Tips to Sharpen your Game (#9, Tips 28-30)

This is the ninth in a series of blogs to help you simplify your knowledge of golf and hopefully improve your game. [These tips are distilled from an article published by Luke Kerr-Dineen for a GOLF franchise called “Play Smart”.]

28/ Flare Your Feet: If you’re sitting at a desk all day, you’ve probably got tight hip flexors. That will limit your ability to rotate during your golf swing, which will cost you power—and could even lead to lower- back pain. To increase your hip turn on either side of the ball, GOLFTEC’s resident GOLF Top 100 Teacher Nick Clearwater has found one method works almost instantly and easily: flaring your feet. “Turning your toes out 20 degrees—maybe even more—effectively makes you more flexible,” Clearwater says. “It creates greater range of motion in your hips, which produces a distance boost in short order.”

This is a pretty basic principle to help your body rotation. We should all be flaring our toes to extend our backswing and especially the follow-through.

29/ Use Your Logo Wisely: At the 2012 World Scientific Congress of Golf, researcher Dr. Joan Vickers revealed the fascinating results from an eye-tracking study performed on a group of golfers. She found that highly skilled, lower-handicap players tend to keep their eyes fixed on one portion of the ball. Higher handicaps tend to move their eyes to multiple points.

This is not only important for your fairways shots but also for your putting. Don’t follow your backswing or your follow-through with your eyes. Just focus on swinging in a straight line up your target line.

It may not solve all your problems, but keeping your eyes focused on one tight spot is a quick upgrade you can make to your game. Tiger Woods, places the Bridgestone logo on his ball toward the back (where he wants his clubface to impact) as he tees it up. It acts as a bull’s- eye to hit on every tee shot.

30/ Temperature Impact on Ball Fight: GOLF Top 100 Teacher Andrew Rice and PING have studied the effects of temperature on ballflight. A 30 degree drop in temperature from 80 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit will reduce your drive and iron shots by about 6 yards. Warmer air temperature is thinner and causes less resistance for the flight of your golf balls.

This ends the selection of 30 mini tips to simplify your game for more success. BTW Tiger’s father always reminded him that “you only get out of your game what you put into it“. Practice with GOLFSTR+ as a reminder to limit your leading elbow bend and to keep you leading wrist flat in the backswing and at point of impact. You will love the results. Buy one today at www.GOLFSTR.com