How to prevent a frozen takeaway Golf (Video) - by Pete Styles
How to prevent a frozen takeaway Golf (Video) - by Pete Styles

If you're trying to improve your golf, I'm sure you've got at least one, if not a dozen swing thoughts going around in your head. And one of the problems that could lead to is actually freezing over the golf ball before you take the club back. You sometimes see somebody on the golf course and you must feel sorry for them. They're really struggling with their swing thoughts, they're struggling to get the club away from the ball and so really sort of mental battle. They set up in a good position, they might have waggle and jiggle and they just can't take the club back and they're really struggling with that. It can be one of the most frustrating things in golf and it can really affect your performance and your enjoyment. We often talk about a frozen takeaway.

So here's a little method really where you can break that frozen takeaway. A couple of areas that you need to work on and the biggest thing really is tension, making sure you're not too tight and too tense. Grip pressure and grip tension would manifest itself in your hands, but then also into your forearms, upper arms, and even into your shoulders. So when you stand over the golf ball, if we think about grip pressure as strangling the golf club as tight as we can is a 10, and letting go of the golf club is a one, try to hold as a four or a five so it's actually quite a loose grip pressure. You don't need to strangle the golf club. It doesn’t weigh much down here. You can hold it in a couple of fingers. So gripping it nice and loose, nice and relaxed and just making sure that you can always play your fingers on the golf [inaudible 00:01:29]. Just waggle them around. That will take as well away a little bit of tension. Then feel how if my hands and arms are relaxed, I turn my left shoulder into my chin, my golf swing happens. So as long as my grip pressure isn’t fighting and it's not too tight, if I push my left shoulder around underneath my chin, my hands and arms relaxed, and then I've got the golf club coming back away from the ball in one smooth motion and I've beaten that frozen takeaway because I've got less pressure, less anxiety.

Another good method would be to just sort of waggle the golf club before you take it away. If you like never let your setter become too static. The longer you stand over the ball staring at it and thinking about it, the more tense you would get, the more static you would get. So I take an approach where I almost keep moving the whole time. I get myself comfortable, a little waggle, set the club up, one last look. I don't really spend too long standing over the ball staring at it and looking at it. It's a pretty smooth motion. I do stay still for just a second, check my target and then I'm off with my swing. So I'm not going to freeze over the top of the golf ball, I'm not going to grip pressure too tightly, and I have that little waggle just to keep everything moving and that should beat the frozen takeaway.

 2013-01-16

If you're trying to improve your golf, I'm sure you've got at least one, if not a dozen swing thoughts going around in your head. And one of the problems that could lead to is actually freezing over the golf ball before you take the club back. You sometimes see somebody on the golf course and you must feel sorry for them. They're really struggling with their swing thoughts, they're struggling to get the club away from the ball and so really sort of mental battle. They set up in a good position, they might have waggle and jiggle and they just can't take the club back and they're really struggling with that. It can be one of the most frustrating things in golf and it can really affect your performance and your enjoyment. We often talk about a frozen takeaway.

So here's a little method really where you can break that frozen takeaway. A couple of areas that you need to work on and the biggest thing really is tension, making sure you're not too tight and too tense. Grip pressure and grip tension would manifest itself in your hands, but then also into your forearms, upper arms, and even into your shoulders. So when you stand over the golf ball, if we think about grip pressure as strangling the golf club as tight as we can is a 10, and letting go of the golf club is a one, try to hold as a four or a five so it's actually quite a loose grip pressure. You don't need to strangle the golf club. It doesn’t weigh much down here. You can hold it in a couple of fingers. So gripping it nice and loose, nice and relaxed and just making sure that you can always play your fingers on the golf [inaudible 00:01:29]. Just waggle them around. That will take as well away a little bit of tension. Then feel how if my hands and arms are relaxed, I turn my left shoulder into my chin, my golf swing happens. So as long as my grip pressure isn’t fighting and it's not too tight, if I push my left shoulder around underneath my chin, my hands and arms relaxed, and then I've got the golf club coming back away from the ball in one smooth motion and I've beaten that frozen takeaway because I've got less pressure, less anxiety.

Another good method would be to just sort of waggle the golf club before you take it away. If you like never let your setter become too static. The longer you stand over the ball staring at it and thinking about it, the more tense you would get, the more static you would get. So I take an approach where I almost keep moving the whole time. I get myself comfortable, a little waggle, set the club up, one last look. I don't really spend too long standing over the ball staring at it and looking at it. It's a pretty smooth motion. I do stay still for just a second, check my target and then I'm off with my swing. So I'm not going to freeze over the top of the golf ball, I'm not going to grip pressure too tightly, and I have that little waggle just to keep everything moving and that should beat the frozen takeaway.