Category: The Set-Up

T.E.M.P.O.

Hi everyone and welcome to the 2013 golf season!  I hope you had a great off-season.  I am very excited about the upcoming year and look forward to helping you with your game.

Spring is a great time to assess your game and set some goals for your year.  To help you assess your game, and all of the parts of your game, I want to introduce you to my T.E.M.P.O. system.  I use this system to break the game into categories to help ensure my students cover all of their bases when trying to improve.

T.E.M.P.O. System

T – Technical Skills
        - Golf skills that include ball striking, short game, putting

E – Equipment
        - Ensuring your equipment and golf ball is optimized to your game and well  
          maintained for performance.

M – Mental Game and Course Management
        - The ability to make good strategy decisions and perform up to your physical
           abilities at all times, regardless of the situation.

P – Physical Fitness and Nutrition
        - Being flexible in key areas like hips and mid-back and being stable in other
           areas like your core to enable a repeatable and efficient swing while avoiding
           injury.

O – Organized Approach
        - Assessing performance, setting goals, making a plan, executing the plan and
           then repeating the whole process.

In each category, there are several skills that ca be addressed.  A great starting point to any improvement program would be to assess your abilities in each of these categories.  I have a checklist on my web site you can download for free and a new e-book that will guide your improvement using my T.E.M.P.O. system.

Most golfers don’t see the improvement they deserve because they spend too much time on only one part of their game or the wrong areas of their game.  Taking a look at your entire game and having a sound idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are will allow you to allocate lesson and practice time so your time will be efficiently spent.

Work with your coach to assess your game, prioritize areas of need and then get guidance on how to raise your skill level in those areas.

Good luck with the start of your season and I’ll see you next month as I start to explore some of the key parts of T.E.M.P.O.

Since you are reading this post, it is probably safe to assume you are either a golfer who would like to improve or a serious insomniac.  I will do my best to educate you on how to make significant improvements to your golf game over the coming cooler months. If you happen to doze off, I will add curing insomnia to my resume!

I think the biggest challenge golfers face when trying to improve is that making lasting improvements takes time and repetition of the desired motion.  When golfers try to make these changes during golf season, they are usually faced with heading out to play golf and having to decide whether to play poor golf while sticking with a new swing thought or reverting back to their “old swing”.  I feel your pain, it is very difficult to soldier on with a new swing move when faced with poor shots, possibly poorer than before.

This is why fall and winter is the ideal time to make swing improvements.  The fact the weather is cool and wet and you are less likely to be playing golf or less concerned with your score, means you are far more likely to stick with your swing changes.

How do we make a swing change?  The steps are quite simple to understand but there is a key element of practice reps.

Step 1 – The golfer is often unaware of what they should change about their technique (unconsciously incompetent)

Step 2 – The golfer is educated on what they need to change (consciously incompetent)

Step 3 – The golfers is educated on the more desirable technique and how to actually do it  (consciously competent)

Step 4 – Practice the desired motion while consciously controlling the motion.  This is the biggest challenge because if you are out playing golf, you will most likely be consciously thinking about where the ball is going. When you think about anything besides the desired swing motion, you instantly lose the ability to make the desired motion because at this point, it is only a “conscious skill” and not a habit yet.

Step 5 – After lots of repetition, the motion becomes a habit (unconsciously competent) and the golfer no longer needs to think about the swing to make it happen correctly. The golfer can then play golf thinking exclusively about the shot they want to hit and not their swings.

So, how do we make a swing change?  Ideally, we spend ample time making the proper motion and not worrying about where the ball is going.  The only time this will make sense is during the fall and winter.

The Problem – Top Hand Placement on the Grip 

Our topic today is probably the most common problem I see; the incorrect placement of the top hand on the golf club.  Almost everyone who starts the game begins by holding the golf club too much in the palm of his or her top-hand (the left hand for right-handed golfers).  This grip fault is often referred to as a “weak grip”. In most cases the club feels more secure in this position (see photos 1 and 2) but it is actually less stable and also leads to many other problems.  The correct hand placement will put the handle of the club more into the fingers of the top hand and will position the heel pad on top of the handle rather than along side. 

Grip Left Hand Too Weak

Grip Right Hand too Weak

The Potential Effects

Placing the club too far into the palm can result in several less than desirable outcomes.  First, because the club is resting in the palm, you will need to squeeze the club quite tightly to maintain control, creating tension in the forearms. This tension can inhibit the wrists from hinging correctly during the swing and cause a loss of power and control.  This lack of wrist hinge can also result in the golfer hinging their elbow in an attempt to finish their back swing (NOT GOOD)!  The incorrect hand placement causes the wrist joint of the top hand to be positioned to the side of the handle rather than the correct positioning over top of the handle.  This inhibits the wrist’s ability to hinge correctly as opposed to the more desirable wrist action and also leads to a breakdown of the arm and/or miss-alignment of the clubface. There are several other potential problems associated with a poor top-hand grip but I won’t bore you with the nasty details!

The Fix

The cure for this very common ailment is to place the club more into the fingers of the top hand.  By doing so, the club will fit under the heel pad and will also allow the wrist to position itself correctly; directly over top of the handle of the club (see photos below).  This will allow you to control the golf club without needing a “Death Grip”, allow the wrist to hinge correctly and will promote a square clubface at impact (REALLY GOOD).  The easiest way to check how you have placed your hands on the club is to lift the club to vertical by simply hinging your wrists.  This should be quite easy and you should not feel any need to bend your elbows.

Good Top Hand Grip for Righty

Good Top Hand Grip for a Lefty

Let me know if this article is helpful and if you would like to see a specific topic in future posts.  Good luck with your golf!

“Practice with a WORK STATION”

If you go to a professional golf tournament and spend a little time watching the players practice, you will notice 95% of them practice with alignment aids on the ground.  They do this for a very good reason.  The best players in the world understand how important it is to line up correctly every time.  To improve or maintain your golf swing, you must align towards the target correctly every single time you hit a practice ball.

If you practice a lot and you don’t use an aid or “work station” as I call it, to constantly reinforce proper alignment, it is very easy to gradually work into incorrect alignment.  If your alignment is even slightly off and you make your best swing, the ball will not go at the target.  You will then begin making compensations during your swing to get the ball flying towards the target.  These compensations are not very reliable and you will then start getting inconsistent results.  All of this could have been avoided if you had simply practiced with clubs on the ground showing you correct alignment.  Correct alignment will promote a swing working naturally towards the target.  Poor alignment will promote the need for compensations.

Golf Practice Station

Here is another important note about your alignment.  If you practice with a “work station” on the range and you are always correctly aligned, your eyes will learn to recognize what correct aim looks like.  If you do make a careless mistake on the course, your eyes will recognize your alignment mistake and you can re-align before you swinging.  Training your eyes to see straight can save you a lot of shots.  There is nothing worse than making a really good swing and watching the ball fly into the trees because you lined-up incorrectly!

Check the “Easy Stuff” First

This idea of constantly checking your alignment goes hand in hand with one of my strongest teaching beliefs.  If you begin hitting golf shots which are not up to your normal level, check the easy stuff first.  What I mean is, don’t start ripping apart your swing to find the problem, check your pre-shot fundamentals first.  Specifically, check your grip, posture, ball position, alignment, balance, etc. first.  Too many people assume it is their golf swing that is to blame for poor shots and cause themselves a lot of grief which would have been avoided had they “checked the easy stuff first”.

Let us know if this tip is helpful.  Good Luck!