Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

There is lots of components that get put together to create a really good golfer, but it might be someone has got the great long game, someone has got a great short game, someone is great at putting, someone is great at chipping. But actually to be a really good golfer we want to have some of all of those attributes in a game. And there is one sort of overarching principle that you'll see amongst all of the good players, and that is they are good ball strikers.

Now out on tour you would say that everybody on tour is a good ball striker, but there are still some ball strikers that are a class above everybody else; but at club level the different swings you go play and your high handicappers often comes down to the quality of the ball striking. Now ball striking sounds like a fairly simple term. It's just how we strike the ball, but there’s lots of different components that make up ball striking.

We ought to make sure that we are hitting at the right height, so we’re not going to be too high or too low that would be thin, that would be fat shots. We've got to make sure that we hit the middle of the club, not too much the toe, not too much the heel. We've got to make sure the angle of attack is right, that’s why we don’t want to be too steep or too shallow going into the ball. So all these different principles go together for us to try and hit that middle piece right in the middle of the golf ball, and the sweetest spot on most irons is around about the size of your thumbnail. It's not a big target and you're trying to hit that target with the club travelling sometimes in excess of 100 miles an hour. We’re trying to hit that sweet spot the size of a thumbnail.

So clearly there is lots that needs to go in to being a really good ball striker, and one of the key principles that I feel is overlooked by lot of golfers is not just keeping your head still because you look at a lot of players, they don’t always keep the head still even on the toe players heads going up and down, left and right; but keeping your eyes level seems to me to be a bigger principle that we should be striving to get right.

So as we set up to the golf ball we want to try and keep our eyes level and during the swing any change to the position of your eyes is probably an indication that something else is gone slightly amiss within your swing. So if we can keep our eyes level that should encourage us to be a better ball striker, but also having this one simple thought when you go and play of just focus on your eyes being level the whole time.

We’ll often encourage you to push to the back of your mind some of the oldest swing thoughts that might be trying to crowd into your brains, try and get your attention. Maybe swing thoughts that aren’t going to be positive towards your golf. Things that are going to be detrimental to your golf, too many swing thoughts is never good for players, so focus on keeping your eyes level is a really good swing thought. So try and make your golf really nice and quiet, nice and simple, and ultimately improve your ball striking.