Golf Instruction

The secret to playing better golf is to improve your golf swing. There are other aspects of your game that you can work on, such as your putting line and ability to read greens, but if you can improve your swing then you will improve your overall game.

The secret to consistent golf is to have a consistent swing. Have you ever watched Tiger Woods’ swing? It is the same all the time. Whether he is playing a full powered drive or an eight iron to the green, his swing is consistently the same. That is true of all sportsmen: consistency is the key, and if you can get consistency in your swing, your game must improve. So how do you develop that consistency?

Whether or not you are going to be as good as Tiger is debatable, but the first step to attaining consistency is fitness. Not just ordinary fitness, but fitness for golf. Your swing is not a natural movement for you, and you are using muscles you rarely use in ways that they are not normally used. If that sounds confusing, it is no more so than why golfers rotate their bodies that way. The only way to train for that type of rotational body movement is to use it in your training!

That statement is probably best explained by example. The stronger the muscles you use in your swing, the more energy you are going to be able to pass on to the club head as it drives through the ball, and the farther you will hit it. It’s not only strength of course, since you need the flexibility to be able to stretch these muscles on the backswing and wind up the potential energy needed for these great long distance drives.

The best way to strengthen the muscles used in your swing is to swing with a greater resistance or weight than you are used to. The way you build up your biceps is to lift weights and the way you build up the muscles you swing with is use weights when swinging. The simplest way is to use a heavy or weighted golf club, but you can also hold a piece of strong elastic tied to a door knob, or even purchase some exercise tubing, while you swing your arms as if you were holding a club.

That will strengthen the shoulder, arm, back and leg muscles you use. The more strength you develop then the faster you will be able to swing. If you carry out stretching exercises, then these muscles will become more flexible, and you will be able to twist right back on the backswing and unleash all that power in one mighty swing with all that acquired strength, and whack that golf ball farther down the fairway than you ever have before.

Simple rotational stretching exercises can be carried out at home or in your office by sitting on a chair, holding a weight straight out in front of you with both hands (a dumbbell, heavy rock or large tin full of earth) and then twisting as far as you can from one side to the other, holding for three or four seconds at the end of each twist. It won’t take long till you notice the difference in how far you can twist round on your backswing and follow right round on the follow through.

Strength exercises, as already explained, involve swinging your arms with a weight such as a dumbbell as if you were swinging a golf club, or even better, getting yourself a weighted golf club designed for the purpose, and using that. Pumping iron in a gym will not get you fit for golf since it does not exercise the rotational swing movement or improve the flexibility of the muscles and joints you use when playing the game. Treadmills are equally useless for golf fitness, although they might help you walk round the course quicker.

The main way to improve your golf swing is to get fit for golf by using golf specific strength and stretching exercises to improve your swing and help you to get more power through your swing, and more energy on the club head as it strikes and drives through the golf ball.