Keys To Improving Your Golf Takeaway (Video) - by Pete Styles
Keys To Improving Your Golf Takeaway (Video) - by Pete Styles

So here’s four great tips I’d like you to focus on to help you take the club away in the correct fashion. The first one is getting it at the right speed, we often see golfers from this set up position, they take their time, they get into a nice position, but then one, two, three the club just goes too fast away from the golf ball, it’s almost like they’ve been waiting for that motion, someone goes bang with the gun and they’re off with the golf swing. So I’ve never really seen many golfers that have a backswing takeaway that’s too slow, you know so try and be as low and as slow as you can in the takeaway, the better you can take this club back in a slow fashion the more consistently you’ll be able to do that. The next thing for yourself is to have good balance in your takeaway, so we want to make sure that from this set up position we’re nicely balanced and the club comes away from the golf ball in the right way and we don’t feel like we topple over onto the tip toes or counter wise going back onto the heels, rocking back onto the heels, we’ve got to feel like we’re nice and steady, 50, 50, 50, 50 so left and right, front to back is all balanced. Then as we take the club away with a slow takeaway you should still be in the same balance by this point your body weight shouldn’t have really moved much. You might feel it shifted over slightly to your right side, but it’s certainly not a sway away from the ball, it’s a nice turn away rather than a sway away.

Now one thing that can help with all this tied all together is being nice and relaxed, we definitely don’t want to be too tense, we see a lot of golfers, they set up over the golf ball, they’re quite tense about the shot they’re about to hit, and then that manifests itself in grip pressure, the grip pressure gets really tight, the forearms get really tight, the shoulders get really locked out and then at the top of their backswing the one, two, three, go! And the top of the backswing they’re travelling too quickly, they’re too tense; they can’t efficiently transition into the downswing. One last thing I think would help you with your takeaway is correcting your ball position and making sure it’s nice and consistent, so the ball position needs to be in the same place for each individual club. I’m going to take the ball in the center of the stance, when you’re taking sand wedge, pitching wedge, nine iron something like that, then work on a position where it moves half an inch per club, forwards as you get to your longer clubs, so we go from here, we go eight, seven, six, five across, across, across into the driver ball position. Driver ball position right up against that left instep, because if you have the wrong ball position effectively your takeaway is not really going to work, driver ball position here would have a nice long, smooth slow takeaway, pitching wedge ball position here, you’ll see the club picking up a little bit more steeply just because it’s on a different path of the arc. So the key to ball position is really consistency, having it in the right place for each iron all of the time to allow your takeaway to become nice and consistent. Work on those four elements and you’ll see a better takeaway and hopefully better golf shots. 2015-10-09

So here’s four great tips I’d like you to focus on to help you take the club away in the correct fashion. The first one is getting it at the right speed, we often see golfers from this set up position, they take their time, they get into a nice position, but then one, two, three the club just goes too fast away from the golf ball, it’s almost like they’ve been waiting for that motion, someone goes bang with the gun and they’re off with the golf swing. So I’ve never really seen many golfers that have a backswing takeaway that’s too slow, you know so try and be as low and as slow as you can in the takeaway, the better you can take this club back in a slow fashion the more consistently you’ll be able to do that. The next thing for yourself is to have good balance in your takeaway, so we want to make sure that from this set up position we’re nicely balanced and the club comes away from the golf ball in the right way and we don’t feel like we topple over onto the tip toes or counter wise going back onto the heels, rocking back onto the heels, we’ve got to feel like we’re nice and steady, 50, 50, 50, 50 so left and right, front to back is all balanced. Then as we take the club away with a slow takeaway you should still be in the same balance by this point your body weight shouldn’t have really moved much. You might feel it shifted over slightly to your right side, but it’s certainly not a sway away from the ball, it’s a nice turn away rather than a sway away.

Now one thing that can help with all this tied all together is being nice and relaxed, we definitely don’t want to be too tense, we see a lot of golfers, they set up over the golf ball, they’re quite tense about the shot they’re about to hit, and then that manifests itself in grip pressure, the grip pressure gets really tight, the forearms get really tight, the shoulders get really locked out and then at the top of their backswing the one, two, three, go! And the top of the backswing they’re travelling too quickly, they’re too tense; they can’t efficiently transition into the downswing. One last thing I think would help you with your takeaway is correcting your ball position and making sure it’s nice and consistent, so the ball position needs to be in the same place for each individual club. I’m going to take the ball in the center of the stance, when you’re taking sand wedge, pitching wedge, nine iron something like that, then work on a position where it moves half an inch per club, forwards as you get to your longer clubs, so we go from here, we go eight, seven, six, five across, across, across into the driver ball position. Driver ball position right up against that left instep, because if you have the wrong ball position effectively your takeaway is not really going to work, driver ball position here would have a nice long, smooth slow takeaway, pitching wedge ball position here, you’ll see the club picking up a little bit more steeply just because it’s on a different path of the arc. So the key to ball position is really consistency, having it in the right place for each iron all of the time to allow your takeaway to become nice and consistent. Work on those four elements and you’ll see a better takeaway and hopefully better golf shots.