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Learning to match pieces is key to consistent golf. One component that many golfers neglect is training your ideal tempo. Tempo helps smooth and coordinate complex movements. Tempo also helps serve as a great external playing feel for on the course. Most golfers find that their game will perform best at around 80% tempo compared to their all-out maximum.
Tags: Poor Contact, Practice Strategies, Drill, Beginner
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Sural is 78-90 tempo. So many golfers change their tempo when they get on the course.
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So it's important to train your playing tempo and what you'll notice is under pressure,
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you'll either really speed things up, you'll really shorten things, you'll lengthen
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things, you'll slow them down, everybody's got different tendencies. But having a tempo to fall
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back on helps and what most golfers will find is that when they're swinging at about 80-85%
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of their maximum tempo, they hit the ball better and further than when they swing at 100%.
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So finding kind of your playing tempo and it can change slightly day to day, but finding your
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playing tempo is a good skill to practice on a periodic basis, you know, at least once a month or
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once every other week depending on how much you're training. So what we're going to do is we're
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going to hit some shots and we're going to kind of identify how solid we hit it, whether we swing at
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what feels like nice and easy. So you can even go down as low as 50% or if you're swinging
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really full out hard, whatever you would call 100%. If you're still keeping balance, it's probably
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not really 100%. That's one of my kind of go-to tell tales as to how hard you're swinging.
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But experimenting with, okay, do I play better when I hit it at 70% or 80% or 90%. And
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one of the goals is to have both of your backswing, your transition, and your release, all matching
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that same tempo feeling. So I don't want you to have a backswing that feels like it's 20%
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and then a transition that feels like it's 80. At least not unless you have a specific issue where
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you need to mess around with the timing or the sequencing in a certain part of your swing.
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So for the general practice, we're just going to hit a few shots with a variety of different
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tempos. So first one I'm going to do is we'll go 70%. And that's pretty comfortable, pretty close to my
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playing tempo. Now we're going to step it up a little bit. We're going to try to go to 80%.
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And 80% is still fairly comfortable with for me. I hit that pretty solidly that's getting close
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to my playing feel. Now I'm going to push it a little bit and I'm going to go to 90%.
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90% is usually where I start to have some contact issues.
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And I hit that a little thin and a little on the toe. Doesn't mean that my swing broke down.
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Doesn't mean that I had a technical flaw in my swing. It just means that my sequencing got disrupted
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because of my tempo or my intensity and how hard I was swinging. So now, when you're doing
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little 10% changes, it's often easier to kind of have those little steps.
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I'm going to take a bigger jump and I'm going to go down to 50%. So 50% will challenge my sequencing
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and my release even greater. So I hit that pretty solid, really controlled the flight.
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Obviously, didn't go quite as far but that's a very playable tempo for me even when I'm hitting
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into the greens where I want to control the spin or if I'm trying to keep it down.
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Now I'm going to try and jump to 85, which for most of the time was my playing tempo.
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So I've got this feel of 85%. Try to keep it all the way through the swing.
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And because I had gone from the 50%, I felt that I got a little slow in transition and then
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quick during the release but it didn't have that same 85% throughout feel. Again, doesn't necessarily
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mean that I had a mechanical issue even though I had a mechanical flaw. There's more of a tempo
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flaw where I thought process for flaw. So now I'm going to try to do that 85% again.
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Actually, I'm going to today it feels like 85 is a little fast so I'm going to throw it back to
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even 80.
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Hit that just the touch thing. We'll do one more 80% oftentimes when I do full swings, my left arm
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actually hits this microphone and it can disrupt my timing. So I'm going to try to anticipate hitting
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the microphone and I'm going to try to keep my 80%. So that was pretty good. That's pretty close to
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where I'd want my playing tempo. Now what I can do is I can hit a variety of different clubs trying
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to recreate the same tempo throughout the bag. And I may find that for certain shots like go around
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the green or maybe my distance wedges I do better with a lower tempo. When I get to my driver
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in three wood I may be do better with a little longer but tempo is one of those great playing
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feels that helps unify a lot of mechanics into something that ties everything together into one
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hole which is great for performing under pressure.
