Golf Tips: A Steady Head

When Mr. Homer Kelley wrote his popular book The Golfing Machine he listed the three Essentials to a good golf swing. In this post we take a look at the first Essential -maintaining a steady head in your golf swing and why that is important.

I think one of the reasons that many golfers have an issue with head movement in the lateral sense is because of old style teaching phrases like “keep your head behind the ball”.  My first question would be, where was your head when you set up to the ball?  If you are playing the ball off your left heel or left shoulder with a driver then yes your head would be behind the ball but hopefully still in the center of your shoulders as if looking at a camera on a tripod.  For a wedge hopefully you have the ball positioned in the center of your shoulders so your head would be on top of the ball, not behind it.  Now if you make your back swing and have the thought of staying behind the ball with your head on the down swing we have a problem? Your swing center has moved on the down swing and you will tend to hit behind the ball, the dreaded “fat shot”.

Part of learning to keep your head steady is learning how to pivot properly and we will take a deeper look into this subject in future video posts. But for now just remember the average human head is about 7% of your total body mass and we don’t want that much mass moving around in your swing!  So just remember, where your head position is at setup depends on where it should be at impact.  A steady head leads to stable balance and better impact.

AGI: play better golf.