Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

An interesting way of considering someone’s golf swing is almost like an orchestra. An orchestra has all these different component parts. And when they are all put together nicely, we get a lovely tune. But if the conductor is not doing a very good job and the different parts of the orchestra are not working together, it’s all a bit of a mess and it doesn’t really work. And sometimes a golf swing can look like that as well and it only takes split second fractional timing or mistakes in the timing to create the mess for a golfer and also for the orchestra.

So, when we see a golfer set up to the ball, it kind of way with the things that need to happen. We’ve got this nice pasture. We’ve got this shoulder rotation coming back to the top. The hands and arms set the club in a good position. Then we’ve got the hips leading the down swing. The club drops in. The club starts to lag, then the club starts to release and then we come through to a follow-through position. And I can make that swing quite nicely as a right-handed golfer.

Now, if I make myself left-handed and believe I do occasionally practice left-handed, in case I’m teaching left-handed clients, I feel like I’m doing exactly the same thing. I feel like I’m putting the club in exactly the same sort of positions from a left-handed perspective. But I tell you why. It doesn’t look anywhere near as nice. And when I hit the golf ball, it goes nowhere near as thought and that’s the real case of having all the right notes, but not necessarily played in the right order.

So, it’s the orchestral play in their own different bits brilliantly, but not working well together as a team and you’ll often see that in a golf swing that they are trying to do all the right bits and then when it comes to hitting the ball, it just doesn’t fly very far and this is all about the timing of a good consistent golf swing.

So, next time you are the driving range, try and work on making sure that you have really good timing between what is your back swing and what is your down swing. And a good way of feeling that is that the shoulders turn all the way to the top and just before you get to the top you initiate the down swing. You’re almost the conductor. You are turning the back swing around and then you start the hips going forward. So, you are turning the back swing around, then you start, your hips going forwards, and hopefully that will result in more power rather than turning one, then turning the other and that little stop/start isn’t the orchestra not quite playing in time.