Posts Tagged ‘Golf Instruction’

GENERATE POWER AT SETUP

We all want more power and distance.Whether you hit the ball 200 or 300 yards, adding an extra 10-15 yards to your driver gives any player confidence and a decisive advantage over the competition.  Over the years as I have taught online golf lessons, many golfers have emailed me consistently with a breakdown of distance per club.They also provide where they would like to get to; usually 10-15 yards increase off the tee and from the fairway w/ their irons. The following tip is recommended to players who want an easy way to generate greater distance off the tee.I don’t recommend this set-up from the fairway or around the green, but it will give you and extra 10-15 yards off the tee. The is a simple breakdown including different ways that power and distance is generated in our golf swing (I want you to understand what generates power):

• Solid Ball Contact:  Not on heel or toe.
• Hand Rotation through the impact zone.
• Weight shift through the swing (i.e. ball).
• Follow-Through position:  This is more of a check point.Club face up at follow- through = less power.Club face down at follow-through = greater power.

Problem Lack of distance off the tee. Solution I am going to teach you a modified set-up that will allow for maximum power generation.Typically players that have a noticable or slight draw generate more distance than players that hit a fade, so this set-up will put you in a position to hit a draw.This is also true for players on the PGA tour.  The following, are steps to modify your set-up in order to allow for maximum distance generation:

• Go through your normal set-up routine as we teach in the DVD.And remember to bend at the hips and not the stomach.
• Close your stance:  Move your trailing foot back so that the toes are parallel to the middle of your leading foot.
• Put a little more weight on your front foot: Instead of 50/50 you will have 60% on your leading leg and 40% of your weight on your trailing leg.Essentially you’ll almost be leaning a bit forward at set-up.
• Knee bend remains the same & take your normal swing, focusing on really shifting your weight and rotating your hands through the impact zone.

These modifications place your body in a more powerful position at set-up. Again please remember to only implement this set-up off the tee.You can try it with your irons on the practice range, and if you see amazing results then play with it on the course, but remember not to change your entire set-up for your irons.This tip is simply an adjustment to add extra distance off the tee. To learn more golf instruction and how to improve your golf swing check out my site.

“Driving the Golf Ball with Confidence, Accuracy, and Consistency”

The three most important elements to the game of golf is:

1. Driving the golf ball in play.
2. Putting the golf ball with consistent speed control (distance).
3. Pitching the golf ball with loft.

Let’s concentrate on what I consider the MOST important aspect to the game of golf, DRIVING THE GOLF BALL IN PLAY. This aspect of the game of golf is the top confidence builder in the sport. As you probably know and have experienced, your score adds up quickly if you hit your tee shots out of play.

Here is a bold proclomation for you -if you read this article/special report every time, just before you play a round, your friends will think they are playing with Joe Durant. Joe has led the PGA Tour in driving accuracies for the past two years. So far this year, he is averaging 79% of the fairways every time he plays 18 holes of golf.

If you are going to change the way you drive the golf ball you will need to implement the following four fundamentals:

1. THE PICTURE
2. PROPER DRIVER
3. CORRECT TEE HEIGHT
4. CORRECT SWING PLANE

1. THE PICTURE

If you can see it, you can have it. Before you take your driver, or any club for that matter, out of your golf bag, you better start seeing what you want the golf ball to look like during its journey down the fairway. Of the millions of words and lessons my mother (the first woman to teach at a golf school in the United States) passed on to me, the one phrase that has stayed with me all of these years is THE PICTURE. You must have a picture in your mind of how you want the ball to fly through the air and where you want it to wind up. When you have a driver in your hands, you have to pick out an exact area you want the ball to land on. IF YOU DON’T SEE THE PICTURE, YOU ARE IN TROUBLE.

Important Tip: During the course of a round of golf, you can find yourself driving the ball well, but all of the sudden you are faced with a difficult driving hole. Shortly after I turned professional, I played a practice round with Tommy Bolt the 1958 U.S. Open Champion. We came to great par four, 435 yards long, water down the right side of the fairway from the tee to the green, out of bounds markers down the entire left side of the fairway from the tee to the green. After I teed my golf ball up I turned to Tommy and said, “What do you do here with O.B. left and water right?” Tommy looked me straight in the eye and said “Son, if you see the water and the O.B. markers, you better go find another line of work.”

That stuck with me to this day, and I wanted to pass it on to you. Don’t worry about the challenges, just think about what you want the ball to do. I have benefited immensely during my golf career, and I want you to gain the same benefit from this as well.

2. PROPER DRIVER

Now that you can see the picture, let’s see if you brought the correct brush to paint with. If you are still trying to buy 20 more yards every time you walk into a pro shop. It is time to stop-NOW! If you own a driver that has a graphite shaft, is metal, and the grip is new then you own what it takes to send the golf ball straight down the fairway.

Let’s back up a foot or two. The loft on the golf club will play a major role in how accurate you are. If you are struggling with your driver you might consider buying a driver with at least 10-12 degrees of loft. The less loft a driver has the more you are apt to slice and hook the ball. If you are driving the ball well you can buy a driver with less loft.

An important side note: If you are driving the golf ball short, low and to the right the shaft might be too stiff. If you are driving the golf ball too high and to the left the shaft might be too weak.

Another item to consider if you have small hands, have the club repair shop regrip all of your grips with either a junior grip or a small grip. If your hands are large, have the shop regrip you clubs with oversize grips.

Bottom Line – worry about hitting the ball in the fairway first, and then focus on distance generation. The chances are, you already own the equipment, that will give you the fairway shots you’re looking for. Remember – It’s the swing, not the equipment. The equipment helps once you have a good swing, but you’ll never FIX your swing with an equipment upgrade.

3.CORRECT TEE HEIGHT

The tee height does not seem like such a big deal, but it plays a huge roll in whether or not you drive the golf ball consistently down the fairway. Something so simple can often be the biggest challenge.

The two major mistakes are teeing the golf ball too low or teeing the golf ball too high. You may have heard that golf is a game of opposites. This is a really good example. Let me explain why. If you are constantly swinging your driver too vertical into the ground in the downswing, you probably tee the golf ball to low. Nearly all golfers with a vertical driver swing fear swinging underneath the golf ball so they tee the ball low in hopes of catching it square. For those of you with this challenge, the next time you are on the golf course, tee the golf ball up a little higher and sit back a little bit more on your heels and keep your weight there in the downswing. After your shot has landed, look down to see if your tee is still in the ground. If you are always conscience of leaving the tee in the ground, you will not pop your tee shots up anymore.

If you are topping your tee shots to the right you might have the ball teed too high because you are trying to hit the ball on the upswing. The next time you go out to play, tee the ball down a little. After the golf ball has landed, make sure your weight is on your left foot and meaning you have transferred your weight correctly.

4. CORRECT SWING PLANE

With this final tip I feel confident you will be on your way to driving the golf ball straighter and with more consistency. The golf club in your bag that swings the most vertical, (up and down) is your sand wedge. The golf club that swings the most horizontal (around you-baseball swing) is your driver. The mistake I have seen most amateur golfers make is that they swing their driver like their sand wedge and they swing their sand wedge like their driver.

A couple of things to remember when you are addressing the driver:

1. Chin up
2. Turn your right shoulder in the back swing level
3. Swing the golf club around you/not up and down
4. Leave the tee in the ground after you hit the ball

When you are ready to begin your backswing, keep your swing thoughts to a minimum. Force yourself to think about swinging more horizontal.

Earlier in this report I promised you would drive the ball more with more confidence, accuracy, and more consistent if you read this article every time before you tee it up this summer. This stuff seems simple, but give it a try and send me an email letting me know the results. You’ll get some really good results.

If you would like to get more indepth golf instruction via golf videos then be sure to follow one of our links in this article.

Happy Golfing-

Bobby Eldridge

Head Professional-PurePoint Golf

Click Here to see The PurePoint Golf Full Swing DVD

Golf Instruction

All golfers should know about the seven ball flight problem areas that most golfers face.  Now once a golfer faces one of these problems, it is usually a recurring theme. We all fall into “ruts” with our swing sometimes.Many are worse than others, and some last for longer periods of time.When it does happen, we all wonder where the “perfect swing” that we had just a few weeks ago went.

When we begin to comprehend these seven swing faults, it becomes much easier to get our swing back when we get into one of these “ruts” with our swing.These are the 7 different problems nearly all golfers face (from the right-handed perspective)

1.    Fades (the ball starts straight and then curves right)
2.    Hooking (the ball starts straight and then curves left)
3.    Pushing (the ball goes straight right)
4.    Pulls (the ball goes straight left)
5.    Fat Shots (the club digs into ground before making contact with the ball)
6.    Thin Shots or Topping (the club makes contact with the top of the ball – making the ball fly very low)
7.    Lack of Distance (ball doesn’t seem to go very far)

Now you may be the rare exception that looks at this list and says “I don’t have any of these problems.” However, every golfer – no matter what level – is going to have one of these problems with their golf swing at some point.And generally, they show up more than we like to come clean about.A lot of golfers spend the whole season chasing down and correcting a variety of problems that have “popped up” in their swing.

Understanding the problem areas is only the beginning.  The real secret is identifying which problem you have and how to fix it.  I found a set of three free golf videos you can check out that address some of these swing issues. The instruction in these videos will show you how to learn the  full swing quickly and easily, its unigue because they take evaluations of real student golf swings so that you can see how easy these corrections can be identified and corrected.

Happy Golfing!

When we come to getting golf instruction we want to be sure we are getting the best. We want to get instruction that will begin by ensuring we are assisting our body in getting the action right. Many of us golfers, when performing our golf swing (you can also read back swing here), let our left knee go down on the back swing. The outcome of this is that our shoulder will drop causing our hips to sway and overturn. Don’t allow the knee to move. Good golf posture encourages us to maintain a steady stance. To have a good golf swing you need to maintain that stability, tension if you like, in both your legs. Some instructors suggest holding some kind of ball between your knees, I don’t think that is going to be very practical on the course. See how using your imagination for this works, you could be surprised how effective it is. Go to golf course consultants for more information.

Golf instructors often point out a common fault in beginners and that is they carry out the swing to fast. A key to eliminating this problem with your golf swing is to relax. If you find that you are rushing things try and slow it down a bit. Contrary to what you may think rushing it does not make the down swing any faster and in fact may have the opposite effect. Maintain a steady action for best results. One key to good golf is to get a steady action in your golf swing and this can be achieved by a pause for a brief moment at the top of your golf swing. This will allow you body to relax and compose itself for the coming down swing. Refer to golf course consultants for more information.

Your golf instruction is going to be great if it teaches that your golf is the sum of correctly performed parts. It will look at stance, posture and action. Another key, especially at the beginning, is your grip. Are you able to hold a club right now? Try this. When you have the club at waist height, grip the club with your left hand and your right hand in the “hitchhiker position” (NB: the palm of your hand should neither be facing up nor down), you should see your thumb pointing up. If you don’t get the grip together in the beginning you are not likely to improve you gold swing at all.

To conclude our short list of golf instruction tips today, I am going to end with an exercise you can do that will help establish some of the fundamentals we’ve talked about here. Good instruction will help you to improve your golf swing and to be consistently hitting the ball well you need a steady tempo and be able to keep good balance. These foundational elements are necessary to improve your golf swing. Good instruction will reinforce these fundamentals through practice. Try this. With your feet close together, about 15cm, hit some shots. This is going to make you keep better rhythm, balance and speed and will result in improvement when you return to your normal golf swing stance.

The best thing you can do is to do some research into golf instruction. Getting it, getting it from the right instructor, can really make playing golf that much more enjoyable, and that’s what it is all about in the end isn’t it! Visit golf course consultants for further information.