“Take One More Club And Swing Easy.” Is That Even True?

Welcome back to this MyGolfSpy series where I take a look at the golf clichés you have heard a thousand times and figure out if they hold up.

The goal isn’t simply to label each one as true or false. It’s to figure out what has been oversimplified and get back to the lesson golfers were supposed to take from the advice.

Next up: “Take one more club and swing easy.”

This advice sounds easier than it is

When I was teaching golf, I gave this advice plenty of times.

A player had 150 yards. Instead of trying to get everything they could out of an 8-iron, for example, I’d hand them the 7 and tell them to make an easier swing.

It made perfect sense to me. The problem was that it almost never worked the way I expected.

Players would stop turning. They would get tentative through impact. Some would decelerate. Others would guide the club into the ball and make a swing that looked nothing like their normal one.

Eventually, I realized I was asking them to hit a shot they had never really learned.

Swinging easy is a skill

The problem is that most golfers don’t automatically know how to take speed off without changing other parts of the swing.

The backswing may shorten, the body may stop turning as much or the golfer may get tentative through impact. What started as an attempt to reduce speed can quickly change contact and delivery, too.

That’s why “swing easy” can be misleading.

The goal isn’t to make everything slower. It’s to produce less distance while still making a committed golf swing.

Taking more club needs a plan

If you’re going to take one more club, you need a plan for what “swing easy” means.

The best solution I’ve found is to choke down on the club and make more of a three-quarter swing.

I like this because it’s tangible. “Swing easy” is hard to measure and can mean something completely different from one golfer to the next. Choking down and shortening the swing gives you two specific changes you can practice.

You’re shortening the club a little and reducing the length of the swing which helps take off some distance. More importantly, you can still turn through the shot and be aggressive through impact.

Take the extra club. Choke down. Make a three-quarter swing. Then keep moving through the ball.

That’s a much clearer plan than simply trying to swing at some imaginary 80 percent.

So is it true?

If you’re standing over an approach shot thinking you might need one more club, that instinct is probably worth listening to.

We recently looked at Arccos data from 668,000 par-3 holes played by more than 13,000 golfers. No handicap group missed long more than 10 percent of the time. Short misses ranged from about one in five for scratch golfers to nearly one in two for higher-handicap players.

Golfers are not regularly getting into trouble because they took too much club.

So I like the first half of this cliché: Take one more club.

Just be careful with the “swing easy” part.

If that means slowing everything down, stopping your turn or getting tentative through impact, you may create a bigger problem than the one you were trying to solve.

Instead, give yourself something measurable. Choke down. Make a three-quarter swing. Keep moving through the ball.

Take a look at a few more from the “Is That Even True?” series:

• “Fairways And Greens.” Is That Even True?
• “Let The Club Do The Work.” Is That Even True?
• “Never Up, Never In.” Is That Even True?
• “Drive For Show, Putt For Dough.” Is That Even True?