The golf swing can always be improved, it’s something which you can always be building upon, whether you’re a beginner or not. In this article I just want to give you some really simple yet effective golf swing instruction that you can put into practice very easily for great results.
So let’s get started!
The Basics
First of all I would just like to cover what I consider to be the basics of the golf swing and that is swing path and swing plane. This is pretty basic so if you’re not a beginner you may want to skip over this, but anyway I just want to give you a quick definition of these terms, and how they relate to one another.
The golf swing to put it simply is a circular shape, your club follows this circular shape as it tracks through the ball. The ‘swing path’ refers to the circular path which your swing takes, whereas the ‘swing plane’ refers to the angle of the swing path in relation to the ground.
So let me just explain this in a little more detail just so it’s a little clearer, your club travels on a circular swing path however this swing path is not flat, but rather as the club is following this circular swing path it follows an inclined plane.
As you can see these terms are different from one another, but they are very much interrelated as the swing path follows the swing plane. As I said earlier your swing path is not flat instead it follows an inclined plane. So this plane is not horizontal like a merry go round, but it’s also not vertical like a Ferris wheel instead it is tilted somewhere in between.
So that’s the basics out of the way I hope that’s cleared a few things up for you. Don’t worry too much about the technicalities of the swing plane, it’s going to differ depending on your height and other things anyway.
Now it’s time to move onto the more advanced golf swing instruction.
Using Your Body Correctly
Any golfer knows that in order to swing and swing well you must have a really great body rotation. The swing is lead by the body, not by the arms! One of the most common swing mistakes is starting the swing from the arms and letting the arms just become way too overactive through the swing.
If you’re starting your swing with your arms that’s going to cause all sorts of problems. the most common being a slice. Not only that but a swing that comes from the arms has no power, causes miss-hits and is going to take your club off of its correct path.
In order to achieve a great swing you must begin the rotation with your body, so at address the hips and shoulders should be parallel as you swing to the top of the backswing, the hips will complete their turn before the shoulders.
The shoulders rotate at a right angle to your spine until your back faces the target. On the downswing the hips begin their rotation before the shoulders
When it comes to lower body rotation a problem which a lot of golfers have on the downswing is that when they start the rotation of the hips, they make the mistake of jutting their hips out and slide their lower body out too much.
Now there’s a difference between rotating the hips in the downswing and sliding them out, so you really need to ensure that you keep your hips on the correct path. Don’t feel yourself pushing your hips out, instead you want to feel more of a turn of the hips back towards the target, whilst maintaining your correct posture.
Finally to ensure that you’re really utilizing your lower body through the swing ensure that as you swing back you let the left knee swing in towards the right knee and then on the downswing as you rotate you want the right knee to swing in towards your left leg.
Achieving Solid Ball Contact
Now that you’ve gotten a good rotation you want to ensure that you make good contact with the ball at impact. Firstly you want to make sure that you’re hitting the ball correctly now what I mean by this is that in order to get the ball in the air you must hit down on the ball. You may already know this or you may not, but it’s important that you don’t try to lift the ball with the club.
Now it’s natural to hit up at the ball, after all if something is on the ground and we want it up in the air it seems logical to try and lift it. However you must remember that the golf club has not been designed to get under the ball to lift it.
The lofted clubhead has been designed to contact the ball as it descends in the downswing, the loft of the clubface then gets the ball into the air. So remember to hit down on the ball with every club with the exception of the driver and the putter. The driver requires a more horizontal hit.
Secondly in order to achieve solid ball contact you must ensure that your clubface is in the correct position at the moment of impact. In order to get the correct clubface position at impact the most basic principle is to ensure that you have a good neutral grip. However to really ensure that nice solid contact you need to know how to utilize your left hand.
The left hand is important because it’s the hand which steadies the clubface, so in affect it controls the position of the clubface at impact. So practice making swings using just your left hand and don’t delay the unhinging of the wrist until the last minute, let it gradually unhinge from the start of the downswing.
If you delay the unhinging then you’re going to have to compensate by flicking the wrists into impact this doesn’t work and you’ll lose a lot of power this way.
So just make some practice swings using only your left arm, this will really help give you an idea of the correct rotation of the left arm through the downswing.
Practice…
Follow this golf swing instruction and put the advice into practice. The get out there on the course and just practice your swing!
