In the quest to hit the golf ball as far as possible, you might feel like you need to swing hard from start to finish – from the moment you start the backswing to the time the club stops moving in the follow through.

That might seem like the best way to hit long shots, but that’s not actually the case. In reality, there is only one moment during the swing when the club needs to be moving fast – when it strikes the ball at impact. Other than that, you should be focused on simply using solid fundamentals to build up power for that moment of truth. You only get to hit the ball once per swing, so you want to make that impact count.

Unfortunately, many golfers fail to accelerate during the correction portion of the swing. Rather than waiting until the bottom of the golf swing to pour on the speed, many players accelerate immediately from the top, as soon as the swing has changed directions. That’s a mistake – and a costly one, at that. If you accelerate from the top of the swing, you are going to waste the potential for power that you had created in your backswing, and the best of your speed is going to be gone before you ever reach the ball. That means the club is actually going to be slowing down when you get to impact, which is not the desired outcome. You won’t be able to hit the ball as far as you could have if you accelerated through impact properly, and you might even have trouble making clean contact.

One of the biggest differences between the average amateur golfer and their professional counterpart is the ability to accelerate the club at the right time. Learn how to accelerate at the bottom of the swing, going through the ball, and the quality of your play should improve dramatically.

All of the content below is based on a right-handed golfer. If you happen to play left-handed, please take a moment to reverse the directions as necessary.

Why It Goes Wrong

There are a number of reasons why a golfer may wind up accelerating their golf swing at the top rather than the bottom. Before we get into some advice on how you can fix this mistake, we think it is important to stop and talk first about what may be leading you in the wrong direction to begin with. It’s always important in golf to understand your mistakes as completely as possible, since that understanding can help you to avoid going down the same path again in the future.

Let’s work through a few potential causes of accelerating the club prematurely.

• Anxiousness. This is likely the leading cause of accelerating the club at the top instead of the bottom of the swing. Simply put, many golfers are too anxious during the swing. They are in a rush to send the ball on its way, and they fail to be patient enough to let the swing develop properly. In a game this difficult, it is understandable why you would be in a hurry – you want to see if you are going to succeed or fail on a given shot. This sensation is even stronger when you are trying to tackle a difficult shot, such as playing over the water. With all of that said, you still need to find a way to put your anxiousness to the side and make a smooth, rhythmic swing. Golfers who consistently rush through their swing are never going to reach their potential on the course. During practice, make it a point to be deliberate with your swing technique, allowing your swing to develop slowly and smoothly before you finally unleash your power through the hitting area. It’s going to be more difficult to maintain patience during your swing on the golf course than it is on the range but working on this point specifically during practice will be a step in the right direction.
• Poor backswing technique. It’s possible to mostly lose this battle before you even get up to the top of the swing. That means you are in such a poor position at the top that you don’t really have a chance to begin the downswing properly. Most golfers wind up in this situation by making a backswing which is far too narrow. If the swing starts off narrow as soon as the backswing begins, you’ll wind up with your club – and your hands – much too close to your body at the top. This crowded position is going to force you to push the club up and away from your body to begin the downswing, and you’ll probably accelerate in the process. From there, you will drag the club down through the ball, with the club moving slower and slower as impact nears. In the end, you won’t have much swing speed left, and you may even end up hitting a slice. To unwind this string of errors, you need to go back to the beginning and improve your technique in the takeaway. Try to keep your hands and wrists out of the action early on, instead relying on your shoulders to rotate the club away from the target. This type of move is the best way to stay wide on the way back, and it should lead to placing the club in a nice position at the top of the swing. There is no guaranteeing that you’ll wind up accelerating at the bottom when you fix your backswing, but this is a nice place to start.
• Failure to use the lower body. This is a big one. Many amateur golfers fail to use their lower bodies properly, and the results speak for themselves. The lower body is where you are going to create the majority of the power in your swing, so players who lack power through the hitting area should look to their legs and hips for help. With regard to accelerating at the right point during the swing, starting your downswing with lower body rotation to the left is a great way to gradually build speed as the club comes down. When you arrive at the top of your swing, try to start your move left by opening your left hip toward the target. Don’t slide to the left laterally – turn to the left with your lower body while your upper body, and the club, hangs back and waits to accelerate until later in the swing. By getting your lower body in front of the upper body in terms of rotation, you’ll be in a great position to continue to add speed all the way through impact.

In reality, there are a lot of different reasons which could be to blame for your inability to accelerate the club at the bottom of the swing. As you work through some upcoming practice sessions, keep this problem near the front of your mind and do your best to figure out what is going wrong. Is it one of the three points listed above, or is it something else entirely? It may take a bit of time to figure it out, but your effort will be worth it in the end.

Getting on the Right Track

The task at hand is obvious – you need to find a way to turn your acceleration at the top of the swing into acceleration at the bottom. That probably goes without saying, but it doesn’t make the job any easier. It’s going to be tough to pull this off successfully, and you can be sure there is going to be some hard work required along the way. With this section, we would like to present you with a few tips on how you can get your swing on the right track. These aren’t meant to be quick fixes, but rather concepts that you can apply as you practice to create an improved overall technique that serves you for the long run.

• Emphasize your finish position. One of the best things you can do while working on accelerating the club at the bottom of the swing is actually to work on getting into a full finish position at the end of each swing. Many golfers make the mistake of thinking that the finish position doesn’t matter since it takes place after the ball is already gone. That is a mistaken assumption, and one that can be costly in terms of your performance on the links. Basically, the follow through is important because it highlights what has happened earlier in your swing. If you reach a full finish, it’s likely that you did a good job of accelerating through the hitting area. If, on the other hand, you stop your swing shortly after making contact, you were probably slowing down as the club approached the ball. Make it a top priority to finish each full swing with most of your weight on your left foot and your chest facing the target. This might seem like a simple thing – and it is – but it speaks volumes about the overall quality of your golf swing.
• Learn to lag. Building lag in your golf swing is one of the most valuable skills you can develop as a golfer. Lagging the club means to allow the club head to hang back while your body begins to turn through the shot. Your lower body should start first, followed by your upper body, while the club continues to trail behind. Then, as the swing continues, the club will eventually approach the ball and it should be speeding up nicely as it does. The key to lag is maintaining the angle between your left arm and the shaft of the club as far into the downswing as possible. There should be a roughly 90* angle formed between your left arm and the club at the top of the swing, and you need to hold onto that angle deep into the downswing. Many golfers fail to lag their club nicely, and that struggle shows in a lack of swing speed and overall distance. The topic of lag certainly deserves an article or two of its own, but safe to say it plays a huge role in your ability to accelerate through the hitting area.
• Think aggressively. This last point doesn’t have to do with the physical technique you use, but rather your mindset prior to hitting each shot. It is best to be in an aggressive mindset, feeling committed to moving the club through the ball with confidence over and over again. As you may already know, this is not something which most amateur golfers manage successfully. The average player swings with more fear and doubt than aggressiveness and confidence. Golf is a hard game, yes, but that doesn’t mean you need to assume the worst every time you hit a shot. In practice, work on developing the ability to believe in yourself and what you are capable of achieving with your swing. Pick out very specific targets on the range and do your best to hit those targets. When you succeed, make a mental note of that success and use it to build your confidence a little higher. Over time, you should be able to develop a belief in yourself during practice that will eventually translate out onto the course.

The exact steps that you need to take in order to get your swing on track will depend, naturally, on what is actually wrong with your technique currently. Every swing is different, which is what makes improvement in this game so difficult. There is always a fair bit of experimentation involved with finding your way to better golf, so don’t get down on yourself if you work through some struggles on the range before you break through.

An Important Drill

If you decide to take a golf lesson or two to work on your swing, there is a good chance that the golf teacher you work with will provide you with some drills. Those drills are going to be aimed at improving your weaknesses, and you should be able to use them even after your lessons are over. Of course, you don’t have to take the step of having a golf lesson to use golf drills – you can use them during your regular practice sessions as long as you have one or two in mind.

In this section, we would like to provide you with a drill that you can use to work on your ability to accelerate the club through the hitting area properly. Consider giving this drill a try during your next visit to the range.

• For this drill, you are going to use one of your short irons and you aren’t actually going to be hitting the ball. You can use this drill to make some practice swings before going back to your regular swing in order to hit more shots.
• To get ready, take your normal stance with a short iron and make sure your address position feels balanced and athletic. While you aren’t going to be hitting a ball, you can still go through the process of picking a target and taking your aim carefully.
• Once the prep is done, you can go ahead and make your practice swing. However, as you might imagine, you are going to alter the way you make this practice swing in order to turn it into a drill. Perform the takeaway phase of the backswing as normal, but stop your backswing when your club is parallel with the ground. That’s going to be quite a bit shorter than your normal backswing, and you are then going to switch directions and swing forward from that point.
• With such little room between the end of your backswing and the bottom of the swing, you will need to accelerate the club aggressively if you are going to make it all the way up into a full finish position. Use your whole body to turn to the left, just as you do in your normal swing, and do your best to maintain nice rhythm even though you are making such a short backswing.
• Feel free to repeat these short swings as a drill as many times as you would like. Once you are finished with the drill, go back to hitting full shots and remember what you learned during the drill about accelerating all the way through the hitting area.

There is nothing complicated about this drill, and you don’t need any special equipment beyond what is already in your golf bag. Try including this easy drill in your regular practice sessions and hopefully you’ll see some improvement in this key area of performance.

Acceleration in the Short Game

We’ve established that acceleration at the bottom of the full swing is important, but it does need to be mentioned that accelerating through the hitting area is just as important in the short game. It’s hard for many amateur golfers to grasp this concept, but it’s crucial to your success on and around the greens. If you can accelerate the putter and your wedges when playing short game shots, you should see quickly improved results.

With the putter, you don’t want to do anything drastic or dramatic. It’s not like you want to swing the putter back slowly and then rapidly pick up the pace once you start moving the club toward the hole. Instead, you want everything to be gradual, with the putter changing directions smoothly before slightly picking up speed through impact. If you can manage to accelerate lightly while maintaining a nice feel for the putter throughout the stroke, you should find that more and more of your putts start to find the bottom of the cup.

As you transition off the greens and into the area of chip and pitch shots, things get a little more complicated. On most of your chip and pitch shots, you do want to accelerate the club firmly through the ball. However, that is not going to be the case on every last shot, as sometimes you’ll need to move through more gently in order to produce a soft shot up toward the target.

For example, when you are hitting a standard chip and run from a clean lie around the green, you will want to make sure the club is accelerating nicely. An accelerating stroke is going to help you to make clean contact, and it is going to make it easier to control your distance, as well. The same can be said for an uphill pitch out of the rough – acceleration is going to be an important piece of the puzzle. However, if you are playing a tricky downhill chip from a lie in the light rough, it might actually be better to decelerate a bit. Doing so is going to take some of the speed out of the shot, and it is going to make it easier to produce the soft shot you need to put the ball close to the hole. This is an advanced technique, however, so only work on this kind of chip once you are confident in your abilities throughout the rest of the short game.

Acceleration is important in golf, but the timing of that acceleration is a detail which you cannot afford to overlook. Accelerating the club from the top of the swing is largely going to be a waste, and it is going to make it difficult for you to play quality shots. On the other hand, accelerating at the bottom of the swing will improve your ability to hit the ball with authority, and your strikes should be cleaner, as well. We hope the content of this article will help you move in the right direction with regard to this important element of the golf swing. As your acceleration improves, your overall play should go along with it. Good luck!

There are a couple of phases that I’d like you to consider in your golf swing. There’s a set up phase where you get yourself nicely set-up for a nice powerful start to the swing. During the back swing, we’re going to talk about building and coiling, power and turning to the top. But this particular swing can be quite slow because the backswing has no real bearing on how fast you swing down. So you’re turning and winding up and creating power, and then from the top, you’re releasing the power. This is the bit where the club head starts to accelerate through, but it doesn’t need to be travelling very quickly until right to the bottom of the golf ball. It doesn’t have to travel very fast, particularly not if you put all your energy into that bit. By this bit, you go in slower again. The golf ball is the thing you’re aiming for. So, you want to be fast, about 12 inches, and 12 inches after. So, just before and just after is your most powerful part of your swing.

So, have a few practice goes where you turn back slowly, you start your downswing and then you accelerate through the bottom half of the swing. That’s where you put your most efforts. We don’t want to stand there over the golf ball and put all the effort into the backswing. You get wrenched out of position. And likewise, we don’t want to get to the top and snatch the golf ball and have nothing left. Save your power. Build the power on the back swing. Do all the power on the downswing and then release the golf ball, and feel how you can have nice rhythmical swing, slow, fast at the bottom, slowly back, building the power quick at the bottom to whip the club head through.

That’s the key for a nice balance swing, a nice powerful swing. Watch the best tall players. They never looked like their rushing their golf swing. They never looked like they’re trying to hit the golf ball too hard, but they unleash all of that stored up power right at the vital 12 inches just before, at, and just after the golf ball. That’s the key to the most successful and powerful shots that you can hit.