Golf Swing Technique

By Barry H. Nolan

“Technique”, according to Webster, is: “....the details of procedure essential to expertness of execution....” Golf-swing instruction tends to get far too detailed.

Placement of body parts (elbow here, head there, knee here, butt there) takes use of muscles.  If a student is forced to focus on placement of several individual body parts, he’s going to use the necessary muscles to accomplish those placements.  Tension is the inevitable result. 

That tension must be eliminated.  Tour pros concentrate on getting as loose as they can above the waist before they start to swing.  Amateurs need to do the same thing.  If you’re being instructed to move a certain above-the-waist body part to a new position, once you do so, relax--utterly. 

Executed by the best, the golf swing is a wild, uncontrolled, whirl.  Most amateurs will have some technique issues with which they’ll have to deal.  But these should not be the primary concern. Rather, focus primarily on getting loose and wild.  Here’s a priceless quote from Jim McLean: “Commit forward with abandon.  To gain control of your shots, you will need to give up control of your swing” .

Ban “control” from your golf vocabulary.  Concentrate instead on stretching big torso muscles as much as you can and then unleashing that stretch into a wild whirl.  This thought is counterintuitive.  How can we ever get a one-square-inch sweet spot back to the ball amid all these wildly moving parts?  Amazingly, the wilder we get, the less in control we are, the more frequently we’ll hit flush shots.

So, yes, get yourself into the right positions.  But never forget that your primary objective is to accelerate the clubhead to great speed in a fraction of a second.  You’ll never be able to do that if you’re tense.