By keeping your golf swing simple, you'll find yourself avoiding many of golf's pitfalls. (Mike Anderson)

By doing less with your golf swing, you will get better

By Chuck Evans,
Special Contributor

As I stand out on the tee line it always amazes me to watch people "practicing." One might take the club to the top, stop and look at it, and say, "Yeah this is what I want, this is great." Then they get settled into their address position heave the club back, not even getting close to their practice stroke, have almost uncontrollable amounts of motion, swaying, bobbing, etc., and still hit the ball.

I truly admire players like this. It takes a tremendous amount of athletic ability to strike a golf ball with some of the motions and positions I see everyday.

So athleticism, or lack of it, is not what hurts golfers and their games. What hurts is their perception of what they need to do and all of the gyrations that are going on. I've seen more Elvis impersonators on the tee than on stage in Las Vegas.

As I tell the players I work with, "It's always harder to do less." What I mean by that is if someone has a lot of body motion, twisting and turning in their stroke it is extremely difficult to not not have any un-golflike motions.

here are so many things going on in a golf stroke that we need to move as few a pieces as possible and in the smallest amount of space. Watch figure skaters at the end of their routines. They start with their arms out and away from their bodies but as they pull their arms inward and closer to them they start speeding up until finally their arms are crossed against their chest they are whirling so fast are sometimes just a blur.

Address positioning is the one time that anyone can look as good as any PGA Tour player … unfortunately it's usually all downhill after that.

As players we really need to do only three things to dramatically improve our ball striking.

1. Set our "Alignments" - the left arm and clubshaft angle and the right forearm and clubshaft angle.

2. Take these alignments up a Plane and down a Plane.

3. Add clubface control

While these three items are simplistic there is a lot that go into them and these also must be learned. At our Medicus Golf Institute "GeoMetrics" Golf Schools players learn and come away with a complete understanding of their games, how to apply the above three items to their games, and more importantly how to own these three items for the rest of their golf lives.

Try doing less in your stroke, you will get better!

September 15, 2006

Chuck Evans, G.S.E.D., a Golf Magazine Top 100 Teacher, is one of only 31 golf instructors worldwide designated to hold a doctorate in golf stroke engineering. He is executive director of instruction for the Medicus Golf Institute and has served as director of schools for the PGA Tour Golf Academy, and as director of instruction for the United States Golf Institute. He is also the author of "How To Build Your Golf Swing."