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I recently read an article that described Tiger Woods’ past problems hitting poor drives on the first tee in many tournaments. I did not realize that it was a problem for Tiger but I certainly know that I, like many others, generate poor drives on the first tee for any round of golf. We all practice for that first tee shot but I did some research to understand first tee jitters and how best to fix them.

Chemical Release That You Need to Overcome
Nervous tension on the first tee automatically triggers the release of dopamine and serotonin as well as the hormones: adrenalin and cortisol. They affect the mental way that you react and the physical way that your body moves. You have no choice but to deal with these mental and physical limitations.

Dopamine speeds up your heart rate and serotonin affects your emotions. They get your excited and may be the reason why you are speeding up your swing on the first tee (or any tee for that matter). Adrenalin gives you an energy boost and Cortisol increases your stress level. They are the reason why you shorten your backswing and hit shots off the toe of your open faced club.

Set a Plan to Overcome your First Tee Emotions
Just knowing that you have to deal with your chemical and hormone release will give you a new advantage over your nervous body and mind.
1/ Calm Down: Take a few deep breaths as you select your club and setup for your shot.

2/ Keep Moving: Take a practice swing by shifting your weight from your leading to your trailing foot as you rotate your hips and generate a FULL backswing with your shoulders and arms.

Every time you setup to hit a ball you need the right plan in your mind.  You are either planning to LAUNCH with your driver by hitting up or you are trying to POWER off the deck with all of your fairway clubs. You can’t afford to mix these up or you will pop-up your drives and top your fairway shots.  Positioning your ball forward for drives and centering your ball for fairway shots is easy to do but your mind also should focus on the right swing ANGLE OF ATTACK.

Too often we generate power off our back foot when we drive and then repeat the same swing and fall back when we are mishitting a fairway shot with a wood or iron.  We have all read articles where you can’t tell if the author is writing about a LAUNCH or a POWER shot (off the deck).  Make sure you tee up and tilt your shoulders 20 degrees to launch your drives.  It’s the best way to shorten the course.

EARLY EXTENSION Will Kill Your Launch AND Power Shots

Completing your swing by SPRINGING up with your knees will kill your driver or fairway shots.  Don’t do it.  I’m only making this statement to ensure that you don’t misunderstand the launch with your driver.  You still need to let your shoulder tilt and let your limited loft driver do the work.  Use the point of impact off the tee to allow your driver’s trajectory angle take care of the distance.

Tiger Woods Described How He Controls Launch Angle with Irons

No, I don’t mean that you should beat-up on yourself. Every time you play a round of golf you should be using your strengths to improve your game. Why not play a game against your current handicap or an average score that you would like to beat. Or you may plan to shoot a round under 100 or 90 or 80. The best way to succeed is set a realistic score for each hole that you are about to play based on the handicap level for each of the 18 holes.

You will never improve your game if you keep taking the same approach to every hole.

Every hole on every golf course is rated from 1 to 18 based on the hardest hole being the #1 handicap hole and 18 being the easiest. Before you start a round of golf decide on the number of strokes that you will allow yourself over par and mark your card on each of the lower handicap holes (difficult holes) to play those holes as a bogie or double bogie hole.

Stay in the Right Frame of Mind
1/ Take the pressure off your mind and relax the swing with each club. You will be amazing at how easy it is to hit every shot to 80% of your expected distance with your chosen club.

2/ You will lower your scores if you take the pressure off your game by playing shots to a safe area at the front of the green and then chipping for a 1 or 2 putt green.

I really enjoyed watching the final round of the Waste Management Championship with 3 leaders who fought neck and neck throughout the day. I like to root for the underdog, so Nick Taylor (ranked 223rd in the world) had a surprising performance as he kept up with Scottie Scheffler and Jon Rahm who were fighting it out to take the number 1 golfer position in the world. Nick Taylor has not won a major championship in years so I was really curious to find out how he had changed his game to stay in contention.

Bonus money was added to this tournament, so the winner took $3.6 million and second place took $2.18 million. That prize money added pressure on every shot for the leaders and especially on Taylor who really has been a Canadian No-Name in golf for some time.

Game Changer
Nick Taylor had to make a number of pressure putts over 10 feet throughout the final round. After the round he described his NEWFOUND SUCCESS. Over the past few months, he has been putting with a claw grip with his trailing hand.

–His lead hand is a conventional putting grip but with his first finger pointing directly down the leading side of his putter grip.
–His trailing hand is a claw grip with his wrist turned sideways so that it can’t bend during his swing.
-As long as he chose the right line and the right amount of swing speed his claw grip allows him to swing directly up his target line. Eliminating any trailing wrist action stops his stronger right hand from pushing his putter in an arc around his body.

I love this concept and plan to adopt this claw grip as I have been putting by releasing my trailing hand at the point of impact so that my leading hand swings my putter directly up my target line. Using a claw grip with my trailing hand should give me more stability in my swing especially for putts under 15 feet.

Recreational golfers love to imitate the pros that they watch on TV but it may be doing you more harm than good. Of course we all want to make shots like the pros but their exceptional shots may be killing our mental focus and sending our games down the drain.

If the pros can land a 150 yard shot over a well trapped narrow green, why can’t we? For one thing, we don’t have the height and backspin with our 6 or 7 iron to hold the green. I tried this shot yesterday and it cost me 2 more shots to get my plugged ball out of the forward lip of a trap. What was I thinking?

Here are 2 more common sense thoughts that we should learn from the pros.

1/ Sinking 10-15 foot Putts: Last year’s leader in this category was Alex Noren. He sank 43% of those mid-range putts. The Tour average was just 30%. Recreational golfers should be happy to sink 10-15% of these putts. My point here is that you should not lose your cool if you miss a 10-15 foot putt. Plan on passing the hole (as the short ones never go in) to give yourself a chance for success but you should be happy with a 2-putt from that distance.

If you miss a 10-15 foot putt DON’T GET ANGRY WITH YOUR PERFORMANCE.

Each golf shot is a fresh new opportunity to deliver your ball to your target. You can’t do this without a methodical plan and response that works for you. I realize that very few golfers will ever achieve the distance and control of the male pros so I like to focus on the graceful swings of the female pro golfers. If they can consistently deliver drives that are controlled and over 250 yards, that should be good enough for 90% of all golfers who will never be scratch golfers.

When my game is going sideways, I have always been told that I’m swinging too hard. That’s exactly when I try to take control of my mind and body and place it in my own private box where I can take control of my takeaway tempo.

Slowing down your backswing gives you more time to complete a full shoulder rotation and wrist hinge for a 90-degree lag. Rush it and you will miss your opportunity for a great shot with less effort and an amazing result.

The Korda sisters, Nelly and Jessica, both have graceful swings. During a training session with their coach, Jamie Mulligan, they were asked how they controlled their takeaway. Nelly said that Jamie taught her to imagine that her club head is like a rock on the end of a string. She uses a slow acceleration through-out her backswing to create a graceful tempo (as she swing her rock away from the ground).

That’s a great image to help you create a wonderful tempo for your backswing. It will help you slow your transition and accelerate your downswing.

There are lots of ways to create mishit shots, but you should learn the 3 basic tricks to eliminate at least 50% of YOUR mishits.  If you are falling back when you swing or taking a divot before impact with the ball, your swing arc is bottoming out too early.  Using the following “tricks” will help you learn the correct impact position to avoid mishits and should help you reform your swing.

Mental Preparation

Before you start to use these swing “tricks”, calm your mind and stop trying to knock the skin off your ball.  Your last great shot or your last missed shot may be motivating you to swing harder.  Get that out of your mind. Setup and make the exact practice swing that you plan to make before you hit your next shot.  Learn from that swing by watching where you skim the ground or take any divot.  Adjust your setup and make the practice swing that you want to execute.

Use the following “tricks” when you find that you are rushing your swing on a windy day, hitting from a bad lie in the rough or when you are planning to hit a miracle shot.  A proper swing will allow you to transfer your weight to your leading foot during your transition and allow your swing-arc to bottom-out at the correct point for your driver, irons and wedges. 

1/ Driver Trick: [Error to avoid: bottoming out under your ball and causing pop-ups]

I found a great summary of mistakes published by Josh Berhow when interviewing PGA pros at GOLF’s Top 100 Teachers Summit . You really don’t have to change your game to lower your scores. just don’t make the following mistakes.

Arriving Late for Your Tee Time: Arrive early for your tee time or your round will suffer. Warm up with stretching and hit some wedges, chips and putts. Ideally you should get there earlier, don’t rush, practice with a purpose (stretch and practice your woods, chip, putt, etc.) and stroll to that first tee with confidence.Play from the right tees: Choose the tee that allows you to reach the green in 2 shots on the longest par-4 hole. Do it and you will have a lot more fun.Hit the Shots that Work for You: If you are hitting a 10-yard slice with their irons and a 20-yard slice with the driver on the range, don’t try to make changes during your round. Use the shots that work for you. Stick with it. Own it. Be confident in it. And if the issue is still there after your round or again for your next, then it’s time to check in with a teacher.Know your gear: Don’t try to get more out of your clubs than they are designed to give you. Understand that your 5-wood will give you a higher ball flight (than a 3-wood) with more stopping power on the green. Apply the same rule for all of your clubs.Stop going after pins: Just don’t do it. Even pros don’t go at every flag. Aim for the middle of the green and favor the side with less trouble. Even Bernhard Langer has said he sometimes does this when he has a lead down the stretch. He calls it being “cautiously aggressive.”Find the fairway when you are struggling: World GOLF Teachers Hall of Famer Mike Adams says, in short: tee it low. This makes you hit more down on the ball, and if you stand a little closer and flare your lead foot out, it will force you to rotate and, worst case, your mishit will be on the heel and lead to a harmless cut that still finds the short stuff.Avoid double bogey or worse: Stop playing hero shots and get your ball back in play. Punch out from a dire situation, find the green and two-putt for bogey. Call that a win and move on.Know your distances: High-handicaps miss short way more often than they miss long. Golfers with a handicap of 21 or higher missed short 70 percent of the time. So, if you are in between clubs, remember that stat.Get over bad shots and move on: After a poor shot Tiger Woods told his son, Charlie: “I don’t care how mad you get. Get over it and be 100 percent committed to the next shot. That’s all that matters. That next shot should be the most important shot in your life. It should be more important than breathing.”Don’t get too cute around the greens: Unless you really know how to hit a high-lofted wedge, chip with a safer club or if you are close enough to the green, use your putter. Learn to let the bounce of the wedge do the work for you after your round of golf.These tips will help your game without changing your swing. Why not practice with GOLFSTR+ to help you learn 6 types of swings with a straight leading elbow and to control your wrist position for putting, chipping and iron shots. Buy one today at www.GOLFSTR.com

Easier said than done. How does your mind slow down your backswing and execute the rhythm to add power to your swing? We have the ideal solution to blank-out extra thoughts and add the proper tempo to your swing. Avoiding a Wandering Mind and adding Backswing Actions are the keys to the future success for consistency in your swing.

I realized that I was on the right track when I started my new season of winter golf in Florida. I read a simple golf tip by Sean Zak a senior writer for the Golf.com blog who referred to the “Hideki-esque” move. Hideki Matsuyama has changed his swing from an actual pause at the top to a slow transition. Most golfers lose their tempo when they jerk or rush the transition. All of the power in your swing comes from the down swing so there is no need to rush your backswing up to the top!

You can enjoy the benefits of a Hideki-esque transition as long as you control your mind AND execute a critical windup sequence.

1/ Eliminate a Wondering Mind
I have covered this in many previous blogs but you will improve your tempo and focus if you mentally repeat the following words during your backswing: “1 annnd 2”. If you say these words in your mind you will not be able to say or think any other thoughts. Buy saying these words you will slow down the tempo of your backswing.
-Say “1” to start your WIDE takeaway as your hips and shoulders rotate.
-Say “annnd” as you flatten your leading wrist and add lag at the top of your swing.
-Say “2” as you accelerate your downswing.

2/ Take Your Time to Build your Backswing Actions.
Hank Haney often points out that you need to impact your ball with a square face to eliminate slice. The critical motion is to take a wide backswing (without swaying your head or body) and add a shallowing loop at the top of your swing. This is just a natural motion when you flatten your leading wrist and add lag to your club by cocking your wrist 90 degrees.

Golf is a lot less frustrating if you learn this game backwards. Putting is the easiest part of this game so why not practice until you learn to 2 putt every green. After that chipping and pitching with your irons to hit every green is a special art that you need to perfect. To make those shots easier, you need longer drives that land in the fairway. That’s why Hank Haney recommends that perfecting your game with his “Speed Slot” technique will make this an easy game.

Longer drives will improve your game faster because it’s easier to hit shorter shots into the green. So we all should have learned this game by using the forward tees until we learn the most difficult skill of hitting longer drives and landing in the fairway.

In short: Your goal is to improve your driving and iron accuracy in order to hit more greens in regulation. Then the pars and birdies are easy.

Speed Slot Technique
Hank Haney teaches this technique for power, accuracy and to avoid the dreaded slice. The Speed Slot is the opposite of the Slice Slot. You have all heard that slicing is caused by “swinging over the top”. It’s a natural tendency that we all learn when we swing a baseball bat from the top of our backswing and down into the strike zone.

In golf you need to learn to swing your driver from the inside and up your target line. The critical move in golf is to flatten your wrist at the top of your backswing so that you can swing your club from the inside and up the SPEED SLOT.

I was amazed to see how many long putts were made at the PNC Championships where a PGA Pro teamed up with a non-PGA family member. VJ Singh and his son shot 2 rounds of 13 under par to win the 2022 Championship. Their success came from playing a Scramble Format where they both hit each successive shot from the best location. Their biggest advantage came by understanding the break in their putts.

Every putt was played strategically by allowing the weakest player to make their best putt so that the second putter used the knowledge of the BREAK in the first putt as it slowed down near the hole. Of course we rarely get the chance to putt after someone putts on our exact same line. Watching this 2-putt team approach, we should all recognize 3 key points.

1/ Choosing the right line and speed is your primary focus if you are ever going to be a great putter.

2/ The most break occurs as your ball slows down at the end of your putt. Of course, the greater the side slope, the greater the break so you need to estimate if the break is non-existent (0), slight (1), moderate (2) or major (3 to 10)

3/ To limit your break (as the ball nears the hole on a slight to moderate slope) you should always putt with enough force to pass the hole by 10 to 20 inches. This extra force will eliminate a significant amount of the break as your ball passes the hole.

We all have a love hate relationship with golf. When its good, we love it. When it’s bad, it can be very frustrating. Burning the side of a hole with a missed putt is only costing you 1 stroke. A poor drive results in losing some easy distance. But a missed chip from 10 to 40 feet is so much more frustrating because its such an easy shot. After your miss, you tighten up and your next attempt is fat or bladed across the green. Then your blood begins to boil as you add-on 3 more strokes putting. Wouldn’t is be nice to make every chip for a 1 putt green?

You need an easy solution for perfect chip shots to limit your putts around the green. Mr. Short Game on a recent GolfersRx blog reminded us to “take your hands out of the swing”. Limiting your hand action is the perfect solution for consistent chips.

He reminded us to chip exactly the way Steve Stricker and Jason Day chip.

-Let your limited hip and shoulder rotation take care of the speed and power of your swing.

-Start with a narrow stance

I recently found a blog titled: “Trevino’s Left Hand Secret”. In 1974 he exposed his secret for accurate tee shots: “Keeping your left hand ahead of the club-face.” He said: “If the other guys ever learn that it is the back of the left hand that controls the club-face, there would be a lot more winners, and I would have a lot more to worry about.” He also recommended this “with an open stance which will give your arms room to extend along the way as your body turns.”

I have never heard any pros recommending an open stance for drives, but it really caught my attention as this is exactly the way I setup and drive off a tee to control the direction of my drives. An open stance helps me shallow my downswing so that my trailing elbow grazes my side as I drive up my target line.
Lee also bowed his wrist at the top of his swing (where I flatten my wrist) to shallow the downswing for an in-to-out swing. It’s described as a push-cut swing causing a slight fade.

I’m sharing this description to highlight the fact that you can choose the setup (open stance), transition (cupped wrist) and delivery (inside to out) for your swing as long as it gives you consistency and control.
Your dominant strength in one arm, wrist and leg or a tightness in your hips, spine or neck will all have an impact on the swing that works for your body.

Changes in any position in your swing will continue to provide inconsistent results. You don’ t have to stick to the text book swing. Find the swing that gives you a consistent result and then groove that swing for your driver and another swing for your irons.

Trevino and every other pro found the right swing motion for their driver and irons. Once you find it you need to lock it in for consistency. Unfortunately, the older you get the more the more you have to be aware of your bodies tending to change throughout each round of golf depending on your stamina, the changing temperature and your energy level.

This is the ninth in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”.]

28/ Flare Your Feet: If you’re sitting at a desk all day, you’ve probably got tight hip flexors. That will limit your ability to rotate during your golf swing, which will cost you power—and could even lead to lower- back pain. To increase your hip turn on either side of the ball, GOLFTEC’s resident GOLF Top 100 Teacher Nick Clearwater has found one method works almost instantly and easily: flaring your feet. “Turning your toes out 20 degrees—maybe even more—effectively makes you more flexible,” Clearwater says. “It creates greater range of motion in your hips, which produces a distance boost in short order.”

29/ Use Your Logo Wisely: At the 2012 World Scientific Congress of Golf, researcher Dr. Joan Vickers revealed the fascinating results from an eye-tracking study performed on a group of golfers. She found that highly skilled, lower-handicap players tend to keep their eyes fixed on one portion of the ball. Higher handicaps tend to move their eyes to multiple points.

This is not only important for your fairways shots but also for your putting. Don’t follow your backswing or your follow-through with your eyes. Just focus on swinging in a straight line up your target line.

It may not solve all your problems, but keeping your eyes focused on one tight spot is a quick upgrade you can make to your game. Tiger Woods, places the Bridgestone logo on his ball toward the back (where he wants his clubface to impact) as he tees it up. It acts as a bull’s- eye to hit on every tee shot.

This is the eighth in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”.]

26/ Know Your Cover Number: There are lots of numbers that come into a pro golfer’s consideration whenever they set their sights on the green. But there’s one above all else that reigns supreme: It’s the yardage to the front of the green, which pros call the “cover number.” “The COVER is a number players know they absolutely need to hit their shot,” says GOLF Top 100 Teacher Boyd Summerhays, who teaches Tony Finau. “It’s really important.” When your COVER NUMBER is paired with the distance to the back edge, it illustrates the size of your target zone.

You should know the distance that each of your clubs will cover when you execute a great shot. Unfortunately your perfect shots occur less than 50% of the time. Why not up your club and hit with 80% of your power to ensure that you reach the green or roll out to the center of the green.

27/ Improve Your Green Reading: Is it better to over-read putts or under-read them? Mark Sweeney, the inventor of the groundbreaking green-reading system Aimpoint, found that it is better to err on the side of over-reading putts. Putts rolling downhill keep rolling and take longer to lose their speed. In the example below a putt that has been over-read (above the hole) by 12 inches will trickle down to about six inches above the hole. A putt of the same speed that has been under-read by 12 inches will take more of the slope and keep rolling all the way out to 36 inches.

Golf is a game of perfection, but you will never improve your scores if you don’t apply the basic swing to improve the consistency of your hits. Practice with GOLFSTR+ for all of your swings to limit wrist and elbow bends where you should not be bending. Buy one today at www.GOLFSTR.com

This is the seventh in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”.]

25/ Know What To Do When You’re In Trouble: You’ve done your smart preparation, but some-how things still aren’t going according to plan. Don’t worry, it happens. Golf is a game of misses. So you should try to minimize your misses and take your medicine and make a good recovery shot. Stay calm. Following are 4 solution to avoid a blow-up hole:

25a/ Try variable training: “It may sound counterintuitive, but one of the best things you can do when you’re struggling to hit the sweet spot is try to hit misses,” says GOLF Top 100 Teacher Mark Durland. “The next time you’re struggling, try intentionally to hit shanks or shots off the toe. This kind of ‘variable training’ will help your brain get a better sense of the club face when it’s time to hit the center.” [I don’t really understand how this tip will help but I don’t make these up. However, we should give it a try to see what happens in a non-competition game.]

25b/ Eat something: You may simply be running out of energy if you’re playing poorly. Sugar and carbs will spike your energy the fastest but fade fast. Higher-protein snacks will last longer. Drinking water throughout is essential. Weight Watcher’s former head of nutrition says golfers should choose a blend of everything but try to stick to a 2-to-1 protein-to-carbs ratio (a protein bar and banana or apple), with up to 10 glasses of water per day.

25c/ Time your tempo: If you’re playing in the wind, one of the first things to go is your tempo. First brought to light in their pioneering book Tour Tempo, John Novosel Sr. and Jr. say good rhythm can come at different speeds, “but the ratio should always stay 3:1, meaning your back- swing should be three times slower than your down- swing.” If it’s not, your tempo is out of sync. [LOVE THIS TIP!]

This is the sixth in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”.]

21/ Plan for Your Shot Pattern: In golf, we deal with luck in terms of shot patterns (according to Scott Fawcett, Founder of DECADE GOLF). Think of your shot pattern like the spray of a shotgun blast: Some pellets may end closer to where you were aiming, but others may veer off slightly, and you never know which one ends where you want. This fact is what makes golf so darn hard. That’s why you should plan around your typical dispersion pattern for each type of club and distance. Instead of trying to hit your approach shot inside of eight feet, choose a target that results in a safe location for an occasional birdie putt. You would be stunned at to know how many PGA Tour players aim away from a hole, as you should to stack the deck in your favor.

22/ Count Down Your Swing: Dr. Matthias Grabenhorst, who has spent his life researching the subject of human reaction, published a study last year that showed humans tend to react best to events a few seconds into the future. Instantaneous reactions are often clumsy, but a little head start can go a long way. Dr. Bob Christina of UNC Greensboro, wanted to see if that held true for golf. They took a group of 32 golfers and found that those who counted backward from four (as in “four, three, two, one”) before hitting shots performed the best in terms of accuracy. Those who decided on their own when to hit their shot often stood over the ball for a lot longer and fared much worse.

23/ Understand “Spin Loft”: As defined by TrackMan, it’s the measured angle between the loft delivered by the club at impact and the angle of attack into the ball—the larger the number, the more the ball will spin. When hitting driver, it’s optimal to generate the lowest spin loft number as possible because that’s what fuels distance. So you should be driving into the ball with a positive angle of attack. For shorter shots, a higher spin-loft value is key for shot-stopping power into the greens.

24/ Practice the Money Putts: Sinking an 8-foot putt is a “money putt”. Sink more of them and play like the pro golfers who sink 53% of them. Golfers shooting in the 80’s sink 33% of 8-footers and golfers shooting in the 90’s sink 27%.

This is the fifth in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”. These nuggets of knowledge are designed as a quick reference to help you as they have helped so many other golfers.]

17/ Don’t Try to ‘Fix’ Your Miss. Narrow it: For decades, conventional golf wisdom has bemoaned the terrors of the “two-way miss.” Lou Stagner, the data lead over at Arccos Golf, is here to tell you it’s not so bad—and he has an army of statistics to prove it. Stagner puts forward Dustin Johnson as a prime example. Lauded as one of the statistically best drivers of his generation, DJ’s drives have missed left 2,203 times and 2,238 times to the right, almost an exact 50-50 split. It’s a trend that holds all the way down through the Tour. While it is true that it’s beneficial for players to have a preferred shot shape (DJ’s, for instance, is a slight left-to-right fade), the statistics simply don’t bear out that players use it to eliminate one side of the course. “As a player, you’re better off trying to narrow your biggest left miss and your biggest right miss,” says PGA Tour coach Shauheen Nakhjavani.

18/ Pay Attention to Posture: As human beings, we’re hardwired with an innate instinct to balance ourselves in order to avoid falling over—and, potentially, hurting ourselves. It’s what helps us take our first steps, but, sometimes, it can throw your swing out of whack.
For the average male golfer, your head encompasses about 8 percent of total body weight; your trunk about 55 percent, your arms about 12 percent and your legs make up the rest. If you’re not in a balanced setup position to start, your body will attempt to balance itself during the swing—and it won’t be pretty. That’s why GOLF Top 100 Teachers like the middle of a golfer’s foot, kneecaps and armpits to form a straight line with each other when viewed from down the line. That’s the position of optimal balance at setup because it “stacks” your heavy body parts in one line. The official term is “joint centration.”

19/ Know Where Your Clubface Is Pointing at Impact: Where your clubface points at impact, has the greatest influence on what direction the ball will start its flight pattern. For a right-handed golfer, an open clubface (relative to the target) will result in the ball starting right of the target, and if the face is closed, the ball will start left of the target. According to TrackMan, around 80 percent of the ball’s starting direction is dictated by where the clubface is pointed at impact, with the remaining percentage caused by the direction the club is traveling (club path). Configuring the clubface with club path at impact will help you create a more consistent ball- flight, shot after shot.

This is the fourth in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”. These nuggets of knowledge are designed as a quick reference to help you as they have helped so many other golfers.]

13/ Manage your Expectations: One of the keys to happier golf is to be realistic with your own expectations. Pay attention to your successes and learn from your weaknesses to overcome your frustrations. Unfortunately, too many golfers have expectations that are wildly out of whack with the reality of their game. A great way to work on this is to keep track of the basic stats from your own game as you play. Keep your personal score card on every round with a tick when your drive lands in the fairway, a tick when you hit a GIR and add the your number of putts for each hole. Add-up your results for each round and track your progress.

Do you know that from 150 yards, a scratch golfer hits the green only about 60 percent of the time and hits Greens In Regulation 61% of the time? Don’t expect to reach these target numbers.

14/ Find Your ‘Center’: Yes, it’s important to “load” on the backswing and shift your weight forward on the down- swing. But 3D motion-capture systems reveal both happen earlier than you might expect. GOLF Top 100 Teacher Shaun Webb and coaching partner Mike Granato, co-founders of Athletic Motion Golf, have used the GEARS system to demonstrate that pro golfers have fully shifted their weight to their trail foot halfway through their backswing, but by the time they reach the top of their swing, weight is already beginning to shift toward their front foot.

“By the top of the backswing, pros reverse this move off the ball and shift back to just slightly forward of where they started at address,” Webb says. “That’s how you should complete your backswing: by BY SHIFTING SLIGHTLY TOWARD THE TARGET.”

This is the third in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”. These nuggets of knowledge will provide you with a quick reference to sharpen your games.]

9/ Randomize Your Practice: A study was performed in multiple sports to determine the best way to practice. (a) Block Practice, practicing one thing over and over again and (b) Random Practice, where you never do the same thing back-to-back. Randomized practice is by far the best where you hit different shots with different clubs and never the same shot twice in a row. It makes you think about each shot and make adjustments to get them right.

10/ When to Hit Driver (or NOT): So, you’re standing on the tee of a tight hole, wondering what to do. Should you play it safe? Or hit driver and hope for the best? DECADE Golf founder Scott Fawcett dived deep into the PGA Tour’s ShotLink data to find the answer. He says that to solve that problem, golfers need to answer two questions:
a. Are there less than 65 yards between penalty hazards?
b. Is the fairway less than 40 yards wide to the spot where your driver would land?
If you answered “yes” to either of these, then you should play it safe. Club down. If you answered “no” to either—or can carry your driver over the hazards—then pull the big stick and in Fawcett’s words, “Send it!”

11/ A speed-boosting concept: When it comes to hitting the ball far, more muscle mass certainly helps. But you can only get so far with brute strength. In order to maximize how efficiently you transfer your body’s strength into your swing, pros are using a concept that’s known as “over-speed-under-speed training.” It’s the concept that helped Matt Fitzpatrick boost his speed to win the 2022 US Open. Overspeed training is when you swing some-thing like the shaft of a club at very high speeds to increase your swing speed. Underspeed is the opposite: Swinging your weight loaded driver slower than your driver. Overspeed trains your muscles to be explosive and Underspeed improves your strength. Fact: You need to train both ways to hit booming drives.

12/ Change Up Your Breathing: An intriguing point of interest among pro golfers is learning how they use their breathing to play better golf. Nick Bolhuis, who works with Bryson DeChambeau, Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, among others, the vice president of performance programs at Neuropeak Pro, explains: Golfers perform their best in an optimal zone. “Sometimes that means taking slower, deeper breaths” (to reduce their heart rate when they are nervous). “Other times it means quicker, shallower breaths.” to speed up your heart rate and help you focus during those mid-round lulls.