How To Play Golf Properly

• To aim accurately, sole the clubhead behind the ball and point the face at your target, then set your stance perpendicular to the face.• With a driver, play the ball just inside your front foot. That, combined with a slight tilting of your upper body away from the target, will promote a high launch.• Stay loose by keeping your arms and legs in motion as you stand over the ball. Good drives come when you maximize your freedom of motion.

A good start to the swing is essential. Get it wrong, and everything can go south (apart from the numbers on the scorecard):• Start your hands, arms and shoulders back together for maximum efficiency; don't let your hands take over the swing.• When the club reaches parallel to the ground, the clubhead should be in line with or just outside your hands. This means the swing is on plane, setting up solid contact and good direction.• Turn your shoulders on the downward angle they were at setup rather than level to the ground. The latter would make your swing too flat and inside.

The better the backswing, the simpler the move back to the ball. Here's how to get there:• Stay in your address angles. If you lift out of your posture, you have to drop down the same amount before impact, or else risk making poor contact.• Keeping the right leg flexed as weight is shifting onto it ensures that the body is coiling and storing energy.• If your club reaches parallel to the ground at the top, it should point about at your target. That means your swing has stayed on plane, and you won't have to make any downswing compensations.

Tips For Tall Golfers

The return to the ball takes only milliseconds, so make it count:• A good indicator of power is when the lower-body turn is leading the upper-body turn. If they unwind together, you leave yards on the table.• Keep your right elbow close to your body as the club moves down to make sure the club stays on an inside path to the ball.• When you maintain the angle between your left arm and the shaft as you swing down, you have what's called clubhead lag. The more you lag it, the more acceleration you'll have at the bottom of the swing.

The moment of truth! Here's what to focus on:• Good compression of the ball comes from a good weight transfer. Feel as if you've shifted all of your weight from your back foot to your front by impact.• The clubface should be rotating closed as your right arm extends and starts to roll over the left.• Swinging the club out to the ball from the inside will promote an easy, repeatable draw.

Want to look good for the cameras? Try these tips:• After impact, your arms should be fully extended toward the target. That's a sign that you've expended all of the energy you created in the backswing.• Your weight should be firmly planted onto a stable front leg.• Body rotation shouldn't stop at impact. Your torso should continue turning left even as the ball flies down the fairway.

Warm Up Properly Before You Play Golf With Andy Driscoll

No need for anything fancy here. Keep the motion compact and simple:• Set up with more of your weight on your front side, with the ball off your back foot. That'll help you hit down or solid contact.• Keep your wrists firm and your hands ahead of the clubhead. Less hand action will make it harder to thin or chunk the shot.• A good way to avoid decelerating is to keep your upper body turning through the shot. Your chest should face the target at the finish.

Bunkers are intimidating, until you learn how easy this shot can be:• The sand is unstable, so build a solid foundation. Take a wide stance, and really dig in your feet.• You're not actually hitting the ball on bunker shots--you're hitting the sand just behind the ball--so you need to make a big swing back and through.To hit high, soft bunker shots, the clubface has to slide under the ball. To make this happen and avoid digging too deep, sling the clubhead past your hands through impact.

Putting with feel won't happen unless you feel good. Here's how:• Set up with your eyes over the ball and your hands hanging directly under your shoulders. This relieves tension and promotes a repeatable stroke.• The putterhead should move pretty much straight-back and straight-through, beginning to move on a slight circular arc only as the stroke gets longer.• To avoid any decelerating or over-accelerating during the stroke, focus on swinging the putter at a steady pace and about the same amount on each side of the ball.There has never been a better time to learn golf, and if you’ve come this far, it’s probably because you’ve figured that out on your own. By its nature, golf is uniquely suited for a social-distancing world—it’s a game played over a vast outdoor space, a worthwhile source of exercise, a diversion for the mind. To truly appreciate golf, however, you need to get past all the intimidating elements that might have kept you away until now. It’s a hard game, for starters, and it brings with it an assortment of equipment and customs that might overwhelm anyone coming in cold.

Golf For Beginners: So You Want To Play Golf

Every golfer has been a bad golfer at some point—many of us still are!—and you’d be surprised how much of everything you can pick up as you go. Our purpose here is to give you the basics—not only how to hit a golf ball, but what you need to hit the ball with, and anything else necessary to start your golf journey on the right foot (speaking of which, you don’t need golf shoes right away). There’s a reason Golf Digest has been around for 70 years, and it’s because there’s no shortage of topics to cover when it comes to the greatest game there is. But best to keep it simple with some basics here first. When you’re ready for more, we’re here.

The Hall of Fame golfer-turned-commentator Johnny Miller once described teaching his kids how to play golf as starting out by letting them whack balls into a pond because it was fun to see the splash. Notably, there was no talk about how to hold a club, how to swing it, or anything else technical.

Does that mean you don't ever need lessons to get better? No, a good coach will certainly help you improve. Eventually. But Golf Digest Best Young Teacher Will Robins is firmly in the Miller camp, embracing the dynamics of the game first and fine-tuning later. That means going to a practice range, Par-3 course or even an open field with a sack of plastic whiffle balls and getting the feel for making the club move around you before diving into deep swing theory.

How To Increase Your Club Head Swing Speed

“When you move from the phase where you're just trying to whack it to where you actually start thinking about mechanics, you stiffen up—and you probably have trouble even making contact, ” Robins says.

Instead, stay connected to the feeling of swinging the club with some speed, not hitting “at” a ball. “You don’t need a swing thought beyond: ‘Get to a balanced finish and hold it for three seconds.’ ”

You can try Robins’ video series, which helps get you off the couch and onto the course with fewer swing thoughts and more solid shots.

Perfect Golf Posture: 3 Easy Steps

There are a blizzard of golf tips out there—trust us, we’ve seen them all!—which makes picking one that’s perfect for you a tricky task.

A good place to start? You can think about a good swing motion as a composite of what lots of good players do. The closer you can get yourself to some of those benchmarks—without necessarily being obsessed with copying any particular player’s swing—the more solid you’ll hit the ball. Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher Nick Clearwater is the director of instruction for GolfTEC and has swing data on more than 50, 000 players at all handicap levels.

Two prime examples keeping you away from hitting a solid shot that doesn’t curve dramatically to the right? How you turn your shoulders back, and how you turn your hips through.

What Typically Causes A Golfer To Hit Behind The Ball?

“For a lot of new players, the tendency is to turn the shoulders back level, as if you were turning to look behind you to talk to someone, ” Clearwater says. “But tour players tilt their shoulders—so that the one closest to the target is lower—in addition to turning them.”

You can also make solid contact much more likely with a quick tip for your hips. “Beginners tend to stall hip rotation—the amount the hips are turning toward the target—on the downswing and try to control the swing with their hands and arms, ” Clearwater says. “Tour players have their hips turned toward the target at impact almost twice as much.”

In broadest terms, your clubs themselves will help tell you when it's best to use them. Each club is designed for a particular job—namely, to send the ball a particular distance at a particular trajectory.

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