Lesson 1: An introduction to the swinging motion

I’ve asked hundreds of golfers that question and not once have I ever had a first time, accurate answer!

If we don’t know what a swing is, how can we produce it?

What most golfers do with a golf club in their hands at best can be described as making an action in line with hitting the ball. This can still be effective, but hitting and swinging are two completely different actions.

Most of us love watching great swingers of a golf club. It looks easy and produces phenomenal results. We fail to appreciate that a true swinging motion is the most effective way to generate and transfer energy to the club and ball and maximise our efficiency. Instead, we use effort or rely on following a technical model that can become stressful, frustrating and sometimes discouraging.

We are not going to get the results we want by forcing ourselves to strike the ball with everything we’ve got, or contorting our body to conform to technical moves we think are correct.

At best, these take continuous attention and effort. I would rather you focus all of that effort and attention on actually producing a correct swing, and that has a very clear and specific definition:

A swing is a free motion, backwards and forwards.

That’s it. Nothing complicated but a simple definition of a physical motion. When applied to golf: a golf swing is a free motion, backwards and forwards, with both ends of the club moving in the same direction, at the same time.

This means that both ends of the club – the top of the handle and the club head – move together backwards and forwards at the same time and at the same rate.

Note there is no down or up in a swing, it’s simply back and forwards. Have you ever been told or believe that you need to hit down on the ball? Or that you should swing upwards with the driver? Both of these, by definition, break the boundaries of a swing.