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.