I'm at the golf driving range
at Bali National Golf Club. And we've had a lot of requests for me to share advice on how to swing
a golf club for senior golfers. I don't know who a senior golfer
is, but it might be someone like me. I'm 55 years of age. And I'm
a bit gray here, but fit, but you may not be fit.
You may not move very well. Maybe got some limitations
in some of the ways you move. And I've worked with many
people in golf like that, that can't move anything like the players
they watch on TV when they're watching all these elite athletes
swinging their golf club. And there's all of this talk about
how to gain more distance and so on. It can be quite frustrating because, what should you do when you're swinging
a golf club if you want to increase distance and increase
enjoyment in the game? So what I'd like to do is share
some ideas for you around that.
And I think the most important
thing to understand is this: Let's forget for a moment about the
athletic body motion, or the body swing, where you see a lot of instruction
today particularly from a lot of young instructors about dynamically moving the body and using the
ground and all of these wonderful suggestions. But you know,
at the end of the day, the bottom line is you don't hit
the golf ball with your body. You hit the golf ball with a golf
club. This is the instrument here. So what you really want to be good at
is using this better. So what do I mean? There are two things we would
want to do when we swing the golf club back to the side of us, it would be helpful for you to
have this golf club positioned somewhere between vertical and
somewhere between horizontal, and it can be anywhere in there.
But what you think about it, if you had a laser stuck out of
the end of the golf club here, and we've got a golf
ball on the ground here, and if I was to put another ball
say, behind that one over here, and then one in front say here, so really simple way to do this so I can
swing the golf club back to the side of it.
And you may not be able to
swing any further back than that. And this is just fine. You don't
have to swing further back than that. Maybe you can lift a little
higher, but let's say I'm here. What you can see the handle here is
pointing somewhere towards that ball. Now it doesn't have to
be directly on the ball, but what we're not looking for
a golf club that gets too high, pointing too much over
here or too much this way.
Now some of you might be saying,
yeah, but Jack Nicholas was this way. Going back there again, we're
talking about elite athletes, elite human beings that do exceptional
things. we want to keep it simple. If we can keep this golf club pointing
down along this line or close to it, it's just simpler for us to deliver the
golf club. We don't have to do as much. If the club, however, is tilted up
this way, then when I start down, how could I make that rotation
able to find that place? Because the ball is there. I want to strike that ball there and I
need the golf shaft to be on a similar angle.
So if you look at where it is here, it's kind of on a similar angle when it's
down here. So I've got it to the side. And if I had the golf
club over here, well, now I have to force it to go this way. And this is where a lot of people get
into trouble because they swing the golf club around their body. And the golf club
gets into quite a horizontal position. And then they have to use
excess muscle power with a right side, their right shoulder
and right arm to correct that. And quite often they over-correct. And now the club gets over in front
of these golf balls swinging this way. And this extra effort here
creates slower moving golf club. So keeping it here is really
going to be helpful. Now, the other thing is when it's to the
side, I want a full wrist motion.
If you use an overlapping grip like
this, maybe you can't get that. And maybe if you've got
an interlocking grip, you can't get a fuller wrist angle
as you can see I've got there, which is almost a 90 degree angle.
And the more of that, the better, particularly as you get older, you want more of this because
you're going to get less of this. Maybe you can't turn as well, but you want a lot of wrist angle because
you can use that in your golf swing. It's potential energy
that can be used. So, you want to get your hands on the club
in such a way that you can do that. Now I'm not gripping very tightly.
When I hold this golf club, I'm literally just pulling
the handle up into my hand.
And literally I'm not squeezing tightly. These muscles are really tight
here and through the shoulder, I haven't got that going on. So I can literally hold the golf
club and I can let it go very easy. If I point my fingers to the ground,
the club just drops straight out. So I'm not squeezing the death out of it. If I squeeze it too tightly and all these
muscles in my shoulders start to pull, I'm going to make bad golf swings,
and I'm going to make slow swings. So we don't want to do
that. So number one, let's keep the pressure lightened in
hands and forearms and the shoulders because that's going to make a
tremendous amount of difference.
The other thing that we need
to understand about this, is how to move the golf club from
here to the finish of the swing. Now, you notice I said, finish of the swing.
What I didn't say was to the ball, because the real trick here is you
don't want to be trying to hit that golf ball. What you want to understand is that you're
going to make a swing from this side of your body, to this side of your body, and that ball's going to get in the way.
And if you swing the golf club like that, where you're not purposely
trying to make the club go fast, because you're just swinging
it from one side to the other, and you're letting the club build up
natural amount of energy in the swing. You'll swing it faster
than if you hit the ball. Because if you try to hit the ball, if you go to the side here
and you try to hit the ball, then you're going to create a very early
release of pressure against the club. And you might go quick here, but it's
going to be going slow at the bottom. So you don't want that. Golf clubs swinging to the side
with a really good wrist angle here. And then this is the top of the backswing. And then you want to swing from
here to the top of the finish, wherever that is for you.
Now, some people will be here, some people won't get their body
through, but your arms are folded here.
Now for some, you'll get further
around. You're hearing instructions, so often that the body's got to
finish pointing to the target. Well, you know what? A lot of
people can't do that. You've been sitting in a desk
for 30 years of your life, and you've got limited mobility and you
don't go into the gym and you don't work with an instructor. So understand that the weapon
that you have available to you is using your hands and arms
against the golf club. You can make the club move very
quickly without a lot of body motion.
You can really get it whipping out
long, if you just add wrist hinge here, and then you do this: you stop the golf swing from
this end, not from this end. And I'll tell you what
makes it easier to do that. If you've got a ball on the ground here, and you're thinking I'm going
to hit that ball on the ground, that is when you'll start starting
this end of the golf club, because this is becoming the
goal. That is not the goal. The goal is to swing from here and
finish here. And this gets in the way. If you think about that for a moment, you think now I'm swinging
from here to here, I've got more time and the ball will
just get in the way and get hit. So it looks something like this.
I'm going to swing it back. The golf is going to point
more or less towards that ball.
More or less to that ball
on the follow through, swing it back to the side,
and swing it through. Now, my arms have gone through a little
further cause that's a lot of speed. And so I finished here. That's enough.
I don't need any more finish than that. If I swing the golf club and
I finished it, that's enough. I don't have to get my body all
the way around, if you can, great. But if you can't, it doesn't matter.
This is the key: Work on your arms. So hinging the club to the
side with a full angle here. If you have to modify
your grip to do that, where you just have two hands on
the golf club like this, so be it. It doesn't have to be perfect. It
just got to be able to do that.
Here and then from here,
swing it to the finish, wherever that is for you and
let the ball get in the way and start your swing work from this end
and get this into the handle to move past the golf ball. If you do
that, watch what the club does. It releases itself out. So you're going to go from here and move
this handle around to here and let the club release itself and take it through
there. If you do this in the swing, we'll call it the senior swing for
whatever that means. For us older folk, you are going to make the club
move much faster than normal. You're going to be more in balance. You're not going to be falling out of
balance because you're not trying to hit that ball and body's moving away because
there's an equal opposite force going on.
And if I attempt to hit the ball,
and my body pulls away at the same time. That's why you see so many golfers
fall off the ball. So, work on that, put some time into it, share
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