Golf Swing Training Aids

By Barry H. Nolan

The most effective training aid for this game is to get into your mind a solid understanding of how you can most efficiently use your body to hit a golf ball.

Lots of golf-instruction terminology is the result of a superficial look at the swing.  The most common view, face on, makes the swing look as if it has a dominant back-and-forth motion.  This has led to ‘back’ and ‘forth’ becoming the dominant directional indicators in instruction.  But the truth is that the dominant motion in the golf swing is rotational.

Camera views from overhead leave this impression indelibly, and accurately.  Back and forth motions are essentially incidental to the overall around motion.

Similarly, the face-on view gives us a good look at the swinging motion of the seven-foot-long rig that is our arms and clubshaft.  However, this rig is just along for the ride.  Its' motion, too, could be described as incidental.  The engine of the golf ‘swing’ is the thighs and torso.  Their motion is covered up by and large by the swinging arms and clubshaft.

The motion of the thighs and torso is anything but swing-like, rhythmical.  These body parts are getting stretched then firing. “Snapping” according to Ben Hogan.  If the engine of the ’swing’ is stretching and snapping, aren’t we doing a disservice to students by emphasizing the gentleness, all-togetherness, rhythm of a swinging motion?

How about “club”?  Cavemen used clubs to whomp prey senseless.  Golf ‘clubs’ have some whippiness to them, and even look a bit delicate with their thin shafts.  The feeling you should have, through the ball, is that you’re flinging the ‘club’head.  Cavemen never felt as if they were flinging their clubs.  They were pounding forcefully.  You never want to feel as if you’re pounding forcefully on a golf ball!!