Instructions

Lateral movement creates weight shift in the swing—a key power component. To train side-to-side motion, Kaitlyn Pimentel recommends the Lateral Split Squat. Stand up a club in front of you, and squat out to the right, straightening your left leg. Then, drive through your right heel to return to a standing position. Switch sides, and

For touch shots around the green, you have to add some wrist hinge to the swing. In this video, teacher Travis Fulton shows you the right way to do it. (Hint: Good pitchers don’t wag the club back and forth.) Then, it’s time to put the hinge into action, blending it with a little turn

ABOUT Are you ready to make this your best season ever? Travis Fulton, one of Golf Digest’s Best Teachers in Florida, is ready to help you! With his four-part video series covering everything from gripping it to ripping it, you’ll start this season right. Through easy-to-follow video lessons, Travis will help you head into your

“Social distancing” sounds like an ominous outcome for face-to-face golf instruction, at least in the near term. But just because you can’t be physically present in the practice area with a coach doesn’t mean you don’t have options for improvement. It’s not only possible to work with a coach remotely—many top instructors have a thriving

Even if it has been a while since you’ve seen the golf course or touched a club, you could still be improving your game without realizing it. If that sounds too good to be true, Golf Digest’s State No. 1 teachers, Jeff Ritter (Oregon) and Jason Sedan (New Hampshire) have identified a number of common

In 2018, an Australian meditation teacher named Jonni Pollard collaborated with Golf Digest on a pseudo-experiment investigating the benefits of meditation for golfers. The premise seems fairly quaint now: Three players were tested in a series of skill challenges over a summer day, with Pollard guiding them through intermittent meditation sessions to see how it

Here at Golf Digest, we’re big believers that golf makes people’s lives better. It happens in the simplest ways, like the joy that comes from a good shot. And it happens in ways much more complex. Any story from our series Golf Saved My Life demonstrate golf’s capacity to improve seemingly impossible situations. In light

In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we went back through our archives to find a collection of interesting—and sometimes controversial—golf-instruction images and asked today’s top teachers to give their contemporary interpretation of the advice from decades past. In this story from 1951, club pro Buck White shows off what golf instruction of the day

One of the most coveted shots in golf is a draw (the shot curves slightly left for right-handers). You can learn to hit this shot if you focus on your feet. As you reach the top of the swing, you want to have roughly two-thirds of your body weight supported by your foot farthest from

All those national flags you see next to the names on the leader boards at PGA and LPGA Tour events should be validation that golf is a global game. But just to prove the point, we conducted a worldwide search to identify the best instructors outside the U.S. What we found were 75 teachers from

Mike Trout is better than you at everything. Golf too. To the surprise of few, the Los Angeles Angels slugger’s power at the plate translates nicely on the tee, as he showed off in a video shared from Topgolf yesterday. https://twitter.com/Angels/status/1234325518578671618 Sure, he’s an immensely strong world-class athlete, but it’s still fun to dive a

A lot of golfers never get over the instinct to lift the ball off the ground. They swing off their back foot or flip their hands through impact, both of which make the club bottom out too soon. As a result, they hit the ground first (fat shot) or catch the ball on the upswing

The one requirement from fairway bunkers is, hit the ball first. Catching even a little sand before the ball results in a shot that goes nowhere. So let’s tweak your technique with the goal of making clean contact. First, a few setup adjustments. Grip down an inch to promote a steeper swing into the ball,

In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we went back through our archives to find a collection of interesting—and sometimes controversial—instruction images and asked today’s top teachers to give their contemporary interpretation of the advice from decades past. In this story from June 1953, soon-to-be 1953 PGA champion Johnny Revolta displayed his leg action to

A host of teachers with sparkling credentials can (and, in a minute, will) wax poetic about the quality of the late, great Mickey Wright’s swing. For Jim McLean, the fact that the assessment came from even higher authorities was all he needed to hear right from the start. “Whenever I talked to the great players

Fitness has become a huge topic of conversation in golf. From tour players to the usual suspects at your local course, so many golfers are talking about training for a better golf swing. But most of them neglect one extremely important muscle: the trapezius. But not 2014 FedEx Cup champion Billy Horschel, who does some

If practice and preparation were all it took to prevent nerves on the course, tour players would never get rattled. We hit a ton of practice shots and spend hours and hours preparing, and we have teachers and trainers and mental-game coaches sharing all kinds of sophisticated improvement techniques. But even with all that, I

ABOUT Tour players have always been the best models for a powerful, efficient golf swing. Now they’re becoming the models for fitness, too. With our new series “Tour Pro Workouts,” the pros share their fitness secrets with you. In this episode, PGA Tour player Scott Stallings walks you through what he does in the gym

Viktor Hovland was able to laugh off his short-game adventures in Puerto Rico because elite ball-hitting and draining 30-foot tournament-clinchers tends to paper over some deficiencies. But Hovland wasn’t wrong when he said his short game “sucked.” We asked Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher and tour short game coach Kevin Weeks to evaluate three of

The secret to great wedge play is being able to produce any distance on command and that comes from knowing how to control speed at impact. There are two leading methods: Vary the length of the backswing and accelerate through, or make whatever backswing you want and just feel out the right speed at impact.

Golfers are commonly told to lock everything down and just rock their shoulders when they putt. The problem with that little gem of advice is, freezing any part of the body causes tension, which destroys feel. RELATED: Hot List Mallet Putters Let’s focus on the head. When you try to keep it still, you create

In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we went back through our archives to find a collection of interesting—and sometimes controversial—instruction images and asked today’s top teachers to evaluate whether the advice presented in them still holds up for the modern player. In this article from June 1952, Dave Bauer analyzes the swings of his

What if you could putt with a mallet that behaves like a blade? Enter toe-hang mallet putters. If you’re not familiar with toe hang, put the shaft of a putter in the palm of your hand with the face turned skyward. If the toe of the head drops down, that’s toe hang. RELATED: Hot List:

If your breaking putts tend to miss on the low side, I’d bet your problem is how you look at the putt from over the ball. Most golfers spend too much time staring at the hole, and then putt toward it—after all, that’s where you want to end up. But you have to discipline yourself

Back in my 20s, and even well into my 30s, I was one of the longest players on the PGA Tour. That’s no longer the case—I’ve had four back surgeries, and I’m only six years away from being eligible for the senior tour—so it’s more important than ever for me to put my drives in

Of all the tough lies you can get in a greenside bunker, perhaps the worst is when your ball comes to rest so close to the edge, you can’t stand with both feet in the sand. It’s a tough shot, but not impossible. First, take a deep breath. I want you stand over the ball

In pro-ams, my partners often ask what they can do to I improve. My stock answer: Take advantage of your good drives. The funny thing is, I wasn’t doing a good job of listening to my own advice. Despite good results with my irons in 2018, ranking fifth on the PGA Tour in greens-in-regulation percentage

An “aha” moment is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working on your game, few things feel better than when the stars align and everything clicks. In collecting some feedback around the start of the new year, we were overwhelmed by the successes shared with us by golfers on social media.

Look at old videos of the best swings of yesteryear, and you’ll likely see the golfer’s lead knee move toward the ball during the backswing. At the same time, the lead leg’s foot would roll inward and the heel would come off the ground. For the most part, it’s become a thing of the past.

Madelene Sagstrom of Sweden had her biggest breakthrough in her first LPGA Tour event of 2020, winning the Gainbridge LPGA at Boca Rio. Sagstrom joined the LPGA Tour in 2017 after one of the most successful seasons on Symetra Tour history, with three victories and four top 10s in her rookie campaign. Known to be