Improving your swing, really means improving 1 thing about your swing. What is the golf club doing at the time you hit the ball? Where is the face pointing, what direction is the head moving in and what height is head at or what upward or downward angle is the head approaching the ball at?

Improving your swing is about learning how to control the set of conditions that exist at impact. The direction the face is pointing in, the direction the club head is moving in and the height of the club head at impact. This is what all swing improvement is about. We need to control where the ball will land, to do this we need to control the balls’ starting direction, trajectory and curvature.

Face
The face of the golf club should be at right angle to a line from the ball to the target.

The Path
The path of the golf club should be the same as a line from the ball to the target.

The Height
The height of the club head should be that it will impact the middle of the ball to the middle of the golf club face
With an iron about 1/3 up from the sole.
With a driver about 1/3 down from the top of the face .

As our swing improves we will approach this set of conditions with higher levels of accuracy the ball will start straighter, fly straighter and achieve the correct height thereby landing the correct distance away.

Improving your swing will mean different things at different points of your development. At the beginning swing improvement will be achieved by reducing large errors of movement. As you practice and improve the refinements will become smaller and smaller. As will your ability to feel and sense the smaller errors and smaller differences between swing errors.

This is regardless of what the swing faults might be. To determine what swing improvements you need to make you need to consult a trained golf instructor. Someone who has both the latest most up to date information and is also a good communicator. Knowledge is useless if the instructor can not impart that knowledge to the pupil in a clear concise manner so that the pupil can take the information away and be able to put that knowledge to use every time they play and practise.

In Australia the Professional Golfers Association ( PGA ) spends years training professional golfers to be coaches of the highest standard. Many other countries have similar organisations.

There are 3 main traps that golfers fall into when trying to learn golf and improve their swing.

1. Assuming that golf does not look that hard and trying to teach themselves by trial and error.
2. Learning only from a well meaning relative or friend.
3. Learning only from a publication either a book or a series of magazines.

The main problem with all these methods of golf improvement is a lack of feed back. One of the main focus’s of my business is to teach adult beginners in groups. This is something I have done for over 15 years and have taught over 4000 golfers in beginners classes. Now my style of coaching these group lessons is to give about a 30 minute talk at the beginning of each session followed by the class trying to put that information into practice. During the practical session I expect to see at least 10 different versions of that days’ topic. This is true for each week and each skill that is being taught, putting chipping, irons, bunkers and woods. Everybody in the class interprets the words differently as they would reading a book and I’m sure without individual swing correction the result would be the same for books, magazines or friends.

The crucial aspect of golf swing correction is understanding the difference between what they are doing and what they should be doing. To have a way of learning how to change from their interpretation of golf to the correct technique and have a way of monitoring improvement. Peolple do not try to do the wrong thing on purpose, every one is trying to do the right thing.
However because they can not see themself they realy have no idea of what their doning, wrong or right.

Even under the best conditions without monitoring progress, golfers who have all the right information and are practising the right things can over achieve and end with exaggerated movements. Once you have learned something you can stop practising it or you will start to over do it. There comes a time when you have learned the task and can stop trying.