Play within your own limitations.

One appreciates that a lot of the fun in the game for the club player lies in having a go, but surely the score counts too? If it does, a little more reality about one’s own ability, and a little more assessment of the percentages, can work wonders. This does not presuppose a defensive attitude. By all means attack and have a go when there’s a reasonable chance of success. But, when the thing is obviously impossible, accept your mistake and play to minimize its effect.

Playing the percentages is not something you do only on recovery strokes. Innumerable times club golfers are faced with situations where some strategical thought, allied to common-sense assessment of their own capabilities, must result in an iron from the tee, or a sand-wedge instead of a four-iron from a fairway bunker, or a four-wood instead of a two-wood from the fairway. It might hurt your pride to accept the fact you have limitations, but it will rarely hurt your score.

Try your utmost on every shot.

Easy to say, difficult to do. Yet this is one of the greatest factors in success or failure at golf. How many times have good players lost to poorer players simply because they didn’t give maximum effort?

It is, of course, very easy to try on every shot on the first hole, and probably on the second and third holes, too. But what about the fifteenth and sixteenth holes, especially if things haven’t been going well? There, often, is the acid test.

So, to get the maximum pleasure from your golf, try your hardest on every shot. This doesn’t mean adopting the characteristics of a man contending for the Open, and taking 10 minutes to crawl around inspecting every blade of grass between you and the hole. It means above all concentrating on golf when you’re playing golf, and conditioning yourself to the shot every time as you approach the ball. From there on, it is a question of thinking properly: forgetting the last shot, however it resulted, disregarding those to come, and focusing your attention exclusively on the shot at hand.

Unfortunately, there is no doubt that if you are going to try to play the best golf of which you are capable, it is necessary to devote reasonable time and thought to each stroke, just as it is necessary to complete each hole.

What I am really suggesting is a maximum effort, and in this respect I would advise at least half-a-dozen warm-up shots and some putts before playing. The middle-handicapper is always in a hurry. He rushes to the club, into the locker-room, and out onto the course not having touched a club since the previous weekend. He then rushes into an appalling start, which sets the standard and the tempo for the rest of the round. No wonder his handicap stays high!

Click on Your Golf Attitude Part 1 or Your Golf Attitude Part 2 if you would like to read the rest of this great golf article

What is the backswing for?

How many golfers, I wonder, have ever asked themselves that question? They know all the things they are supposed to do to make a good backswing — “head still,” “shoulders turned 90 degrees, hips turned 45 degrees,” “left arm straight,” “right elbow tucked in,” “transfer the weight,” and so on. But have they ever stopped to ask themselves just what it’s all for: what is the real purpose of the golf backswing?

In case you haven’t, I want now to tell you.

The backswing has two purposes. One, the obvious one, is to provide power through the wind-up, or torque-like action, of the body. Its second purpose — perhaps less evident, nearly as important — is a matter of simple geometry, of two vital angles — swing plane and club direction. Assuming you have a grip that returns the face of the club correctly, golf would be a simple game if you could always get these two angles correct.

Theoretically, of course, the ideal swing plane would be vertical — the ultimate in upright swings — because this would eliminate any divergence of the clubhead from the target line. Unfortunately, such a swing is anatomically impossible. Even if it were possible, it would create problems in another dimension — the angle of the clubhead’s approach to the ball. Too upright a swing produces too sharp an angle of attack of the club on the ball, creating a weak glancing blow — a “choppy” action.

Thus, since we are endeavoring to propel the ball forward, the ideal plane for the clubhead to travel is a happy medium roughly half-way between vertical (totally upright) and horizontal (totally flat). This is the plane on which most of the world’s best golfers swing the club — certainly through impact.

Now, let’s look at plane in terms of your game. The plane on which you swing is established chiefly by your address position. As you stand to the ball comfortably and squarely, neither cramped nor reaching, your left arm and club form a more-or-less continuous straight line. The angle of that line relative to the vertical is the “ideal” plane on which to swing the club up and down with your arms.

What you are aiming to do, in golfing terms, is to shift your right side out of the way in the back-swing and your left side out of the way on the throughswing, so that at the moment of impact the club is being swung freely by your arms with the clubhead moving straight through the ball, along the target line. To do this a golfer of shortish stature will normally have to stand fairly well away from the ball, and will naturally turn his body on a fairly flat plane — at a fairly rotary angle, as do, for example, Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino. A tall golfer, on the other hand, usually needs to stand nearer to the ball, and will naturally tilt his body on a more upright plane — less “round himself” and more “underneath himself” like Jack Nicklaus and George Archer.

The shoulders, of course, must also turn on some kind of plane. Should the shoulder-turn plane match the arm-swing plane? Despite what you may have heard or read, or thought to have seen in good golfers, the answer is no. The shoulders should always turn on a more horizontal — flatter — plane than the plane of the arm-club swing: (a) to allow the club to reach a top-of-the-backswing position from where it can be swung down to the ball; and (b) to give the arms room to do that swinging. Attempting to “marry” the arm-and-club swing plane too closely to the shoulder-turn plane tends to create excess body action, which inhibits the arm swing and thus reduces clubhead speed.

The golfer with an effective short game, the man or woman who can consistently lay those little pitch and chip shots close enough to the hole for a single putt, really does have a tremendous advantage. Confidence in one’s short game gives a tremendous edge at all levels of competition.

The sad thing is that so few people command a sound short game when, whatever their standard with the long shots, it is well within their reach. Here is the area of the game where the fellow who booms the ball 300 yards off the tee is pulled back to equal terms with the chap who can never manage more than 170 yards. This is the department of golf that calls for nothing more than good mental imagery and “touch”.

The techniques for pitching and chipping are simple, but first let’s see the imagery factor. You should never play a short shot until you have a clear mental picture of how you want the ball to behave. This really is the secret of a strong short game. Until you decide how far and high the ball should fly, where it should land and how much it should roll, you cannot select the right club for the job. And what prevents so many people from developing a good short game is their illogical use of the same favorite club for every shot. There is no way that one club will get the ball close to the hole in every situation when you miss a green.

By using the wrong club for the particular shot at hand, you introduce a needless variable. If you choose a club with too much loft for a little chip from the fringe, in some way you will have to de-loft it during the stroke. Conversely, if you choose a too-straight-faced club, there will be a tendency to scoop at the ball to get it into the air. Selection of the correct club will allow you to play the same, simple stroke under all circumstances, with the club’s loft automatically governing flight and roll.

Watch the extreme care with which the pros think out and plan these little shots in tournaments and you will get an idea of how important it is to “picture” the shot, then select the club that will match the picture.

Golf injury prevention means focusing on conditioning for golf,
good golf swing mechanics, and the right golf equipment choice.

Mentioning the words golf injury may bring to mind a picture of
someone getting hit in the head with a golf ball. Not surprisingly
there have been studies of just this sort of golf injury that utilize
crash dummies with specialized load cells
to determine the extent of an injury from a flying golf ball, however,
these studies do not address the real risk to golfers. The fact is that
the chances that a golfer will be struck by a ball or club are so small
that golf injuries do not make any of the published lists of sports
accidents because they are simply not life threatening.

Rather than suffering dramatic head injuries, the reality is that
most common golf injuries occur to the soft tissues: muscles,
ligaments, and tendons, and joints of the upper body: the back, elbow,
wrist and shoulder. The top reasons for golf injuries include:

Read more at engineering-views.com

When You Consistently Miss Your Putts

You are on the green, there is a great opportunity to finish the hole in perfectly by sinking that first putt. For newcomers, however, your dreaming, unless the ball is sitting within a few feet of the hole. Some of the pros, like Tiger Woods, sink an occasional long putt to the enjoyment of onlooking crowds.
One of the secrets to a good putt and getting the ball in the hole is keeping your eyes over top of the ball. If you don’t focus on your target, you risk the chance of sending the ball to the left or right of the hole. One simpe test to make sure your eyes are over your ball, is to assume your putting stance, then take a second ball and drop it from your eyes down to the ball in front of you. It should land squarely on your putting ball at your feet.

For more secrets of golf be sure to read our secret guide to winning the game of golf