Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus, PGA coach and coach for Collin Morikawa.
How often do we get frustrated on the golf course when we just can’t hit the ball correctly?
Well, part of hitting it solid is we want to obviously get in the center of the face. Let’s talk about three concepts that you want to start utilizing in your practice to hit it in the center of the face.
First thing is balance. How often are we hitting shots and we’re off our back leg and we’re all over the place. We’re going to be hitting off the toe, the heel. We’re going to hit it thin and all over the place. How can you expect the ball to go the distance you choose?
So let’s first talk about balance. First one would be a simple drill of a feet together drill. So feet are here, make as big a swing as you can make by still staying in balance and see if you can stay centered. So now you can hit the center of the face.
Next would be pretty simple, a full finish balance. Coming through…Hold…123. Start feeling where do you tend to go? If I tend to go back, if I tend to go forward and the concept I want you to go with is something called stacking the joints. So I have my ankle, my knee, my hip and my shoulder. I should never get outside of my ankle joints on either side.
So if I can stay now balanced within my frame, which part of that pre shot routine of having even a thought of feet together can help you? I’m going to be much more stable. So first thing, you’ve got to stay balanced.
Next concept to help you hit it off the center of the face is tempo. I ask people all the time “is tempo important?”. They say yes. I said, Do you work on it? They go, no. So a couple of things with that.
I want you to imagine that it takes three parts back, 1 part down. Most people are 2 to 1 and then beginners 1 to 1. Best players in the world look at Colin’s swing, right? Nice and patient. one to three and accelerate. Now that tempo is in control. The next thing with tempo? Think about your best shot you’ve ever hit. What percentage of effort were they at? I doubt they were at 100%, maybe 70. Maybe 80%. Practice now swinging 70%. Oh, that felt good. Let me go a little bit more. 80, let’s see. 90 oh, 90 felt out of balance for me. Find your best tempo.
So now you’ve got good balance, you’ve got good tempo, a good golf mental game routine. The last thing that’s really going to affect how you hit it off the face is posture. So often when we’re told to get into a great posture, it’s at setup, which I of course, completely agree with and have my spine in a great position here. But how often, unfortunately, do we find people they’re moving all around with their posture? How are you going to get back to that ball? So we want to feel like you’re staying level with it. Well, one of my favorite drills is just simply doing some half swing drills to where I’m staying in the posture that I started at.
If you could start mastering that you’re not going to deviate from that. You’re going to start hitting it on the center of the face. So today, in order to hit solid contact, we’re going to have great balance, smooth tempo and we’re going to stay in posture the whole way.
So start working on your golf mental game routine today to shoot lower scores.