The Natural Golf Swing (15 page)

G
OLF IS FULL
of misconceptions that we’ve taken for truth. We’re so eager to improve that we’ll try anything.

The misconceptions that follow are a direct result of the fact that most golf theory has ignored the aspect of motion. Now that you understand that the swing is a motion that conforms to the laws of motion, it will be easy for you to understand where the misconceptions came from. You will also be able to ignore them for the rest of your golfing days.

Gene Sarazen was once asked what he does when he swings. “I ride through the ball,” he answered. That’s a powerful image. It tells us so much about the swing as motion. We’re free. We want to move without restrictions.

Balance, as we know, is the key fundamental to the natural golf swing. It’s the singular essential, the one factor we think about and the major condition that we evaluate. To be in balance is to be relaxed, in a state of equilibrium. Yet much of what we are told to do during the golf swing would put us out-of-balance, not to mention out of commission sometimes. Doctors’ and chiropractors’ offices are full of golfers who have contorted themselves into such
convoluted shapes that they can hardly get out of bed, let alone make a swing motion.

Golf instruction is full of misconceptions and misinformation, including good ideas that have been garbled and misinterpreted as they’ve come into common usage. For instance, it’s a good idea to develop maximum extension. But it’s not a good idea to throw the club behind you so that you can almost put it in your back pocket. You lose energy that way. Yet many golfers think that extension means just that: sticking the club behind their backs. That might ease an itch, but it won’t do anything for extension.

And yet we accept the ill-conceived information. It’s as if we have looked at the golf swing through a pair of glasses with a particular prescription: “Follow these rules of thumb and you can’t go wrong.” But how can they be right if they violate balance? How can they be correct if they result in us overworking our bodies? The golf swing is much easier and much more enjoyable than we have been taught. We want to retain and develop energy, not lose it. An imbalanced condition strips us of our energy.

You will be familiar with most or all of the following misconceptions. I’ll examine each of them with respect to the natural golf swing. Then we can ignore them, forever.

I was as guilty of this as anybody. I used to hold the club as if I were in a tug-of-war. I thought that “death-gripping” the club was the way to ensure that I wouldn’t lose control of it. Of course, the only thing I accomplished was to tense the muscles in my hands, forearms, and shoulders.

Don’t bother with the death-grip. Ignore the articles that tell you to hold on tightly with the last three fingers of the left hand. It’s true that the pressure is in the last three fingers, but you don’t
make
that happen. It happens as a result of the compact grip you assume as part of the natural form.

Also stay away from other variations on the theme, as in: to grip firmly with the middle two fingers of the right hand and/or the thumb and forefinger of the right hand.

Hold the club no more firmly than you would a butterfly or a baby. You want to feel the club in your hands. You need soft hands to do that.

The size of the arc during the loading motion is defined by the length of the left arm plus the club. Golf instructors have long known that when the left arm is most extended, the golfer is most likely to have developed both a source of power – a maximum arc – and a source of accuracy (an arc that because it is maximized can be repeated). Unfortunately, instructors have taught that the golfer should therefore keep his left arm straight. He is told to force it straight, to extend it on his own.

Straightening the left arm has the effect of tensing it. It is, in effect, a hyperextension that interferes with natural extension and in the process introduces tension and rigidity.

Golfers have observed others at the top of the backswing and seen a straight left arm. They have examined stop-action photographs of better players and seen a straight left arm. But it is an effect, not a cause.

The left arm will extend on its own if the grip is relaxed in the starting form and during the swing. Centrifugal force and inertia will extend the muscles naturally. Transfer weight and you’ll have all the extension you need. You need not do a thing to extend it.

This idea must have arisen to compensate for the torque or twist in the old hickory shafts. Golfers must have felt that by pointing the V’s toward the right shoulder they would have a better chance of getting the clubface squarely on the ball. Applied to steel shafts, and given the balance requirement, this is a distortion. The golfer who points the V’s toward the right shoulder and then makes a pure swing will
hook the ball wildly as his hands turn over at impact due to weight transfer. They will have rotated too much during the downswing.

The hands must oppose one another symmetrically in order to maintain balance in the starting form. Centrifugal force will return the hands to this position through impact. This will happen of its own accord. Let it happen.

This posture-related rule of thumb destroys posture. It’s in the same category as the admonition to sit down to the ball as if you’re taking a place on a bar stool. The effect is to compress the golfer; how can you maintain maximum elevation, and therefore encourage a maximum arc, if at address you’re already sitting down, with your weight back?

You will put yourself in good posture when you let the length and lie of the club determine your elevation at address. Place the clubhead behind the ball so that the sole is flat on the ground. Then bend as you need to keep it there.

This is another distortion of a balanced starting position. It introduces tension into the left arm and upper back. It pulls the left shoulder up and out (toward the ball) and the right shoulder down and back. It pushes your weight forward, destroying the fifty-fifty distribution of weight during the starting position that we want between the right and left feet – the two pivot points.

This misconception is associated with the “keep-your-left-arm-straight” idea. It is meant to promote extension. But it prevents good form. All we’re trying to do at address is give ourselves the best chance of making a pure motion. What chance have we got if we’re contorted at the start?

Any person who stands on the ground with his weight distributed toward the insides of his feet is out of balance. If you’ll stand up now, your weight will be evenly distributed between your feet. There’s no point in distributing the weight otherwise on a flat surface. This doesn’t
change because you have a golf club in your hands.

Pinching the feet in pinches the knees in and tenses the legs. It forces attention upon the lower body because you are now uncomfortable and unnatural. You’ll subconsciously feel that you want to get your weight back flat on your feet, evenly distributed. This focus on one area will inevitably disrupt the calm, even feeling you want throughout your body in the starting position. This misconception, like so many, developed from the admonition to keep your head still.

This will assist you greatly if your intent is to tilt and perhaps fall over during the swing. The golfer who leans back at address is a golfer who slips and slides during the swing. You want to feel active while relaxed at address. Keeping the weight toward the heels encourages slumping. This is a drowsy position from which to begin a vigorous motion. Avoid it by setting up in a balanced position.

Absolutely no good can come from bending the knees. Golfers who do so not only look awkward, they pitch their bodies forward as if somebody has shoved them from behind. The effect is also to push weight into the feet and then into the ground. The knees will bend a discrete and proper amount as you fit into your starting position. You don’t need to add any flex to what comes naturally.

This is a misguided attempt to ensure you’ll be able to make a shoulder turn. The hope is that by keeping your chin up you will create room for your left shoulder as you make your backswing. The difficulty here is that you will create tension in the back of your neck that will likely restrict your shoulder turn.

You want to feel “oily” at address. Sam Snead used this term to describe how he felt throughout his swing and I can’t imagine a better image. Set up as I have indicated in previous chapters and you won’t have any need to thrust your chin up. When you are in natural posture, your chin will be just where it should be.

This popular notion derives from an adjustment golfers think they must make due to the placement of the right hand on the club. The right hand is then obviously lower than the left. This opens the shoulders to the target. There’s nothing the matter with this. Our anatomy does it.

Some golf teachers, however, are determined to make their pupils arrange their hands, arms, and shoulders in a perfect triangle. So they advise the pupil to go against nature by sticking his right arm into the side of his chest. This is supposed to square up the shoulders, hips, and knees. However, it’s not a balanced position. You may as well squeeze yourself into an overcrowded elevator for all the discomfort and muscular tension you’ll feel. Remember, we relax to play golf. Tucking the right elbow in ensures maximum discomfort, not maximum ease. It means that we’ll have to manipulate the golf club and our bodies during the swing: and there goes the motion.

So let the arms hang. Square to the target, as we’ve learned, is slightly open.

This is the number one misconception concerning the swing. It’s also expressed as “keep your head still,” or “keep your eye on the ball.” The idea of keeping the head still and the eye on the ball has everything to do with the mistaken belief that golf is a hand-eye game: and if it is, then we’d better keep our eye on the ball. This, of course, leads to the notion that the head is the pivot point of the swing, the one part that does not move. In other words, we fear that if it does move, we’ll mis-hit the ball, or worse, miss it entirely.

Golfers who are mesmerized by the ball feel they have to hit it rather than swing through it.

That means keeping the head locked. But all that does is lock up the body.

Hitting the ball is not the answer. Golf is
not
a hand-eye game. The idea is to stay relaxed and let the centrifugal force extend the arms, hands, and club downward and outward to create a maximum arc in the swing motion.

Body location relative to ball location will determine the contact between clubhead and ball. It is body location relative to the ball in the starting form rather than hand-eye coordination that is the key factor in making solid contact. The answer and the fun lie in creating a free-swinging motion that will meet the ball on the way to the target.

This misconception has done more harm to more golf swings than any piece of advice I’ve come across. It wrecks balance, for one thing. We see a golfer’s head behind the ball at impact and we think it’s there because he’s kept it down or still throughout his swing. This is a misperception. We’re seeing an effect, not a cause. If he’s swung freely, he’s swung in motion and in balance. His head has merely returned to impact with the rest of his body.

We restrict motion right from the start when we keep the head still. We thereby carry so much weight in our heads. It is a principle of motion that we move with a light head, with a head balanced softly on our necks.

Try this experiment with a partner. Lie on your back. Have your partner sit behind you in a comfortable position while sliding his hands under your head from the front. Let him gradually move his hands under your head so that he is supporting the head. Focus your attention on dropping the weight of your head into his hands. As you release the weight, your partner will gently lift your head a couple of inches off the floor. Continue to allow the weight of your head to sink into his hands.

Imagine that your head would drop to the floor if he let go, which of course he won’t. Your partner might want to move your head around a bit; this introduction of motion will let you drop more of the weight of your head into his hands. Your partner will then guide your head back to the floor, and remove his hands.

Notice how light-headed you feel. Do you have a sensation of freedom in your head? We carry so much weight in parts of our body, yet are quite accustomed to doing so. We don’t realize it can be different. And the head, of course, is the heaviest part of our body relative to other parts. If we hold it rigidly during the golf swing, we make it even heavier. It’s meant to move as we move. The simple exercise I have given here will demonstrate how much weight we hold in our head when we keep it still.

There are so many things we cannot do if we keep the head still. We cannot transfer weight naturally, for one. There must be movement throughout if there’s going to be a weight transfer. That’s natural motion. If there is any sense that anything is nailed down or restricted, if we’re doing anything to take away the freedom, then it becomes an unnatural motion.

The head is not the pivot point of the golf swing. The feet are the pivot points. You transfer weight from foot to foot. The head travels where the body takes it during the swing motion. It will do so when we think of balance. The head moves as we displace weight while loading and unloading during the swing. It goes back and forth and up and down, wherever it wants. The body carries the head.

A final word on the absurdity of keeping the head still. We’ve been led to believe that golf can hurt the back. There’s supposed to be such a condition as the “golfer’s back.” If golfers do develop bad backs, the condition is often due to keeping their head still. It forces them to swing the club away from the ball while staying in one place, and then to swing through it while doing the same. If you keep your head still while swinging away from the ball – particularly if your intent is to hit the ball – then your feet will
remain locked in place; to counteract your movement away from the ball and to allow yourself to keep the head still, you may even find your lower body moving forward during the backswing, the classic reverse pivot. The opposite thing might happen on the throughswing, your weight moving back as you move forward. No wonder golfers wreck their backs. Keeping the head still causes what has become known as the “Reverse C” finish position, in which the golfer retards the forward motion of his upper body in an effort to maintain his rigid head position. Is this natural? Can this be right?