Golf Instruction Tips: How to Improve Your Swing Power
When you watch professional golfers, the thing that amazes most people is how effortlessly they seem to swing the club. Yet these same golfers are able to hit the ball astounding distances, often well over 300 yards off the tee. How do they do it?
The answer is proper swing mechanics. Swing power has almost nothing to do with muscular strength. It has even less to do with trying to hit hard. In fact, paradoxically, when you employ more effort, the muscles tend to tighten up and actually work against swing speed. Often the swing is actually shortened when it should be lengthened. The image you need to have in your mind is one of a long, full backswing that builds up power, followed by a momentum-gather downswing that allows you to strike cleanly through the ball at impact.
This general image should put you in the right frame of mind for increasing swing power, but you need to add some details if you really want to get it right. Swing power is generated by the uncoiling of stored energy. When you swing a golf club back, you are coiling your hips, your shoulders, your arms, and your wrists. At the top of your swing, the maximum value of this coiled force is available to you. The trick, therefore, is to hold as much of this force back as possible so that it is still available at impact.
Have you ever heard the term “swinging from the top“? It’s a bad thing. It means that a player is unfurling too early, spending his stored energy at the start of the downswing rather than holding it back. When this happens, a big powerful guy with a huge grunting swing can end up looking ridiculous as he pops his drive barely 150 yards down the fairway. The problem was that he wasted his swing power long before the club head reached the ball.
The alternative is to do what the top players do, to begin the downswing primarily with the arms. The wrists in particular should remain fully cocked for as long as possible. Only when the hands reach the level of the waist should the uncoiling process really get underway. At this point, the hips drive forward with a mighty turn, the shoulders rapidly cross over in front of the body, and the wrists snap through the ball with maximum force.