Archive for the ‘General Golf Tips’ Category

Hit Your Irons with more Consistency

It amazes me how many golfers don’t know how far they hit there clubs, when asked they normally respond “7 iron 150 yards”
This leads to inconsistency when hitting shots into the greens – mainly coming up short!!

I have put together a cracking video tip on how to control your distances with your irons.

It only takes a minute to watch so please watch it and leave me your comments below.

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

Keep it simple out on the course

It is very easy to get hung up on technique whilst out on the golf course and the ramifications can lead to poor golf!!

It is very hard to work on your technique and work on producing a good score at the same time, so please stop trying to do both.

When you are out on the course you must make it your goal to “free up your mind” on technique and theory. The best players in the world will carry only just two swing thoughts in their mind, mainly just to keep the feel and flow of the swing and those swing thoughts will be dead simple – like smooth tempo or complete the backswing!!

These types of swing thoughts will most certainly help you keep your rhythm and will help keep your mind calm, making it easier for you to focus in on the target and producing a good result.

Keep the club swinging and don’t get to positional as this will lead to a very jerky golf swing – no flow…  

Keep the main swing changes and  swing thoughts for the range as this is your “working ground” for grinding out those good changes.

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

KNOW YOUR DISTANCES

One of the most important aspects of great golf is knowing how far you hit your clubs and controlling your distances with your wedges.

You can learn this while you are practising out on the range or the course, pay attention to how far each shot is going, especially the carry distance. Professionals know how far each club goes and sometimes their caddie knows even better than their player.

Knowing how far you hit each club makes life so much easier out on the course in tournament conditions, it will save you shots during a round. Most amateurs come up short of the green as they overestimate how far they can hit each club.

There are factors to consider and your distances may vary and change due to wind and temperature as well as the kind of ball you use. On average you lose about 2 yards for every 10 degrees the temperature drops, which is why you hit the ball further in the summer than the winter.

Everybody has their 150 yard club in the bag (for most it’s a 6 or 7 iron) so knowing what club you hit the magic 150 yards is a good start. Next you can work out what gap you have between clubs, it’s normally 9 to 12 yards as a rule. When you have all your yardages note them down in a course yardage book so you have all the info at hand during your round.

With your wedges find out how far you hit each wedge with a hip to hip swing length, chest to chest swing length and a shoulder to shoulder swing length. Knowing how far your wedge distances are will save you a bundle of shots during a round.

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

Ernie Els – How I fixed my Posture

I was reading in a golf magazine from a few years back and found an article on the Big Easy. The article was titled “My Craziest Lesson” and how he fixed his posture with the help of US Open Champion Michael Campbell.

The 2005 US Masters was a complete wash out for Ernie as he did not feel at all comfortable in his set up and as a result hit the ball poorly all week. This is very common in golfers of this stature, feel is massively important!

Lucky for him his coach at the time, David Leadbetter, was watching the tournament a week later (the Johnnie Walker Classic) and noticed the flaw in Ernie’s set up.

Ernie’s posture had become slumped and was affecting his golf swing, so Lead put a video together of a current coaching session with Ernie of him in a better position. Lucky for Ernie, Michael Campbell was flying out to the next tournament at the BMW Asian Open where he gave Els the video tape.

Ernie quickly headed to his hotel room where he could watch the video and immediately realised how poor his posture had become. He went out to the range shortly after and started to work on the changes and immediately found that his swing clicked right away – he was flushing it!!

In round two of the tournament he shot 62 with 8 birdies, an eagle and no bogeys. He went on to win the tournament by a mere 13 shots.

The video reinforced some key pieces of advice that every golfer should follow. Work on your fundamentals as these can easily get out of position and this will have an effect on your golf swing.

Go back to the basics often – tour professionals do and tiny changes in your set up can have a huge impact on your results.

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

Article taken from Golf Digest

STANCE

The width of your stance is another foundation to get right as having a stance that is too wide will affect your body rotation.

Also a stance that is too narrow will affect your balance during the golf swing.

The width of your stance will vary a little depending on what shot you are playing, chip, pitch, mid iron to a driver. A good general guideline which will give you both balance and mobility during the golf swing is roughly shoulder width apart for a 5 iron. This means that the insides of your heels should be the same width as the shoulders.

To help you establish whilst you are practising at the range or even at home, is to take a club or alignment cane and hold it across your shoulders to measure the width off. From there you can drop the alignment cane down to create the same width in the stance. This will insure that your heels are shoulder width apart.

When you are practising you should be regularly checking your stance width as well as the other areas of your set up as most swing faults can be traced back to a poor set up position.

A common misunderstanding among a lot of golfers is where to aim your feet, hips and shoulders. More often than not golfers align their stance at the target as opposed to “parallel left” to allow for a good dynamic swing plane.

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

High Soft landing Greenside Bunker Shot

Mark Wood PGA Advanced Professional, has a very easy and effective way in playing a very high soft landing greenside bunker shot. All you have to do is weaken your right hand grip so that the ‘V’ of the right hand is pointing up towards your left collar bone. Keep your left hand as normal but just make this slight alteration in the right hand and watch the results.

Make sure you set the face open a little to add some loft but to also engage the bounce.

Keep your bunker shot swing as normal, coming into the ball nice and shallow, utilising the bounce of the wedge.

Keep the swing nice and aggressive and watch the ball spin.

You can watch the video of the tip here

Go ahead and make someone’s day share this tip with a friend!

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

40 Yard Bunker Shots

The 40 yard bunker shot is one of the hardest in golf to play. You need to be able to treat the shot more like a greenside bunker shot, not a fairway bunker shot.

I have a great way for you to do this and it does not involve your wedges at all !!

Take a 9 iron and open the face of the club a little to engage the bounce of the club and to also add some loft onto the club. Take your normal regular splash shot stance, ball forward, weight forward, wide stance with the centre of gravity set low. From there just make a fairly full splash shot swing and you will be amazed at the results !!

This is how the pro’s play them.

Go ahead and make someone’s day share this tip with a friend!

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

Poor body alignment

A common problem amongst golfers in general!

The amount of golfers who align themselves completely wrong at the address position will have a major influence on how they swing the golf club. You will compensate for this during the golf swing. I have helped golfers tremendously to stop shanking with this just one fault alone. Most golfers from my experience align their bodies too far to the right of their intended target, in a closed position. At some point during the golf swing you are going to compensate for this and it usually happens in the downswing. You are fully aware of where the target is but due to the closed off stance you are going to swing over plane in the downswing to get the club back to the ball. This moves the club much further out in front of you in the downswing leading to the hosel contacting the ball first. Some golfers even lose their balance: falling forwards in the through swing.

Great ways to improve your sense of alignment is to pick a point just in front of the ball (2ft approx.) which is directly on line to your intended target and align the club face square to that point. From here build in your stance keeping as square as possible to that point.

Practise your alignment on the range by picking random targets and working through your pre shot routine of the above.

Another great way is to place down 3 alignment canes on the range, one aligning to a target on the left side of the range, another aligning to a target in the middle of the range and the last one aligning to a target on the right side of the range.

Practising in this manner will most certainly make you more self-aware of how you are lining up correctly. You will instantly be aware if you have aligned correctly or not.

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

“When I was a little kid, I would pretend I had a shot to win the Masters or the Open, to make me try my best.”

                                    Hale Irwin

 The practice range is the only place you can find your faults and work at correcting them without it costing you strokes or money. The same is basically true of public speaking, selling, or almost anything you can think of. Practice allows you to record, film, examine and critique your own performance, in a positive way, to bring about change for the better. That’s why role-playing is such an important part of learning. A delightful TV ad depicts a teenager, playing alone among the evening sprinklers. He addresses his ball, takes a last glance at the green, and says something like, “He needs a birdie on this one to beat Freddie.” Then he hits a shot that comes to rest a few feet from the flag. Picking up his bag he adds, “It looks like we have a new PGA Champion!”

I’m sure you’ve played similar mind games, especially if you’ve been playing golf since childhood. Perhaps you’ve played two balls in practice rounds — one for you and one for Nicklaus. You may even have played tournament rounds in your head. Tom Watson said, after winning the 1977 British Open at Turnberry in an historic battle with Jack Nicklaus, that he played so well because he had done it some many times before. When reporters questioned this, he went on to explain that he had, on many occasions during practice rounds, role-played a one-on-one confrontation with Nicklaus. As a result he was not intimidated by the situation when it finally arose in real life.

I hope you enjoyed the article, any comments or Questions then please leave a comment below..

Until next time I wish you all the golfing success

From Your Friends at Mark Wood Golf Academy

PS. Come down and tee it up to make some magic moments of your own. Check our website at 

www.markwoodgolfacademy.co.uk

Mark Wood

PGA Advanced Professional
UK’s No1 Golf Coach

The Best Golf Lessons in Sussex and Kent

Why stance width is important

Stance width is a very important part of the address position as this will effect how the body turns and moves in the golf swing.

Having a stance to wide will promote a very stable base but unfortunately you will lose a lot of mobility during the golf swing. It will in essence effect your body turn in the backswing and will also make it difficult for you to get your weight into the left side (for right handed golfers) in the downswing and into the follow through. This will cause the swing to get off plane and therefore potentially give you a poor path through impact, tilting the spin axis of the ball. It can also lead to poor strikes, thin or heavy and lack of power and distance.

If you address the ball with a to narrow stance you will have lots of mobility but very poor stability in the golf swing.  You will be able to turn very well in the swing but the loss of balance due to the narrow stance is going to be a major problem. You will start to slow the swing down to keep some balance through the strike, leading to inconsistent strikes and a lack of power.

Try and check your stance regularly to make sure it is roughly shoulder width apart for your long game as this will give you the blend of both stability and mobility in the golf swing.

I hope you enjoyed the article, any comments or Questions then please leave a comment below..

Until next time I wish you all the golfing success

Mark

Mark Wood Golf Academy
Dale Hill hotel & golf club
East Sussex