Unnatural Golf

Filed in archive Golf Instruction on April 24, 2007

Courtesy: golf digest

It is and likely always will be the amateur golfer's Holy Grail: more distance off the tee.

As golfers everywhere know only too well, that is easier said than done.

Why? Because we have to always fight natural inclination.

The natural inclination to hitting a golf ball further is to hit the ball harder.

And to hit the ball harder, the natural inclination is to grip the club harder.

That is an instant recipe for less distance, nasty slices, a driver head buried into the turf behind the ball - there is no end to the nightmarish results that can occur due to natural inclination.

I know all this to be true not because I profess to be a teacher (hah, what a thought!) but because I have fallen victim time and again to all of the above.

Slowly and painfully I, like many others, have learned that, to hit the ball further, you must do the opposite of what seems natural. And I also know this: I will always be fighting natural inclination.

So, what's the big secret, then, to greater distance? We all know that answer: more clubhead speed.

The golf products industry has come out with various teaching aids to help increase clubhead speed. The Speed Stik is one product; the Momentus is another.

There are electronic gadgets that attach to one's hip or one's club shaft to measure hip sway (a distance robber) or club head speed at impact and teach a better coil or delayed wrist release on the downswing.

In my search for more distance, I fired off an email to my teacher, Mark Greenwood, Director of Swing Machine Golf Canada.

The Swing Machine Golf technique is very simple (believe me; golf instruction needs more of the KISS principle).

Two of its main tenets are relaxed arms and light grip pressure.

Mark got back to me with sound advice.

"You want to increase club head speed?" he wrote, "then loosen up the arms and wrists even more and uncoil your hips faster on the downswing. That creates more "whip" with the arms. This will all produce more lag and therefore faster clubhead speed through the ball when everything catches up to your hip turn".

In short, distance comes from the lower body, not the upper body. We knew that, didn't we?

But that natural inclination wants to take over, making you swing like a gorilla and look like a chump.

I'm off for a lesson with Mark on this very thing today.

Natural inclination be damned.