You Won't Get a Good Swing From A Poor Posture

80% of what goes wrong with a bad golf swing happens before the club even moves.

That may sound counter-intuitive, because all too often we get caught up in swing mechanics -- swing plane, release, follow-through and the like. These are important, but as it with all things, you really need to start with a sound base in order to make all of the swing elements come together and get a good result.

This I know in spades, as I have recently entered into a small mini-slump from a ball-striking standpoint, one in which I find I am pushing the ball to the weakly to the right and either not getting long draws off of the tee box or hitting targets on my approaches. That in turn has led to too much defensive golf, which makes a day out with the regular foursome a little less fun (and profitable) that it normally is.

Like most amateurs, I have tried this drill and that adjustment, hoping to get the club back into "the groove" -- that seemingly effortless swing where the golf club almost finds its own way back and through, sending the ball on the right way towards the target at impact. None of it worked. These adjustments weren't going to ever work either, because I have discovered that the problem lay in the foundation. I took a lesson last week and the second I saw the first video of my swing, I knew exactly where the problem lay: I was slumping over the ball with a poor stance, and that gave the club little chance to rotate through correctly. So now I have something to work on -- redeveloping the habit of a proper stance.

Here's a video from professional Bryan Pemberton, the Director of Instruction at the Reserve at Spanos Park in Stockton, California. Pemberton is a former NCAA All-American, and in this video, he describes in precision a problem many golfers have but never realize: