Golf Tips – Ball Position Part 2
In my last article I described where you should place the ball in your stance. Many people got in touch with me to explain further where the ball should be in terms of being forward or back in your stance, and on reading the article again, I notice I spent more time on distance from your body as that’s the area I had most problems with.
Whereas, it appears most of you are more concerned with the other aspect of the ball position. Just proves once again how varied we are as golfers! I revisited the notes I made during coaching, and realise there is more to say on the subject, hence this second part of the article.
To quickly recap the first part, you should place the ball away from you based on the club you’ve chosen for the shot at hand. With the driver having the longest club shaft, this means the ball will be furthest from you for the driver, and nearest to you for the shorter clubs.
What I learned to do in terms of positioning along the line of the swing, then, was position the ball at different points depending on the club. So not only are we placing the ball at different distances from ourselves dependent on the club selected, we’re also positioning it at different positions along the swing plane, also based on the club we’ve chosen.
Based on the length of the club shaft again, the ball will be further up the line of swing for the longer clubs. With the driver being the longest club, when using this we should place the ball right near the front of the stance, along the swing line. ie opposite or nearly opposite your left foot for righthanded golfers.
The driver is the longest of the clubs, and requires more of a rounded swing than any other clubs. Because of this, we don’t want to hit the ball too early in the swing, so when we place it near to our front foot, we will be hitting the ball on the upswing rather than the downswing.
99% of the time for amateur golfers, the driver will only be used from the tee, so placing the ball on a high tee will combine with this technique of hitting it late in the swing, to hit the ball up off the tee and give us a clean and long strike.
For the other clubs, of course, we don’t need such a big swing or to hit the ball on the up so much, so we position the ball further back from the front of the stance, with the middle of the stance (directly in front of our eyes) being the ideal position for the shortest clubs.
Mike Jackson runs an online golf equipment store, where you can buy golf clubs, golf balls, Christmas golf gifts, golf bags etc.
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