We’ve all seen the golf ads that say you can gain 30 yards in distance in one golf swing and naturally we dismiss them. But here’s a golf video featuring Padraig Harrington that shows him making quite a radical golf swing change and gaining 30 yards in distance! Enjoy the show 
Tags: distance, golf swing, golf video, Padraig Harrington
The golf swing is probably the most dissected movement in all of sports. And almost every one has an opinion about what should happen in the golf swing. Arguments among professional golf teachers are common. But over the last 25 years of playing golf I’ve discovered that all of this leads to one thing, which is…
GOLF SWING CONFUSION
For example, you get golf coaches saying you shouldn’t let your right elbow fly out at the top of the swing like Jack Nicklaus (18 Majors).
You get some golf teachers saying we should only swing to parallel because swinging past parallel is bad. Yep, if you swing past parallel you might only win a major or two like John Daly.
And almost everyone agrees you need to watch the ball being struck when you’re swinging because if you don’t you have no chance of shooting 59 for 18 holes of golf like David Duval
And you most certainly have to keep your right hand on the golf club exactly like you had it at address or you’ll be a terrible ball striker like Vijay Singh.
For almost every “should” in the golf swing you’ll find someone who successfully contradicts it. Here is an interesting video which shows some of the funkiest and most successful swings in golf (apart from the last one ).
I’ve given up on swing positions…apart from one! (mentioned at 5 minutes and 17 seconds in the video above)
You see, for the last couple of years I have looked at the golf swing from an 80-20 point of view. And this 80-20 point of view is to find the MOST important things in the golf swing. To start my quest I turned to the goal of the long game which is…
“To hit each club as long, accurately and consistently as possible.”
Upon reflecting on that goal and looking at the golf swing in terms of results I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important aspect of the golf swing is what happens at impact. And there are 5 main things that concern us golfers at impact which are…
1. Hitting the ball first.
2. Striking the ball on a path that will send the ball straight where we want.
3. Striking the ball out of the center of the clubface.
4. Contacting the ball consistently with a slightly open or slightly closed clubface.
5. Contacting the golf ball with the clubhead moving as fast as possible.
Now IMPACT may not seem like much of a perfect golf swing revelation to you, but to me it was HUGE and let me explain why because it’s very important…
When I was trying to play on tour as a teenager I was obsessed with swing positions but I never focused on those 5 things above. I mistakenly thought that if I had perfect swing positions then the result at impact would be perfect. Sadly the reality is that you can have a great looking swing that hit’s the ball consistently badly. But conversely like that video above showed, you can have a terrible looking swing and hit the ball consistently great.
The only way that can happen is because at impact the great golfers all consistently achieve those 5 impact conditions above.
So now I firmly believe that if we want to improve our ball striking in the shortest amount of time we should systematically work on improving the 5 critical impact elements above. If we improve those 5 impact elements over what we are doing currently then improved ball striking has to be the result.
This may be a different take on the perfect golf swing than you were expecting so I’d be interested to hear your comments. Just post your thoughts below on the 80-20 perect golf swing.
Tags: perfect golf swing
After my last blog post a number of people wanted more information about an 80-20 pre-shot routine. And one of the best way’s of teaching is by example. So here is a video of my 80-20 pre-shot routine. After you watch the video I have a couple of important things to mention…
Did you notice how simple that is? But there are some very subtle things I’m doing when setting up that will mean I’m more consistent than most other golfers. And those things all relate to the following three things:
- Grip
- Alignment
- Ball Position
Posture is not on that list because the posture you have at setup is more a result of the habits you’ve setup in the past. But I’m doing very specific things with my grip, alignment and ball position to help me hit the ball consistently. Can you guess what they are? Put your comments below and I’ll see how on to it you are.
Tags: 80-20, pre-shot routine