Why You Need This: Today I'll explain "How Practice Swings Could Hurt Your Game"

I know you've seen the top pros doing them before their shots.

They always seem to be focused on one particular move that they want to make sure gets incorporated into their next swing.

But there's one key thing that they all do.

Without it, the practice swings don't really do any good...and could even be detrimental to your game.

You see, we all have our own "swing signature" with a particular tempo, rhythm and sequencing.

This is whether we are taking a full swing or just practicing our swing before our shot.

In today's video, I'm going to show you what the key is that you need to make sure you do during your practice swing.

And I'm going to give you 4 key elements that need to happen on every swing...especially when you're practicing.

And finally, I'm going to make sure you know NOT to do one thing in particular when your practice.

Let's get started....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 6:37

Video Transcription:

All right, we’ve got a controversial topic here today, how practice swings can actually hurt your golf game.

What I mean here is not practice swings are bad, or we should never make a practice swing, but we have to be careful.

We have to do these in a specific if we want to get the results and to make that improve our swing to where we play better on the course.

One of the biggest things is whenever we’re making a practice swing, it has to transfer over to what we’re actually doing in a real golf swing, which means that the tempo, the rhythm, the sequencing has to be correct in our golf swing.

What they found through tons of motor learning research is we all kind of have a tempo signature at what we move the golf club.

For example, I can grab a sand wedge and hit a little pitch shot here, and the overall synchronization of how I hit that pitch shot, that little 50-yard shot, is going to be pretty similar to how I hit a 300-yard drive.

How long it takes me to make my backswing, relative to my downswing is going to be fairly consistent.

You don’t see players that hit pitch shots, and have a super slow backswing, and then come on through, and then on their drives that are 300 yards, they have a fast swing that’s totally different.

We all have our own swing signature, and we kind of take that throughout all of our range of shots. When we’re making practice swings, that’s the first point that I want to hit on.

It has to match up to your tempo and your rhythm. One of the biggest that I’ll use here that I see all the time, is players that are trying to improve their lag.

If you’re working on your lag, what I don’t want to see is a lot of practice swings where I go like this, and I’m kind of completely stopping my body and get this arbitrary angle that I want to see, and I’ll do four or five of these.

I come back and feel like that, never making a follow through swing at all, and then go try to recreate that feeling in my golf swing. It’s really not going to work.

When we’re doing those practice swings, you may need to make a couple of little drills like you’re talking about, but I want to finish that up with a full follow through.

I want to make that, even if I go slower, let’s say I want to go a tenth of the speed, the synchronization of it should be the same.

If I’m going to go a really slow practice swing, working on getting a lot of lag, I might do that something like this where I go slower, but I’m still following through and kind of keeping somewhat of an overall rhythm of what my swing would be.

Here’s the reason why. If we take away all the synchronization and rhythm, and I just do this with my swing, I can get into some crazy positions that were never going to work.

I’ll see players a lot of times keeping their body really closed so they can see their hands and getting this big swing of lag, but if I tried to swing through from here, there’s no way I could do it.

My body just simply would never be able to make a swing like that. So I’m actually training myself to get in bad impact positions with my body, to get way out of whack. I’m training myself to do things that won’t work.

So whenever we’re doing these practice swings, even if I am working on lag, I may get a couple little practice like that, but I always want to swing on through, and I always want to do one which would be kind of my regular tempo, my regular rhythm.

Then once I get the feeling of what I want to try, I’m going to try to do that with a real shot. Now when I hit a real shot, I want to make sure that I have a little bit of time to review what happened.

I want to sit back and say OK, maybe that wasn’t as good as I want it to be, what do I feel like I need to do different here?

Take 5 or 10 seconds, work on a few more practice swings that would maybe adjust whatever I’m working on.

If I’m working on lag again, make a few of these where I feel better, make a regular tempo swing that feels like it could hit a good shot.

When I’m doing those practice swings, I’m visualizing a nice, solid shot that’s going to my target. Then I’m ready to hit another one.

What I don’t want to do, and what the research has shown is terrible for improvement, is to hit one bad shot immediately rake over a ball, and then grab it and want to hit another one.

I have to take a little bit of time to review what I did, come up with a new plan, feel what that plan’s going to be and how that’s going to produce a solid shot, and then go from there.

I want to hit, I want to review, I want to plan, I want to act. When I hit another shot here, let’s imagine I’m working on lag again. I’m going to try to hit a nice, solid one. Let’s see what happens.

There we go. A little bit to the left, so I know I want to have that good lag, and that good speed like I just did there, but I hit that one a little bit to the left.

I’m going to sit back here and say OK, how can I make my practice swing where I feel like I go slightly more to the right.

I’m going to make a few practice swings that feel good pairing up my lag or whatever it is that I’m working on with a different result, take 20 or 30 seconds between the shot, and then I’m going to come back in and try to recreate what I just did in my practice swing.

There we go, hit a nice solid one that time, straight toward the target. That’s in a nutshell how you want to do your practice swings.

I don’t want to go way off tempo or rhythm, that can throw everything out of whack. I can practice stuff that’s going to destroy my swing.

I don’t want to do all these pausing swings where I just completely get out of whack from what is reality of a golf swing.

Every time I’m doing a practice swing, I’m always trying to pair that up with a result in the distance, with the target that I’m going to try to hit that to.

If I’m just going practice swings mindlessly, and not even thinking about where I’m going to hit the ball, those aren’t going to transfer over, I’m not going to hit very solid shots.

Follow those steps for practice swings, those are going to help you a ton to improve your game. So how do we pair this up with the Top Speed Golf System?

That’s where you’re going to get a ton of your results. To be honest with you, if your technique isn’t as good as you like, maybe your Stable Fluid Spine is moving around all over the place, that’s getting you to chunk some, to thin some, really throwing off your game.

Maybe your lag and your Straight-Line Release aren’t where they need to be. You’re casting and you’re flipping it, that’s really going to hurt.

We need to make those changes, and in order to make those we’re going to have to do practice swings, and a lot of practice swings to get a new feeling.

What I want you to take away from this video as you’re working through the Top Speed Golf System, to get those long-lasting results, to get that technique, it’s always going to hold up under the gun.

Every time you’re making a practice swing, every time you’re working on anything that’s technique-related, I want you to always be focused on solid contact and where that ball’s going to end up.

If I’m making a technique change, I’m making some practice swings, I always want to feel like I’m going to hit a solid shot. I always want to feel like it’s going to go toward the target.

That’s going to help you to improve so much faster and to make those practice swings really efficient. So jump into the Top Speed Golf System.

I challenge you this week to pick the one thing, the one piece of the five pieces that you feel like is the farthest off for you.

Get into level 1, start doing those drills, do these practice swings correctly, and you’re going to improve more this year than you ever thought possible. I’ll see you in the Top Speed Golf System.