Using Lines of Flight to Improve Your Golf Swing

Series Summary

Though Musselburgh, Scotland is home to The Old Links, oldest golf course in the world, golf is rumored to have begun in the Netherlands in 1297. After seven hundred years it still follows the same basic premise: hit a ball into a hole using a stick; the person who gets it in the least number of hits, wins. Today, a golfer may have any number of sticks, called clubs, made up of wood, graphite, or titanium. Each club has a specific use depending on the type, whether it’s the driver for an opening long ball, the wedge for shots out of the sand trap, the putter for the last short shot into the hole, or a variety of irons for anything in between.

The game starts with the first player placing a ball on a tee and driving it hundreds of yards down the fairway. Therefore, having a proper and efficient swing is one of the most important aspects of your golf game. Techniques for gripping and swinging confound even PGA tour golfers sometimes.

In these free videos, learn the proper way to swing a club, whether you’ve never hit a golf ball before or you have 20 years experience in the game. Our swing coach has deconstructed the perfect golf swing, breaking up the essential elements into manageable sections. Watch these clips, and get fundamental techniques for addressing the golf ball with the club, ball placement, timing and tempo, and wrist positioning. Practice these exercises to improve your golf swing. Repeating the right things over and over is the best method for becoming a great golfer.

Video Transcript

"Hello I am Arthur DeBolt on behalf of Expert Village. We are going to cover in this lesson the intro to setup. What I mean is that, when you walk up on the golf course and when you find your ball as it is sitting here, the first thing you want to know is what do I do first? Am I supposed to just walk up here and hit my ball, or should I know where I want the ball to land? And that is what we are here for; I am a swing coach, I teach purely people who do not know how to swing a club, how to use the club, so that as we develop, you will not only learn how to swing the club, but why are swinging it in a certain way. It does not make any difference whether you are 5-years old or 40-year-old lady, gentleman, you have 20 years of playing experience; it does not matter what is your background. We will give this for the beginner or the advanced. Everyone will understand as we go why we do a certain thing. Now, if you will notice, here on the floor I have a bunch of lines drawn here specifically for a purpose. This line here is called the line of flight; that means that where I want the ball to land out there. This is going to give me the idea that is where I want it to land. So when I find my ball, the first thing that I want to do is I want to find out where the line of flight is. The line of flight is that if I stand behind the ball, and I hold my club up like this, my club will point directly where I want the ball to land. The next thing I must do is to decide how I am going to get that ball to land at that particular spot. So I walkover to this position here, and I look for my line here, which is 90 degrees to the line of flight. This line of 90 degrees is what is known as the index line. So we must know if that is 90 degrees, and that is where you put your heel, the 90 degrees line is that we are going to aim at the target where we want the ball to land, and that is the first and beginning part of the intro as far as setup."