Video Golf Tip | Practice With Purpose
Now what? You bought the equipment, you rented the balls, they have given you some beautiful space from which you can practice, you have a pocket full of tees and you arrive out here with an hour and plenty of desire. What are you going to do? How are you going to use this time to the best of your golf swing’s advantage. Well first of all, never hit golf balls before warming up. Warming up means stretching, and if you do it here or at home it does not matter, you get your body to start working in an athletic manner. Make some pivots, do some knee bends, do some leg stretches, and then always start out with a sand wedge to loosen yourself up. Never start out with a full swing and never ever start out with a wood club. It is not to your advantage, you are asking to hurt yourself. So with a sand wedge, make some little motions, half swings. Then make those little motions with the ball there, not concerning yourself with how you are doing it. What you are doing is loosening your muscles up so that when you go into the full swing you are ready to go and you won’t hit all those bad shots looking and praying that one good one will show up. You can have good ones from the onset if you start out with a high lofted club and a little tiny swing. Once you have gotten to the point where you are making full swings, establish a practice station. What is a practice station? It could be a shaft on the ground for alignment. It could be using tees when you practice because you are not a very accomplished golfer yet and you don’t get the ball in the air often. Just remember one thing, when you tee it up that is to help you get the ball in the air, because it is already there. But to insure that you are going to hit it well and to hit a very good shot, focus on knocking the tee out of the ground. Not only should the ball fly up and forward, the tee should also fly up and forward. What you are doing is preparing yourself for impact, and the better you get at having a more consistent impact position, the more you are going to enjoy the game of golf. When you are going to the practice tee it is not just for exercise. You are trying to teach your muscles to do something here that you can use out on the golf course. The better you practice here and the more organized you practice session is, the simpler the game of golf will be for you out on the golf course. That is really why we practice, we practice to make our game on the course simpler by understanding what we are trying to accomplish with our swing, with our mind, with our muscles, so that when we go out there we can just forget that stuff and just simply go play golf. Remember, you buy the clubs, you rent the balls, you rent the space. Now it is a matter of how you are going to use that area to enjoy the game of golf much more than you might be enjoying it now simply because you do not know what to do with the time and the space. See what you can accomplish when you do it and you will accomplish a lot more out on the golf course.
John Elliott, Jr.
St. Andrews Golf & Country Club
3N441 Route 59
West Chicago, IL 60185
Tel: 630-231-3160
John Elliott, Jr., is listed as one of Golf Magazine's Top 100 Teachers and Golf Digest's #39 instructor in the world. He is the head professional at the Country Club of Ocala in Ocala, Florida.
