Women have an innate ability to excel in activities and sports requiring coordination and grace as evidenced in swimming, skiing, skating, gymnastics, dancing, and yoga. As far as golf is concerned, has this innate gift been stifled by traditional golf instruction and the mindset of “trying to do it the right way?” Has the freedom to move your body how it wants to move instinctively been forgotten in the game of golf?

Assuming you have established effective foundations of grip and posture, the next step in developing a reliable golf swing is awakening instinct and finding your personal rhythm. Rhythm is the soul of the golf swing. It is found through trial and error, failure and success, exploration and discovery. It can’t be defined by or taught through, words. It can’t be shown. It can’t be thought into being. Personal rhythm is expressed as a feel. It’s a flow in the body/mind connection accessed through a deep sense of the movement involved.

How can you develop your personal rhythm in your golf swing you might ask? Play, explore, and permit your body to move how it wants to move in order to hit the golf ball. Be in your body.

Bring awareness to the origin of movement in your body during the above-mentioned activities such as dance. As you imagine or perform dancing with coordination and grace, you are most likely not thinking about how to move but you are feeling the movement in your body, and more specifically the origin of movement coming from your “center of balance” or “center of gravity” located a few inches below the navel in the center of your torso, often referred to as your ‘core.’ Similar to the graceful movement of dance, you can develop a graceful and instinctive golf swing by originating the pivot in your golf swing from your core. In dance, intention activates movement and allows you to flow with grace and ease. You can also develop a graceful golf swing through intention, which is the “fuel” that ignites the “engine” of your subconscious neural/muscular motor system. The best pre-swing thought might be, “I’m going to allow my swing to just flow!”

Flow is often characterized as “being in the zone.” Experiencing the zone doesn’t have to be something foreign and rarely attainable while playing golf. You’ve likely experienced it during activities of dance, yoga, or even cooking when you were fully present to the activity and movement. Flow is present moment awareness or present movement awareness! — attending to each present moment as it streams, unobstructed, into the next without feeling a need to try or accomplish or do it the right way. It is an uninhibited sense of movement and activity generated by intention free of interference by the mind. Just as in dance, you can free your golf swing to be a method of self-expression through movement.

Optimal flow occurs when there is no interference from the mind ‘telling you’ to “do it the right way,” when you can trust that the ‘right way’ is the way your kinesthetic instinct wants to move your body to hit the golf ball. Therefore, I recommend that you focus on the feel of your golf swing and the feel of pure impact to deepen awareness of your kinesthetic instinct.

Once you establish effective foundations of grip and posture as evidenced in the accompanying images, you will learn to trust your instinctive kinesthetic intelligence, awaken your inner golfer, find your flow, and discover the instinctive golf swing that you can own for a lifetime!

Jerry

Jerry Brown was introduced to golf at age ten by his dad and a local golf pro who promoted the philosophy of ‘keeping it simple’ and encouraged him to learn by feel rather than mechanical instruction. Brown attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, qualified for a competitive golf team his senior year, and played on the Long Island Stoddard Cup team post-college.

Jerry has studied how we naturally learn physical motor skills effectively. He has developed simple guidelines to establish effective foundations of grip and posture along with a variety of instinct-awakening golf exercises in his recently-released book, Awaken Your Inner Golfer: Finding Your Flow, which he hopes will improve golfers’ games and inspire them in all walks of life. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he assists golfers in reaching their potential.

For more information, visit Jerry’s website at http://www.keepitsimplegolf.com.

Feature Photo: Ingee Chun at the 2018 U.S. Women’s Open | Photo: Ben Harpring