How Swing Myths can ruin your game – Here are the top 3!
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
There are quite a few misunderstandings that I come across in my teaching. Misconceptions involving alignment, posture, and ball position are fairly common. Here, Mark Crossfield talks about his 3 most common misconceptions and how they can confuse golfers if they do not understand what they are trying to accomplish, which is to hit the ball straight!
They say, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” That’s sometimes true in golf, but not if you believe one of these swing myths. Here’s the truth about the top-3 swing myths I hear when I work with golfers.
Charlie King talks Swing Plane and curing the Slice!
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
Charlie King, the instructor of golf at the Reynolds Kingdom of Golf at Reynolds Lake Oconee, is regarded as one of the premier teachers in the PGA. His thoughts on the swing plane and how it relates to correcting the slice are quite revealing. Thanks to Mark Aumann of PGA.com for sharing this!
For most new golfers, the first frustration to overcome is usually how to make consistent contact with the ball. But once that’s accomplished, it usually leads to a second, sometimes life-long frustration.
No matter what they do, every shot slices off to the right. And the harder they try to hit the ball straight, the worse it becomes. Forget shanks, chunks, tops, and three-putts. Slicing the ball is perhaps the most common — and aggravating — malady most amateurs battle as they try to play the game.
The farther left you aim, the more the ball seems to want to wind up going right.
At some point, golfers with nasty slices either quit or eventually find professional help. As PGA Professional Charlie King puts it, “Thank goodness golf is hard, because that’s why I have a job.”
So what causes severe slicing, and why does it seem to affect beginning golfers and those who play infrequently?
King, the instructor of golf at the Reynolds Kingdom of Golf at Reynolds Lake Oconee, said it usually stems from a misconception about the golf swing, and misapplication of logic.
“To hit a ball straight, instinctively it makes sense to go straight back and straight through,” King said. “But golf’s a tilted-over circle which we call a swing plane. So you have to swing on plane and square the face to make a ball go straight.”
If you don’t get back to square at impact, King said, bad things happen. And instead of knowing how to fix their slice, they usually make it worse by trying to overcompensate in the wrong direction.
