Do you sweat swing mechanics? Many golfers do. That can spell disaster if you’re not careful. Being too mechanical in your swing can cause you to focus too much on hard-set positions. These positions can buckle under pressure, causing hooks, slices, and other mishits. Those can all pump up your scores and golf handicap.
If your swing isn’t what you want it to be, try replacing your hard-set positions with a series of triggers and feels. With some work, you can ingrain them and work on perfecting them. Once they can become second nature, you won’t even realize you’re using them. When that happens, you’ll have a swing you can trust—one that produces solid shots again and again.
Below are five golf tips on how to build in pressure-proof swing triggers and feels. Because these tips are simple and easy to execute, they’re easy to ingrain:
1) Feel the Clubhead Move First: You can’t achieve solid positions in your backswing with poor rhythm. Poor rhythm can make it hard to time your swing to get it where it should be at impact.
Instead, start your backswing by taking the clubhead away smoothly. To do that, you need to feel your clubhead move first. That will keep you in sync during the takeaway.
2) Feel Your Left Arm Pull Across Your Chest: I teach my students in golf lessons to come from inside the target line to produce high-quality shots. To do this, you must delay your shoulder turn from the top.
Instead, focus on feeling your left arm tight against your torso as you come down. The rotational force from this move brings the club out in front of you, keeping you in the angles you need to hit from inside the target line.
3) Feel like you’re hitting the ground with the heel: A common swing flaw I see in lessons is spinning out too early at the start of the downswing. This flaw causes you to stand up through impact, making it hard to compress the ball.
A good counter to this flaw is to feel as if the heel of your iron is digging into the ground. While this doesn’t actually happen, it does trigger a low-hands position. That helps keep you on an inside line and boosts swing speed.
4) Feel like your left bicep is pinned against your left side: Another common swing flaw I see in golf lessons is a player letting her left arm fly away from her torso at the finish. Lost left side connection spells disaster. It results in lost balls and added strokes.
Instead, feel your left bicep staying in tight to your body in your follow-through while you allow your left elbow to “roll” against your torso. It won’t stay that way, but it’s a great trigger to keeping your swing tight.
5) Feel like you’re pushing your body toward the target: A third common swing error I see in golf lessons is hanging back on the right side too much. That causes you to flip the clubhead through the ball, disrupting clubface control and swing tempo.
Instead, work on feeling like you’re thrusting yourself after the ball as it starts down the line. Don’t make it just a turning of the body. Instead, feel as if every ounce of your swing’s momentum is moving toward the target. To help, think of your finish as an action, not a static pose.
Keep in mind that these feelings might be slightly different for every golfer. Also, you don’t have to use all of them. Using a couple or even just one can work wonders by triggering a whole chain of events for the positions that follow. And that can produce a swing you can not only trust, but also use to chop strokes off your golf handicap.
Gustavo Woltmann loves playing golf. This is a great blog about his favourite past time! – Gustavo Woltmann