Have you spent countless hours trying to find the best swing and the fixes to your common mistakes? If you are anything like myself, the first place you go is YouTube or Google. What if the best place for us to go was back to ourselves instead of anyone else’s input? As someone who just recently converted from being a high-level collegiate baseball player to a golfer with a handicap below 4 that was my answer to success.
I spent countless hours roaming YouTube to analyze players such as Rory Mcilroy, Jason Day, Dustin Johnson (DJ), and the list continues. All those guys are extremely reputable names in golf, but one thing I noticed is that they all have different swings to account for their individual body and play type. Whether it's the notorious wrist set position of DJ or the sweet short swing of Jason Day they all were different but had one thing in common: They have all been world number 1 at one point in their career. That begged the question, how did they all do that if their swings are different? The answer to that question is they mastered their own swing, just as we need to try and do each day.
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Instead of spending countless hours trying to change and looking for golf swing help, or trying to get more rotation like Rory or force ourselves to set our wrist like DJ; what if instead we took our natural swing and tried to be the best at that swing. That is what I did and found success.
As I mentioned I recently switched from baseball to golf around a year and a half ago and have found success in understanding my own swing and feeling throughout it. That does not mean there are not different positions I could get better at, or my impact point couldn’t improve because they can. What I am suggesting is that many of us amateurs and professionals alike spend countless hours trying to change our swing instead of fully understanding it. We think by changing our swing it will get better and will improve when in fact you may be hurting it.
For example, if I tried to go out and get more rotation throughout my golf swing such as Rory, my ball would be all over the course because I can’t rotate like Rory does. My body can’t get into positions that Rory does and neither can some of the professionals he plays against each week, but they still win and succeed.
So, the next time you go out to the driving range or are sitting at home thinking about what you can do to get better, I challenge you to analyze your own swing and what you feel throughout it. I know that when I go to my local course there are people that when they swing, I think “How does that work?” I have even asked them before and I remember one gentleman told me one day “I know my swing from the beginning to the end and how to get the face square.”
That was the first time I thought to myself, “I do not need to swing like Rory, DJ, or Jason, but instead I need to swing like Joe Gregory.” As should the rest of you because at the end of the day we are not Rory, DJ, or anyone else but we are ourselves and we should swing like ourselves.