Name: Brian Vincent

Question:  Hello Nick and happy holidays,

I just viewed a video of my swing and saw that I am swinging over the top. I have tried to stop this but can’t seem to. I don’t know how to navigate your site to find help.  Any comments from you will be appreciated. I am on your email list.

Sincerely,

Brian Vincent

Now because so many golfers suffer from this golf problem I thought I’d share my answer to Brian with you…

Brian,

First of all, go here and watch this golf video…

http://consistentgolf.com/blog/stop-swinging-over-the-top-video-part-1/

Then go here for the second part:

http://consistentgolf.com/blog/the-secret-golf-swing-move/

Hope that helps.

-Nick

P.S. Golfers…if you suffer from this over the top problem golf swing problem feel free to ask me any further questions after watching the golf videos.

If you struggle getting off the first tee here’s a couple of tips you can do which will help.

First of all make sure that you hit some warm up shots before teeing off.  After doing this I suggest you take a couple of minutes before your first tee shot to shut your eyes and imagine yourself driving off the first tee successfully.  And when you’re doing this imagine yourself swinging in slow motion.

Why?

Because most golfers natural instinct when teeing off is to hurry.  If you imagine yourself swinging in slow motion you’ll have more chance of swinging nice and smoothly off the first tee.

By doing these couple of things you should notice a lot more success from the first tee.  And now you know what to do, make sure you do it.

If you often feel under pressure on the golf course which makes you tense and try harder then you need to get out of that vicious circle.  Because when golfers “try harder” the worse they score.  So I’m going to give you some simple golf tips you can do to stop the tension cycle.

Now when most golfers get tense they hurry and try to complete their shots as soon as possible.  Although this is a very natural response to tension and stress it’s just going to cause more, because by rushing you’ll play worse and that’s just going to make matters worse.

To avoid this happening you first need to notice when you’re getting tense and uptight and then when you notice this happening you should take a couple of deep breaths and ask yourself why you’re playing golf.  And your answer will hopefully be because you enjoy the game, you enjoy the company, the challenge etc, etc.  So play as if you were enjoying it, even if you’ve played a few bad shots.  Would someone who is enjoying what they’re doing rush it to get it over as fast as possible?

Of course they wouldn’t!

So play golf at a constant leisurely pace, take some deep breaths.  Enjoy the fresh air and enjoy the challenges of each shot.  And hey, it’s not the end of the world if you have a bad round is it?

Another thing which will help you with your tension is to have some nice big practice swings, forgetting about any mechanical thoughts but instead concentrate on your tempo.

And here’s a really good technique to help you do this.  When you start your backswing breathe in through your nose and then when you start your downswing breathe out through your mouth.  Doing this will naturally give you good tempo plus it will focus your mind on the breathing and not the result.

If you do these things you’ll be able to stop the viscous tension cycle and enjoy your game of golf more.

The advice I’m about to give you in this post goes for any golfer who wants to score better but it is very much aimed at golfers that score consistently over 90 for 18 holes of golf.

What you need to work on to score better is the following and this list is from the highest priority to the lowest…

1. Putting
2. Chipping
3. Pitching
4. Bunker Shots
5. Driving
6. Irons
7. Fairway woods

You should work on improving your putting first because if you normally have 38 putts per round and you improve by 5 putts per round you’ve just knocked 5 shots off your score.  This same philosophy applies to chipping and pitching.  The more you can improve those two aspects of your game the better you’ll score.  And finally, you must get really good at bunker shots.

Now when you’re practicing putting you should mainly work on distance control.  So work on longer putts first and save the shorter putts till last.  And don’t practice your putting for too long.  Just get some good feel for distance and then go and practice your chipping and pitching.

And when practicing your chipping you should concentrate on landing the ball where you want and then assessing how far it’s going to roll to the hole.  Then choose the club that will be the most efficient at getting the ball close.  Then when you practice your pitching you should mix up the distances you practice from so that you get a good feel for distance control. But experiment.  Make practice fun.  Play some games.  And this applies to bunker shots as well.

Play some bunker shots out of unusual lies.  For example, play a shot that’s plugged, play another shot where you have to stand out of the bunker but the ball is in the bunker.  Just have some fun.  Even try a “Seve” and get out your 3-iron and try to get the ball out of the bunker with that.  This will force you to use your imagination.

If you just worked on these four areas of your game consistently then your score will drop.  It has to.  Because it’s been scientifically proven that shots inside 100 yards make up about 70% of golf.  So therefore it makes sense to work on that part of the game the most.

Unfortunately most golfers work on their game the reverse of what I’m saying, and I suppose that’s why there is so many “DRIVING RANGES” around!   So remember this 70% practice rule when you next go out to practice and if you spend all of your practice time hitting long shots and you’re not improving, then don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Now I say apparently because I haven’t seen that particular show. I’m just going off what a number of other people are reporting. However, I have since done some more research into this and found this article which outlines a number of different studies that have found basically the same thing.

Now in my experience with using a heavy club/device I have found that you do feel like you’re swinging faster when you immediately go back to a normal golf club, but the swing speeds don’t go up. I’m not sure what’s going on there but that’s my experience. And it seems like the research backs that up.

I don’t think that heavy clubs should be discarded completely though. Because these tests are showing the results immediately after swinging a heavy golf club and then hitting shots with a normal golf club. I haven’t’ seen any research into the long term affects on swing speed/shot distance by using a heavy club.

My gut feeling is that a heavy golf club doesn’t directly help a golfer to hit the golf ball further but indirectly it might. Here’s my thinking on this…

A heavy club does help to improve functional swing flexibility or in other words it helps you to swing longer. Look at John Daly for a great example of this. He started playing golf as a kid swinging his dad’s golf clubs, which obviously were way too long for him. That’s how he got the super long golf swing he has now…even though he’s a fraction overweight.

Swinging heavy clubs will help you to become more flexible when swinging a real golf club as long as you swing fully and completely, finishing your backswing and follow-through with the heavy club. I do think you have to be very careful when doing this to swing within yourself however. Because a heavy club does put a lot more stress on your body as you’re swinging.

So I think you should use a heavy club as part of your flexbility program BUT not part of your speed program. If you’re training to hit the ball further I believe you should swing things that are lighter than your normal golf club. The excepted “best” for this is about 12 % lighter than your normal golf club.

Now in that tpi article that I have linked to above it concludes with this….

“Also using the heavy “donut” attachment that is still popular as a warm-up device is definitely not advised. The donut device has been shown to actually alter the swing motion pattern (Southard and Groomer) and decrease swing speed (DeRenne, 1991).

….but I think that needs to be qualified.

I wouldn’t advise the use of a weighted device immediately before hitting off the 1st tee. But if you’re just warming up on the range before you’re going to hit balls before playing I think a heavy club/device is fine. The thing you must make certain is that you hit practice balls after swinging the heavy club.

I would like to see a study that gets golfers that greatly lack flexiblity to use a heavy golf club for 30 days or more and then see if they hit the ball further. If you know of a study that has done this please post your comment on this blog and let me know. I would imagine that golfers doing that type of program would hit the golf ball further simply because they are swinging longer.

Anyway, I thought I would share this information with you so you don’t get caught in the trap of swinging heavy golf clubs immediately before hitting shots off the 1st tee. Because as I said earlier, you’ll probably feel as though you’re swinging faster straight away but if you check with a swing speed measuring device, you’ll probably find that that you’re not.