Lesson 4: Set Up Your Golf Swing Alignments

The importance of setting up your golf swing alignments correctly is emphasized in the second chapter of Jack Nicklaus’ classic instruction book Golf My Way, which is titled, Setting Up: Ninety Percent of Good Shot-Making. Setting up your golf swing alignments correctly is especially important if you want to swing the golf club and hit the golf ball with great timing.

After all, a big part of swinging the golf club and hitting the golf ball with great timing is hitting the ball at the point of maximum clubhead speed, which will translate into greater ball speed and distance. It’s also hitting the ball in the center of a square clubface, which will not only translate into greater ball speed and distance but also greater accuracy.

So what are your golf swing alignments and how do you set them up correctly? Your golf swing alignments are really nothing more than what have traditionally been referred to as your address fundamentals and include:

  • Grip
  • Aim
  • Stance
  • Posture

This lesson will not present a lengthy explanation of the address fundamentals. Many of golf’s most famous players and teachers have already done an excellent job of explaining these fundamentals in the large numbers of books and videos on golf instruction available in the market today.

Because of the quality of instruction and the authors’ place in history, I personally recommend Bobby Jones’ Bobby Jones On Golf, Tommy Armour’s How To Play Your Best Golf All The Time, Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf and the aforementioned Golf My Way by Jack Nicklaus. All of these books are available in the Store on this website and I encourage you to add one or more of them to your golf library.

This lesson will instead present only those particular aspects of the address fundamentals that are essential to swinging the golf club and hitting the golf ball with great timing. Because the grip is your only contact with the club, aligning your hands on the club correctly is the most important address fundamental. As a result, we’ll start with it first.

Grip