Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

So one of the most important elements of making sure that you get a good takeaway motion in your backswing is ensuring the tempo of that takeaway is correct. Generally most golfers are going to be a bit too quick in that takeaway. They almost get set over the golf ball and there’s bit of urgency to start the swing and the club comes back too quickly which therefore uses the wrong muscles and the wrong motions.

So quite importantly when the club should be coming back away from the ball nice and slowly, very few golfers are ever too slow. So work on that principle of slowing that down if you can, and here’s a great drill to help you do that. I’m going to go ahead and take a normal setup position, we’re going to bring the club back around about a foot to 18 inches back and stop and then bring it back to the ball. Take it back again and stop and back to the ball. One more time, back again, back to the ball and then go ahead and hit the ball.

And because we’ve had that little dummy swing of bringing it back and through, we’re hoping that it’s not going to come back too fast, because if you’re building too much momentum here, you’ll never get the golf club to stop at the right point. So let me do that drill fully, fully. We set up aiming at our target; we come back a foot and back to the ball, back a foot and back to the ball. One more time, back a foot, back to the ball and this time hit.

And hopefully with that we really feel the first motion back away from the ball is very slow and very steady. There’s nothing rush, there’s nothing quick about that tempo. If you can bring in that little three practice swing exercise, three practice swings in the shot when you’re on the driving range, groove in that slow tempo then try to have slow tempo out onto the golf course and I’m sure that will help you with that slow, low and one piece takeaway motion.