Why ‘Keep Your Head Down’ Is Bad Golf Advice and Beginner Mistakes

🏌️‍♂️ Most beginner golfers struggle with grip, often holding the club incorrectly and causing poor shots.

🎯 Proper alignment of shoulders and hips is crucial to avoid slicing and improve swing direction.

🔄 Keeping your chest and pelvis centered during the backswing prevents inconsistent strikes and bad contact.

🚫 The advice to 'keep your head down' is a myth; finishing with your chest up and hips forward leads to better speed and contact.

00:00:00 - If you are a beginner golfer, brand new to this really, really challenging game, I've got four things that I see a ton of beginners do and a lot of the lessons that I teach, uh, that I can help you avoid if you're in that same boat. So, stay tuned. We'll talk about some four common mistakes that I see beginner golfers exhibit all the time.

00:00:21 - Okay, so the first one is just how you hold the golf club. Okay, most beginners that I see that come in for a lesson or just want to start out playing golf have their hands on the club in a very very bad manner. So, one of two things happens. Either a they don't know how to put their hands on the club, so they might hold it like a hockey stick. I've seen people hold the club cross-handed where the wrong hand is on the top. So, that's the first thing. Just make sure

00:00:45 - your hands are really close together and they're touching. The second piece would just be rotationally how you position your hands on the club. A lot of beginner golfers will put their hands in a position where their hands rotate too far towards the target. So, you can see how my right hand is on top of the grip, my left hand is underneath. What that's going to lead to is a club face that gets far too open. It's also going to make it really hard for you to get your

00:01:07 - shoulders and your hips aligned properly. So, making sure that your hands actually go on the club where your left hand or your lead hand in this case goes more on top of the grip or rotates away from the target and then your trail hand actually goes more underneath. That would be the first thing. If you want to hold the club with all 10 fingers, you want to interlock, you want to overlap. I don't really care too much about that. I worry more about rotationally where

00:01:26 - your hands are. So, that would be the first one. Make sure your grip is in the right spot. The second piece to this goes back to the alignment piece as well. So, I touched on this a little bit, but a lot of golfers, if you're looking at them from down the line when they first start out, because of how they have their hands on the club the wrong way, they tend to have their shoulders and their hips pointed too far to the left from for a right-hander. So, what that leads to is it leads to a club

00:01:48 - path that becomes too many degrees out to in. You couple that with a club face that is open and you're going to have a recipe for hitting a lot of slices. So, that would be the second one is just make sure when you're setting up once you have your grip where it needs to be, get your hips and your shoulders pointed more out to the right. That will go a long way to helping you move the club more in and around your body in the back swing. Make it easier to swing more into

00:02:08 - out. The third piece, it revolves around how they take the club away and how they make a back swing. So, generally I see a lot of bad golfers, beginners included in this, start to move their hips and their shoulders away from the target as they take the club back. What this leads to is it leads to a ton of inconsistencies with your strikes. So, you'll see golfers sway their hips away from the target, sway their shoulders away from the target for far too long,

00:02:32 - and then that's going to cause them to hit the ground before they get back to the golf ball. And if they don't hit the ground before they get to the ball, they tend to flex their elbows and do a lot of bad things when they hit, which can cause a ton of other issues with not only contact, but direction. So, in order to fix that one, basically just make sure your body, the center of your of your sternum and the and the center of your pelvis, so the center of your

00:02:51 - chest, center of your pelvis, don't move away from the golf ball as you take the club back. It's about turning. It's not necessarily about shifting. So, that would be the the third piece there. Just pay attention when you take the club away, trying to keep everything more centered. The fourth one has to do with how you finish the swing. This is the worst advice that anybody in the golfing world can ever give you is to keep your head down. I see so many beginners come

00:03:15 - in and they have been told by so many people the reason they hit bad shots is because you're picking your head up. I have yet to see somebody take their head and go like this. I know it's close to Halloween when we're filming this, but your head doesn't work that way. Okay? So, keeping your head down is probably the worst thing you can do. What it leads to is a lot of people will make swings and when they finish their chest points down to the ground, their head

00:03:34 - points down to the ground. That makes it really hard to rotate. That makes it really hard to create speed and it's going to affect your contact. So, what the best players in the world do and what you as a beginner should really focus on is when you're making swings, move your hips towards the target and point your chest more up towards the sky. You can see as I do that how my head and my neck start to rotate. I can actually follow the flight of the ball as it leaves the club face. That's what

00:03:58 - you want to be doing. The best players in the world do not hit the golf ball and look like this after impact. Nobody is staring at the ground. It's the worst thing you can possibly do. So, if you're a beginner, practicing those four things, getting your hands on there the right way, getting your shoulders and your hips a little bit more aligned to the right for a right-handed player at setup, making sure you're not swaying off of the golf ball, and then finishing

00:04:17 - nice and tall with your arm straight. That would be a great way to teach yourself how to hit shots that go really far and really straight. So, if you're brand new to golf, avoid those four common pitfalls and you will be on your way to hitting better shots much, much more quickly.