Popular Golf Advice Seniors Should Avoid (And What to Do Instead)

If you’re a senior golfer, there’s a good chance some of the advice you’ve been following is actually holding your game back. In this video, Peter breaks down 4 of the most common “tips” that do more harm than good — and what to do instead. From forced lag to dangerous speed drills, you’ll learn how to protect your body and build a more consistent, effortless swing that works for you.

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All advice is well-meaning, but there are some contingencies with it. And some of that advice is not so good when taken on face value. Let’s have a look at some of the advice that’s given out commonly that seems really helpful but is easily misinterpreted. Hi, I’m Peter Knight and I’m created this channel, Peter Knight Golf, to help you play the best golf you can. Today, we’re going to look at some of the misconceptions and some of the that can create trouble for you in your golf. Let’s look at how you can avoid them and what to do instead. The first of these pieces of advice is that if you swing the club faster, you’ll hit the ball further. Now, all things being equal, that’s true, but it’s the all things equal part that’s the issue. If you hit the ball from the center of the club face, if you have your club face aiming at the target, and if you strike the ball with the club meeting the ball on the ground at the same time with your iron shots, then yes, the ball will go further. It’s hard to do that though just by trying to make the club go faster and make your body go faster because you’re sacrificing balance. You’re sacrificing the timing and you’ll certainly be sacrificing those elements that I just mentioned. It’s very tricky to strike the ball correctly. when you just move much much more quickly. You’re far better off to first of all develop rhythm, develop the timing in the swing, and make sure that the elements of contact are right. Can you hit the ball consistently out of the center of the club face? Practice that with doing things like putting a shoe powder on your club face. Hit some shots and have a look at the strike pattern. If it’s not quite what you want, then practice putting maybe putting TE’s either side of the ball so that you can start to develop the feel of hitting the ball out of the center of the club face. The second is can you hit the ball and the ground at the same time? If the club swings through at the wrong height, if it swings through too high, you’re going to hit it thin, too low, you’re going to hit it fat. Then those things aren’t going to be helpful either. And can you have control of the club face? So the club face is aiming straight at the target when you strike the ball. If you don’t have control of those things, then swinging fast is just going to lead to the ball going further offline. The mish hits being more mit. So get those elements right first, then look at developing that speed. When you’re practicing, practice hitting shots at different speeds. So when you hit some shots, practice making swings that are less than full pace. Imagine pushing hitting a few shots that are pushing longer than full pace. What you’ll find is that there will be a sweet spot speed that you can have control of the movement of the club and still strike the ball correctly. So find what that is rather than just going flat out. The second piece of poor advice is trying to hold on to a lag. Now, most players when they’ve got that advice, they’ll I see on the range, they hang on, hang on, hang on. There’s so much tension here. Now, the club when it swings down and through is never going to meet the ball anywhere near correctly doing that. There’s loss of control of the club face. There’s a buildup of tension is absolutely massive. Yes, we want the club to trail and catch up as the club’s approaching the ball. That’s going to accelerate the club and give you momentum and help you to hit the ball further. What we don’t want is for it to be a held motion. So, what we need to do is to practice building up this feeling of how the lag actually works. Lag is really just trailing. So, if I move my arms backwards and forwards, you can see when I change direction at the start of the down swing, the club keeps going even though my arms have stopped. So, it’s the club’s movement that’s hinging my wrists, not me hinging my wrists. Then, I want to time the motion so that as I’m swinging the club back towards the ball, the club is going to straighten out and hit the ground where I want to. And ideally, the club will swing into line with my left arm as I’m striking the ball. And we’ll see this with so many good players. So, club trails and catches up. Trails, catches up. My club’s hitting the ground in exactly the same spot every time. Now, this does involve the body as well. But if we focus just on arms and hands for the moment, and I’ve got freedom with my body, then I can start by making small swings. So, if I’ve even though I’ve got a sixiron in my hand here, I can make small swings and try and get the feeling of keeping that lagging movement until the club meets the ball. So, I’m not trying to manipulate the club so much as play with the swinging motion of the club as it swings back and through. If I activate my hands or if I hold on, then I’m not going to be able to utilize that lagging or trailing motion properly. So, it’s get the tension out so there’s no held motion in there. The third thing that we can look at is how the body moves being centered. When I swing the club back and through, if I either keep my balance on my left leg and just spin around my leg, I’ll say stay quite stable, but I won’t necessarily be able to generate the power that I could otherwise if my body moves around. So, this idea of center doesn’t mean that you’re in a static spot. If I set myself up and now I going to pivot around the center of my body, as I turn back and through, you can see that my body’s spinning. my hips sort of almost look like they’re moving towards a target. So again, it’s not going to help me to be able to move correctly. If I think about my body’s center of mass and how it should move when I swing back, my my body’s center of mass, and I can demonstrate that just by holding a golf ball against my belly here. As I turn back, you can see that the ball moves across to my right and up in the air. But if you look at my right leg, my right leg hasn’t shifted sideways. So I turn back. I allow my center to move across here without my hips sliding. So I can feel more pressure in my right side here. Now from here, this is the key thing. Rather than just spinning my hips back the other way or trying to bump my hips sideways as I swing down, I feel like my body’s center actually moves down and forwards a little bit so that again I’m not getting these big angles and I’m not actually spinning my body really quickly. So this I’m allowing the center of my body to shift a little bit to the right and a little bit to the left during the swing. If I shift too far, I’m going to overbalance. So when I swing the club back and through, one way I can check that is if I imagine I’ve got a line up the outside of the right side of my body. I turn around that line and that line which connects my right leg, right hip, and the right side of my head is still on there at the end of the back swing. When I start my down swing, I’m going to allow my body to drift slightly towards the target before the turn starts. So there’s this little drift and turn, this combined drift and turn which shifts my body mass forward there. So it’s not this big bump. It’s not just a twist. It’s a combined movement. Now when I get the feel of that motion shifting from foot to foot, one, my body’s center of balance stays contained so that I don’t overbalance either way. And second, it doesn’t become just a spin. And what that does is that builds up different torqus in my body. The lateral movement, a little bit of vertical movement, as well as the rotational movement. And once I’ve got the sense of that, then I’m going to be able to work less with my arms and hands and still be able to develop power in my shot. So, if we watch the motion, going to make a nice free swinging movement. And you can see that my the center of my body does move around, but if you watch my head, it should have stayed pretty steady. I hope it stayed steady during that swing. The final piece of advice is on hitting down. I see so many players who sort of try and hit down and throw the club down onto the ball. And as you can see, that dramatically affects the path that the club’s following and my body movement as well. So, I lose stability with my body and I’m certainly going to be taking a lot of really big divots and not striking the ball correctly. So, instead, let’s have a look at what actually happens when I move the club toward the ground. The club is moving down. As the club gets close to the ground and begin and makes contact with it, the club, think of the club as still moving down, if I don’t move my body, when I turn my body, my shoulders going up. So now we’ve got this combination of my shoulders going up, the club’s moving to the ground. What that does is it flattens the strike point where I’m swinging through. So that’s why my club when it swings to the ground isn’t just moving in an arc toward the ground. It actually has a flat spot. So what I need to do is practice moving the club to the ground so that it just clips the top of the grass perhaps takes a little bit of a divot or if I’m on a driving range mat it might go into the mat just a couple of millimeters. Not very much. Now, if you’re watching it, you probably won’t even see the club strike the mat, but you’ll certainly hear and feel it. When you’re on the grass, of course, you’ll see that the the grass clippings will fly up or you’ll take a little bit of a divot as well. So, my intent when I’m swinging the club to the ground is move the club to the ground, but don’t try and hit down or don’t try and drop my body. My body is quite stable when I’m swinging down and through. So my body stays stays up, my arms move towards the ground, the the club will move to the ground. And again, because my body’s turning as I’m as I’m getting close to the ball, I know that that’s going to flatten the strike point. So because the strike point is flat, I’ve taken a divot, which is a pretty even depth all the way through. If my club moved in an arc, then the middle of the divot would be a lot deeper than the rest. But what we can see here is that the divot is actually fairly uh shallow, but the same height all the way through. So, the best thing to do is to practice swinging the club toward the ground, allowing the club to meet the ground without chopping down or dropping down. The other thing, too, is if I’m moving correctly, I’m more likely to have the club swinging on the correct path. So practice all of those things. So in the video we’ve looked at four well-meaning but not necessarily helpful pieces of advice. Now I hope I’ve sort of clarified how you should interpret that advice so that the person who’s trying to give it to you to be well-meaning actually does help you. If you found that advice useful and you’d like to find out more, then you can download the free videos that I’ve linked in the description below to help you strike the ball better and play even better golf than you currently are. If you’d found this video helpful, then I’ve created another one where I talk about three shots that are enough to give you the basis for a really solid golf game. And you can watch that in the video linked here.