The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth
A Review of Jim Hardy’s The Plane Truth for Golfers
January 13, 2010
One of the many funny things about golfers is that we tend to bring religious conviction to our swing techniques. “Thou shalt keep thine head down!” and a million other commandments come down from the mountaintops of golf wisdom. We talk about swinging the club “the right way” or “correctly”, we seek the “secret move” like the Holy Grail itself, and I have found that it is a rare golf conversation that does not include the word “perfect” somewhere along the way.
True to form for us messianic mashers of golf balls, the titles of the three golf books I have recently read each include one of the following words: perfect, truth, and laws. These are great words when we are dealing with commandments and our eternal souls, but are they really appropriate when working on a reverse spine angle in this silly game we play?
Creating a Swing With Tour-Like Beauty
June 26, 2005
Golfers often wonder how and why professional’s swings look so effortless. They wonder why their own swings look and feel so different. Instead of the fluid, quiet power of Ernie Els or Fred Couples, most amateurs have a swing that amounts to a patchwork of moving parts, compensations, and tension. So what makes the tour players’ swings so different? Read more
The Inside Scoop
About Golf Swings and Causal Relationships
February 10, 2005
Golf, like life, has a lot to do with causal relationships. Say what? Causal relationships; like when you tell your boss that you are late to work because your alarm did not go off. Of course, the direct cause for being late was that you overslept. Oversleeping was caused by the alarm failing to go off (and because you stayed up too late watching the golf channel). The alarm did not work because you forgot to pay the electric bill, which caused the electric company to cut off power to your house. So, in a roundabout way, you were late for work because you forgot to pay the electric bill. Causal relationships. Read more
Are Your Golf Clubs Too Long?
Even if You Seek Distance it Might Be True
June 16, 2009
There is a good chance that your golf clubs are too long. Over the past twenty years, golf club manufacturers have been making clubs stronger (meaning they have less loft on the face), and longer so that they can sell hopeful golfers the newest “hot” weapon that will knock the ball unimaginable distances. But when golfers arrive at the driving range with long clubs, what I see is a lot of people with poor posture, inefficient shaft angles, awkward or mismatched swing planes, off-center contact with the ball, unhelpful trajectory, little accuracy, and none of the distance the long clubs were supposed to provide. Read more
Out of Posture
How to Avoid the Punch & Jump Combination
February 22, 2009
Many golfers suffer from the tendency to “peek”, “look up early”, “pick up the head”, or to “come out” of their shot, meaning their posture changes before they make contact with the ball. Most of the time this tendency results in a frustrating, “thin”, worm-burner of a golf shot when the club hits high on the ball—but confusingly, sometimes the shot is “fat” (hitting the ground before the ball) even though the body has practically gone airborne before impact. Read more
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