What Does It Take To Learn a Natural Swing?

Just about anyone can swing a golf club, but before a swing will advance your golf game, it is necessary to (1) become adept at a wide variety of skills, (2) aquire good concentration and (3) exhibit grace in order to have a swing that gets your golf ball to fly the distance with the accuracy needed to reach the target area.

Grace? Is This a Sport or a Dance?

Once you've started the swing with the club head descending toward the golf ball, it should do so with as little force and as much grace as possible. Novice golfers will generally miss this combination of grace and agility, whipping the golf club with as much force as they can, chopping at the downswing more like a medieval warrior than a skilled golfer. The result is a swing that is awkward, is disorganized in its contact with the ball, and shows poor balance between power and precision. Grace comes in balancing skill, speed and force, not in bringing your full muscle power to bear on the tiny little ball.

Attaining The Right Balance

While most sports encourage a balanced approach, no sport demands as much from a player as golf does. In order to be effective players, golfers must have the correct balance between strength and control, especially during critical, high-stress times where it is especially crucial during the swing. Bringing accuracy and power into balance is necessary to be successful.

A balanced physical posture is also essential. A player whose posture is not balanced will shift their weight from one foot to another during the swing, making it very difficult to control how the club head hits the ball. This problem usually causes the club head to meet the ball at an undesirable angle, destroying the shot.

Try this observation the next time you go to the golf course or driving range. Take note of some of the other players' swing. Do they tend to fall sideways after taking their shot? If they do, then they are exhibiting a problem with their control. Ridding yourself of this habit and regaining a balanced swing without weight shifting is accomplished by rotation of your body around an axis. What this means is that your golf swing should not be lateral. It should instead be more rotational. Keeping this in mind will go a long way toward maintaining both control and balance during your swing, and it may even allow you to boost the power of your shot.

Ok. Where Do You Start?

A strong and graceful golf swing is attainable even by novice golfers with a little practice and attaining control over a few variables of the game. For example, keeping a steady pace, remembering to maintain grace and body control, and focus on maintaining balance. However, as a beginner you should not try to fix everything at one time.

What is true for every new challenge is especially true for golf: Do not try to correct every problem at once.

Trying to overcome all your golf swing issues at once will only lead to much frustration and little progress. Pick one thing to improve, work on it until you have mastered it, then pick the next issue to work on. Repeat those steps until your golf swing is as graceful and strong as the pros.

Above all, be patient with yourself and your progress. Retaining focus on each individual issue in turn will allow you to show significant improvement with time.

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- Perry Rightmond