Improve Your Golf

The best way to improve your golf game is to remember that it is just a game after all. We all tend to take things a bit too seriously, even our hobbies, and turn them into something akin to another set of chores. So don't stress yourself out too much on improving your golf, but I can give you some tips that will most certainly help you nonetheless.

The number one thing that will improve your golf game is not new clubs, not a bunch of lessons and not five hours of practice on the driving range - it's what I call expanding the cup. getting a lot better at draining putts will have the biggest impact on your score, far more than any one aspect of a round. Here's how to make the cup look a whole lot bigger in just a few easy practice sessions.

Take four golf balls and a ruler or measuring tape, you can also trace this out on a piece of paper if you like and just cut it out and place it on the floor. Place the first two balls six inches apart to form what is going to be the base of a triangle. The third ball goes six or seven inches above the line between the other two balls. If you're doing this on paper you will draw an arc between the top ball and the other two and remove everything in between.

This area represents the true size of the golf cup. A round object will fall into a hole when it's centerline crosses the threshold of that hole - unless other forces keep it from doing so. the reason a whole bunch of your putts are rolling right past the hole is that they are going too fast to simply fall in. If you putt too fast, angular momentum overcomes gravity and keeps the ball rolling.

The area between your three golf balls represents an area between which the ball will always fall into the cup. All you have to do is practice putting a ball so that it comes to rest anywhere between the other three. The cool thing is, it's a really big area to hit, the only thing you'll have to work on is speed, which is the real key to great putting.

If you get to the point where you can get your putts to stop in this much larger semi-circle, you'll be surprised at just how much your putting will improve, just a week or so of practice on this technique will have you draining putts you were missing just a few days ago from all over the green. Using this larger target zone is how we expand the cup, and improve your golf game.

How to Putt

You may have heard me blathering on about the fact that getting really good at putting is the real key to shaving huge chunks of points off of your score card. It's the truth, but I haven't revealed exactly how to putt, but I mean to solve that right this very minute. It is certainly true that getting really good at putting will do more to improve your scores than any other single thing you do, but the real trick is that putting is all in your head.

Now, there is some form to putting, but you can find all that advice in other places. I'm just going to help you get your head wrapped around the process properly. Putting isn't really all that hard once you understand the physics behind putting a round object into a round hole. It turns out that the hole is really an awful lot bigger than you think, and all you're trying to do is get it close.

So let me rephrase myself a bit. Even though putting is all in your head, one of the things your head needs to be good at is speed. The speed of your putts will be the key factor most of the time in a hit or a miss. The problem is that most tips about putting get the speed all wrong.

Most people will tell you that you are trying to putt the ball a few inches past the cup. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. Without going into why that is so silly let's just give you the real speed. You want to putt the ball just fast enough so that it will stop at a point that would be right in the middle of the hole. No faster, no slower. You want the ball in the hole, and it will get there far more often if you putt it in such a way that it would actually stop in the hole and not somewhere past it.

Oh, but I'll leave my putts short! Nonsense, you see, this is where physics takes over. A round object near an edge of any type will roll off the edge when its center approaches the edge. If the ball is moving too fast, angular momentum will overcome this tendency to fall. If the ball is almost at a stop, all you have to do is get just a bit of the ball, as much as half into the edge of the hole and it will quite naturally plop right into the cup because of gravity.

Therefore, the hole is actually much wider when it comes to getting the ball to fall right into it than the hole itself. A golf cup is actually as wide plus another width of the ball on either side. So you can practice your putting by doing this: Place one ball one inch behind the cup and another ball on either side a little more than half a ball width from the sides. Then just move this target areas to a location where there is no cup. That is the area you are trying to hit. If you can putt a ball so that is ends up inside of these three balls without touching them, you will vastly improve your putting.

You will see that it is really easy to keep from hitting the ball hard enough to touch the ball on the back side of the cup when you are trying to keep from doing so. Later, place your practice area back around a cup and do a few more strokes. Your eyes and mind will begin to see the hole as much larger, and you will find your ball falling quite gracefully into the cup more often than ever before.

Using these tips when it comes to how to putt will also mean that you never have that six or ten foot putt coming back when you have tried to keep some "speed" on the ball and just went way past the hole instead. Putt slower and let the ball find it's own way to fall into the cup and your putting will improve dramatically in a very short period of time.

About Golf

It's fun, it's hard, it can be thrilling or relaxing or even completely maddening. Playing golf and talking about golf consumes hours and hours of people's time the world over. And it's no wonder, either. Golf is addictive and fun and runs the gambit between hilarious and teeth grinding, it all depends on your approach and personality.

So let's talk a bit about making golf more fun. For you type A folks, I'm not sure you're really out to have fun since fun is generally and directly associated with winning, but improving your golf game will certainly make it more fun. And while golf is incredibly difficult to master, otherwise we would all be on the pro tour, that doesn't mean you have to be Tiger to enjoy yourself and be relatively successful.

The best way to improve your overall golf game is start short and then go long. If, although it should certainly be when, you practice, be sure to spend most of your time on the putting practice greens instead of on the driving range.

By working on your putting, chipping and pitching you will be in a far better position to score lower each round than if you spend all your time hammering away with your driver. Even pros only hit roughly 60% of fairways with those big drives, and so you can't ever expect a high percentage of your shots to end up going perfectly straight off the tee.

But if you get to where you can chip within five feet and make more than half of those five foot putts you can probably shave as many as ten or fifteen strokes off your round. The key is working on those five foot putts enough so that you rarely two putt and almost never three putt.

Most shots in golf happen within 100 yards of the pin. You won't, or shouldn't, use your driver or long irons more than 10 times in an entire round. But you will use your putter on every single hole, the less you have to use it, the better your score will be at the end of the day.

So when it comes to getting better at golf, start short and spend most of your time working on your short game. You will have a lot more fun, and yes, you will win an awful lot more often if that sort of thing is important to you.

Golfing Tips

When it comes to golfing tips you are certain to find thousands. Some will seem simple while others will be painfully complex lessons on physics. While there is certainly some truth in the fact that a perfect swing has about a hundred moving parts and you should be doing them all properly, that doesn't mean that you can't play pretty good golf without a magnificent swing. There really are some simple things you can do to improve your golf game while you work on your pursuit of the perfect swing.

It may not sound like much of a golfing tip, but the one thing you really need to realize about golf is the the club head hits the ball, not your swing. All the swing does is add speed to the club head. That's it in a nutshell really. Hitting the ball straight is impossible, even with a perfect swing, if the club head is not in the right location when it contacts the ball.

A good swing can definitely help you get the club head in the right spot, but you can also begin by concentrating on the head itself while you work on getting your swing right. There are really only three inches that make any difference in every single golf swing - the inch and a half on either side of the ball.

Good golf shots are made when the club goes from a few degrees open to a few degrees closed as it moves through the ball. Even trickier, the face need to be just a hair open when it actually first touches the ball. About three degrees open at impact is just about right. Now, this all happens in the course of milliseconds, so there is no way of knowing if you've done it right except by watching how the ball flies.

If your ball goes right and then further right it means that not only were you open more than three degrees at impact, you also didn't close it at all - that's what makes a slice. If the ball goes left and then further left, a hook, it means your club face was closed at impact and then closed even more as you rolled your wrists.

It is this flick of the wrists right as you strike the ball that determines if your shot will be straight or not. If you concentrate on getting your club face open and then closing it right as you hit the ball, you will be able to tell right away whether you were too late or early in regards to the club face and will know exactly what to do on your next shot to fix it.

We don't have time to talk here about exactly how to do that, but an easy way to see it is to take a sheet of paper and put it between your hands. As you bring your swing back, you have to turn your wrists so that you could see something written on the side where your left hand is located (for right handed golfers, that is). As you bring your swing down, the only thing you should see at impact with the ball is the edge of the paper between your hands and after impact you should be able to read something on the other side of the paper.

By thinking about the club face like that piece of paper you will begin to gain a lot more control over each shot you make. Your wrists control your club face, and your club face makes all the difference in every single golf shot. You don't want to extend this to putting, of course, where you want to keep everything as still and neutral as humanly possible, but for almost everything else it can really improve your control.

Pitching the Right Way

There are so many different swing types and situational shots in a round of golf. It's no wonder that people struggle with them. The reality is that golf is one of the hardest things to master in the world of sports, but that certainly doesn't mean you can't get a whole lot better at each of the individual shots. Pitching is one of those things that can really improve your scores in a round of golf if you learn a few simple techniques.

Pitching is a half or quarter swing shot that is highly dependent on your distance from the pin. It is different from chipping in that you want to get a little more loft on the ball in flight and have it land and "stick" a little in most cases.

When you chip, you're using a putting motion to get the ball up just enough to clear the rough and then roll toward the hole. Pitching is trying to get the ball up and over so that it lands without rolling too far past the hole. That's what makes pitching pretty tricky.

When you chip and putt you want to make sure that you keep your wrists neutral throughout the swing so that you don't strike the ball, it's more like a shove. But pitching is a bit more like a slap and you'll need to bring your wrists into play.

While you can get lots of pitching advice, the real key to each shot is to eliminate as many variable as possible for each type and focus on one or two things you can control. That's what makes driving the ball so difficult, there are just so many variables in a full, powerful swing that the number of potential mistakes get compounded.

So to make a good pitch begin by bringing your arms and hands back much like you would in putting or chipping, with everything neutral, your shoulders and hands forming a triangle. Near the top of the stroke allow only your wrists to bend, and don't worry about opening the club face as you would in a full swing.

Bring your hands down toward the ball and snap your wrists back into place right at the ball, as though you were driving a nail. The face of the club will do the rest of the work. Don't worry about coming through the ball, a good, smart rap is what you're trying to get.

By pitching with this simple wrist snap, you'll see that the ball just hops rigt up into the air. The rest is just figuring out how much of a back swing to add to the wrist snap to get it to travel the proper distance for each shot. But by using the same technique for every pitch, you'll soon get a good feel for distance.

Correct Golf Grip

Let's begin by restating that golf is a game and perfection is completely impossible. And I don't just mean perfection in golf, but perfection in anything is impossible. In golf, perfection is something much further away from impossible. What you are really trying to do with golf is mitigate the impact of the mistakes you are most certainly going to make in every single swing.

Let's be honest here - even swing machines end up putting golf balls in groupings. You could make a machine that would toss a basketball into the net from 60 feet away every single time, but you simply can't come close in golf. Wind, grass, bugs, beer, moisture and a plethora of other things can change in a fraction of a second and two identical strikes from a driving machine can end up fifteen yards apart.

As a result there is also no such thing as the "correct" golf grip, if you mean by that one of the three grips which is best. There are a few little things every kind of golf grip needs  to do as well as some things it needs to not do, but it doesn't matter if you use the interlock, overlap or baseball grip in the end.

The hard and fast rules of the grip is that the left thumb must go down the shaft, the grip is neutral with the palms facing each other, is medium pressure. The rest of the things you've heard are merely checks to see if you are doing those things properly. You know, the "v" made by the index finger and thumb of your right hand need to point at your right shoulder? All that tip does is give you a tool to tell whether your right hand is where it should be instead of too far over the top of the club or too much underneath it.

Perhaps the best way to look at gripping a club is to take a sheet of paper and hold it between both hands. That's what you are actually trying to do with your golf grip. Each hand needs to be exactly facing each other. Neither hand should be open or closed in relationship to the club shaft. Neutral grip, neutral pressure and you at least have a chance at not making mistakes with your hands.

In the end the correct golf grip is the grip that makes you feel comfortable during the swing and at impact. The one hidden gem in golf is knowing the the club face hits the ball, not the swing. Your hands have a lot more to do with that than your shoulders and hips. By getting your hands in a comfortable and neutral grip, you are far more likely to open and close them properly as you come through the ball than if your grip is wonky for some reason. Always remember that piece of paper, you can't grip it too hard sandwiched like that, and your hands should always be facing each other. That one tip will fix your grip.

How to Find Your Handicap

What I really need in my life is more math. I hope you can detect the sarcasm in that. It's fine to have to do a little addition after a round of golf (we all know most of us fudge our score anyway so it's rather addition in general) but complex things involving variables doesn't excite me all that much. But unfortunately, calculating your golf handicap takes a little bit more than adding 4, 5, and hopefully not very many sixes.

In order to even attempt calculating your handicap you're going to have to stop cheating. I say that with a smile, but you really have to be fair to the rules of the game to calculate a true handicap. The next part is to play five rounds without fudging the score - ouch, I know, but it has to be done.

I know that most of you are perfectly honorable and the previous step will be no problem, it's also why I have no idea what my handicap is even though I know how to calculate the thing. But even with five rounds worth of relatively accurate scores - all from a single course, you can then do the following.

-Take each of the five score totals

-Subtract from each the rating of the course on which you played

-Multiply those numbers by 113

-Divide by the slope of the course

-Take the lowest one and multiply it by .96

-have another drink

And that's all there is to calculating your golf handicap. You can get the rating and slope for each course from the scorecard or the pro shop. In order for your handicap to be "official" you will need to register it in some way with the course, most locations will have a computerized system of some kind for this.

Once you know your golf handicap you'll be ready to take over the world, or brag or maybe take up another hobby. Well, probably not the other hobby bit, golf is way too much fun even if you're not all that great at it. Believe me, I know.