How to Improve Your Game of Golf
Article by Robert Cummings
There are numerous ways of improving your game of golf but first of all you need to know your weak points, enabling you to concentrate on improving them. However, as a beginner, this is not always so straightforward.
This is because you cannot actually see yourself when you strike the ball and it goes off in the opposite direction to where you intended it to go. This is where having a professional trainer or an experienced partner with you can help you immensely as they can observe your body movements and point out just where you are going wrong. But if you are not lucky enough to be accompanied, don’t despair, just simply take a video camera long with you and film yourself taking the shots you feel you need to improve on.
This is a great way of learning just what you need to do to put things right because you can play the video back as many times as you need to study your stance and the angle and speed at which you hit the ball.
If you have access to the Internet, why not do a search on golf techniques. You will discover many sites offering free training videos with professional players showing you how to do it the proper way.
So now you know how you should be doing it, take another look at your personal video, taking things a little at a time you will spot just where you are going wrong. It may be something as simple as the fact that you are not gripping your club correctly or misalignments in your stance at the end of your swing shot.
Now all you have to do is put this newly discovered information about how you should be playing the game into practice. Using your video camera again, act out the process of the good techniques you have just seen and record yourself again. I can hear you asking the question “WHY?” There is a good reason why this procedure should be followed and this is because things do not always feel the way they look.
Each and every one of us has physical limitations based on conditioning which is the reason why we practice. Our bodies have to be taught how to perform in the correct manner by putting our muscles through training and stretching exercises.
An example of this would be if your shoulders are tight. It may feel that you are drawing the club back to the height it should be when in fact it could be quite a bit lower than it needs to be for you to make your shot correctly.This is the main reason why recording yourself works well. You need to link up the visual and the kinesthetic forms. Once this is clearly in your mind you will no longer need the video recordings to help you.
Use a clear approach to connect the whole process to programming methods by describing the shot to yourself in a positive way.
Something along the lines of saying to yourself “draw back the club by twelve inches, imagine a line from the ball to the hole and swing with medium force in a fluid motion” works so much better than simply saying “don’t forget this time to aim and hit the ball a little less hard”.
Your subconscious mind does not comprehend negative commands. In fact, it works in the opposite way, so when you say “don’t forget this time to aim” it translates as “forget to aim” and this is exactly what you do.
Last but not least, we should mention pacing. Would you say it is better to work on one shot at a time or many shots simultaneously? In my opinion, if you are not yet advanced in your amateur game, it may prove more beneficial to work on multiple shots, thus improving your overall technique. It is advisable to get your posture and grip right from early on and then you can perfect the finer points of your game such as individual shots.
About the Author
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