2017 March

There is a big difference between your game and the way the professional golfers approach their game. You have limited time and they make a living with their full time occupation. As a recreational golfer, you need to accept this fact and focus on the key tricks that will help lower your score.  You spend less time working on your game than the pros  so you have to do the little things that will work best for you.

Slow Down: Arrive early for your round of golf and get your body and mind slowed down. Always work on getting in the zone to play golf and enjoy it. You can’t do this if your mind is listening to rock and roll music and you are driving like a demon to get to the course.

Warm Up: Take your time to stretch your body and then hit some short and progressively longer shots at the range. Tight muscle will stain and ruin your game if you don’t start swinging with a full range of motion and comfortable timing.

What’s Working?: Figure out what is working at the range with your wedges, irons, woods (hybrids) and driver. Set a game plan for each type of club to ensure that you are setting up correctly and swinging with a consistent tempo. Use that feeling for each club throughout your game.

Putting: Don’t start your game until you test the speed of the greens on the practice green. As greens dry out during the day they will speed up but you need a baseline to start from for your first putts in your round.

Be calm and relaxed. Sort out the swing that is working for you and get in your zone for total focus for every swing.

Get in YOUR FOCUSED ZONE: Take your comfortable swing tempo from the driving range to the first tee. Snap your mind into a focus on each hit. You have a routine so stick with it. Use it to control your setup and your mind. Seeing others swing like a mad man should have no effect on your next swing. Line up your target. Take a full practice swing exactly the way you want to hit the ball. Step forward to the ball, relax your shoulders & grip and complete your swing in a calm and relaxed zone.

Your Game Plan:  You only need to hit 1 shot at a time. Forget any other shot and only focus on your next shot. [Ben Hogan said that the most important shot in golf is your next shot.]  Tiger Woods seems to get into a Zen State and Jason Day goes into a trance as he squints his eyes. You can’t play well if your mind is not on your game. Jason showed this when he had to drop out of the Dell Match Play Tournament after the first few holes when his concentration was on his mother’s struggle with Cancer. Above all else your mind and focus has to be on executing your next shot.

Learn the key basics for your swing with GOLFSTR+. See the results at the range and build confidence in your swing with your GOLFSTR+ for 6 swing fixes. Buy one today at www.golfstr.com

I love to find shocking articles by credible writers to give me the real truth about ways to improve my golf game.  Stephen Altschuler – in a recent GolfWRX BLOG wrote “Forgiving irons? A perspective you might not like.” I just wanted to share the abbreviated version of his comments because I always thought that this was the truth.

“Club manufacturers have glommed onto the term “forgiving” to coax golfers to their products, and I think it’s done more to detract beginners from learning the game properly and eventually dropping out. In the process, people try the game thinking their forgiving clubs will essentially do it all for them, almost by magic.

Today, with irons looking more like garden tools, and drivers more like battle-axes, forgiveness is the keyword. As the commercial for the XE1 wedge says: “The XE1 is awesome. It just popped the ball right up,” says a guy with a swing not unlike Charles Barkley’s. Effortless? The club does all the work? Right: All you have to do is take the same lousy swing you’ve brought to the course for 30 years, and it bounces right on the green. I kid the XE1. It’s probably a fine club, (tongue-in-cheek) but we all know down deep the club is probably not much better than Gene Sarazen’s sand wedge he invented in 1928. You still need to swing the club properly to make it do what it was intended to do. That takes good instruction and lots of practice.

Back in the day, with a 200cc persimmon driver, you had to have pretty darn good technique to make solid contact, so the emphasis for the recreational golfer was solid contact and not so much club head speed. Swings then were smoother, better paced, slower and more athletic.

Do you really believe that these beauties will make all the difference in your game. It will cost you $300+ to find out for sure.

But in one of the greatest marketing ploys in sports history, golf club manufacturers have convinced us that salvation was in larger and larger club head sizes for both irons and drivers, digging out huge cavities in the backs of irons, switching to whippier and ever-lighter graphite shafts, and fatter, flatter, less tapered grips. These days, young golfers wouldn’t know what Trevino meant when he joked, after being struck by lightning with a long-iron in his hands, “Only God can hit a 1-iron.”

You can’t reliably buy a guaranteed better game, unless you’re talking about lessons. If you practice the wrong fundamentals, you will dig yourself a deeper golf hole. As Palmer says in a recent TV spot, “Swing your swing. Perfect in its imperfection. Swing your swing. I know: I did.” And, please, don’t buy a club because it’s more forgiving. Just forgive yourself for not using your pro more often, and squeezing in just a bit more time for practice and playing.”

I love to read the hype about new club concepts that will turn my game on fire. It’s just lots of hype. Save your money for lessons after you get a good club fitting to match your strength and ability with the right clubs for you.

To help you hone in the right swing with a straight leading arm, flat wrist and lag, why not buy a GOLFSTR+ to help you with 6 swing fixes. Buy one today at www.golfstr.com

This is a refreshing thought! We are always being told to “swing like a pro”. Could it be possible that the untrained everyday Joe or Jane CAN’T swing like a pro. I have learned that I can’t swing exactly like a pro and I have seen what others have done to overcome weaknesses in there swing. I just wanted to share these observations with you because it may lead to your golfing success with more consistent hits.

Take for example the situation where a person has been injured in war, in a car accident or in past athletic endeavors (with a broken leg, arm or ankle while skiing or a wrenched shoulder while reaching for a ball or even a jar on a shelf). Yes, this could be anyone of us and we don’t realize that the limitation in our muscles is harming our swing.

I recently read an article by Shawn Clement, a Class A Professional at Richmond Hill Golf Club in Ontario, Canada advising that you should “use your natural physiology to improve your swing and your game”. I had never thought of it this way. For example: if your natural body swing is a blocked swing at 15 degrees to your target line why not swing with an open stance by 15 degrees to the left. Just setup that way and hit up your target line.

Rory McIlroy has a unique swing and you do too. Take lessons to get it right and then make your swing work for you.

These are examples of my friends who are adapting to accommodate a physical limitation:
-Mary: (major car accident). Her back swing is with a bent leading arm but she releases her arms and club to a straight arm at impact and has an amazing 200 yard drive.  [She also lifts her leading foot like a baseball player swinging a bat and she loses her balance backwards on every swing.  YES, she breaks every rule for a great golf swing and still has a  Handicap Index of 15.]
-Frank: (Swollen arm from an infection in his youth.) He sets up his drive with an extremely closed stance and consistently nails the ball up the center of the fairway.
-Andy: (An athlete with timing limitations.) He sets up with more pressure on his leading foot so that he can control his hits for extreme distance and direction control.
-Myself: (Lower back discectomy limiting spine rotation.) I setup with an open stance and slightly open club face to allow an inside to up the target line swing to control my direction.

Shawn Clement found research that proves that your body positions in your backswing is never exactly the same. Your mind compensates to hit up your target line. He said that “Your mind needs to focus on your target. Your target will change your swing to adapt to hit to the target.” I’m just recommending that you go one step further. Sort out your physical limitation. Then setup for your golf swing to work with your limitation. You will only be successful if you focus on YOUR consistent setup for YOUR body.

You may not have any physical limitations but I’m willing to bet that your swing will change as your body ages. You may have noticed it with Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer as we watched them age. It’s still in your best interest to swing with a straight leading arm, flat wrist and with wrist lag in your backswing for more consistent and longer hits. GOLFSTR+ is a great training aid to help you learn 6 swing fixes. Buy one today at:   www.golfstr.com

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I love the recent blog from Hank Haney where he said that he’s not a big fan of the hocus pocus suggestion to focus on a target and expect that the ball will go there. Picking your target is a critical starting point but simplifying our thoughts to create the swing to get your ball there is the only thing that counts.

You have to choose your target, decide on the best shot shape, finalize your setup to execute the shot and then and only then focus on a swing thought to make the shot.

1/ Determine your target direction and draw an imaginary line back to your ball. (Your target direction is the line where you want your ball to launch and then draw or fade to your target.)
2/ Then choose a leaf or fat blade of grass at an intermediate point on that line a few feet out from your ball (so that you can still see it when you setup to the ball).
3/ Set your toes on a parallel line to your target line in preparation for you practice swing.
4/ Adjust your feet and ball position to achieve your desired draw or fade.
5/ Take your practice swing exactly at the speed that you want to swing and finish.
6/ Move up to your ball, relax your shoulders and wrists.  Inhale and exhale.

From this point onward you are NOT looking up at your end target. You are only looking at your club face pointing a few feet up your target line to that blade of grass. Your only goal is to launch your ball up your line.

Complete your setup and THEN lock into a single swing thought and make it happen.

Now that you are lined up you need a single thought in your mind to make sure that you are creating the swing for a perfect impact to launch your ball and finish with a balanced stance on your leading foot. At the driving range before your round you may determine a swing thought for that perfect hit.

Your thought might be one of these:

– “Slow my backswing and transition for time to lag my wrists”
– “Swing from the inside and up my target line”
– “Rotate my arms, shoulders and then my hips for a full backswing.”
– “Swing up my target line to a balanced finish.”
– “Hold my head to prevent any swaying as I coil my body.”
– “Keep my eyes focused on the back of the ball”
– “Sweep in annnnd Balance”  [say it as you swing and impact the ball on the word “Balance”.]

If you want longer and more consistent hits, practice with your GOLFSTR+ to learn to swing with a straight leading arm, flat wrist and lag. By one today at www.golfstr.com

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First Hole Jitters?  There is always a build-up in your mind about that first drive on the first hole. There is a lot of pressure because your drive sets up your success or failure for each hole.

If you are not confident with your setup for each drive, a build-up of Adrenalin will play tricks on your mind and your swing. Lingering memories of your last drive (good or bad) or a poor shot on the previous hole can destroy your next drive.  Get a grip on your head before you start each round of golf.

Golf Digest shows what happens when you swing with all arms and then the correct way.

Have you ever noticed how others mess up their drives. They take a practice swing at a 50% speed: hips start the down swing and they release their swing perfectly.  But when they step forward to the ball, it’s a new ball game. The backswing is rushed so they never finish it. In their rush they miss the hip shift to their leading foot. The swing becomes all arms, causing an early release of the arms before the foot pressure shifts from the back foot to the front foot. This causes fat hits, topped balls, duck hooks or high flying slices.

It seems that our minds can’t handle the thought of hitting that little white ball. That ball seems to cause the “Dragon in our Minds” to rear its ugly head and unleash a killer swing with any result but a good one.

Get rid of that Ugly Dragon in your head every time you play golf.

It is easier to see this in others but it may also be your problem. A lesson will help, but your mind has to accept that the rush to reach the top of your swing is killing your results. Hank Haney said that a professional golfer’s downswing swing is 3 times faster than their backswing. You need to take your time to complete your full backswing without rushing the transition to the downswing. You may even want to try that full stop at the top of your swing like Hideki Matsuyama [but it is rare to see this being tried by others].

I know that my mind occasionally kicks into high gear and that Ugly Dragon rears his head to mess up some of my shots. We all need to be aware of that Ugly Dragon hiding inside our heads.

Calming the Dragon is what we all need to do. Don’t let Adrenalin over power your swing.

SOLUTIONS:
-Get rid of your tension by setting up with relaxed shoulders (let them drop)
-Loosen your grip.
-Take your time to complete your backswing, transition and weight shift to your leading leg.
-If you can’t create the weight shift, setup with 75% of your weight on your leading foot.
-Make sure that you are consistently hitting your ball in the center of your club face.
-Haney suggests 20 to 100 practice swings per day to feel the rhythm of the lag release.

Use These 2 Swing Thoughts (or chose your own favorite 1 or 2 Swing Thoughts):
1/ Release your club head from the inside and up your target line.
2/ Finish your swing in balance on your leading foot.

Try these approaches and see what works for you. Practice while using your GOLFSTR+ to ensure that you are swinging correctly. Buy one today at www.golfstr.com

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