Remembering Your Golf Swing

One reason why the golf swing is so difficult is that many golfers do not have a good idea from one day to the next just exactly how they swing the club. They often rely on the groove they got into last time at the range, but the move they thought was The Difference can't be found the next time out. Now what?

You would have to have daily lessons and daily practice to remember every detail in your golf swing and know just what to do to correct yourself when something goes wrong. The best bet for a recreational golfer is to remember how to perform five critical parts of the swing and just work on performing them the same way every time. If so, what happens in between has to be happening the same way, too.

The five parts of the swing to remember are: the takeaway, the end of the backswing, the start of the downswing, impact, and the finish.

Takeaway defines your club path and the plane of your backswing. The end of the backswing is the furthest limit of your being able to feel that the clubhead is still connected to the ball. The start of the downswing can be led in many ways, but never with your hands. Impact is, of course, impact, but it is a dynamic position, one of moving through, not of arriving at, a spot. The finish is where this all leads to. When the finish is right, likely everything that came before it was, too.

You can practice each one of these positions separately. The task is to memorize what each one feels like, installing the feeling into our subconscious awareness so that the movements in between will automatically seek the next position. When you play, you could take a slow practice swing to rehearse hitting all the right feelings.

Good golf is not played by having a great swing. It's played by making your best swing more often. Learning these five basic positions, given a fundamentally sound grip, stance, posture, and alignment, will take care of that.