Tommy Armour is a legend of the game and a great teacher, one whom the great teacher Harvey Penick named as an influence on his own teaching. Armour's book How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time was THE golf manual before Hogan's Five Lessons became popular.
I've been posting quite a bit about using your hands lately, so I thought I'd add some of Armour's thoughts from his book. These are some various thoughts from his tenth chapter, called (appropriately enough) The Art of Hitting with the Hands. Where Armour mentions the right hand, you lefties can substitute the left hand. He's just talking about using your TRAILING hand.
Whether you or each person else calls the pay-off successful or a swing, I do not care. That's handiest a count number of terminology. The action is that of whipping the clubhead via the ball with the palms. Not slapping it, waving it, flinging it, stiff-arming it, but whipping it with a tigerish lash.
The notable hitters in golf are people who move their arms quicker than the ones whose distance and precision are inferior. That also is the case in sports activities apart from golfing. A fighter accomplishes knockouts with the aid of having his fists pass with devastating velocity. Ruth's home-run record changed into set in the course of seasons whilst the liveliness of the ball various, but due to the fact The Babe's palms moved faster than those of any other batter, he become excellent as a long hitter. When Jimmy Thomson changed into continually the longest driver in golfing, motion pix confirmed his palms transferring at notable pace.
To can help you in on one of the amazing secrets and techniques of accurate golfing, which truely is not a secret in any respect, one golfer gets greater distance because he makes use of his fingers for energy, at the same time as the opposite fellow is trying to get distance by means of using his body.
The long hitter gets his body in position so his palms can paintings maximum efficiently.
What misleads human beings into wondering that swinging and hitting are extraordinary is basically a count number of the participant's temperament. Macdonald Smith and Byron Nelson have been commonly identified as swingers because of the swish look in their moves. Hagen and Sarazen were labelled hitters because their common feature become to wield their clubs with what seemed to be violent and impetuous slashing.
But, all 4 of them ? And every other high-quality participant ? Had the clubhead coming in with all the speed they might command even as preserving constant stability in their our bodies.
Hitting the ball a protracted manner isn't a matter of size or weight of the participant. It relies upon on powerful use of the hands, as opposed to on trying to throw the weight of the frame into the shot or even, inside affordable limits, lengthening the backswing within the belief that a longer backswing will enable one to boost up clubhead pace greater and get the clubhead shifting at maximum pace at contact with the ball.
The extra you may get your fingers ahead of the clubface inside the downswing, the greater energy you can observe with the right hand.
The late uncocking of the wrists, or the not on time hit, as you can hear the impact called, instinctively causes a decided acceleration of right hand movement at the only length.
If you'll pause to consider, you will realize that if your hands are behind the ball at impact, you can only scoop the ball up. But if your hands are in front, you've got to smash the ball with lightning speed. That's a cross-section of what he says, but it gets his main points across. Here are two specific things to note:
- Even lengthening your backswing has limited effect if you don't use your hands. That means flexibility isn't as important as you may have been led to believe.
- If you get your hands ahead of the ball at impact but don't use your hands to get the clubhead to hit the ball at the same time, you won't hit the ball very far.
How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time is an underused instruction book these days. If more people read it and applied it, we'd be a world of better golfers.
0 comments