Steering Your Golf Swing

February 8, 2008

Driving a golf ball is like driving a car.

From talking with other amateur golfers, I have come to realize that there is a misconception about what it means to steer the ball or steer your golf swing. Golfers have a wide range of habits, from swinging away without even looking at where their target is to watching the club head during their backswing instead of the ball.

Steering, in the bad sense, is the latter. It means consciously trying to affect the club’s path at each moment as you are swinging it. What happens when a golfer hears the advice “don’t try to steer the ball” is that they start doing the formerly mentioned, just swinging without a sense of purpose.

You steer your golf club the way you steer a car. When you steer a car, you focus on where you want the car to go. Then, through practice and experience, your mind and body work together to make the car go there without any conscious thought needed. Using the same analogy, the bad type of steering would be to, instead of watching the road and letting your subconscious take care of getting the car there, you would watch the steering wheel and attempt to adjust it every time you needed to turn the car. This would become very difficult, because if you are focused on watching the steering wheel, you lose focus on where the road is. That’s why we watch the road, not the wheel.

The same holds true for your golf swing. I suppose a good way to say it is, “steer the ball, not the club.” You need to be consciously aware of where you want the ball to go, and you do need to be thinking about it while your swinging. What you don’t need is to be aware of exactly how you need to do it. Let your subconscious work out exactly how the club is going to get to where it needs to be, which is swinging down the target line.

Written by John at 3:23 pm. Full Swing