Deceleration: Deadly During the Golf Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles
Deceleration: Deadly During the Golf Swing (Video) - by Pete Styles

There's one word that is synonymous with bad golf shots. It doesn’t matter whether it's a chip, a pitch, a putt, or a drive, and that's Deceleration. A club that is slowing down at the point of impact is very rarely going to produce good, solid golf shots necessarily not consistent shots. I often think about its like riding a bicycle. If you ride a bicycle quickly it's that easy to ride in the straight line. But if you ride a bicycle very slowly, everything just gets a bit wobbly, and it will be the same thing with are golf stroke.

If you come back in through you want to put nice and quick a brisk, the club will stay online. If you have a long back swing and then a deceleration as you hit it, that club will start to twist and move. Likewise, in the big swings a confident backswing and through swings when I have big finish would generally produce longest strike to better golf shots. A big backswing and then a steery little poke down the fairway will often cause bad shots. And it's often the confidence of the golf so this is actually faulty. If we stand without a driver, but on a very narrow hole, we certainly got the negativity of where the danger is, and then we take that driver and then we try and steer it on the fairway.

It won't work. The ball will cut or draw off target, and it will miss the target line. You're actually better off in these situations taking a more lofted club, a shorter club, and then committing to it, and hitting a bit harder, hitting a bit more, a bit more confident, with a bit more assertiveness to drill it down the fairway, so don’t ever take a big club and try and steer it onto a narrow fairway. Drop down to a more lofted club and hit it with a bit more authority.

And a great way of make sure that you have all authority in your swing is just a very simple swooshing drill, so you can either take a golf club upside down and swoosh the club head or actually taking alignment stake. So one of these little so the carbon canes here I can swing with these, and just make a swoosh, and I want the swoosh to be fast and I want the swoosh to happen late in the swing.

I wouldn't want to feel that there was a swoosh going back or a swoosh going down to here because I'm going to use all my power my acceleration too early. I want to feel that the swing is slow but gradually getting quicker right the way through to the impact phase and beyond. So my swing is slow coming back and then there's a big swoosh right the way around to the finfish so it actually feels that my fastest zone is just from the ball and behind, so I'm accelerating through impact. Next time you get yourself out on the golf course pick a target out on the fairway. Work out whether that's where you want to aim the ball and the nice unswooshy straight down the target line, accelerating all the way to target, never decelerating.

2013-09-13

There's one word that is synonymous with bad golf shots. It doesn’t matter whether it's a chip, a pitch, a putt, or a drive, and that's Deceleration. A club that is slowing down at the point of impact is very rarely going to produce good, solid golf shots necessarily not consistent shots. I often think about its like riding a bicycle. If you ride a bicycle quickly it's that easy to ride in the straight line. But if you ride a bicycle very slowly, everything just gets a bit wobbly, and it will be the same thing with are golf stroke.

If you come back in through you want to put nice and quick a brisk, the club will stay online. If you have a long back swing and then a deceleration as you hit it, that club will start to twist and move. Likewise, in the big swings a confident backswing and through swings when I have big finish would generally produce longest strike to better golf shots. A big backswing and then a steery little poke down the fairway will often cause bad shots. And it's often the confidence of the golf so this is actually faulty. If we stand without a driver, but on a very narrow hole, we certainly got the negativity of where the danger is, and then we take that driver and then we try and steer it on the fairway.

It won't work. The ball will cut or draw off target, and it will miss the target line. You're actually better off in these situations taking a more lofted club, a shorter club, and then committing to it, and hitting a bit harder, hitting a bit more, a bit more confident, with a bit more assertiveness to drill it down the fairway, so don’t ever take a big club and try and steer it onto a narrow fairway. Drop down to a more lofted club and hit it with a bit more authority.

And a great way of make sure that you have all authority in your swing is just a very simple swooshing drill, so you can either take a golf club upside down and swoosh the club head or actually taking alignment stake. So one of these little so the carbon canes here I can swing with these, and just make a swoosh, and I want the swoosh to be fast and I want the swoosh to happen late in the swing.

I wouldn't want to feel that there was a swoosh going back or a swoosh going down to here because I'm going to use all my power my acceleration too early. I want to feel that the swing is slow but gradually getting quicker right the way through to the impact phase and beyond. So my swing is slow coming back and then there's a big swoosh right the way around to the finfish so it actually feels that my fastest zone is just from the ball and behind, so I'm accelerating through impact. Next time you get yourself out on the golf course pick a target out on the fairway. Work out whether that's where you want to aim the ball and the nice unswooshy straight down the target line, accelerating all the way to target, never decelerating.