BY TODD HARMON

Over a decade has passed since I crested the hill of age continuum and yet it just dawned on me last year, at 53 I should be getting more roll out of my drives than I did before! Seriously I’m no physicist, but even I know that golf balls roll further downhill. And I’m definitely over the hill!

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BY DR. RICHARD MYERS

Many experts would agree that most golfers take their swing too seriously. Learn the basics, practice a lot and stay out of your own way!

Here are the basic steps for a full and perfect golf swing:

1. Grip the club with your left hand so that your thumb lies along the shaft. The line between your thumb and index finger should point toward your right eye. Wrap your right hand over your left so that your left thumb fits into the cup of the right palm. If you are left-handed, reverse these instructions.

2. Stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart with your right foot pointing straight ahead and your left foot slightly to the left. Bend at your hips, keeping your back straight and your knees flexed. Distribute your weight evenly from front to back and left to right.

3. For the backswing, shift your weight to your right foot. At the same time, tilt your shoulders vertically so that your left shoulder points down, and right shoulder points up. The left end of the club will be pointing approximately at or behind the ball. As you’re shifting your weight to your right foot, release to the instep of your left foot so you can get behind the ball. Ensure that your right foot, right hip and head are in a vertical line. Begin your backswing with your hands, followed immediately by your arms and shoulders. Don’t hurry. This won’t create a faster downswing. Keep your pace steady throughout your backswing. If you aren’t happy with your golf swing, this is one of the first corrections to try. Slow down your backswing.

4. For the downswing and impact, start with your hips. Shift your weight to your left foot by leading with your hips in a slight lateral motion. Point the club end in your right elbow down at your right foot. At the same time, shift to the instep of your right foot so that most of your weight is on your left foot. Release your hips by rotating them through, so that your hips, belly button, and shoulders are facing the target. Your right toe is just balancing you, not supporting any weight. Hold the finish position. Look down the target line, not down at the ground.

Many golf professionals say that 80 percent of the perfect golf swing is the body pivot. This involves three main components:

• the turning of the body back, down and through
• the correct weight shift throughout the swing
• balance

Any loss of balance throughout the golf swing means that there is a pivot and weight shift problem. That will be reflected in the direction, loft and speed of the ball. Review these steps until you are comfortable and then keep practicing. The perfect golf swing is within your reach!

Richard Myers is a keen golfer and his websites Think and Reach Par and Golf for Leftys contains many free tips and great golfing advice plus training videos and DVDs to help you improve your swing and lower your score using some very simple exercises.

BY JAMES VINCENT

Keep your eye firmly on the ball for every shot and watch your handicap drop like a stone.

Mystery writers know they must grab the reader’s attention right off and hold it until the very end. You must do the same with the ball – keep your attention focused on it through the entire shot, until the natural movement of body and shoulders pulls your head away.

You think you already do, right? Try this little exercise:

Drop six balls in the rough very close to the edge of a bunker, within one shot of the green. Chip the ball over the bunker and on to the green without watching the flight or run of the ball. Look at the ball, make your shot and do not lift your head to watch it. The first few shots will be easy, the next few almost impossible.

It’s actually quite funny how difficult it is for a golfer to keep their eye on the ball.

Your attention comes in two flavors – spontaneous and voluntary. Spontaneous attention is the kind of attention given without thought, very effortlessly. For example, when boarding a bus or subway you will pay attention long enough to put coins or card in the slot. You do this without thinking, probably even talking at the same time.

The second type is voluntary attention. You willfully focus on something and give it all of your mental concentration. This is hard to do for more than a few seconds. But it is this kind of concentration you must give to the ball during your shot.

The way to do this is to first decide what kind of shot you are going to make – distance, wind, club type and so on. But once decided move directly to the ball, give it your full attention – that is, eyes on the ball – and make your shot. Do not take your eyes, and hence your concentration, off the ball until the movement of your body naturally pulls your head away.

Don’t believe it? Try this little experiment. The next time you’re at a vending machine take a quarter out of your pocket. Stand right in front of the machine, quarter in hand, ready to put it in the coin slot. Close your eyes. Now put the quarter in the slot directly, on the first try, the same as you would do with your eyes open. You can’t do it. You come close, sure. But you hit to the side of the slot, or just above it, but not exactly dead center right into the slot.

Your mind controls your actions based on what is directly in your field of vision.

Now try it again. This time leave your eyes open until the coin is about two inches away from the slot — almost in. Close them at the last second. You still can’t do it.

Apply this to the golf ball. What happens if you take your eyes off the ball just a fraction of a second early? The club is still a few inches away. How much of a difference in your shot will a quarter of an inch make when the club hits the ball? A huge difference. Very huge difference. But you know you can’t control your hands and arms precisely without looking directly at what you are doing. So keep looking.

It takes practice, for sure, but now that you know you should keep your eye on the ball, and exactly how to do that, practicing it becomes much easier.

Combine this simple tip of keeping your eye on the ball with a halfway decent swing and your handicap will fall to scratch in no time.

James Vincent runs the Online Golf School. Visit the site to improve your game, get great golf tips, golf lessons and complete lessons on the science of every golf shot, the psychology of the game and your opponent and match play from world champions.

BY JONATHAN BARRETT

What part of the body contributes the most to generating maximum golf club head speed?

This single answer allowed me to make a huge leap in my understanding of the golf swing, and in everything I had seen and read about the golf swing, none of it emphasised it enough.

I carried out a survey on the Internet over several weeks and asked visitors to my website the question: What part of the body contributes the most to generating the maximum speed of the club head?

Only 20% got the answer correct — that’s only 1 in every 5 golfers! And these golfers had a wide range of handicaps down to single figures.

Interestingly this figure corresponds to another golfing statistic — did you know that only around 20% of golfers have a handicap of less than 18? It made me wonder whether the misunderstanding of the fundamental aspect could be the one thing that is holding so many golfers back.

Which part of the body do you think creates the maximum speed of the club head?

Is it:

• Shoulders
• Arms
• Hands
• Hips
• Legs
• Torso
• Wrists

The part of the body that generates the maximum club head speed in golf can also be found in other sports such as tennis, baseball and cricket.

In all of these sports the role of the hands or wrists is such that they contribute the most to generating the speed of the club, racket or bat.

When the club reaches the point on the downswing where it is level with the ground notice the position of the shoulders. Then take a look at the point when the club is parallel with the ground again, after the ball has been hit and again notice the position of the shoulders.

Look at how far the club has moved (over 180 degrees) compared to how little the shoulders and arms have moved (around 45 degrees).

So the answer to the question that I posed above is that it is the hands (or wrists) that contribute the most to generating the maximum club head speed. The club is moved through over 180 degrees whilst the arms move through less than 60 degrees — all of the rest of the movement of the head of the golf club is generated by the movement of the hands.

Unfortunately the large majority of golfers think that it is with the shoulders and arms.

So we have shown that the club head travels a long way with very little body movement in the final stages of the swing, and this is how the pros generate club head speeds of over 120mph! We have focused on the movement of the wrists but it’s important to point out that the wrists are only really hinges at the point that the two arms meet and are therefore under the control of the arms. At the point we have highlighted in the swing where the club is about to travel through 180 degrees the right arm is bent at the elbow and the left arm is straight.

Just put your arms and hands into this position (you don’t need a club in your hands but use one if it helps). Now simply straighten your right arm and allow your straight left arm to move towards the centre of your body (simulating the point of impact).

Can you see how the wrists actually move in response to the straightening of the right arm? This is a key factor as developing the correct swing relies upon you getting your right elbow close to the right side of your body — if you move your shoulders early in the swing you won’t be able to achieve this position.

When you get this move it feels like you are throwing the club head into the back of the ball, which in reality is what you are actually doing and it feels great as you release all that power right into the back of the ball!

Let’s see less emphasis on the movement of the shoulders and more control with the wrists.

This will create a totally different feel to the way you’ve been hitting the ball in the past.

Jon Barrett WAS a frustrated golfer who studied the golf swing for 5 years in search of information to make his scores tumble but without success… UNTIL he discovered what only 1% of golfers know. Read about his eye opening concepts you won’t find in standard advice in Golf Swing Eureka!

BY DAVID NEVOGT

The first thing that you need to realize about creating backspin is that it?s a very tough shot to accomplish, let alone control.

The second thing that you should realize is that there are very few situations where this shot is actually needed.

In my opinion, the best shot to master is an approach shot that bounces once, and then stops on a dime. This shot is not easy to accomplish either, but is more realistic and much more effective in the vast majority of cases.

So I’ll get into the basics of this shot now, but please realize that an entire book could be written on this subject, and it would still be very hard to incorporate into a recreational game.

Here are the basic conditions that must be met before the shot even occurs. If these factors are not in place, don’t try to create backspin.

• Conditions must be completely dry (the club face, and the ball included)
• You must be on the fairway (grass can’t get in between the club and the ball)
• Greens have to be very nicely kept (very short)

Now, let me clarify. Those are the conditions that must be met before the shot even occurs. So hopefully, you are beginning to see just how difficult this shot is and why it doesn’t come highly recommended from someone who focuses on making golf simple.

I was thinking of ways to describe the action necessary to create backspin, and I came to the conclusion that the best analogy is one of placing spin on the cue ball in billiards.

Side Note: They say that good pool players are also good putters. So if you want to sharpen your putting skills, I would advise learning billiards as well. It will help you to develop steady hands, learn to see the line, and it will also teach you a lot about spin.

In pool, to create backspin you have to hit downward on the cue ball with a significant amount of force. Notice that players chalk up before hitting a shot requiring a lot of spin (dry). They also go at the ball with a very steep angle. And they hit the lower portion of the ball.

All of this is necessary in golf as well. The ultimate goal is to pinch the ball between your club and the fairway. You must take a downward blow at the ball, you must add a fair amount of velocity to your swing speed, and you must make clean contact with the lower portion of the ball. It is all of these factors combined that make this shot so tough to complete with any accuracy.

It?s also essential to have a new ball (preferably a high spin/soft-cover ball), and a newer (clean) club that has some of the grip left on the face. As the ball compresses into the grooves on the face of the club, backspin is created.

On a final note: It’s important to realize that if you make course management the foundation of your game, you will rarely be in a situation where you need to use backspin. Course management is one of the true keys to golf.

David Nevogt writes golf instruction material that helps golfers of all levels reach their full potential and lower their scores. David is the author of The Simple Golf Swing which guarantees to have you shooting 7 strokes lower in only 1 week from today.