Great Tips To Improve Your Golf: Section 1F - The Downswing

The most important and critical area of golf is the first movement of the downswing.

With it we uncover the most common and at the same time most devastating flaws.

The golf swing itself is probably the most difficult and certainly the most elusive action in all athletics.

Beyond question it is the most frustrating, and nowhere more so than at this very point, where the club and the body make their first moves down toward the ball.

The peak of frustration is reached here because, no matter what has gone before it, this one move can make a greater difference in the result of the swing and the shot than any other.

We can have a perfect grip, start back from the ball properly, reach the top in faultless position and then ruin it all by the next move we make.

Not only can the swing be ruined by this move, it is ruined about 95 per cent of the time.

Here are some fatal flaws to avoid:

The deadly moves, the most fatal flaws, are these:

1. Spinning the hips without moving the weight laterally,
2. With this spinning motion turning the right shoulder high toward the ball,
3. Trying to move the club head or slowing down the hands.

These moves bring quick disaster by causing two things.

They make us hit too soon and they make us hit from the outside in. The first robs us of distance, the second of direction and what else do we want from a full shot?

Because we hit too soon, the drive that might have gone 220 yards goes only 190, and into that trap that juts out into the fairway.

Because we hit from the outside instead of from the inside, the ball is pulled, and, if the face of the club is not square, it will be hooked or sliced, or perhaps smothered or even shanked.

The best we can hope for is that we will slice it only a little and that, after starting to the left, it will curve back into the fairway. Even if we are that lucky, we will know we have hit a weak and sloppy shot.

These are the actions and these are the shots that we see on every private course in the country, every public course,

It can truthfully be said that this is the natural way to hit a golf ball with the Sunday duffer spin.

It is also the principal reason that the scores of our millions of players remain so high. These actions in this one area of the swing produce bad shots in such astronomical volume that the short game, no matter how good it is, can't take up more than a little of the slack.

We will say without fear of contradiction that a player who makes these moves and still gets around in 86 on a good day would cut ten strokes from his score if he made the right moves.

So what are the right moves, the best moves? They are, simply:

1. Move the hips laterally to the left while
2. keeping the head back and
3. making no effort whatever To move the club.

We cannot emphasize too strongly that the movement of the hips must be lateral and not a turning motion. When the hips are moved laterally to the left from the top of the swing, they carry the weight (which has been mostly on the right leg) along. They move it toward the approximately equal distribution, at least, which we must have at impact.

That is the first reason we must move the hips laterally. The second reason is that, since we are twisted and wound up tightly at the top, any turning movement of our hips turns our shoulders too.

It turns our right shoulder around high and toward the ball. Hence, when we bring the club down, we have to bring it from the outside in.

The hips will turn if they are moved laterally, but they are very liable not to move laterally if they are merely turned. You can prove this to yourself by standing up and moving your hips to the left as far as they will go.

As they near the limit of extension, they will turn and you cannot stop them. At the top of the swing, of course, the hips are turned somewhat to the right, maybe 45 degrees, and as you move them laterally they will quickly begin to turn back to the left. The trick is get them going to the left, laterally, before they turn too much.

If you ask how much is too much, you become hopelessly involved. You might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You don't have to worry about that. Just be sure you get, the hips going laterally and that you don't try to turn them.

A third reason for the lateral slide of the hips is that this is the movement which starts the club down toward the ball, by causing the shoulders to rock slightly as they turn.

That movement of the hips—and nothing else—provides the first impetus for the downswing.

It might help you to visualize this action if you think of the spine as being the axis of the swing. Now think of the axis as being a T-square, with the shank as the spine and the crosspiece the shoulders. The end of the shank reaches down to the pelvis or hips.

As we address the ball this T-square is, for purposes of the comparison, vertical. On the backswing the hips move slightly to the right, causing the crosspiece to tilt slightly to the left, as it turns, of course, with the turning shoulders. On the downswing (and here is the critical point), the low end of the shank (the hips) is moved sharply to the left.

This causes an immediate and definite tilting of the crosspiece to the right and that is what starts the shoulders, arms, and club moving down toward the ball. This will be true so long as the whole swinging system is twisted tight, so that a movement against the twist in any one part moves all the other parts. Make no mistake about it, the hips are what move the shoulders and club and start the downswing.

Our second injunction was to keep the head back. The head, at this stage, plays a vital role. You have often heard and read that the head is the anchor of the swing. Right here it is. If we keep the head back as we move the hips laterally, it keeps the upper part of our body from going with the hips and thus loosening or relaxing the tension we have been at such pains to build up with the backswing.

This tension that we had at the top of the swing must be kept as long as possible as the swing comes down to the ball. This is one of the chief factors that give power to the swing and speed to the club. If the head comes forward at this point, we lose the tension and get ourselves, in a manner of speaking, "over the ball" as we hit it.

If we keep the head back we do in truth stay back of the ball where we should be. That is what is meant by the advice to "stay back of the ball."

The head, as a matter of fact, has a strange little action of its own during the first movement of the downswing. Contrary to the old principle that the head must be kept still at all costs, it moves.