Swing Tips

Grip

This is a term golfer’s use to explain how the golfer’s hands hold the club. Since, our hands are the only part of our bodies that touch the club, it’s easy to imagine how the grip is one of the most important parts of the golf swing. If you’re right-handed, you want to have you’re left hand at the top of the grip. Your right hand should sit underneath your left with both thumbs running down the middle of the grip. If you were to hold the club up like a sword, all eight finders should be stuck together – if you have a gap between, your hands, you could run into some trouble. For lefties, just switch your hand position, making sure your right hand is at the top of the grip.

There’s a few different types of grips golfers use, but this one (called the ten-finger grip) is a good one to get started with!

Stance

Stance describes how far apart or close together our feet are. As a basic rule of thumb, as the club gets longer your stance should get wider. This is to complement the design of the club and enable you to hit different length of shots. For short shots that fly high, your stance should be slightly narrower than shoulder width. For normal iron shots, your stance should be roughly shoulder width. Finally, when using the longest club in your bag, the driver, your stance should be slightly wider than shoulder width. Also, pay attention if one foot is closer to the ball than the other. Try and have both feet equal distance away from the golf ball.

Swing Shape

An easy way to think of how to swing the golf club is to try and make different letters. Sounds wacky to begin with but imagine your two arms and the club are making different letter shapes. When you take your grip, stance and place the club behind the ball, your arms and the club should make a letter ‘Y’, or at least closely resemble it. When swinging the club away from the target – we call this the backswing – try to make the letter ‘L’. This can be done by keeping your left arm (for righties) – we call this the lead arm – straight and hinging the wrist upwards so the club points to the sky. Try using a mirror to see if you can make the different letters. A good key principle is to try and keep your arms straight – if you begin bending your elbows expect inconsistent shots.