For many of you, the week of the Masters constitutes the start of your golfing season. Even if the weather isn’t great where you live, after you watch the tournament it makes you want to go play. As this is the 25 years after the greatest Masters Tournament, the 1986 Masters, it brings me back to a philosophy that many legendary coaches bring into the start of any season. Revisiting the basics. Every year, Jack Nicklaus would go to his coach, the legendary Jack Grout and say,”Let’s start over and review the basics.” Grip, Posture, Ball Location and alignment. The great UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden would start every season by showing his players how to properly put on their socks as to not create blisters early in the season and jeopardize valuable practice time. Coach Halas, the Green Bay Packers coach started every training camp by introducing his players to,”Guys, this is a football.” No one is too good for a spring brush up. My mini-tour players and advanced tournament players always start the season by asking me to check their grip and posture because they understand that without these things being in place, the rest of the swing is working on a faulty foundation. So this is a call to action for all of you golfers out there getting ready to start your season. Before you start to practice and in grain some bad habits, go to your coach and ask them to begin with the basics and work from there. You will be glad that you did. Here is a video that I did last year that will give you a head start to checking your grip and posture. Two of the most important basics that will help you put the ground floor on the house of your 2011 golf swing.
To schedule your lesson with the Guru and get your season started off right call 704-542-7635.
See you on the lesson tee,
Coach Guru
The Golf Guru Show 
Agreed Guru, it’s always a good time to check basics.
I would like to pose a question: Shouldn’t solid posture be addressed PRIOR to grip? Because if I have lousy posture and what appears to be a solid grip, yet the club is in the right position, don’t I by default have a bad posture AND a bad grip? In my mind the grip is a slave to posture, so the posture needs to be good before the club should be even held. Another way of thinking of it is if I have a posture that involves too much arch in the low back (S posture) and not enough bend at the hip sockets, if I take the proper grip I should not be able to get the club to the ground, but players will naturally take whatever grip is necessary to get club to ball. This is how a bad grip can be cemented stemming from flawed posture, and we know how hard it is to change a grip once it’s been ingrained. I suggest that after posture, alignment is next, because a faulty alignment can also create a flawed grip. I would like to change the adage of GPA to PAG.
Let me know your thoughts on this concept, after all you’re the guru and I’m just an accountant (a busy one right now!)
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