How to play golf…All you need to know.

Iona meets up with Kristian Baker, her original golf coach to cover the basics of Golf. Finally a video that will help you from the very start, or a video to revisit as you develop your skills!

#golf #golftips #golfswing #iona #ontheroadwithiona

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I’m delighted to say that this is episode one in a very special Series where we are going to take you through the fundamentals of golf and the reason that we’re going to do that is because Christian did this with me about 10 years ago it was actually a bit of a rip boring success wasn’t it Christian it was a phenomenal success I think we you know that that very first year 12 months you came from four to plus4 which was unheard of three course records and you came down when we first met you were a talented Sports person but your golf was kind of rough around the edges it amazing what we achieved in that first year and we literally became like a a student but it almost did a doctorate in golf yeah learning the swing how to play everything it was great fun and we’ve got it all written down and I’m going to share it all with you so I think we can get into it don’t you come on I feel like got homework with me it’s probably more my homework K’s going to talk us through the fundament mentals of the golf swing this is gold this is dynamite this is the stuff that you have to pay attention to and it doesn’t matter what your handicap is if you play off 36 or if you’re a player on the DP World Tour I’m out there a lot of weeks on the DP World Tour and it is 99% of the time the fundamentals that the golfers are working on and I know that’s not exciting I know that’s not what you want to hear you probably want to hear about the things that get them to you know 180 mil an hour ball speed but that’s not what we’re talking about we’re talking about something that can dramatically improve your game today if you get it right and it’s the setup isn’t it so one of the first fundamentals that you and I worked on which we you know we were really specific and detailed on was you was your grip because the grip’s the only thing that is going to control where the club fa is pointing at the moment of impact and it’s the part that without getting that right we you know we’ve got no chance hitting straight shots or whatever shape of shot you want to be hitting so the key thing that we always said was you got to grip the golf club in your fingers the majority of people are always wanting to grip the club in the Palms because it’s a feeling of strength but what it does is it limits our Mobility through our wrists so the key thing we always said was making sure that we get the club position directly across diagonally across our fingers like so and then really fin make sure we hold it in the fingers cave R up into the palm and then making sure it’s the last three fingers of the part that is actually holding on to the club okay a lot of people again tend to get it into their thumb and forefinger here the last three fingers with a pad sitting on top so once we’ve now got your left hand sitting like so we should easily be able to see sort of two to three Knuckles now the thing with everyone’s grip is it’s not one size fits all but this is a a good kind of broad brush way of getting in the right place to start with we can personalize it as we go on you know depending on the shot shape or particular tendencies that you have but the key thing is making sure that we get it in the fingers we have the hand over and this V that we always talk about in golf it’s got to point somewhere towards your right shoulder okay when you bring the right hand on we spoke a lot day one about do we overlap our fing fingers do we go the 10 finger baseball grip or do we interlock and again to be totally honest with you that part makes no difference it’s whatever’s most comfortable and you feel most sort of free to move your wrists around and your hands in that sort of comfortable position but again the key thing is making sure that we get it into the fingers again we don’t want it into the Palm so the spine often golf clubs have a ridge down the back making sure that Ridge sits across the fingers here so when you bring your right hand over this left thumb is sitting in the cupping of your right palm here so the right hand sits over the right thumb sits just on the left side of the grip but really important part most golfers forget is the trigger finger in the right finger here okay you can see there’s like maybe just a 3 or four millimeter Gap there but what that does is it enables my right four finger to sit on the club correctly so I can see this knuckle and that’s going to give me the pressure that we sort of so often hear now about getting compression through the ball making sure that that’s going to give me the best opportunity to do that but when I’ve got my hands correctly positioned on the club here like I said I’ve got the the pressure in the last three fingers in the middle two of my right hand when I’ve got my hands working together it enables me to cut my wrist correctly if I get it too much in my Palms my wrist won’t physically be able to move in the correct way therefore I can’t control the club face to get it back to square every time yeah brilliant I love the way that you’ve described that and I feel like I’m going back in time into one of our lessons I I cannot tell you how excited I am that we’re getting to do this again together KB and and share it with you guys at home because a lot of people always ask me how did you you know go from a four handicap to plus4 and turn professional in such a short space of time and the answer is it’s because of the time that we spent together and having you know real detailed lessons and understanding things like the fundamentals that we’re sharing here that Christian taught me all those all those years ago so the grip’s really important I think you know some of the key points Christian’s covered there is there’s no one grip for everyone but how you grip the club’s very very important and you can’t do anything else in golf unless you’ve established how you grip the club and make sure you do the same thing every time so gripping it in the fingers at the time I used to have an overlap grip yeah and the reason for that was my hand the size of my hands I don’t have big hands you know women often have smaller hands I do and the overlap grip was recommended to me for that reason as opposed to the interlocking grip where sometimes you can need you know you need quite a lot of strength to maintain that grip now because I have uh arthritis in my right wrist I actually have the 10 finger grip because that gives me a feeling of strength down the back of my wrist and I’ve I found that to be very helpful to allow me to play painfree golf so I’ve had to adapt and sometimes you might have to adapt with the grip but it’s really important to practice your grip and Christian and I came up with something you remember KB called the grip routine is yes yeah so it started with the grip routine and I can still remember the grip routine as though it was a dance I learned as a 5-year-old and it started like this you get two fingers at the top so that you know correctly how far down to put your left hand on the grip and you always put the left hand on first grip it in the fingers and then wrap the hand over so the V is pointing at my right shoulder second hand comes in with the overlap at the time into the fingers which R runs down there and over the top my right hand came with my right V pointing up my right shoulder so went like that went like that wrapped it over so I’ve got my V’s in the correct position and then we were always looking for what we called short thumbs so it’s kind of tucking the thumbs into the the palm of the hand rather than having a big kind of long thumb down the grip where again everything’s kind of disconnected the hand the grip when you first learned to do it correctly should feel really really uncomfortable like this feels awful how am I supposed to hit a golf shot like that and I can promise you that after five shots you’ll be like this feels amazing this is this feels fantastic you want a real feeling of kind of com um compact in the grip you don’t want the hands operating separately they have to work together because that’s important for connection throughout the game and throughout your swing but when you’re coming down the stretch if you’re under pressure If you it doesn’t matter who you’re playing you can be playing your dad you could be playing in the Wednesday rollup if you suddenly have a nine iron into that final green and and your two hands are working separately you’re in big trouble you need the you need your hands to be best friends and they’re going to lead you under pressure in the golf swing so the grip’s really important and I used to practice this grip routine 100 times a day and I’d have basically I would get these clubs I would chop off the the the shaft um of old Club pick them up at a thrift store pick them up at a charity shop get some old grips that have feel like a club and I would practice this routine 100 times a day we took it a step further didn’t we in terms of the grip routine we did yeah we I think exactly as you said there we we we knew that it had to become familiar and it was that repetition repetition and the golfing brain is very cynical is isn’t it in the sense that you’re absolutely right in what you said there that you can change someone’s grips you can change your grip and as soon as you change your grip you go the brain goes I don’t like that what it doesn’t like is it feels different and the Brain goes well different is wrong no different just different but we hit four or five shots you hit something two or three good ones and the Brain goes I love that grip now but for you what we did is we had this we got some modeling clay yeah and it was literally the size of your grip and we basically we got it into the shape of your grip and then we just put your hands on it gently we got them into the right position and then you just gently squeezed it to form like a mold and you had three of them yeah I had five of them five yeah had five of these perfect grip molds made out of clay I went down to the local BQ or Home Depot wherever you live and got some clay and then I basically took the perfect grip into what was uh looked like a grip and let them set and then I had one in my car so if I was sitting in 25 I would practice I had one in my living room I had one in the kitchen they were scattered all over the house and it just meant any time I had a couple of minutes I could practice my grip I would pick it up I would go through the routine and before you know it your taking the grip perfectly every single time but that took work it doesn’t just happen without practice and repetition repetition is a key part of golf and it is no different with the grip and I say that to to students all the time now and this is something that that I learned from when we worked together you know was was this how important the repetition was so when I’m teaching the grip now I say to people all the time just leave a a club where you’re going to walk past it five six times a day might be at the bottom of the stairs it might be on the sofa and every time you walk past it just take great care to put your hands on in the correct way maybe just wagle it around a few times and put it down but then every time you walk past it four or five times a day you just do that same routine repeating repeating repeating then you go to the golf course on Saturday having not played a week and this is starting to feel comfortable again now yeah absolutely so that is the that is the first chapter isn’t it Christian the grip is the most important fundamental now we want to talk a little bit about once you’ve mastered the grip and you feel like you’ve got that in a really good place we can start thinking about the way we set up to the ball because we’re ready we’re getting closer to take action now so Christian what do you remember about what we covered in the fundamental address position for golf okay so the the first thing we need to do is to stand B correctly because without that you can’t pivot correctly yeah very very simple what we we used to work on was in order to get the right posture to understand where you’re going to bend from so the key thing is not to bend from your waist above your most people if they make a mistake they Bend from above their Belt Line we got to bend from this knobbly bone halfway down your pocket okay so what we’re going we’re going to stand with your feet with your heel shoulder width apart yeah okay find that nobly bone and think if I’ve stood up nice and Tall with correct posture I’m going to tilt over from this knobbly bone I’m just going to bend forward trying to maintain this spine angle and as you do that your feel your hamstrings tighten a little bit and your weight tends to go back into your heels okay from here we just unlock your knees okay so we’re just going to soften the knees and the weight now sort of sitting through the fronts of your ankles yeah okay but you can feel that you’ve kep this spine nice and flat okay then from there the really important thing is when we grip Club we’ve just been over the grip is your right hand sits lower than your left now in order to get that to work correctly what we don’t want to be doing is just sort of tilting our shoulders like this to get the right hand lower because that’s going to Arch your spine so what we’re going to do is if you take a golf club and you want to go from your tailbone so right down the base of your spine yeah to the top of your shoulder blades okay if you hold that clubber there and again we’re going to get into that good posture we’re just going to tilt over from that hip joint we’re going to unlock our knees we can feel the weight through the fronts of our ankles now what we want to do is just tilt this golf club or cane just a little bit say four or five degrees to the right and as you do that imagine your right shoulder naturally now moving sort of a centimeter or two below your left okay that’s now naturally going to help your right hand sit lower than your left on the golf club okay okay so once you’re into this position to how do you know if you’re the right distance away well what what you want to try and find if I just put this on the ground is once you’ve got this correct posture here all you want to feel is your hands hanging down underneath you so if you get into your correct posture yeah clap your hands a few times and you’ll feel your hands just hanging down and when you look at them they’re going to appear sort of just outside the front of your toes but we want your hands to to return to this natural hanging position when we swing so we need to start this so as we get into our posture your hand should be just relaxed down underneath you so they’re not stretched out because that’s not when you’re Swinging The Golf Club they won’t return to that stretched out position naturally or if they’re too close to you they won’t you got no room to swing yeah so we getting into our posture and we’re just having our hands naturally hanging down and that’s going to give you the distance that you then want your hands and your legs to be away from each other yeah great that makes a lot of sense I’m just going to go through that so I’m going to get myself tipping from just below the waistline and I’m going to get my club to feel my spine angle I’ve got a little bit of flex in my knees and then I’m just going to tip a little bit to the right and that should naturally get my right hand make sure my grip’s good yeah my right hand a little bit lower than my left my my my shoulder angle as a result is a little bit like four or five degrees to the right and then in terms of the right distance from the ball a really good point that Christian makes you got to make sure that that arm hang is natural not reaching not too close that we’re claustrophobic but there’s a natural hanging of the arms if you take the hands off the club is your arm hanging very naturally now I’ve had a tendency if you’ve watched any of the other videos on the channel the TPI video specifically to get a little bit reachy and that that has implications later on in the swing which we’ll talk about later but for now what are some of the key mistakes that you see golfers making in this setup Christian because you coach loads of people you’ve coached the very best in the game and brand new beginner golfers so what do you see the mistakes I think one of the one of the main ones is is tilting from too high up and then we tend to sort of slouch into it this way so it’s important we understand where we’re tilting from I think the other one is making sure where the weight is in your feet we want the weight to be positioned somewhere sort of at the front of your ankles in the middle of your shoes and just making sure just close your eyes and just as you get into your posture just feel am I on my heels or on my toes and is it equal between both feet I think the other one is how people again tilt to the right yeah because this is massively going to swing as we come further into the series about your swing plane is making sure that we get the correct the right shoulder sitting lower than left but in the correct way because so many people they know they got to get the right hand low on the left so they literally just drop their right shoulder down but again that’s then just doing it through your thoracic spine just bending so we’ve got to make sure that we get this tilt in order to get the hands correctly but making sure that we’re doing it keeping our spine in a nice straight Direction brilliant fantastic KB thank you for going over that I really don’t think you could go over this stuff too many times it doesn’t matter your level of golf and for me this is perfect timing to be revisiting a lot of this because I’ve had a few months off golf it’s the depths of WI and now is the time that we can really kind of nail into this uh these fundamentals so we’ve spoken about the grip and we’ve spoken about the body position and the way you address the golf ball the third fundamental is the ball position and this might be the most important of them all Christian take it away how do we know where to put the ball so as on was saying that you must get this correct and the easiest way and the most reliable way suddenly when you’re under pressure on the golf course you want a simple way of getting the ball position correct easiest way in the way that would always coach it now is for all of your irons we want the ball 4 in inside your left Hill okay so then for a pitching wedge I’m going to have my right foot slightly narrower than shoulder width and you can see relatively speaking that brought the ball into the middle of my stance then as I move to a six iron I’m going to move my right shoulder sorry my right foot out to shoulder width and that’s now move the ball relatively speaking nearer to my front foot so what we’ve done is we just have a simple 4in gap between the ball and my left heel and for all of my arm iance I just leave it there and I just move my right foot in as the club gets shorter to round about this width for a pitch and wedge and then I move it out just slightly wider than shoulder width for say a three iron and again that’s relatively moved it forward but as long as you’ve got that Gap 4 in inside your left Hill it’s a much easier way to get this constructed on the golf course under pressure for your woods and your rescue club for a rescue club we’re going to have it 1 in inside your left Hill and again the right foot is going to be just slightly wider than shoulder width and then for my driver I’m going to have the ball now just opposite the inside of my left heel and I’m going to move my right foot out a touch further so it’s now even slightly wider than my shoulders but I’ve what I’ve got here now is I’ve got a easy way every time to be able to repeat this I’m not guessing it’s easy it’s repetitive and I get it right every time that sounds really simple I hope that you’ve been taking notes because that is such an important part of learning this wonderful game of golf and it’s something that so many people get wrong and you might be missing the ball right missing the ball left and going oh my swing’s totally useless your swing’s not totally useless and more often than not it’s the tiny little things like the ball position if you just tweak a little thing little tiny inch here and a tiny inch there you’ll find that you’re actually hitting perfect shots down the middle of the Fairway ball position is something that can be so often overlooked so please pay attention to the ball position when you’re practicing and when you’re out on the golf course now we’re going to talk about the next step which is Swing path an attack angle and actually understanding how do we swing this thing around our body and that is something I remember at the beginning finding very confusing because a lot of the things we do in life like throwing very linear a lot of the things we’re working in this kind of linear fashion it’s not often we have something in our life where we’re suddenly rotating and it’s important to understand how that works we’re going to try and make this as simple as possible for you aren’t we Christian yeah and I think also how the two are linked yeah so you know how you’re we he this word Club half but what exactly does it mean um and how you know why is the angle attack how does that change as well so yeah I think the easiest way of explaining it is is just using this simple sort of large hula hoop and if we place this sort of if we were to take a a cross-section from from one end the other and that was parallel to the Target line okay what we can see here if we use this red dot at the bottom here is we can see this is the angle that we swinging the golf club around so if this giant if I was stood in the middle of this giant hula hoop yeah this is the angle that I’m swinging my arms in the golf club around yeah okay so all we’re trying to do exactly as you said there is how do we take this and move this Golf Club in the right direction if you just imagine this hoop here and you’re swinging your arms in the golf club around this hoop that we see here on the way back down and then also on the way through Y and then in terms of how does that affect our our attack angle what we can see here is where the Red Dot there is is the low point in the swing as we move that ball position to the left of that red dot I the ball position move forward for my driver catch it on the upswing if I move the ball back relative to where I had it I’d be hitting more down on the ball which is what we want for an eye we want to be striking down on the ball for our Ires but for our driver we want to be hitting up on the ball I’m just going to creep in here and explain that a little bit just you explain it perfectly Christian but I’m going to move the ball a little bit just to just enhance what you were saying so if the ball goes back relative to this Arc you can see the angle of attack here is down everything about is moving down because the swing is coming from this direction as soon as we reach this red point and continue we’re now traveling up and wherever the ball is on this Arc will determine whether you’re hitting down or up on the golf ball so it’s a really really important point and I think as you say there as well n is that what we don’t want is we don’t want to be influenced we don’t want to be physically trying to hit down on the ball we want to let our motion and our our setup dictate that in the right way so if I’ve got the correct setup if I’m moving the golf club around my body correctly I’ll strike down on the ball with the correct path correctly or hdden up on it correctly with a driver so we use our setup and our understanding of the golf swing to dictate that without us forcefully trying to hit down on it or trying to hit up on it because then we create faults to fix other faults yes here we’ve got zero faults because we’re doing it all correctly from the start from our setup and this this mental understanding yes so if I can just step in here now KB now that we’ve got that visual of the blue hoop you can think of that however you want but it’s this kind of concept of an arc rather than straight up and down something very linear we are not dealing with something linear in golf we’re dealing with rotation and as a result this Arc that goes back down down down down down down down to the bottom of the arc and then up up up up up up up all the way through to our follow through so it’s a really helpful visual I hope to understand what people are talking about when they’re saying the golf swing is an arc and you’re swinging on an arc now this gets to the fun part I can finally hit some balls I’m going to hit some balls try and put a few of these principles into action and then in our second video the second in this series we’re going to take a look at some of the technical aspects of my golf swing and break that down further so that’s still to come but for now I’m going to smash a couple okay so I’ve got my eigh iron here which I think seven or an eigh iron a mid iron is is always quite a good place to practice you want to practice every Club in your bag of course but I’ve got my eight iron here and I’m going to think about the things that Christian has gone through with us today I’m going to take my grip first of all I’m going to make sure that my stance is correct my body position I’m sort of tipping from this bone here nice spine angle right shoulder lower than my left ball position looks pretty good standing a nice distance from the the ball and off we go we are golfing thinking about that Arc which can be a really helpful thing to visualize you know sometimes even though I’m a professional golfer and I play golf probably more than most I still go through this grip routine it’s actually incredible how I still go back to it and I’m really glad that we’re doing this series together right now because my game’s feeling incredibly Rusty I know that all my old habits creep back in and in the next series the next episode of this series we’re going to talk a little bit about what I’m seeing in my golf swing and some of the things that we need to do technically to swing the club well so let me hit one more getting these fundamentals correct felt nice there we have it I’ve got a little bit of work to do no doubt you do as well because this is something that you will work on in your golf game the fundamentals for the rest of your life Christian thank you so much for coming on the channel today thank you for having me it’s been an absolute treat and this is a video that while it might not be you know the 100 miles hour Club headp speed and the Fast and the flashy the these are the fundamentals of golf and if you want to improve your game in 2025 these are the things you have to get right so please come back to this video as many times as you like cuz it’s totally free and on that please subscribe don’t forget to do that that helps us to make more videos like this for you Christian thanks again next episode number two coming to you very soon and we’ll see you next time [Music]