Golf Club Distance – Your Clubs or Your Swing?

Most golfers are obsessed with golf club distance. They seemed to think that their game hinges on how far they can hit that ball. In an effort to increase their average club distances they will try almost anything, including wasting a lot of money on clubs that are supposed to help them get more distance. 

Here's the problem with that: most golfers are not hitting the ball as far as they could be with the clubs they already have. Buying a hybrid club will just mean that they will have one more club in their bag that they are not hitting as far as they could with. That can be fixed in our swing. 

The key to hitting a golf ball far is in your club head speed. The faster the club contacts the ball the more distance you will get from that golf club. Here's where the amateur makes his first mistake. Hitting the ball harder is not the same as hitting the ball faster. When you attempt to hit the ball harder your body ends up doing the exact opposite of what it should be doing to hit the ball fast. 

First off your body needs to be relaxed. Trying to hit the ball harder will tense you up. Your knees need to be relaxed especially if you want to swing your club as fast as possible. Tensing up will cause you to hit the ground behind the ball and not your forward momentum. 

You also needed to have your body properly balanced. An unbalanced body means that at some point during your swing, you're going to need to expend energy to stay balanced. That energy could be directed at the ball instead. 

The second mistake that most amateurs make is not following through. As soon as the club has made contact they are done with the swing. This is another area where trying to hit the ball hard slows your swing down. When you are focusing on hitting the ball hard all of your energy is directed at the ball itself. This causes you to mentally want to stop when you hit the ball. That anticipation makes you subconsciously start to slow down before you even make contact. 

The target of your club should always be where you want the ball to land. If you've properly addressed the ball and have done a proper backswing, the ball is merely a stopping point on your way to swinging the club towards that target. 

So the bottom line is, that if you're looking for more distance from your golf clubs, you should first address whether or not your swing is keeping you from hitting that ball as far as you'd like. Once you get your swing down, then take a look at buying some new clubs.