Golf Video Guide

A free golf swing lesson seems a little too good to be true. But there are actually a variety of websites available that offer free videos to help you improve your swing.  Golfing is a fun sport that people of all ages enjoy. Children as young as three and four years old are playing as well as older adults that are well into their 80′s.

The Clubs

Having the right clubs can lead to a big improvement in your game. If you are playing with a club that is too small or too large, it will be difficult for you to get the correct angle on the ball. So the first step to being a golf sports star is to buy some clubs that fit you. You don’t need to buy a set of PGA professional clubs or even some expensive name brand. Just look for a set of decent quality clubs to get you started.

The Swings

Golfers are constantly struggling on improving their swing. But it is difficult to see what needs improvement while you are swinging the golf club. A good way to take a look at your golf swing plane is to tape your swing and your stance.

You could have a friend tape you making a couple different types of shots. Then later you can go back and watch yourself and your swing. Usually you will be able to clearly see areas that you can improve. You might not be swinging a complete swing or maybe you tend to look up before you have hit the ball. The video camera is a great learning tool for beginning golfers as well as more advanced golfers.

Comparison

After you have watched your golf video, you can watch some free swing videos online. While watching the professional golf swings, you will probably notice even more areas that you would like to improve. Watching the professionals swing their clubs is a great way to see how you should be doing it.

You can write down the areas where you feel you can improve your golf swing. Then work on those noted areas the next couple times that you go golfing. When you feel like you have adjusted to the areas that you wanted to fix, then take the video camera out again.

When you video tape yourself this time, make sure and get all varieties of swings so you can see what your driving, chipping, and putting all look like. You may be surprised the first time you watch the video because you will see plenty of areas that will need improvement.

Don’t let that get you down. Improving your golf game is an ongoing process that requires a lifetime of dedication. You will not be a professional after one afternoon of video watching or even one year of trying to improve your game. Golf is just one of those sports that takes a lot of time to develop your game. So enjoy yourself and play some golf, every time you play you will be working on a better game.

When I watch inexperienced golfers players hit the ball I find that they are usually mis-alinged to their target. Typically, they aim way too far out to the right.  The reason they aim to the right is because the inexperienced player has the tendency to hit the ball with their arms which causes the ball to pull to the left.  This means that they are compensating for a flaw in their swing by just aiming their body out to the right instead of fixing the actual flaw.

What this boils down to, is that the inexperienced players’ bad swings make the ball go on target and their perfect swings make the ball end up in the trees, or bunker on the right of the target.  So, they are seeing their good shots as bad shots and bad shots as good shots.  If this is the case, the inexperienced player will never want to fix their swing flaws.  If they don’t fix their flaws they will never reach their golfing potential.  This is why I call alignment the most important lesson in golf.

Check Your Alignment

In order to find out if you are a player that has swing flaws, you must check your alignment.  To do this, all you have to do is pick out a target and do your normal set up.  Once you feel like you are ready, lay a club down at your heels or toes.  Then, step back about 10 paces behind the ball to see where you are actually aimed.  If the club you placed at your toes or heels is parallel left of your actual target, you have properly aligned yourself.  If the club on the ground points to the right of your target you are mis-aligned.

If you find that you are mis-aligned, you must learn to square up your stance.  To do this, simply find a target in the distance that you want to hit the ball to.   Take out 2 golf clubs that you rarely hit (ie. 3 iron and 4 iron).  Take the first club and lay it down directly at the target (you will have to step back a few paces to check this).  Place the second club parallel to the first club on the ground.  Now, take away the first club that is pointing at the target.  You should have one club on the ground that is parallel to the left of your target.

Once you have the club on the ground parallel to your target line you have a guide to help you align your feet, knees, hips and shoulders squarely.  If you aim your body squarely to the club on the ground and you hit the ball to the left of your target you have just found out that you are pulling the golf ball which means you are trying to hit the ball too hard with only your arms.  If you hit the ball to the right of the target from this square alignment you are sliding your body too much laterally through impact which is causing the ball to fly to the right.

Learning that you are mis-aligned can be quite shocking at first but don’t think of it as a bad thing, think of it as a good thing.  It’s a good thing because you now know that you have a swing flaw and you can get on the road to fixing it so that you can play even better golf in the future.

Until next time,

Paul Wilson

There are many different types of golf swing faults and golf training aids can go a long way in helping any golfer deal with their specific problem area.

The golf swing is the essence of the golf game and therefore it would not be a bad idea to get even two golf training aids that are specific to your swing fault.

The golf training aid that I have found to be very effective is the weighted club. This is a very golf-specific golf training aid as you go through the exact same motions you do with an ordinary club but with more weight. This greatly helps in strengthening and conditioning all the relevant muscles.

The inside approach is another great golf training aid to help improve any golf swing. This particular device is extremely useful for slicers and helps deal with this problem fairly quickly.

Another golf training aid is exercise tubing, which is very affordable and yet very effective. The strength of this device is in its’ ability to break down the golf swing into as many different phases as you would like to focus on for the sake of improvements. It offers specific resistance training for each phase.

A stability ball is a golf training aid than any golfer with a bad back should have. There are almost countless different stretch exercises that you can with it. And what makes this golf training aid even more attractive is the fact that you can do your exercises in the office or at home when you have a moment.

A simple pair of dumbbells can be a golf training aid that is very useful to any golfer. They are usually very portable and there are many exercises that can be done with hand weights.

Use of a golf training aids all boils down to the golfer knowing exactly what they are doing when using it.