Better Golf through Better Thinking

I like to think that golf is easier than most of us think it is. One thing that I find through years of teaching is most of my students over analyze things that are not that important and forget about the easy little things that make a huge difference. While most of us are busy thinking about more turn or keeping our left arm straight, we forget the simple things like; grip, ball placement, alignment and posture.

Correct ball placement, a good grip, alignment and posture will serve you so much better as a starting point for good golf. Great instructors will always tell you how important it is to get posture and set-up techniques down so that you can begin to see what may be wrong with your swing. Better golf through sound fundamentals is a great way to improve. If you begin your practice session with some set-up aids such as: laying some clubs down to be sure to get the alignment procedures and ball placement correct and then check your posture in a mirror, you have a far greater chance of getting the results you are looking for.

Let’s first examine the grip. To me the most important thing to focus on is placing the club in your hand properly. I use a baseball bat to get my students to realize that the club is held much more in the fingers then most people think. Rest your club over your shoulder like it was a baseball bat and feel how the club sinks down into the fingers of the hand. The grip feels fine up on your shoulder, but most of us will place it back into our palm when we put it down in the hitting zone and that is where we make the first mistake. Keep the club in the fingers more and under the meaty pad of the hand while it is in the playing zone, it will make your hands feel much lower than what you are use to, but that is where it belongs.

When the club is gripped properly, it enables you to use the hands effectively. The most common error I see is the club runs through the hands more vertically than it should and doesn’t allow a proper takeaway or release through the shot. Be sure to get the club under the meaty pad and in the fingers more and the club will naturally sink a little lower at address position and give you full use of the hand action. Most of us know that the V’s the thumb and forefinger make is suppose to point at our trailing shoulder, but this is not the main focus, for me it is having the club in the right plane with our grip.

As the illustration shows, the club runs through the hand more in the fingers and when you close on the grip the meaty pad rests on top of the club. Once you have the club running through the hand properly, it will be much easier to get your V’s to point to the trailing shoulder.

A proper grip is essential for you to have a chance at swinging the club effectively. A PGA Instructor like myself can get you tuned in easily within seconds, getting use to the grip takes time and patience, but the positive results you’ll experience are well worth the time and effort. I like to say that, “the result is well worth the adventure.”

Next month we will talk about set up, posture and ball position. Until next month good golfing and have a wonderful April. The Masters lays in wait.

Good Golfing

Chuck

Golf is a Journey

Well, the season here in Ohio is slowly coming to an end and I feel like I left some strokes out there on the course. Of course they were all good strokes because I certainly had my fair share of bad ones. As this season winds down, I think back to all the busy days at the driving range working on my swing and many other swings. What a blessing to have the opportunity to share swing thoughts and life thoughts with so many people.

When I was ten years old I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I have been able to pursue that dream thanks to all of those folks who have trusted me with one of their most precious possessions, their golf swings. I have to tell you it is always a learning experience on the practice tee, whether it is by myself or with my students. My favorite Instructor, Jim Flick once said that if you are not constantly learning then you are doing an injustice to yourself and your students.

I am always excited when I see the lights come on for my students and it is always such a rush when I know that one of my students has just said or done something that I learned from. Yes, I learn from my students all the time because I have an open mind and I am searching for all the answers that I can find. Golf is as I like to say “a journey well worth taking” and while I am on that journey I might as well explore as much as I can.

It is hard for me to believe that I have now played this game for almost 50 years; I must say that I love to be able to say that. I am a pretty adequate player of the game, but still not as good as I would like to be and certainly not as good as I could be. I have hit thousands of golf balls and played thousands of holes and still I seek what I can not find – “perfection”. I guess the reason I bring that up is to encourage my students to know that; “things take time”, but if you truly want to get there you can. Remember – “Golf is a Journey, Vegas is a destination”. We live in the greatest country in the world one that encourages each of us to try our best and achieve our goals, I still believe that whatever you want you can achieve.

As winter approaches, I will try to be a little more efficient about writing some instructional items for my blog. I should have some more time now that I won’t be teaching everyday. I do hope however, to continue teaching throughout the winter months and I am currently looking for an inside studio type setting to teach in. I now have some new equipment to use that would be fantastic for a studio type setting. I am using Digital Pro Golf (www.digitalprogolf.com) as my video teaching aid and have a new computer to be able to show you your swing compared with Tour Players, it allows me to break the swing down frame by frame. If you have never been in a video lesson, you really need to try it, video really helps.

I am working on a couple of swing aids as we speak and a putting tool to help you learn a better stroke. I hope to have some info posted on my blog about those items soon. I sell Rife Putters and Golf Logix GPS systems and would be more than happy to try and help you locate things that are of interest to you in the game of golf should you need me. I sell gift cards for lessons all year long.

Thanks again for reading my blog. Please feel free to drop me a note via email anytime. I look forward to helping you with your golf game in anyway I can. I could even be coerced into playing on occasion. See you next month when I will get back to some instructional thoughts.

Good Golfing

Chuck

Better Golf through Better Thinking II

The Masters has been decided and Tiger has won the US Open, but forced into retirement for the rest of the year. My spring has been so full of lessons and Taylor Made Demo days that I have been neglecting my blog, so gladly I am setting down to talk about such basic things as ball position, alignment and posture.

Thank you to anyone who has taken the time to read my writings and perhaps has taken some of the information to the practice tee to try and improve their golf game. I will continue to try and help anyone who wants to improve their game and I look forward to hearing from any of the readers.

Posture is an extremely important piece of the puzzle when you are talking about good golf. It is very important to give yourself a support system in which to swing your golf club around and your spine is that support mechanism. If your spine is too slouched over then your golf swing will tend to be unsupported and move up and down and all around. In a sport that demands consistency, try to be consistent when your moving all over the place, it just isn’t going to happen. Set up should consist of several things, but certainly one main ingredient is a supported spine angle, not stiff – supported.

Jack Nicklaus told us to: set your feet, flex your knees, grip the club at hip high and bend at the waist until the club hits the ground, that will help you to figure out your distance from the ball and help to give you good posture. It is still excellent advice and can be summed up to some degree by saying the club should be at right angles to our spine. If you could extend the club through your belly it would be fairly close to right angles to your spine. That information has to be aided by a good grip as discussed in my last blog lesson, if your hands are holding the club wrong (too much through the palms) your posture will still be off somewhat. See photo below to view a proper set up.

Ball position and Alignment are as easy as geometry – well I hope easier than that. Think of alignment as railroad tracks, my feet are on one rail and the ball is on the other rail. Easily put; my body and feet are aligned parallel to the target, not right on the target.

Ball position is the easiest of the ball position – alignment paradox. Simply put ball position is where I position the ball in my stance, the paradox is that what it looks like and what is real sometimes don’t click. I like to say that, “without good ball position you can not have good alignment and vice versa.” Alignment and ball position play off of each other, one of the best things you can do when you practice is; hit to a target that is achievable, throw a club down to see that you are targeted correctly, throw an intersecting club down to show you where your ball position is and be sure to look at your target from the playing position often to become aware of what that should look like when you are on the course.

It’s hard to explain in written form, but take my word from experience and years of teaching, if you tend to set up closed to your target, you are playing the ball too far forward in your stance and compensating by coming over the top to get the ball to start on target. If you are playing from a too open stance you are unknowingly playing the ball back in your stance and pushing the ball out to your target.

Ball position and alignment influence an awful lot of things including; solidness of contact, angle of attack, the ability to square the face properly and most of all the ability to not have to make compensation moves to accommodate for poor technique.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts. I would love to get a chance to help you play better golf with better thinking and therefore better technique. Call me sometime and let me try to make you a better player.

Good Golfing

Chuck

Monthly Instruction Tip

If you are struggling out of the sand, the first thing you want to check is the bounce angle on your sand wedge. The bounce angle of your wedge can make a huge difference in your short game. If you are for instance playing a club with too much bounce angle, it can cause you to hit “thin” shots, too little and you hit “heavy” shots.

The bounce angle is often times marked on the wedge or is a part of the name of the wedge; as in for instance, the Titleist Vokey 5614, a fifty-six degree wedge with fourteen degrees of bounce. The bounce angle is a measurement of the angle from the leading edge of the wedge back to the trailing edge, or you might say, the amount the leading edge sticks up off the ground when in the playing condition.

As a general rule of thumb if you play on a course with a harder turf and firmer sand in the traps you should be using wedges with less bounce. The lower amount of bounce will help the clubs leading edge dig down easier into the turf and through the rest of the shot. The type of player that would be best served by a sand wedge with less bounce is one who takes very little divot and has a shallow angle of attack.

On the contrary if you play on a course with softer turf conditions and fluffy sand then you should be using wedges with a little more bounce as this will help prevent the club digging to deeply into the ground thus causing those heavy shots as discussed above. The player best served with a higher bounce angle is one that has a steep angle of attack and usually takes a bigger divot.

Bounce angle is very important in playing those greenside shots also. If you play a course with deep or heavy rough around the greens, it might be best to have a sand wedge that fits the firm, tight conditions and a lob wedge that fits the deep, heavy rough conditions.

The modern day wedges come with many different lofts and bounce angles. Not only can you pick wedges to match the conditions you play in, but you have maximum availability to pick the wedges that get the distances you are looking for as well.

Many of the sand wedges on the market today offer grindings that permit you to get multiple bounce angles from the same club. An example of a wedge that allows you to get multiple bounce angles from the same club would be the Cleveland Golf “DSG” wedges, DSG standing for Dynamic Sole Grind. The trailing edge of the club is beveled off which permits you to roll the club face open and not get a tremendous amount of bounce involved, a wedge without that trailing edge ground off, would have the leading edge quite far off the ground and make it readily available for the dreaded “thin” shot.

The best advice I can give for selecting a wedge; is to see your local PGA Professional for assistance. Watching how a person approaches a shot and seeing the swing motion will give the Professional all the ammo he needs to help you select the correct bounce angle and club for you.

Best in Golf

Chuck Mayhew