Golf: A Game of Consistency not Distance!
by James Palmer
Unlike football and some of the other popular team sports, golf is not a game of size, strength, and quickness. Maybe for this reason, golf is one of the most difficult and most frustrating games for many Americans. In the end, the deciding factor in who wins a round of golf is rarely a matter of who hits the ball the farthest. However, that seems to be the focus of so many amateur golfers worldwide. They swing harder and harder and read tip after tip from the golf magazines or wherever so that they can hopefully hit the ball 10, 20, or 30 yards farther with their driver or irons. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, but there are simply more effective ways to improve your game. If your goal is to win a long drive contest, go ahead and continue to work on your distance. But if you want to lower your handicap and impress your friends, there are more important things for you to perfect. Probably the most important thing you can work on with your driver, woods, and irons is consistency. Without consistency, you can hit the ball a mile and still score a 100 at the end of the day. How is consistency achieved? A lot of it is just a matter of practice. However, without the right mechanics, no quantity of practice will result in the same swing time after time. To use an analogy, a basketball player achieves the highest shooting percentage when he does exactly the same thing every time he shoots. If the shooting motion is too complex with too many moving parts, he will have a tough time developing consistency in his shooting motion and will most likely shoot a much lower percentage. This is why basketball coaches teach the simplest, most effective, and most repeatable motion they can when they teach players to shoot properly. This same idea applies perfectly to golf. To improve your score, you will need a simple yet effective swing that you can duplicate over and over again. For most of us, this does not come natural. Trying to emulate the professionals’ swings or trying to follow each separate tip we pick up from the television or our golf magazines will result in too many variables and a very erratic swing. This is why many amateur golfers are all over the place and never really know where the ball will end up when they hit it. Luckily for us, there are resources that we can use to help us out. They are readily available to us and are provided by people who really know what they are talking about. Many of these resources are very cheap and can be purchased for about the same price as a round of golf (or much cheaper, depending on where you golf!).
About the Author
James Palmer writes on golf and golf swing technique. His review of the top 5 golf swing systems is available at http://info-about-stuff.com/betterswing/golfreview.htm
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