Get your arms and body working together with this simple drill
By Cennydd Mills

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lot of amateur golfers struggle to get the most out of their body turn when hitting shots. Once your arms start moving independently from your body, it becomes difficult to strike the ball consistently. Here’s a drill to help if you tend to suffer from this swing trait.

Grab a golf towel and hold it under both arms before setting up to the ball (as shown in these images). You’re going to hit shots ensuring that you keep the towel held in place, but here’s the thing – it’s very important that you don’t try to make your full swing. What you’re looking to feel is how your arms and body should work together through the hitting area. So you only want to make a half backswing. Once your hands get past hip height and the club hinges up, go ahead and hit the ball. This drill forces you to use a lot more rotational energy to strike the ball. Golfers who struggle to rotate and get onto their front foot through impact can really benefit, but most importantly, your sequencing is going to improve.

Getting your arms and body to work together is vital for good sequencing.

It’s very difficult to get your downswing sequnce right if your arms have separated from your body turn on the backswing. So by syncing this up going back, you’ll start to see a much more solid strike on the ball, and a little more compression too.

Cennydd Mills is a PGA Teaching Professional at Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club. For more information, visit dubaigolf.com

Photograph by Farooq Salik

Related: How to get set up for hitting crisp, powerful iron shots

The post Swing drill: how to get your arms and body in-sync appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Choose your club depending on length of shot and pin position
By Jack Woods

During any round of golf, it’s a given that technical mistakes are going to cost you shots. But many amateur golfers compound this by losing more shots with rushed decisions. For every shot you face out on the golf course, you should always ask yourself: ‘how do I make getting the desired outcome as straightforward as possible?’. This is especially applicable to the more technically challenging shots, like those from greenside bunkers.

Pictured left on our Academy Par 3 course at Dubai Creek is a greenside sand shot to two flags. It’s automatic for most players to see their ball here and reach for their most lofted wedge without thinking too much more about it. Sure, for the tight short pin, this is unquestionably the right club. You want to pop the ball up high and soft with minimal roll.

But what about the shot of about 20-25 yards to the longer pin? It’s far easier to play it exactly the same way as the short pin, but just drop down to a pitching wedge. You can make the same swing, and take the same amount of sand, plus your margin for error goes up. By minimising your variables, you can give each shot its best chance of success.

Jack Woods is a PGA Teaching Professional at Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club. For more information, visit dubaigolf.com

Photograph by Kristina Nabieva
Photo Illustrations by Clarkwin Cruz

The post The easiest way to become a better bunker player appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Try this quick exercise for an easy fix
By Jack Woods

One of the most common faults I see with the golfers I teach is an inability to release the clubhead correctly. This stems from a subconscious desire to keep the clubhead square to the target through the hitting area, but the result is the hands staying ahead of the ball and a very open clubface at impact, sending the ball way off to the right. By not releasing the club you automatically give up clubhead speed as well, so you lose both accuracy and distance. Players who exhibit this fault tend to struggle to achieve that nice, full finish position.

Failing to release the clubhead leaves it wide open at impact.

So, here’s a drill to help you fix it. Simply take your club and grip it the wrong way around, so the handle points down to the ground and the clubhead is in your hands. Make a few practice swings and focus on that ‘swoosh’ sound on the downswing. Because you’re swinging with the lighter end of the golf club, you will automatically start to groove a better release with your hands through the hitting zone. After making a few swings, flip the club around and hit some shots. If clubhead release is something you struggle with, you should see a bit more speed in your swing and a fuller, sweeter hit through the ball. Give it a try and good luck!

Jack Woods is a PGA Teaching Professional at Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club. For more information, visit dubaigolf.com

Photograph by Farooq Salik

The post Want to release the golf club better through impact? appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

On fast greens, speed matters more than read
By Mike Kinloch

As a rule of thumb, the greens out here in the Middle East – certainly at Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club – run pretty quick. If you want to score well, you have to have a good control over your speed, because there are few things more frustrating in golf than a three-putt.

The drill I’ve set up here is the best way to practice your pace putting, while keeping it fun at the same time. I’ve used cones to mark out five distance stations, but you can easily do the same with tee pegs. The first cone is at six feet, with the remainder all exactly one club-length apart up to 18 feet. For an amateur golfer, if you can start holing a few more from this range then great, but what we want to avoid at all costs is taking more than two putts to get down.

Two-and-a-half feet behind the hole I’ve placed an alignment rod, which you can substitute with a golf club. The game is simple. Each putt must finish beyond the hole but stop short of the rod. Running a ball more than three feet past the hole leaves a tricky one coming back, while from this range, it’s important to give every putt a chance of going in. You get one point for every ball that finishes inside this ‘two-putt’ zone, and two points for holing it. If you leave a putt short of the hole, or a ball hits the rod, you’ve lost the game and have to start again.

You want to leave a stress-free tap-in for your second putt.

One technique that I’d recommend when doing this exercise is to look directly at the hole when making your practice stroke. You’ll teach your brain to associate the distance with the correct length and rhythm of your stroke. If you want to make things more challenging, all you have to do is increase the distance of the stations. If you make this exercise a regular part of your putting practice, you’ll start seeing those three-putts disappear from your card.

PACE-SETTING
Learning to judge the correct pace from six to 18 feet will automatically make you a more consistent long-range putter, too. From this distance range, a good week for a tour pro can mean the difference between a mid-field finish and a victory. For amateurs, it’s the range where you would hope but not necessarily expect to hole putts. Making sure you take no more than two to get down is priority No.1, and if your pace is good, a few more will start dropping.

Mike Kinloch is a Senior PGA Teaching Professional at Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club. For more information, visit dubaigolf.com

Photograph by Farooq Salik

The post A putting drill that will improve your pace on six-18 footers appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.