Instructions

A long, flowing chipping stroke is never a good idea if the goal is to be consistently accurate with these shots. Take the club back too far, and you’ll be inclined to decelerate through impact and dump it. Good chipping is all about acceleration, so let’s make sure your focus in on keeping your speed

Now that we’re into the NFL season, watch how quarterbacks throw, specifically how the elbow leads the hand until they release the ball. That’s a big reason they throw with power and accuracy, and it’s a motion you should copy in your swing. Discussions about the downswing usually focus on the legs and hips shifting

Max Homa’s first win on the PGA Tour, the Wells Fargo Championship in May, might have been a surprise to some, but for him, it was about seven months in the making. His coach, Les Johnson, worked with him in Arizona for a couple of days late last fall after Homa made only one of

When you’re standing on the tee with your driver, I’m sure you’re not thinking about distance control. It’s all about how far can you hit it. A 3-wood is a different story. Whether you’re using it on the tee or from the fairway, you should think about hitting the ball a specific distance. That’s why

This summer, I got to experience baseball’s version of the first-tee shot. As honoree of the PGA Tour’s 2019 Houston Open, I threw out the first pitch at the Astros game on July 23. With a few deep breaths and a little advice in my head (Aim high), I chucked a pretty good one, as

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome. Don’t be insane. You might have struggled in your end-of-the-season tournament, outing or event, but it’s time to change that for next time. Don’t repeat the same bad shots that cost you the victory the next time

Be honest: When you miss a green, do you grab your favorite wedge without even looking at the shot you’re about to hit? Tsk-tsk. That’s a major difference between pros and average golfers, and one that’s easily fixable. The pros examine the lie, the green, the slope—a variety of factors—before they plan to hit a

Arnold Palmer didn’t leave behind a tutorial on how to live the perfect golf life. Which is just as well, because his life and golf game could never be copied by rote anyway. To play the game as well as he did and look so good doing it, to be adored so thoroughly by the

Some people might have been born to be World Long Drive champions, but you can’t always tell by looking at them. Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher Bernie Najar met Kyle Berkshire, the newly minted, 22-year-old champion, when Berkshire was a scrawny, pre-growth-spurt 12-year-old hoping to make his high school golf team. Fast forward to 2019

Consider all the times you’ve been ready to hit a shot and something changes, like a sudden gust of wind. What do you do? All too often you probably just hit—and hope. Hope that you have the right club, or that the wind won’t put you in that front bunker. Great players develop a sense

Hard to believe, but summer is almost gone, and Labor Day weekend marks one of the busiest golf weekends of the year for amateurs. Whether you’re playing in a tournament, have a couple rounds lined up or an ambitious three-day holiday buddies trip, you need some solid advice to set you up to play your

The old swing tip, “down means up,” suggests that you should try to hit down on the ball for more height. That might work if you have speed, but for most golfers, down means down. In other words, line drives that don’t hold the green. To boost trajectory, you need a higher launch and more

No doubt you have a few holes on your course where another 10 or 15 yards off the tee would make all the difference. It could mean getting to the green in two or setting up a wedge approach to a tough hole location. Now imagine if a few simple adjustments could give you that

We all want to hit the ball with extra oomph, but the way some golfers try to generate more power leads to mis-hits—with the ball usually being weakly struck off the toe of the club. So what’s going on? In golfspeak, you’re getting ahead of the ball. When you start the downswing, you lunge toward

In 1919, reigning PGA champion Jim Barnes put out the first “modern” golf-instruction book. It was called Picture Analysis of Golf Strokes, and it gave the average golfer a chance to see how the best players swung the club. In the hundred years since, almost everything about the game has changed—including how we learn from

It’s hard to imagine a more varied collection of swing styles than the ones we saw win tournaments in 2019. From the perpetually-reinventing-himself Tiger Woods at the Masters to Cameron Champ, Matthew Wolff, Shane Lowry and even Justin Thomas last week at the BMW Championship, players are showing that we’re entering an era where there’s

Students often ask me how to play particular shots, but golf isn’t cookie cutter. I give guidance, but I want them to own the process. They should experiment and determine what works best for their game. A prime example is chipping. To be a great chipper, you must first commit to a system. Do you

It’s one of the best moments in golf—hitting a green after winding up in a fairway bunker. If you want to do it more often, you’ve got to make some adjustments. The first is a reality check. There are times when it’s just not going to happen. A ball close to the lip or in