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The post What you can learn from this 16 year-old golfer who gained 20 mph appeared first on Golf.

A powerful golf swing is not based on gender. It’s based on good technique, skill, and work ethic. Traditionally, the women’s game has been more focused on precision, but with a new generation of athletes taking up the game, and better information out there, I firmly believe females can and will narrow the speed gap in golf.

Presli is a new student of mine, and a perfect example. She’s 16 years-old, 5’10”, plays volleyball and basketball in high school. She came to me with an 85 mph golf swing, and I could immediately tell she was leaving at least 20 miles per hour on the table. The LPGA tour average is about 93 miles per hour, but she could get over 100. Maybe even touching 110 mph.

When golfers think about gaining speed, they often think about speed training. However, that can be very dangerous because if you add speed to dysfunction you’re going to have more dysfunction, and probably get injured as a result.

To go fast, first you have to go slow. You have to train the correct movement patterns and sequencing. That’s why when I started out with Presli, during our first one-hour lesson, we didn’t hit one driver. We didn’t even hit a golf ball.

What we did instead is what performance scientists call deliberate practice. Short, intense, 15 to 20 minute sessions where we went really slow to make sure every movement of her swing was in alignment with what the best players in golf history do: Her left heel up in the air, her left knee behind the ball; a big, unrestricted turn with her upper and lower body, without a lot of side-to-side motion.

One way we practiced this was with a move I call “the dance move,” which you can see me demonstrating below. By the end of the first lesson, she had progressed up to hitting a headcover with 8 and 9 irons at very slow speeds

So many golfers think the only way they get better is to hit tons of golf balls, but doing that can be really damaging if you’re not practicing the right movements. Swinging a golf club is like learning an instrument. You don’t start off playing the song at full speed, all at once, in a concert. Things are happening too fast, and there’s no time to think.

Slowing down gives you the ability to process more information and gives you time to think throughout the whole process. You don’t need to be hitting a golf ball while doing that, but you do need to be precise when you are making those movements. That way, you’re practicing with a purpose. It’s not mindless.

This is also beneficial because it meant Presli wasn’t getting feedback from the poor results, which can be really harmful for new golfer’s confidence. By practicing slowly and without a ball, she’s divorcing herself from the outcome of a golf shot and getting feedback from her muscles, in the moment. If I was on the driving range, and I start hitting bad shots, it’s going to affect my mental approach and take my focus away from training the correct movements.

Instruction

There was about a month between her first and second lessons, so after Presli’s first hour I gave her some homework: To practice these same movements from home, without hitting a golf ball, for about 20 minutes a day. She’d send me videos so I could make sure she was doing it correctly.

When she came back for her next lesson about a month later, she had gotten really good at the movements, and was gaining confidence. I could tell she was itching to hit golf balls, so we went out to the range and she started hitting mid irons at 60 to 70 percent speed.

At the end of the session, we had her hit her first drivers, and we practiced ramping it up. Now that she had engrained the movements, it was all about training to do them faster. And she did: Her baseline when she first came to me was 86 miles per hour. She hit 105 mph that day, two months after we started. I can’t wait to see where we are in six months, or a year.

If there’s one thing I want people at home to take away from this story, it’s to train smarter, not harder. Study what great players, like Snead and Hogan, do in their swings. They lifted their left heel and made a big unrestricted turn on the backswing. Then, they sequenced correctly on the downswing. Their power came from their technique.

You don’t need a golf ball to practice these movements. You can do them from home. Set a timer on your phone for 15 minutes, and try to do it every day. If you practice them the right way, then they’ll stick.

People tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in a day or two, but they underestimate what they can accomplish in six months or a year. All you need to do is train a little smarter.

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The post How this easy drill helped these 3 golfers eliminate their chicken wings appeared first on Golf.

The post How this easy drill helped these 3 golfers eliminate their chicken wings appeared first on Golf.

Many golfers have a chicken wing in their swings, but most of them don’t know why. And, in an attempt to fix it, they usually fail to understand the root cause.

More often than not, the reason why you have a chicken wing later in your swing is because of certain moves that happen earlier in your swing.

When GOLFTEC dived into its data of millions of swings from students of all abilities, they found that the higher-skilled, lower-handicap players tend to do specific things well in their swings. Among them: their hips are shifted more toward the target at impact, they don’t sway on the backswing and their arms are straighter through the ball, all of which give them more consistent control over the low point of their swings.

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A chicken wing can often be the byproduct of not doing these things: golfers who sway too much, for instance, have to bend their arms to compensate for the other flaw. Hence the chicken wing.

Instruction

Anti-chicken wing drill

Nick Taylor, who runs a popular YouTube Channel that you can check out right here, is a coach at GOLFTEC’s Singapore location. In a recent video, Taylor explains that he’ll often see golfers come to him struggling with bent arms through impact. When he does, he’ll assign them a simple drill: Get into your setup position, then swing smoothly through to your finish. Focus on your technique, and don’t worry about swinging hard.

“We start at setup position, extend the legs, lean backward, send my hips toward the target and my arms straight,” he says. “You can see how from both angles my body is extending and turning into the finish.”

Once you’re comfortable doing this, you can slowly start progressing. Start with hitting balls with an abbreviated backswing (with your club shaft getting to parallel to the ground), then hit a shot with a half-backswing (with your left arm getting parallel to the ground).

Again, it’s not a drill for power — it’s one to improve your form, so don’t get sloppy. Be diligent and you’ll start to see your chicken wing quickly start to disappear — and all the swing metrics around it improve — as Nick has shown with a few of his recent students.

When this transformation happens, you’ll hit crisper iron shots, and your swing will look better, too.

Watch the full video below, and here’s how you can find a location closer to you.

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The post How this golfer straightened his slice and dropped 7 shots off his game appeared first on Golf.

The post How this golfer straightened his slice and dropped 7 shots off his game appeared first on Golf.

Coming over the top and hitting a wicked slice has been plaguing recreational golfers’ scorecards for as long as the game has been played. For 90s shooters, it’s often the central issue preventing them from scores in the 80s: A recent study found that higher handicaps tend to miss short and to the right a whopping 70 percent of the time.

That was the issue James Parson was trying to solve when he visited his Virginia Beach-area GOLFTEC. His over-the-top move wasn’t as big of an issue with his short irons, but it wrecked havoc on his longer clubs.

“I wasn’t being consistent with my driver and long irons,” he said. “I didn’t know where the ball was going.”

Parson’s was an 18 handicap, with an average score around 97. Then his coach, GOLFTEC’s Joel Rouleau, spotted a common issue that slicers make in their swings: Parson was lifting his arms out in front of him on the backswing. The pair, instead, worked on hand path. They wanted his arms deeper and more around him, starting on the takeaway — illustrated below, with a line drawn up the shaft, and watching to make sure his hands stayed underneath it.

This had the added bonus of introducing more “turn” into his golf swing. That’s great for power, and one way to help hip turn instead of lift is to focus on straightening a trail leg on the backswing.

The two tweaks worked in tandem to get his arms more back and around him, which helps golfers deliver the club back into the ball with a more inside-to-out path.

Practicing that move improved his ability to hit his long irons and driver. Now, he’s down to a 12 handicap, with an average score at 90 — and trending into the high 80s.

“Now I can stand over a 5-iron or driver and have conference that I can keep the ball in play,” Parson says. “The biggest plus is that training this move gave me the tools to keep improving, because I know what’s going wrong. “

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The post 2 things that helped this beginner golfer get to a 4 handicap appeared first on Golf.

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Anthony Trick had never played golf before — had never even picked up a golf club before. But once he got out of the military, he was looking for a new hobby to take seriously. He was strong and athletic guy, but didn’t know where to start.

1. Learning the fundamentals

The first step for Anthony — and any golfer picking up the game — was to get a good grounding in the fundamentals: Grip, posture, stance and alignment. When he walked into his local GOLFTEC in Massachusetts for his initial swing evaluation, that was where everything started.

Good fundamentals are so important, because if you don’t get them right early, your swing will start compensating around them. That can be a big problem, because these early days are your golf swing’s formative years. If you get off on the wrong foot, it’ll take a lot of hard work to come back.

2. Learning the ‘sequence’

But for as important as good fundamentals are, they can only take you so far. Anthony had a tendency to come over the top and hit slices. This is a common mistake among golfers who played baseball in high school: They lunge forward with their upper body, often because they don’t have enough shoulder tilt on the backswing, which throws off their golf swing sequence.

Anthony and his coach Ae Cahill worked on keeping his weight forward on the downswing with his arms extended towards the target. That would tilt his upper body back, putting his spine in extension and helping him swing from in-to-out. He’d practice that position by hitting full shots with an abbreviated finish, ending with his arms pointing towards his target.

Committing to lessons and a lot of hard work meant that by two years later, Anthony had got all the way to low single digits and made his first hole-in-one. He’s hitting draws now, and he’s got his eyes on an even bigger prize.

“He’s come such a long way from never holding a golf club,” his GOLFTEC Coach, Ae Cahill, said. “He’s a 4 index and wants to be scratch golfer.”

You can sign up for your own GOLFTEC swing evaluation right here:

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The post 2 things that helped this beginner golfer get to a 4 handicap appeared first on Golf.

The post How this golfer fixed his massive ‘over-the-top’ move and solved his slice appeared first on Golf.

The post How this golfer fixed his massive ‘over-the-top’ move and solved his slice appeared first on Golf.

For the majority of golfers, it’s the cause of your slice. The cause of your stress! It’s the reason why your scores continue to suffer, and worse yet, it’s a move that golfers — by way of them being humans — are naturally predisposed to making.

Coming over the top. It’s the most common flaw in the golf swing, and when Larry Jones walked into the Orlando Park GOLFTEC, that was exactly the problem which needed fixing in his own game. Larry wasn’t just coming over the top, though: He was coming really over the top.

“Larry’s swing direction was 20 degrees left of the target, from out-to-in,” GOLFTEC coach Ariel Jones says. A neutral path, for context, is zero degrees, and most golfers generally want to swing from in-to-out. “Larry didn’t realize his swing was like this, and didn’t know where to start changing his swing direction 25 degrees more in-to-out.”

1. Start with the setup

Larry’s extreme over-the-top move was causing him all sorts of trouble, mostly slices and general contact errors, like fat and thin shots. He was struggling to hit the ground in the right spot repeatedly, Jones says, and when they set about fixing it, they started with his setup. This is an important note for all golfers, because often, over-the-top swings are an effect. For Larry, the root cause was found in his setup: His body was turned too far to his left.

“Setting up like a bunker shot isn’t very conducive to hitting straight shots,” Jones says. “We started with closing both his hip and shoulder turns at address.”

This alone lessened Larry’s in to-out-swing path, but it wasn’t there yet.

2. Use a swing obstacle

Once his setup was in a better spot, Jones held a pool noodle in the spot where his club shouldn’t be. If Larry was to swing over-the-top, he’d hit the obstacle in his way; the only way he wouldn’t was to swing around the obstacle. You can replicate this drill by placing a similar obstacle (like a water bottle) outside and to the right of the golf ball, so by swinging around it, you’ll be coming from in-to-out.

He started with small, half-iron shots, but this drill got his club in a better spot on the downswing, which led to a jump in distance, and prevented him from swaying from side-to-side. That’s the beauty of a good drill: It can improve your swing without much thought.

And to book your own swing evaluation at a GOLFTEC near you, use the special GOLF.com offer by clicking the link below:

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There’s still work to be done, but the before-and-after pictures tell their own story. Larry’s club is coming in from a shallower position, and his contact has improved with all his club.

At first Larry was having contact issues and then path issues. We worked a lot on his body motion from swaying back and forth and then into getting better flexibility with having his swing get more comfortable with not moving as much.

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The post This golfer ditched the ‘worst advice’ in golf and went from a 100s to an 80s shooter appeared first on Golf.

The post This golfer ditched the ‘worst advice’ in golf and went from a 100s to an 80s shooter appeared first on Golf.

Ask any teacher what they consider the worst advice in golf, and there’s a good chance they’ll share a phrase you’ve heard before: Keep your head down.

It may have started as a harmless, simple tip to help new golfers stop topping the ball, but over the years it’s become a crutch that can have lasting negative effects in your golf swing. And it was a trap that Harry Francis had fallen into which led him into a GOLFTEC.

Francis’s average score was consistently over 100 — usually in the 105 range — which was surprising. He was one of those golfers whose swing looked better than his scores.

“Harry has a really nice backswing relative to players who shoot over 100,” his GOLFTEC coach Greg Warfel said. “It was the later parts of the downswing and the early parts of the follow-through that were his demise…they were radically different than how a better player moves.”

Specifically, Harry’s arms were too bent at impact, which caused a chicken wing in his swing. It was costing him power and consistency. Either his arms would be too bent, and he’d catch the ball thin, or they’d be too straight and he’d chunk the ball. The cause of this, Warfel said, quickly became clear.

“Harry was trying to keep his head down after impact, which is the worst advice typically given in golf,”

DON’T keep your head down

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The main reason why teachers hate the keep-your-head-down advice is because it restricts your body’s ability to turn through. If your head is down, your body keeps moving, and your arms run out of space. So, you end up flipping at the ball with your hands and chicken wing-ing. Both moves are heavily timing-reliant and hard to repeat.

So, that’s what the pair set about fixing: Helping keep his chin up and head turning toward the target on his follow-through, which helped straighten his arms and improve his torso rotation through the ball.

“Harry didn’t really understand the relevance of his follow-through and the implications that resulted in form that would negated all the really nice style of his backswing and downswing,” Warfel said. “Explaining how the movement after the ball related to improving his ball striking was the most important time we’ve spent together.”

Last summer, he shot his best round ever: an 88, and he’s working on improving it with some minor tweaks to his backswing to get his scores even lower — even though he’s still flying high from his new move.

“It has transformed my swing and given me back distance,” he said.

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