Quick Tips

Ready To Rip

If you asked me what I think is the best part about playing golf, I’m going to always say that it’s having the ability to pound the golf ball as hard as you can. But doing that isn’t just a matter of swinging harder– quite the contrary! If anything, it’s about swinging faster, and the quickest way to a faster swing is to make a bigger, more powerful coil away from the golf ball.

So, to really nuke your next drive, rehearse a few practice swings with the club held across your shoulders as I’m doing here. If you look closely at the photos, you’ll see I have an iron off the instep of my right foot laying perpendicular to the target. The goal, with the club against my upper chest, is to rotate the club so the shaft across my chest is parallel and directly above the iron I’ve laid on the ground. Doing this will help you not only add some serious width to your turn, it will help ensure you properly shift your weight to your right leg as you load up to the top of your backswing.

Rehearse this move a few times, and check to make sure both clubs are parallel. Then, come time to hit the ball, I want you to visualize the drill in your mind as you make a backswing and coil away from the ball, storing massive energy at the top of your backswing.

What happens next, you ask? Let it rip! The body has so much torque at the top of the swing that all that’s left to do is let the muscles and tendons release all that stored energy as you shift your weight toward the target. Just remember, allow the body to uncoil in a ramped fashion, meaning let the clubhead, arms, hands, upper body and lower body accelerate on the downswing as opposed to firing on all cylinders from the top.

Remember, just because you’re hitting the ball during the backswing, it doesn’t mean it’s not important. The backswing is where you create power; the forwardswing is where you release it!

Pomp Braswell teaches at the Jim McLean Golf School at SunRidge Canyon Golf Club in Fountain Hills, Arizona. For more information, visit sunridgegolf.com.

Five A Side

To become a better putter, you have to get used to focusing on smaller targets. Unlike hitting full-swing shots, where your target may be a certain part of the fairway, the green or sometimes a part of the green, putting requires you to be far more precise. A great drill that I like to use for dialing it in is to take five golf balls and put each of them on tees in a line (as you can see in the above photo). Space them near each other so they’re about a finger-width apart. Next, comes the tricky part. I want you to roll a putt from about five feet and try and hit each tee, one at a time, and knock off one ball at a time, in any order you want.

This drill will do two things. First, it will help you focus on a target much smaller than the hole. Second, it will teach you to putt a little more aggressively since you need to make solid contact with each tee to knock the balls off. If you happen to hit the wrong tee, or knock more than one ball off, you need to start over and do it all again until all five balls are knocked off, one at a time, in any order you choose.

Try this drill and not only will you become a more precise putter, the discipline this drill requires will help you focus better, as well.

Dale Abraham, PGA, is the director of instruction at Desert Mountain in Scottsdale, Arizona. For more information, visit desertmountain.com.

Stay Back To Bash It

When we talk about the golf swing, oftentimes, as both students and instructors, we become overly fixated on moving our body toward the target. Sure, the goal with the swing is eventually to do just that, but when it comes to when that should happen, it really depends on what club you’re trying to hit and how you want to launch the ball into the air.

Let’s take the driver, for example. To hit long and high drives, it’s imperative that your body weight moves toward the target and not backward on the downswing. That’s for sure! But the question is, where should your body be at impact?

Do you want to stack your weight over your left side like you would with an iron or a wedge? No! With a driver, you actually want to stay behind the ball at impact. Now, don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean keeping your body behind the ball through the swing. Instead, it means timing your swing move so your weight is behind the ball at impact as it
continually shifts toward your target side, which is over your left leg for right-handers.

How do you do this? Simple. Set up with your head behind the ball, your weight centered, and you even can move your hands behind the ball a bit for a more pronounced effect. At impact, while the body is turned, try and keep your head in roughly the same spot as it was at impact. This will keep your weight behind the ball at the moment of truth, helping you to hit higher, longer drives.

Jeff Yurkiewicz, PGA, teaches at the Grayhawk Learning Center located in Scottsdale, Arizona. For more information, visit grayhawkgolf.com.

Left is right!

If you want to hit better bunker shots (who doesn’t?), you have to eschew conventional swing wisdom and do things a little differently. For instance, in a normal swing, usually you shift weight away from the target going back, then toward the target on the downswing. With greenside bunkers, I encourage my students to do neither! If anything, the best advice I can give you for more sand success is to remember to favor your left side through the stroke.

Staying “left” means setting up with some forward shaft lean, your weight mostly over your left leg and through the stroke, keeping it there well into the finish.

What this does is steepen your angle of attack and help you better use the sand to lift the ball, not the clubhead. Just remember, when you do this, you have to be aggressive with the hands and accelerate through the sand as best you can. Allow the body to rotate as it normally does and the hands to release, again, as they normally would. You can see in this sequence of photos that I keep my weight mostly over my left leg through the entire stroke. If you haven’t tried this, it may feel strange at first, but you’ll quickly see how much more effective it can be. Also, notice how I made a divot under the ball, not behind it. Staying left will help prevent you from hitting too far behind the ball into the sand.

When you hang back on your right side and try and lift the ball out, you’ll run into trouble. But if you stay left, you’ll steepen your attack and have a better chance of extracting the ball from the sand. Remember, left is right for better bunker shots!

Pomp Braswell is the director of instruction at the Jim McLean Golf School at SunRidge Canyon in Fountain Hills, Arizona. Visit sunridgegolf.com.

Hitting successful bunker shots means not shifting your weight too much! Get left, hit left, finish left!

Drag + Tug

No matter what anyone else tells you, the key to shooting lower scores is having a tidy short game. That means you have to become a more proficient and consistent chipper. “Proficient” means you should know the right mechanics for successful results. “Consistent” means you repeat the same motion for steady results from a variety of places around the green.

Interestingly, I see some of my better students make the same mistakes when chipping the ball as my high-handicap and newbie students make. It first starts with the misconception that chips are to be struck more like putts than full-swing shots. That means, some of my students drag the club on the backswing, keeping the clubhead low to the ground. What happens next is usually pretty ugly, with the arms tugging the clubhead upward in an attempt to lift the ball into the air. It’s a move I call the “drag and tug” and, unfortunately, I see it a lot!

To fix this problem, the first thing I do is teach my students that it’s okay for the clubhead to move away from the ground and up into the air via hinging the wrists on the backswing and letting the clubhead release to the ball as the body rotates forward. As you can see in the opposite color photos, the club has hinged going back and my body has rotated through impact with the ball.

Simply put, allow the wrists to hinge naturally. Experiment with how much works best for you, and always rotate the body through the shot. A chip is much more like a mini-swing than a long putt. Follow that simple advice, and you’ll improve quickly.

Don’t drag the club! If you stay low, you’ll lift up.	The collapse of the arms is a sign of little rotation and a tugging motion.
Hinge the wrists! You need some hinge for crisp contact with the ball.	Allow your body to rotate toward the target. This keeps the club in front of your chest.

Jeff Yurkiewicz, PGA, teaches at the Grayhawk Learning Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. For more information, visit grayhawkgolf.com.

Be The (Middle) ball

A very important variable to better ballstriking is “centeredness of contact.” It doesn’t matter how dialed in your swing becomes, if you’re missing the center of the clubface at impact, you’re going to have trouble controlling your distances and hitting the ball in your intended direction. Hitting it on the “sweet spot” not only feels pure, it will also help you to maximize your distance.

Here’s a drill that will help you get better at making contact in the center of the clubface. Simply set up with three golf balls, and place each ball a few inches apart, with the middle ball being the ball you intend to hit. Make sure the three balls form a line perpendicular to your target line. Leave just enough room for the clubhead to pass through without hitting the two outside balls.

If this is too easy for you, here’s a variation of the drill. From the original drill, move the ball closest to you forward approximately 2 inches and the ball farthest from you away approximately 2 inches. Leave just enough room for the clubhead to pass through without hitting the two outside balls. This aligns the three golf balls diagonally, which now forces you to not only make centered contact with the middle ball, but it discourages you from coming over the top and hitting the ball from too outside-in the target line and encourages you to swing the club with an inside path on the downswing. Either variation drill will help you hit the ball more in the center of the face.

Boyd Summerhays, PGA, is a former PGA Tour player and the Director of Instruction of the McDowell Mountain Learning Center at the McDowell Mountain Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz. To contact Boyd or for more information, go to www.summerhaysgolf.com.

Keep A Steady Head

Out on the LPGA Tour, if you’re averaging somewhere in the 28-29 putts per round, you’re considered among the best putters out here. Short putts, long putts, whatever length you may encounter, if you manage to keep your putts to under 30 in a given round, you’ll shoot a good score.

Keeping the head steady starts with also keeping the lower body steady through the stroke.

Among the better putters I’ve seen (not just on the LPGA Tour, but other professional tours), not all two players have the exact same stance, putting stroke, rhythm or even tempo. But what they definitely have in common with one another is a steady head through contact with the golf ball. Often, in pro-ams I see amateurs try to steer the ball with their eyes, hoping to “push” the ball into the hole with the body. Doing that usually means that the body lifts up out of its correct posture, and the putterface either opens or closes at impact. Meaning, all sense of control for distance and direction is lost! Instead of trying to push the ball and opening your body through the stroke (like you would with any other club), allow the body to stay square and the head to stay relatively still through the stroke. Meaning, let the putterhead pass you from right to left and stay in posture until well after you’ve made contact with the ball. By the way, the lower body needs to stay stable through the stroke, too. As you can see in the black- and-white photo, my left leg isn’t visible after contact with the ball. This movement leads to all sorts of inconsistent putts.

This tip, albeit a simple one, will help you make more putts with better distance and direction.

Find Your Length
As you can see in the color photos, I like to set up over the golf ball with my eyes just barely inside the target line. According to my putting coach, that’s a good spot to be, and you never want to error with the eyes outside the target line.

I’m able to set up in this position pretty easily because my putter shaft is a comfortable length and lie. However, a longer putter may help you set up with your eyes directly over the golf ball (or just to the inside), like how I’m doing. A shorter putter usually helps with the opposite problem and will help move your eyes, if they happen to be too far away, more over the golf ball. Point being, get your putter fit for length and lie, and pay attention to your head position as it relates to the golf ball. A good/bad position can greatly affect your putting results.

Paige MacKenzie, LPGA, currently plays on the LPGA tour and is a familiar face on Golf Channel’s Morning Drive. For more info, visit paigemackenziegolf.com.

Middle Game: Plane & Simple

When was the last time you checked your swing plane? Scratch that…do you even know what your swing plane is and should be?

If you’re like most golfers, you probably don’t think about your swing plane very much when, in fact, you should! Your swing plane is essentially the angle you swing the club on relative to the ground. Some of us have steeper swing planes, while others have flatter swing planes. The trick is determining which is right for your game. If you’re too steep or too flat, there will be a lot of manipulation on the downswing, leading to incorrect contact, distance and direction. The solution? Look to the butt end of your grip at the top of your backswing. The butt end should point along the targetline, which is actually a line from the target through the golf ball. Now get this. If you can manage to get the butt end to point at (or maybe just slightly inside) the targetline with a middle iron, you should do the same with your woods, driver, short irons and so on. But here’s the interesting part. As you follow this constant (the butt end pointing to the targetline), you’ll naturally see that your correct plane angle gets flatter with longer clubs and a little steeper with shorter clubs. That’s a good thing! The worst thing you can do is try and keep the same plane angle for every club in your golf bag. That won’t work.

Let your swing plane flex, and point that butt end toward the targetline, as I’m doing here. Follow that advice, and you won’t have to think about swing plane as much, and you’ll hit straighter and longer golf shots.

Jeff Yurkiewicz, PGA, teaches at the Grayhawk Learning Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. For more info, visit grayhawkgolf.com.

Rake It Up For Great Bunker Play

If there’s one shot in golf that golfers unnecessarily struggle with, it has to be the simple bunker shot. Hitting a bunker shot is the only shot in golf where it’s okay to miss the ball, meaning it actually requires less precision than a standard shot. So, as you would guess, it’s all in the technique, which makes this drill I call “Rake It Up” so valuable.

REMEMBER THE BOUNCE

To improve your sand play, first understand how the club is designed to interact with the sand. Most sand wedges have an element called “bounce,” which is the angle of the leading edge and trailing edge of the sole. In simple terms, “bounce” actually does as the name implies. It helps the wedge bounce off the sand and prevents it from getting stuck. To develop how to take advantage of your wedge’s bounce and how to feel the proper sensation for the bunker shot, consider making a few practice swings on top of the rake in the sand that’s pointing directly at your target. (Obviously, this is a practice drill; you can’t do this in competition.) Take a few light swings and get the sole of your wedge to start bouncing off the rake. As you do this, you may actually see the rake lift off the sand. This is the feeling you want to have as the club passes through the sand and helps lift the ball into the air. (By the way, don’t break the rake!) As you practice this drill, keep swinging along the rake at the target.

IT’S A V-SHAPED MOVE

Secondly, think of the bunker swing as a V shape, not a U shape. This means you want to steepen both your backswing and your downswing by adding some extra hinge in the wrists. As you add some extra hinge, keep your lower body quiet and favor your left side. The key is to limit your lower body movement, which will both help speed up the upper body and add some steepness to your swing arc.

BE OPEN ABOUT IT

Third, open the face of the wedge before you grip it (don’t twist your hands) and experiment with how much works best for you. Some players like square clubfaces; other prefer hitting shots with the face wide open. The key to remember is that even with an open face, you want to swing the club directly at the target. Don’t worry so much about where the clubface is aiming. Even if it’s open to the right, I want you to swing the club directly “along the rake,” that is, I like to imagine there’s a rake below the ball and I need to swing the club directly along that rake. Allow the hands
to release, too. Don’t feel as though you need to hold that clubface open through the entire shot.

Lastly, as you make a bunker swing, remember the sensation you developed while practicing with the rake. You want to clip the sand before the ball and actually use the bounce of the wedge to bounce the wedge off the sand. Now, practicing with the rake helps you really feel the sensation of bouncing the sole off the handle, but in
the sand there will be a lot more friction to deal with, so swing with extra speed and momentum, and hit no deeper than an inch or so into the sand. The finish position that indicates a good bunker shot always has a full rotation of the upper body, with the hands low in front of the chest. Hone in on these quick pointers, and you’ll find that bunker shots are a lot easier than you first thought. Bounce your wedge off the rake!

Charlotta Sorenstam is a former LPGA Tour player and now a teacher based in Orlando, Florida.

The Chip Putt

When it comes to hitting the simple bump-and-run shot from just off the green, I teach it the same way to all my students. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Tour pro or a beginner, this shot requires the same basic fundamentals. The good news is, it’s one of the easiest shots in golf, as long as you know the right technique.

I like to see a basic bump-and-run hit with a club that gets the ball on the ground and running as quickly as possible. This means minimum air time and maximum ground time. I wish it wasn’t called “bump-and-run” actually, since there really isn’t a bump anywhere! If anything, it would be better if it were called a “chip putt” because I teach students to approach the shot like they would a putt, but hit the shot like they would a chip.

To start, before you even make a stroke, closely read the length and break of the shot, with emphasis on the last four to six feet when your ball slows down, since this is where your ball breaks the most. Pick your intended line and stick with it. Next, choose the right club for the shot. I like to use anything from my pitching wedge all the way down to the 7-iron. The key is in how much green you have between the ball and the hole. If it’s a long shot, try less loft. If it’s closer, say, within 20 feet, try a higher loft. Just don’t bother with anything more than 56 degrees. You don’t need it here.

Set up to the ball with a narrow stance and place the majority of your weight on your lead foot. Here’s the important part: As you make the stroke, you have to accelerate through it, so don’t feel as though you need a big, long backstroke. Keep it on the shorter side. Second, keep the club low to the ground as you make a shallow–but still descending–stroke into the back of the ball. Don’t feel as though you need to lift the ball up. Remember, this shot is a lot like a putt, so keep the club low and shallow out that angle of attack. I like to think of giving the grass a little haircut. There’s no digging here.

Third, and probably most importantly, keep your body and head QUIET! As you can see in the photos, I like to tell my students to “listen for the ball to land on the green” prior to coming up and out of your posture. You want to avoid jumping up and out of your posture prematurely. Instead, listen for the ball to land. In the photos, you can see my eyes haven’t moved as the ball is chipped and on its way to the hole. That’s what you want. The bump-and-run usually rolls more than most pitches and chips, so practice how far the ball rolls with different clubs. Keep your stroke the same length; adjust your club instead. This makes it a cinch when the time comes to guess the right yardages. The stroke always stays the same!

Finally, I love teaching my students the Feedback Drill I’m demonstrating here. The goal is to learn terrific distance control. Lay a club down three to four feet behind the hole. Hit five to six chips, with your goal of getting all the balls either in the hole or between the hole and the club. If you miss one, start over again until you reach your goal. You’ll quickly see that focusing on how the ball rolls and how far it goes will help you take focus off the stroke and more on the shot at hand. It always ensures you get the ball to the hole more often, helping to make it easier to get up and down.

Give this drill a whirl. I know it will help your “chip putts” from various places around the green.

Barry Goldstein teaches at Inverrary CC in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and at the New England Golf Camp in Maine. For lesson information, email Barry at DRFORGOLF@aol.com.