How to Improve your Swing

There is perhaps no more asked question in all of sports than how to make a golf swing. You hear it all the time on golf broadcasts, how perfect this guy or that guys swing is. Arnold had a classic swing, Ben Hogan and the names go on and on. But what in the world is a perfect golf swing and how can you learn to do it?

The answer is far more complex. There just isn't a motion in sports where more things can go wrong. Just think about that for a minute. You are taking a three foot level to which there is another lever attached at a right angle and swinging it through a full arc at nearly 90 miles per hour (for pros anyway) at a round object just a little larger than one inch at a target perhaps two hundred yards away. Are you kidding me? Throwing a football seems simple by comparison.

Most sports rely on sheer strength and agility. These two things, combined with a bit of quick thinking while processing information lead to good performance. More power can be a little help in golf as well, but they are not nearly as important as the swing. You can be a beast of a man and still not hit a golf ball worth a hoot where you might simply wreck people on a hockey rink. The golf swing is so fast that there isn't time to think about anything, you just have to get your swing into a groove and do it.

This speed means that you are going to need to break your swing down into smaller and slower parts so that you can get muscle memory to do the rest of the work in that single second. In an entire round of golf you will only be actually doing anything for about 2 minutes total. The total time the ball is in contact with the club is less than one second. There simply isn't time to adapt to what you are seeing and feeling like you can in basketball. The only thing that comes close is batting in baseball.

So when it comes time to learn how to golf swing you're going to have to get good instruction and realize that there is no such thing as a quick fix. It's one of the hardest things in sports to learn because it has so many things that can go wrong and it happens so fast it's crazy.