Golf Swing Basics

The golf swing is such a complicated movement it can be hard to know where to start when learning or even trying to improve your golf swing. Let’s have a look at a few basic ideas for how we can start to upgrade our swing.

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Try to get your hands above but behind your trail shoulder

We don’t hit the ball with our backswing, so we don’t need to overcomplicate it and it doesn’t need to be perfect. A simple thought that can tick a lot of boxes for us is to try and get your hands above but behind the trail shoulder (right shoulder for a right-handed player).

This thought will do many things for you, but mainly it will cause you to make a big shoulder and hip turn which is essential for power, and also create some depth to your backswing, which allows you to generate speed and hit a draw more easily.

Golf swing basics: Maintain your spine angle

It is essential for players that wish to strike the ball well that they maintain their spine angle somewhat throughout the swing. This means that your front shoulder must go down and you have some downward inclination in your shoulders at the top. This also means that in the down/through swing the back shoulder will move down and under.

If we lose our spine angle at any point in the swing it becomes very hard to control our low point, and we tend to hit a lot of shots heavy and thin. The best ball strikers very clearly stay in posture throughout the whole move.

Golf swing basics: Make practice swings at a tee peg

To improve our swings it is important that we make a lot of practice swings, but often golfers waste swings without swinging at anything in particular.

Starting a session by putting a tee peg in the ground and making some swings at it without a ball, allows you to have more awareness in the moves you are making without being burdened by potentially hitting a terrible golf shot.

It also does a great job of improving a player’s low-point control as aiming at a tee means you still have to bottom out in the correct place to hit the tee. If you struggle with your contact with irons and wedges from the ground this is a great tip for you.

Golf swing basics: Start your practice with an 8 or 9 iron

This is a big one for golfers as we want to gain confidence and start enjoying hitting shots as early as possible. An 8 or 9 iron is short enough in length and has enough loft for the ball to get in the air easily enough, but still go a decent distance.

Learning to play with a long iron or fairway wood or driver can put golfers off or quickly develop bad habits in a player’s swing. These clubs are too long and don’t have enough loft so the chances of hitting it well are too low.

Feel your weight moving towards the target in the downswing

Once we have our good top position where the hands are behind the trail shoulder, a golfer then wants to start working on getting their weight forwards towards the target.

This weight moving forwards means that the bottom of your swing will be just ahead of the ball, giving us good contact. Golfers that keep either weight back on the back foot, tend to mis hit it a lot, aor are forced to scoop it, which loses load of power.

Golf swing basics: Hit down into the back of the ball

In order to really improve the swing, a golfer should understand what we want to happen at impact. The club should strike the ball as it is travelling down, with the club bottoming out 3-4 inches ahead of the ball, causing a divot to appear after the ball.

A lot of golfers believe that you have to help the ball in the air by lifting up or hitting it up somehow, which is wrong. Clubs are designed with loft which allows proper launch even with the club moving down. It is the downward hit that gives us a good strike.