[Music] hi everyone and welcome to me and my golf and welcome to how to play golf the basics yes we've created a four-week plan for you to learn how to play golf you're going to love this let's take charge of your game here's what's coming up we're busting myths and explaining concepts we're going to show you how to aim how to stand and position the golf ball how to hold the golf club and how to practice let's get started [Music] now in golf we obviously have a target which is usually a flag on the green or a fair way to hit so it's important we understand how to aim and how to stand to the golf ball we're going to talk about that before we get into the most important part which is the grip absolutely okay so let's start with the alignment so the first thing we want to do is aim the club at the target so the bottom of the golf club here we have something called the leading edge now your job is to get a 90 degree line coming out of that leading edge to the flag in this instance if i want to hit a straight shot at the target so that's my club head aimed at the target now from there i need to get my body aligned to the target now the way that we align our body is we run it parallel to that target line that we've just created from the club head so by that we mean the feet knees hips and shoulders are all running parallel to the target line created by the club head so that's my body alignment sorted the next thing is the stance so by that we mean the width of our feet and how far apart they are so in this instance with a seven iron we want to be about shoulder width apart and then from there as far as the ball position is concerned you can see the center of my stance is there the golf ball is target side of that so a little bit further forward than center in my stance okay so that takes care of the very simple way to aim it really it's worth practicing that but it's worth understanding just how to position the feet as well and where that ball goes now it's time to move into the all-important grip the most important part of week one [Music] over the next four weeks of the plan we are going to be talking about the golf club so it's important for you to understand what the parts of the golf club are called so first of all we have the grip some people call it the handle but we call it the grip then we have the shaft and then we have the club head now on the club head we have a face now we spoke about this already that the faces on the golf clubs have different lofts depending on the distance that you want to hit to the shot this is where it gets a little bit confusing we have a toe and we have a heel yes on the head we have the toe and the heel and obviously we've also mentioned the leading edge so it's important to understand these different parts of the golf club as we go through the next four weeks [Music] before we get into the main part which is all about the grip and how you practice we hope you're enjoying the video so if you are let us know hit the thumbs up and also leave us a comment and question down below and we'd love you to take part in this plan if you want to just head to mygolf.com click the link in the description and we will see you over there right pierce the grip this is the most important thing that the guys watching this should be really thinking of why is it so important i mean look there's several reasons why it's the most important part for us the first thing is it's the only part of your body which is holding the golf club it also controls the angles that you swing the club around your body but the most important part is it controls the club face so it controls the hitting area on your shot so it's really really important let's talk about and show the guys how this influences delivering the club back to the golf balls that's the important thing is give us an example of some let's say some poor holes or poor grips a couple of bad ones so obviously if the shots going to the left and the right it could be down to the alignment of the hands so if we think of this i've got my leading edge in place i'll take my stance if i have one or both hands too much round to the right of the handle or the grip like so then when i swing the club back and strike the golf ball the face is going to want to be pointing to the left so we could hook the golf ball to the left conversely if i got my hands and move them too far around to the left of the golf club as i swing back down to strike the golf ball the face is going to want to point to the right and look we've been coaching for a long time now andy and we see versions of this which are causing people to slice and hook the golf ball all the time yeah so what we talk about today is something you're going to work in it for a long time so it's important you just get it right so let's go through exactly how we want to hold the goal for better okay so there is a routine to this that you need to look at to make it as consistent as possible we like you to stand up straight um to attention almost when you're about to do this so feet together hold the golf club up in front now you need to be very mindful of the leading edge of the golf club so the bottom part of the golf club that we've already mentioned i want that pointing straight up in the air so from there they're going to put the lead hand on first now you'll notice that i've got a glove on my left hand so if you do want to wear a glove it can help with the grip and keeping control so you want it for your lead hand left hand in my case so from there now keeping that leading edge pointing up i'm going to run the grip of the golf club from the middle of the index finger to the bottom of the little finger on the left hand then from there i'm going to close my hand on the golf club so i'm making sure now that i'm feeling it's in more the fingers as opposed to being in the palm because this is something that we see the golfers like to have it too high up in the palm like so and then when they do that all sorts of problems happen so again going from the middle of the index finger running down to the bottom of the little finger from there you close your hands on the golf club i'm keeping an eye on that leading edge now when i'm looking at that knife i let go with my right hand i can see all of the knuckles on the back of my left hand and i can see the logo on the back of the glove so right hand comes into play now i always like to put the hand on the shaft like so with the palm facing towards the target from there i can slide my hand down the golf club and then close my fingers and thumb onto the golf club so you can now see that my right thumb is sitting on top of the left thumb so this is going to give me that sort of freedom when i'm swinging the golf club and it's also going to make it a lot easier to square that club face up so when i put the golf club down now i've got my leading edge going to my target but as i'm looking down i can see two maybe two and a half knuckles on my glove hand and there's a v form between the thumb and the forefinger on the trail hand the right hand which is going up pretty much to my right ear from there i think you've got a really good place to start from now it sounds like a lot of information but the more that you practice this you can pause this now and play it back the more that you practice this the more automatic it will become yeah it's worth making sure that you spend time doing this because it it has such a key role in hitting some good golf shots now one question you might have or you might have been asked to do or told is you need to join the hands together well we're not going to ask you to do that at this point we're going to say stick with what we call the baseball grip where we don't join the hands together with with interlocking them because that's that's something we're going to do at a later stage potentially yeah i think experience has shown us that whenever people have tried to interlock the fingers it really does make the hands go into a poor position we really want to be stressing that we want to be getting the hands looking like this when you hit a golf shot okay so that's the grip now we're going to show you guys how to practice so if you're going to a driving range or a practice area this is what you need to do we're going gonna hit 30 golf balls remember on week one now piss once we've done this we've got the grip we know how to stand and aim our body should we use a t or should we go off the ground yeah i mean look you can you can do whatever you want to whatever feels most comfortable to you we would definitely recommend to start with using a tee so if you're on the grass area like this obviously you can adjust the height yourself if you're on a range mat then you may have a fixed tee a fixed rubber tee in there but you can experiment with this so if you need a really high tea to start with that is absolutely fine that's going to make it easy for you then that's absolutely fine but you need to bear in mind that the better you get the more advanced you get we want to be lowering this tea peg so eventually it's like you're hitting off the ground yeah i've normally got the driving range like a black tee which is just above the ground like that we'd recommend if you can maybe start on that but if you do need to change it a bit then that's fine again bear in mind that we do want to be hitting the ground at some point and if it's really high like that it's going to be hard to do that so let's go through how these guys need to practice for week one okay so i'm gonna just stand to the side here as you said andy 30 balls minimum is what we want for this so let's just go through that grip i'm going to go through the routine again again the more you do this the quicker it is and then from there slide the hand down leading edge looks good so from here now split the stance left foot goes a little bit less than the right foot that allows us to get the golf ball target side of that center of the stance and all we're asking you to do from here now is just to have some swings and you can go with whatever swing length you feel comfortable with so don't forget as you know your concept now it's a slight arc around the body but you can see when i'm doing these practice swings i am brushing the ground so if you want to go back a little bit further you can do but again be mindful you're trying to brush the ground when you are doing this i'll actually hit one in a moment but every time you do it you're trying to brush the ground it's inevitable when you're doing this that you are going to miss the ground but this is why the practice swings are so important for you so i'm going to move into the golf ball now let's make sure that leading edge is pointing at my target i'm taking my stance i'm having a look at the grip making sure i'm happy with that and all i want to do when i hit this golf ball is just clip the ball away obviously but i want to hit the t peg and a little bit of the ground when i hit this shot definitely hit the ground there the t pegs popped out of the ground that was okay definitely i think the key thing is pierce has made that look pretty easy but he's a pretty good golfer now this is week one remember so if it's your first time you may even miss the golf ball at this stage which is absolutely fine just get used to getting a good grip having the practice swings making sure you're hitting the ground or the tee and you'll start to see the improvement really important as well after every shot that you hit the club may move in your hand so you need to make sure that you get the grip aligned properly do not hit a golf ball and then another one straight afterwards without changing your grip i'm going to have one more practice swing again when i'm doing this left foot went a little bit the right foot went a little bit more leading edge matched up again get the stance good grip looks good let's see if i can get two out of two oh they're pretty decent i'll take those very nice so i think that's the important thing i think there's a few things we've covered there in today's in this week should i say the grip is the most important thing we want you to take home from that because if you get that right it is so much easier to hit some straight golf shots absolutely crucial absolutely crucial [Music] over the next four weeks we are going to be busting myths and explaining concepts now it's so important on your journey to playing golf that you understand exactly what we're trying to achieve in the golf swing and i'm sure your friends are going to want to help you out and give you some friendly advice and there are lots of things that are thrown around that may actually damage you so we're going to be talking about myths busting those and helping you get the right picture and image in your mind to create the right motion so pierce let's get into the first myth you need to swing it straight to hit it straight well guess what it kind of sounds like that's the thing you should do when you first start playing golf you want to hit the golf ball straight so let's swing straight but let's show you what that actually looks like so if i'm going to swing the club back straight this is exactly what it looks like that's the club going straight on the way back coming back down to the impact and then it's straight on the way through now you can probably see looking at that that actually doesn't really look like a golf swing you've seen before so hitting golf balls with that thought process is not going to help you so if we don't want to swing straight just talk us through and paint the right picture for these guys what we actually want so the concept of what we're after absolutely so think of this as soon as you stand to the side of the golf ball the club now wants to arc around the body so if i get my golf swing now going back you'll see the club head is moving in from the target line almost straight away so it's moving in it's arcing in around the body as it goes up to the top of the backswing and then hopefully on the way down we can get that arc pretty similar on the way down that would always be a nice thing for consistency then i get to the strike as i then swing past where the ball was you can now see that the club head is arcing in from that target line as it goes up and around my body into the finish so nothing there in the golf club is is traveling straight it's really important for you guys to really get that visual in your mind to understand that let's take a look from a different view from over the head here and as you'll see from above the head you will see that the club moves immediately in around the body it's not traveling down the target line all the way to the top of the backswing and as we swing down now it moves back towards the target line at impact and as we go past you can see again moving in from that target line so having that right sort of image in your mind is really going to help shape the concept of your thoughts and it's going to make a huge difference to your golf swing [Music] here's a question we want you to think about should you strike the ground when you hit the golf ball this is something we ask a lot of our students especially the beginner golfers i want you to think about that while we get into the next myth getting under it getting under it okay again it kind of makes sense that if we want to get the golf ball into the air like any other sport that you've ever done you've got to get underneath it so this is what it looks like when we're getting underneath it so from here if i were to swing down with the objective trying to get it under it i may fall onto my back foot i may throw the club head underneath the golf ball like so the problem with this is i'm probably going to hit the ground before the golf ball or if i do miss the ground i may hit the top of the golf ball and send it toppling along the ground so getting underneath it or getting under it is not really going to help you so it would imply that we're hitting up on the goal so okay let's just let's just explain the concept again let's paint the right image in their minds okay so what we're looking to do is you know the opposite we're actually looking to hit the golf ball as the club head is descending so it kind of looks a little bit more like this so as you are swinging down now we want the club head to be descending by the time it strikes the golf ball and then hopefully what happens then is you then strike the ground just after where the golf ball was and the club is almost bottoming out in this area here quite a bit after the golf ball now the reason we can do this is because we have loft on the club face so you can see here now when i've got this golf club in my hand we have the hitting area angled upwards that's the loft on the club face that's what gets it up in the air and this is what we need so we don't need to hang back and try and get underneath it we can hit down on the golf ball and yet it will still go up so we've got to let the loft do the work and understand that when we see people play a golf shot if they take that chunk of turf pierce yes it happens past the golf ball so it's ball followed by the turf and if you can have that image again it's going to make a massive difference as you go to working at your game so it's a good thing to hit the ground it is so we hope you enjoyed that here's this week's practice plan we want you to practice parallel alignment your stanson ball position your grip make sure you hit the ground on your practice swings and most importantly have some fun when doing it that is the end of week one we hope you enjoyed it now if you want to check out week two and have us coach you through the rest of the planet me and mygolf.com simply click the link in the description and we look forward to seeing you over there thanks for watching