Adjust Yardage And Trust Your Swing To Deal With Elevation Changes On The Golf Course (Video) - by Pete Styles
Adjust Yardage And Trust Your Swing To Deal With Elevation Changes On The Golf Course (Video) - by Pete Styles

Playing golf out on the golf course is an ever changing and ever challenging sport. And I think one of the reasons why golfers like it so often is we very rarely get presented with the same shot two times over. But one of the biggest challenges for a golfer on the course is the fact that golf courses are not all flat. You know if everything was as flat and as lovely as this field here, the game would be quite easy, particularly because golf shots played over flat ground, they are just quite easy to measure. But the challenge on the golf course is there is quite often fairly large elevation changes, sometimes hitting from low shots to high shots, sometimes high playing down the hill and sometimes a shot that goes through a valley or over a hill or back down to the same level. And those challenges, most challenge the golfer to make the correct assessment over that club selection and how hard they hit the golf ball.

Now modern advancement in technology mean that most golfers on the flat lie have a good way of getting at a fairly accurate yardage be these one of those laser rangefinders, so we look through it and we judge the distance with the laser. We might have a watch that gives us the GPS signal or even a layout display on our phones that gives us the GPS signal of how far away the green or the flag is. Once you know that yardage, you pull the relevant club, you setup and you hit the ball quite hard, it’s relatively simple. But what happens when we have an elevation change in that, that brings it back a little bit to a skill-based level where the golfer has to assess how much the elevation change, uphill or downhill is going to change the shot. And I think for a lot of golfers, they widely underestimate how much the hill over slope will actually change the shot. So we see a golfer that might be playing some sort of 20, 30 feet up on to a raised green, measure the distance, 150, 150 is going to be my 7-ion but I am going uphill, well I’ll just hit it out a little bit harder than or 150 downhill by 30 feet, well, I will just take a little bit off of that. And the problem with that is even the golfer will misjudge the shot or they will actually misjudge that swing, they won’t correct that swing, that won’t make the right contact on the ball to get the right distance. So what we need to try and do is assess how the uphill and then downhill can affect the golf ball and how therefore it affects us. Then make the right club selection and ultimately commits to hitting the correct golf shots rather than trying to sort of hit and hope and second-guess and judge it. So in this next little miniseries of videos, we are going to work on how the slope adjustments can help us to hit better shots more accurately when we are playing up or downhill shots. 2016-10-17

Playing golf out on the golf course is an ever changing and ever challenging sport. And I think one of the reasons why golfers like it so often is we very rarely get presented with the same shot two times over. But one of the biggest challenges for a golfer on the course is the fact that golf courses are not all flat. You know if everything was as flat and as lovely as this field here, the game would be quite easy, particularly because golf shots played over flat ground, they are just quite easy to measure. But the challenge on the golf course is there is quite often fairly large elevation changes, sometimes hitting from low shots to high shots, sometimes high playing down the hill and sometimes a shot that goes through a valley or over a hill or back down to the same level. And those challenges, most challenge the golfer to make the correct assessment over that club selection and how hard they hit the golf ball.

Now modern advancement in technology mean that most golfers on the flat lie have a good way of getting at a fairly accurate yardage be these one of those laser rangefinders, so we look through it and we judge the distance with the laser. We might have a watch that gives us the GPS signal or even a layout display on our phones that gives us the GPS signal of how far away the green or the flag is. Once you know that yardage, you pull the relevant club, you setup and you hit the ball quite hard, it’s relatively simple. But what happens when we have an elevation change in that, that brings it back a little bit to a skill-based level where the golfer has to assess how much the elevation change, uphill or downhill is going to change the shot.

And I think for a lot of golfers, they widely underestimate how much the hill over slope will actually change the shot. So we see a golfer that might be playing some sort of 20, 30 feet up on to a raised green, measure the distance, 150, 150 is going to be my 7-ion but I am going uphill, well I’ll just hit it out a little bit harder than or 150 downhill by 30 feet, well, I will just take a little bit off of that. And the problem with that is even the golfer will misjudge the shot or they will actually misjudge that swing, they won’t correct that swing, that won’t make the right contact on the ball to get the right distance. So what we need to try and do is assess how the uphill and then downhill can affect the golf ball and how therefore it affects us. Then make the right club selection and ultimately commits to hitting the correct golf shots rather than trying to sort of hit and hope and second-guess and judge it.

So in this next little miniseries of videos, we are going to work on how the slope adjustments can help us to hit better shots more accurately when we are playing up or downhill shots.