The Swing, Part 1
"Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try."
What is the golf swing? Is it the magical combination of tempo and coordination coming from a knowledge of secret moves that only a very few can master? Are those who possess this knowledge sworn to a lifetime of secrecy? If so, lock your doors and pull the shades because you are about to learn it all. And, if you are willing to spend the time and effort you can learn a swing that is productive, fundamentally correct, and seemingly effortless. I can only promise you that it can happen and not that it will. The swing will not appear overnight, and it will not be yours without a lot of hard work, but if you combine what you will learn in this article with the platform there will be no one in your way but yourself.
The first secret is that you have to learn only one golf swing. I talked about that earlier and that's right, only one swing. You remember in the section on stance we learned to position our hands in the same place every time. There is a reason for that position. It is the starting place for every swing. We have set positions for the ball. We couldn't do that unless we had a repeatable swing, and a repeatable swing is the same swing. That means that each swing is like the one that went before. Every full swing will start in the same place, and you will take your hands to the same place at the top of the swing with the same cocking action, and you will bring it down the same way and release the wrist cock the same way every time. You will swing exactly the same for every club, and you will learn to rely on your golf clubs to produce different distances, trajectories and spins.
Every golfer has a swing tempo. The tempo is the time the swing takes for you to move the club away from the ball to the top of the swing and back to the ball again. Since the swing is the same for every club, the tempo is the same for every club. Your swing tempo is unique to you. Your hands start in the same place for every club and go to the same place at the top of the backswing and end up in the same hitting position. Average tempo on the tour has been measured at around one second. That is not a goal to attain; it is just to give you some idea of what the tempo is on the tour. Your tempo could be slightly faster or as much as a half-second slower.
Every golf swing has a plane or a route that it follows. This is true both of the backswing and the downswing. How you set up to the ball establishes the angle of your plane. As you rotate while maintaining your stance, it is your shoulders and your arms with the club that create a plane around the core of your body. Your reaching left arm will keep the club extended throughout, and the club head will remain in front of your body as you rotate. Your stance will determine whether you are an upright-plane swinger, a flat-plane swinger or somewhere in between. There are advantages to each type.