a thousand shots you would have a better idea of what your percentages are, but it is safe to say that at your level most of your shots are not that good, the reason being that your swing is not that good, as it presents your hands with too complicated of a task at impact. The measure of its effectiveness is the percentage of quality shots it produces. Having a bad swing does not mean you cannot hit the odd good shot, or even great shot. You can even have good stretches of holes, or a good nine, or a good 18. But you cannot sustain that level of ball striking, because your swing won’t allow it. You don’t want to swing with the mechanics that hit that one good shot, because that same swing hit all those other bad ones, and if everything stays the same you will continue to have far more bad ones than good ones. What you really need to do is improve, and that means you need to change. When you make your swing better your hands will have an easier time of squaring the club at impact and providing power to the strike of the ball. Your worst shots won’t be quite as bad, and all your other shots will be a bit better. You will hit more decent shots and less bad ones, and you will then be a better golfer”.
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