Golf Tips & Instruction 3/25/09
In this issue we’ll discuss…
1) Maximize Power With Your Irons
2) Maintaining A Quiet Shaft Boosts Consistency
3) Question of the Week – Conquering Island Greens
4) Article – Five Steps To Choosing The Right Driver
5) Article – Treat Golfer’s Elbow Now
1) Maximize Power With Your Irons
Tired of hitting weak irons from the fairway and leaving yourself short of the green. Maybe you’re trying to lift the ball. Lifting is common among weekend golfers—especially with irons. Instead of hitting down on the ball, they try to slip the clubface under the ball and lift it through the air. This swing fault usually results in disaster, producing a weak shot, a dribbler, or some other weird mis-hit.
Here are five keys to maximizing iron power:
1. Shoulders are even at address
2. Open your hips at impact
3. Keep your hands ahead of the ball
4. Make a descending blow
5. Deliver your right shoulder hard
To hit an iron solidly, you must use a descending blow that creates a divot after the ball, not in front of it. The key to doing this is delivering your right shoulder to the ball. Consider this:
At address your shoulders are fairly even. Perhaps your right shoulder is slightly lower than your left. But this changes at impact. At impact your hips are open, your hands are ahead of the ball, and your right shoulder is closer to the ball than your left. This also means your right shoulder stays low through impact.
To train your brain to keep the right shoulder low through impact, visualize a martial artist punching through a board. As she punches the board, she lunges forward with her arm, supplying the momentum she needs to snap the board.
To train your body to deliver your back shoulder, make some practice strokes with just your right arm holding the club. Concentrate on moving your right shoulder closer to the ball during the downswing. This exercise ingrains the proper feel for delivering the right shoulder to the ball, and prevents an early release of the arms and hands—a major power leak.
Delivering the right shoulder to the ball is the key to hitting solid irons, not lifting the ball with your clubface. You want to create a divot after the ball, not before it. Practice the exercises described above and you’ll hit your irons with more punch.
2) Maintaining A Quiet Shaft Boosts Consistency
Many factors hurt consistency in the golf swing. An often-overlooked one is a spinning shaft. A spinning shaft moves independently on its own axis. This move opens and closes the clubface, making it hard to achieve consistency. But in a good golf swing, the golfer never the shaft spins independently. A good golfer maintains a “quiet shaft” throughout the swing—one that rotates but doesn’t spin.
Below are for keys to maintaining a quiet shaft:
* Unitize your chest, arms, and club
* Let your hands retain their position
* Limit trunk rotation in the backswing
* Cock your wrists up and down
The best way to ensure a quiet shaft is by unitizing your chest, arms, and club. In other words you need to swing these three elements simultaneously with what some golfers call “quiet hands.”
When you unitize your swing, your hands retain their position relative to the rest of your body and your club. This entails having wrists that cock up and down the swing arc with no twisting by the club shaft. This move makes it easier to produce sound, repeating results.
Often, it appears that the clubface opens and closes in relation to the clubhead’s path. But it doesn’t. It merely “slides” up and down the swing with no twisting on its own. Of course, a small amount of trunk rotation must accompany the movement of your arms and legs as the club starts off in the beginning of the swing. Otherwise, the shaft will be forced to spin, wrenching the clubface out of position and hampering consistency.
In the battle for achieving consistency make sure you’re not spinning the shaft. It could boost your consistency as you play.
3) Question of the Week – Conquering Island Greens
Q. Hi Jack, I have been reading your newsletter for quite a while. I am an avid golfer (a 10 handicap), who only gets to play once a week (if I’m lucky). My local course has a short par three, plays from 150 yards to 110 yards, and is fairly straightforward to play. But it’s an island green. The landing area leaves no room for error, since the green is in the shape of an upturned saucer. Any shot off target—long, short, right, or left— is doomed to a watery grave.
This hole has us in a very shaky state mentally. I personally have tried every type of shot known to golf with no regularity of success. Help me please, and the rest of us who are on the brink of insanity, not to mention the expense of drowning two pro v 1’s every week.
Thanks,
Joe Macaulay
A. Thanks for the question, Joe. You have two problems with island greens—one physical and one psychological. You must hit the ball higher than normal to get it to hit and sit on the green. First, make sure you select the right club for the shot, one with enough loft to get the ball in the air quickly. Move the ball forward slightly in your setup, about an inch or two in front of your shirt’s logo. And tilt your spine away from the target a little. You want your back shoulder to be slightly lower than your front shoulder.
When swinging, keep your chest behind the ball, place more weight on your back leg than normal, straighten your back arm at impact, and release your hands a little earlier than normally. Swing to a full follow-through, just as you normally would do on a typical short iron shot.
In addition, put backspin on the ball, so it holds the green when it hits. You can put backspin on by swinging down and hitting the bottom half of the ball, like you do when putting backspin on the cue ball in playing pool
Your second problem is a lack of confidence. The best way to gain it is to practice the shot at the range. Pick a target between 110 yards and 150 yards or so from you and practice hitting to that spot. Make sure you change targets after each shot. Once you can do this accurately, you’ll have the confidence to pull off this shot. Until, then, use golf balls of lesser quality than the Pro Vs.
If you’ve got a golf question you’d like answered, send an email to us at questions@howtobreak80.com and we’ll review it. I can’t guarantee that we’ll use it but if we do, we’ll make sure to include your name and where you’re from.
If you want to truly discover the secrets of shooting like the Pros and creating a more reliable and consistent swing, check out: http://www.HowToBreak80.com
Also, for past issues of this newsletter and some of my most recent articles, visit our blog at www.HowToBreak80.com/blog
To view this newsletter online, please visit:
http://www.howtobreak80.com/newsletter03252009.html
Here are some of my recent articles:
4) Article – Five Steps To Choosing The Right Driver
http://www.howtobreak80.com/articles/five-steps-to-choosing-the-right-driver.html
5) Article – Treat Golfer’s Elbow Now
http://www.howtobreak80.com/articles/treat-golfers-elbow-now.html
Until next time,
Go Low!
Jack
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About the Author
Jack Moorehouse is the author of the best-selling book “How To Break 80 and Shoot Like the Pros!”. He is NOT a golf pro, rather a working man that has helped thousands of golfers from all seven continents lower their handicaps quickly. His free weekly newsletter goes out to thousands of golfers worldwide and provides the latest golf tips, strategies, techniques and instruction on how to improve your golf game.
