Extension, Extension and Extension in Golf Swing

Extension!
This practice needs to be emphasized over and over again, and the benefit will be greater when players comfortably execute the entire swing from address, take away, back swing, downswing, impact, all the way to follow-through.  Here, a lot of great components are included such as swing arc, swing plane, swing width.

By extension, we mean that stretching out as straight as possible for back swing as well as follow- through.  Many tips and lessons have been provided with each tip with different presentation.

 

Good extension with the golf swing will encourage a wider golf swing arc. This leads to more power and distance and better contact with the golf ball.  Keeping the arms straight through the takeaway, impact area, and beginning of the follow-through while maintaining good swing extension will more likely to produce straight and powerful ball striking. 

I’d like to introduce what Moe Norman, a legendary Canadian Golfer, has taught long time ago.  As you may remember, he wanted to hit/touch the point with club head straight almost two feet away while taking away the golf club.  This is the first half extension. 

The second half extension would be to hit another point which would be in more than 30 inches forward while doing follow-through.  Imagine how wide and straight the swing path and plane would be.  He used the unique swing postures and methods, and he showed us a lot of great points we can adopt for more solid and straight golf swing. 

Practice more and more on extension until this will be very comfortable and natural to you.  This exercise, without any doubt, will help to generate a great ball striking.

Face Angle of Driver at natural lie and at address

It is worthwhile to notice that there are varied differences in Face Angle of Drivers when they naturally lie on the ground at address.  Some club may have Closed angle and other may have very neutral.  Most of modern drivers have somewhat closed face angle when they are lying on the ground. 

For Driver, handle would be positioned slightly behind the club head when addressing the ball to promote hitting the ball at upswing. 

This is when some conflict can happen between natural grip and club face.  In other words, golfer may have to intentionally rotate grip a little bit to the right (especially when Driver has Closed face angle at natural lie) to make Club Face square to the ball.  This would be a very delicate extra effort on grip, but this could also be a source of less-perfect hit (or club face not perfectly square at the time of impact).  In this case then, it would be better to choose Driver with neutral face angle. 

 Author recently noticed that Driver on the market has more or less neutral Face Angle rather than Closed Face angle.  Please remember there are some Driver that really encourage draw, and this type of driver would have much Closed Face angle. 

Player should pay more attention to what kind of Driver to choose next time.  It would be really worthwhile to experiment the ball striking with Drivers with different face angles.

Golf Swing Posture with Bending down enough

Good posture in Golf swing is very important. 

Posture has to be stable from the beginning to the end finish. In particular, the degree of bending down or tilting is so critical that this may be a one of  dominant factors for the stable and consistent ball striking.

Good posture is grounded in a forward tilt or bending down from the hips -- not the waist.  There may be a specific degrees of bending down, but please remember to bend down enough about 30 degrees or more.

Please see the picture of late beloved golf legend and international icon, Mr. Arnold Palmer when he was young and a very dominant player.  It is quite surprising to see how he maintained the degree of bending down from the hip. Try to accommodate this posture to your golf swing and see how differently you will strike the ball.  This picture was featured in 2017 Golf Digest magazine and is also available in public site.
I am sure we can learn a lot from this picture. 

Thanks be to Mr. Arnold Palmer and he will be missed for a long time and for many generations.
I hope you can improve golf swing this time significantly.
Thanks.