Golf Technique

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With golf technique and swing instructions, Swail has tried to get inside your head and shake things up. After all, how you think you’re supposed to hit the ball probably is going to influence how you try to hit it. So, Swail has taken “swing”, “back” , “forth” , “grip” and “club” to task pretty severely, but with reason. “Clubs” are for cavemen, whomping prey senseless. “Whips” are for golfers, trying to flick a whiphead through the ball--so quickly it’s invisible. You “grip” rocks when you climb a mountain. Tense forearm and hand muscles cannot flick the whiphead through the ball. 

‘Back’ and ‘forth’ are apparent movements in the motion a body makes as it hits a golf ball. The overwhelming emphasis they get is overwhelmingly misleading. To keep from messing up the way you think, build your concept of how to hit a golf ball primarily on around and behind movements led by the torso. “Swing” is a good description of what you ‘see’ as the arms and golf club go through their motions. But you can’t let that ‘seeing’ cause you to ‘believe’ that the legs and torso make a similar rhythmical move. 

‘Swing’ is grossly misleading if used as an instructional descriptor of the motion, or the feeling of the motion, of the all-important legs and torso. ‘Flail’ not only is a good descriptor for the motion of the whiphead during the ‘downswing’, but its implication of wildness also is appropriate to the quickness of the psoas contraction and the resulting zippy speed of the hip rotation.

Golf Swing Instructions

Golf swing instructions defined by Webster on ‘rhythm’: “Movement marked by regular alternation”. The snap of the hips which results in a “wrench” of the torso is not a part of any pattern of ‘regular alternation’. Students, encouraged to ‘swing rhythmically’, will not lead snappily with their lower torsos and are doomed never to improve. ‘Swing’ is what it looks like, but it’s not how you do it. 

Entrenched as ‘swing’ is, its influence on the thought processes of students is insidious, if not diabolical! Take a moment to assess what a box your thinking has been trapped within by the word ‘swing’ and all the ease, grace and rhythm it connotes. Remember Jack Nicklaus saying that the legs and body are the engine of the ‘swing’. What they’re doing is hardly easy, graceful or rhythmical. Indeed, if you were focusing solely on the moves of the legs and torso and trying to find words to describe these moves, ‘swing’ probably would never enter your mind. 

What are we going to do about the universal use of ‘swing’ to describe the motion a body makes as it hits a golf ball? If we keep calling it a ‘swing’, golfers are going to think they’re supposed to swing. But we’ve learned their primary move is supposed to be a stretch and snap. Neither ‘Lift ‘n coil’ nor ‘Flail’ is a good replacement since each describes only a portion of the motion. 

In order to try to come up with something new and improved and catchy, I’ve coined ‘Swail’ by deftly copulating swing and flail--something old, something new. Ever so humbly, Swail is offered as an improvement on, and replacement for, the word swing.