Faulty alignment can ruin your shots before you swing a club. Aiming the body somewhere other than parallel to the target will make a good swing bad and a bad swing even worse.
Learning to align yourself properly doesn't require physical skill or years of experience -- just attention to detail.
Proper alignment means setting up with your knees, feet, hips, shoulders and clubface square to the target line. But do you know what it feels like?
It's a common mistake to drift and twist unknowingly into faulty alignment positions. That's why it's so important for your body to recognise just what square feels like.
Lay a club on the ground and stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, parallel to the shaft. Take another club and make an imaginary address position: knees flexed, bent forward slightly from the hips, back straight, and arms hanging from the shoulders.
Without changing the body position, lay the club in your hand across your knees. Is it parallel to the club on the ground? It should be. Do the same for your hips and shoulders as this will give your body the feel for setting up square.
When you reach the mid-fifties, certain things will start to change, you'll start to get tired and enjoy the odd short nap during the day.
The muscle twinge which used to take a few hours to get over will now take a few days, and you'll find yourself saying things your dad used to say. Loud and aggressive people will become a pain in the backside, and you'll prefer people to speak their mind and you will do the same without the tinge of embarrassment.
The senior golfer must try to accept these realities and by dealing with them, will continue to stay competitive.
Recently a well-known famous player was quoted as saying: "The time will come in every golfer's life when the things you could get away with as a young man eventually stop working".
Young nerves get older, muscles lose flexibility, hand-eye coordination isn't what it once was, and they all conspire to reduce the effectiveness of a big, wide action reliant on the talent of a youthful body to compete. As the year's tick by, we will all lose distance.
This is a function of losing both power and flexibility. As we get older due to arthritis, tightened ligaments and losing muscle mass, we will lose club head speed and raw power therefore, distance is compromised. Our clubs become heavier and our turns, shorter.
Our tempo changes and so does our swing. A lot of this depends on how we hit the ball before. If we had more of a short, upper body swing that delivered raw power at the bottom through sheer hand speed OR if we drove the ball with our legs OR if we uncoiled our back to swing through the ball, all of these may need to be changed. This is why many senior golfers go through phases when they shank, top or duff their shots especially if they try to hit if far or over hazards.
Out of Bounds: Old George shuffled slowly into the clubhouse after his usual 9 holes and pulled himself slowly, painfully, up onto a stool. After catching his breath, he ordered a banana split.
The waitress asked kindly: "Crushed nuts, George?"
"No," he replied, "Arthritis."