You need great hand-eye coordination, balance, athletic ability and creativity to play golf. The biggest concerns of golfers today are inconsistency first of all, followed by slicing and distance. Finding ways to improve your golf game, then applying what you’ve learned and practicing, is the number one way to get ahead of the game.

Approach the game with a positive attitude and repeat affirmations if you can, such as “I play great golf all the time.” Visualize where you would like the ball to land, as you swing. A common mental error golfers make when driving the ball is to hit it as hard as possible.

Try not to grip the club too tightly. Make sure to use the proper technique. At the end of a backswing the hands are above the right shoulder, with the golf club pointing more or less in the intended direction of ball flight.

Swing slowly and steadily using a nice rhythm. Standing over the ball for too long a time and wondering whether you’re going to swing the club correctly can easily result in a skewed shot, or completely missing the ball. Accomplished golfers purposely use sidespin to steer their ball around obstacles or towards the safe side of fairways and greens.

Ask your golf pro to evaluate your posture while swinging. At the end of a swing, the weight has shifted almost entirely to the left foot, the body is fully turned to the left and the hands are above the left shoulder with the club hanging down over the players’ back.

As the body matures, the ability to rotate the upper torso is affected by age, and the hand action can also slow down requiring a slightly stronger grip. After the ball is hit, the follow-through stage consists of a continued rotation to the left. Putting can become a nightmare and a condition called the ‘yips’ has affected not only amateurs but professionals as well; get expert advice and consider a golf swing aid.

Many golfers have improved their golf game by concentrating on golf fitness. The golf swing is mostly rotational so it makes sense to concentrate on your turning ability as it relates to range of motion and speed. Conditioning your golf muscles will reward you with straighter swings.

There are golf swing aids that act as driving range simulators. Golf swing aids come in all shapes and sizes including apparel type accessories to correct alignment or a golf club add-on accessory to monitor your swing. If you’re looking for an aid to improve your stance they’re not hard to find.

There are a number of good golf swing aids on the market today. Look for golf swing aids at your local golf course. Make sure to look for reviews and ratings online for any golf swing aid you’re considering.

Overall, investing in golf swing aids will greatly improve your golf swing and your golf game. Ask an expert, who is not associated with the shop you would buy your golf swing aid from, for advice on the right aid for you. Whether you’re a seasoned golfer or just starting out, pick just one golf swing aid and go to work on your swing.

There are golf swing aids that will help you with swing alignment. Keep in mind that with some golf swing aids, you may still need advice or help from an expert.

There are hundreds of useful golf tips to seek out in golf magazines, consumer magazines, sports magazines, in books, ebooks, DVDs, online and offline. If you can, sit in on a friend’s golf lesson to see if you connect with the pro. If you apply both physical and mental workouts, golf swing improvement will be your reward.

By: Helen Hecker

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Putting a golf ball can be difficult at the best of times. For many people, when they have problems putting, they try everything under the sun including a various string of new putters. But the main thing they forget to do is to go back to the main, basic fundamentals. Most times they simply need to correct the problem they may not realize they have. Follow along as we give you a few brief golf tips that will help you to putt more consistently.

Putting tips have to be very simple in order to be effective. Over thinking disrupts concentration on the putt and only makes things worse. That’s why it is so important to return to the fundamentals when you can’t seem to putt as well as you did previously. Quite often, when people start to putt badly they develop the yips, the term that applies to the herky-jerky putting motion that creeps in. The main cause of the yips is misalignment. You can correct this by consciously making sure your eyes are directly over top of the ball along the line of the putt. When people end up with misalignment problems it’s usually because their eyes are not dead center over the line of the putt to the hole. Your eyes can be directly over the ball or a little behind it but they should always be dead center in the middle of the golf ball along the line of the putt to the hole.

Here are a couple of putting tips to help you make sure you are lined up over the ball properly. Almost every putter in existence has a straight line painted or etched on the top of the putting blade. Always make sure that line is pointed directly through the ball to the hole. You should be able to tell fairly easily if the line is angled a degree or two off the line through the ball to the hole. But here is an added, unique little tip that will help to make your aim a little better. Mark your ball, pick it up and look for the lettering. Now, when you set the ball back down, align the string of letters so they are aimed directly at the hole. Now when you set back up behind the ball, the line on the top of the putter should aim through the letters in a direct line to the hole. Now instead of guessing, you have some visible markings to help you determine if you are set up properly over the top of the ball with your putter square to the hole. This is a method used by many of the top professionals on the tour today.

Putting strokes can come and go even for the best of professionals. Sometimes our eyes can play tricks at us when we think we are set up properly over the ball. Whenever you have problems on the putting greens, it always good to resort to do the basic fundamentals. Get back to the basics and you will soon be dropping them into the cup again in no time.

By: Lee MacRae

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Today its slowly becoming commonplace to see tour professionals putting with their eyes closed in tournaments. In fact a growing number of players use this golf putting technique in practice. Another common trick is to look at the hole rather than at the ball while putting. The golfer Johnny Miller used the technique at the 1994 Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The technique is widely believed to be helpful to golfers with yips.

Medical research has indicated that golf players with yips have rapid eye movements (REM) during the stroke. It is the eyes which transmit necessary information to the brain. Golfers who use the eyes closed or focused on the hole technique receive information about the club head, putter momentum and stroke path through the hands.

Why do players adopt this golf putting technique and what are the advantages of using the closed eye technique for golfers? These techniques are most commonly used by golfers who struggle with their stroke during their golf putting practice. When a player is low on confidence, he can get relief by focusing on the hole rather than the ball or by closing their eyes completely. This technique leads to mental clarity, almost like getting physically away from the pressure of the situation. Moreover it allows the golfers’ own confidence and feel for the course to take over and dispatch the ball to its destination.

Here is a golf putting tip with closed eyes technique. Place three balls 10 feet from the cup, and three more each at a distance of 20 and 30 feet. At 10 feet putt the first ball as you normally would with your eyes open. As you putt the second ball, start as you normally do with your eyes open. Before you actually putt, close your eyes. Try and focus on the feel of the putter head during the stroke. Mentally guess where the ball will end up once it stops rolling. Repeat the procedure for the third ball from 30 feet and close your eyes just before making the stroke. Repeat the procedure at each three-ball station. When you incorporate this golf putting drill into your practice routine, you will steadily develop a better feel on the greens.

Can individual golfers use these techniques? As far as individual golfers are concerned, experts believe it’s probably not a great idea for an individual golfer to close his or her eyes during play. However the recreational golfer can certainly use the closed eye technique in their golf putting practice routines. This golf putting technique should help golfers develop better feel in their putting stroke.

For More information on putting, check out this collection of putting tips: Golf Putting Technique

By: John Davenport

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Do you remember when you were much younger and putted like youth possessed? You were fearless and confident. You just felt that every putt was going in.

What’s happened since then? Why do we now stand next to our ball on the putting green and have all these negative thoughts rushing through our heads? And it just keeps getting worse the older we get.

Sam Snead holds the record for most tournament wins at 82 official and 70 others over his career. At the end of his career, he made the statement “I’ve shot a charging elephant at 10 feet that skidded to it’s death at my feet and I was never as scared as I am at a 4 foot putt.”

What is going on here? Here is a man that knew how to win, obviously. He knew how to hold a putter and use it as well as anyone for 4 decades. And he was afraid of 4 foot putts! He developed such a bad case of what is known as “The YIps” that he went to putting “croquet” style, or rather, putting between his legs.

This enraged the purists after he won a tournament putting that way that they immediately put a new rule in that said you have to stand at the side of the ball. Bobby Jones was said to be instrumental in getting that rule changed.

So what does all this have to do with us and our golf putting game? Everything. Have you put two and two together yet from the ideas presented here?

We go from total fearlessness in our youth to a complete wreck as we get older. Why is this? It’s because we store all those misses over the years in our unconscious golf mind storage facility. You see, it’s very easy and lazy for us to think about what went wrong and that’s because we are hard-wired to do that as humans.

For instance, way back when we were all farmers and cave dwellers, when we made a mistake with our efforts at providing food, clothing and shelter, it could result in death! So we would constantly be looking at our mistakes to see if we could do the task better next time. We would run the problem over and over in our mind until we went about the task again, this time hoping to do it more efficiently so that we could eat or escape the weather! Going over our errors was a matter of life and death in those days.

Fast forward to today. We still do the same thing with our daily tasks. We get feedback from something we attempted to accomplish and then work on improving how to do the task better the next time. This works well for us when we are talking about using our conscious mind to do things. Unfortunately, it wreaks havoc on our golf game because your best golf, as you know, is played with your UNconscious mind.

So every time you miss a putt you thought you should have made, your unconscious mind begins to store it as another failure. The older we get, the more failures we have stored up in our memory banks. These failures get presented to our conscious mind right when we don’t want them to; when we have a crucial putt that we believe we should make.

Youth doesn’t have that problem because, well, they just haven’t missed that many yet. Even Tiger Woods himself has said recently that when he was young, he just felt like every putt was going in. Every putt! This suggests that even HE gets the doubts at times.

So what do we do about this so that we can start putting with the mindset we had as a teenager? Because we all know that confidence is everything, especially in putting. Shoot, there’s even a book by a famous golf psychologist about golf and confidence.

The answer is to release the negative emotions, decisions, beliefs, and attachments we have to the memories of all those missed putts in a Gestalt we’ve created in our unconscious.

What? What the heck did you just say…Gestalt?

Ok, without getting technical, since it’s the Unconscious Mind that stores these memories and brings them back up at the worst time, we have to find ways to communicate with it on it’s level. The only ways I know of are Hypnosis, NLP, and Timeline techniques.

I’ll write more on those modalities in other articles. Greens and fairways,

By: Craig Sigl

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