 Hi, during these trying times of the pandemic, the City of Columbia Parks and Recreation Department realizes that choices can be limited in enhancing one's physical, social, and mental well-being. The Parks and Recreation staff have been involved in developing a number of videos in which citizens can participate in and enjoy in the privacy of their own home. These videos consist of arts and crafts, gardening, physical activity, and sports instruction, with many more to come as we work through this pandemic. The videos will be available to you on a number of our social media outlets. We hope you enjoy and thank you very much. Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin Lyles. I'm the program director over at the Clyburn Golf Center, and during this time where we're kind of indoors and shut in, following all social distancing protocols, we wanted to give you some skills and drills that you could use and apply that could assist you with your golf game, whether you're able to get outside or whether you have to really stay inside, basically whatever your situation is. So we wanted to go through these things with you, start with these drills, and pretty much take the game of golf and wrap a nice bow around it so that you can kind of cover all your bases. So a couple of keys that you're going to find that are going to stay consistent through each phase of the game. The three phases of the game, I'm speaking of putting, chipping, and full swing. You're going to see a grip component. You're going to see an alignment component. And then there's always the actual swinging of the golf club. We're going to start off with full swing. And with that, I wanted to first go over the grip and then we'll work on alignment, which I have an aid behind me. And then we'll talk about the actual motion of the swing. So in terms of the grip, you can do this with any club. I've got an iron in front of me right now. And I'm a right-handed player. So please bear in mind, if you're left-handed, everything's going to be in reverse for you. But for your right-handed player, I'm going to grip the club with my left hand first. And essentially, my left thumb will be resting down the club. And I mean, that's easy enough, but that's going to be a good jumping off point for you. So once again, I'll give you a side view as well. If I'm reaching out to shake someone's hand, I will want the club in my hand. It'll rest under this pad on my left hand. And I will just hold it like so. And my left thumb will just be resting on top of the golf club. I'll take my right hand and put it on top as well. My right thumb won't quite be going down the shaft, but it will just rest, I guess, if the shaft were a clock, just at 11 o'clock on the top of the grip. So just on the side of the grip. I hope you guys can get a good viewpoint of my grip. So fantastic. Once you have your hands on the club the right way, spoiler alert, I'm going to go ahead and say this now. If you are new to the game of golf, this is going to take a day or so for you to really feel comfortable with your hands on the golf club from time to time. Your grip is really one of those funny things where you kind of have your way that you want to put your hands on there. But if you really get into a proper grip, it's going to help you in the long run. It may feel counter-intuitive at first, but if you give it a day or so, it's going to feel better afterwards. So once you tackle your grip, the next thing we want to talk about is alignment. This is always going to be a constant, this is always going to be there regardless of what kind of shot you're hitting. You always have to aim yourself before you hit your golf ball. So if you put your hands on the club properly and then you get to the point where you're ready to hit a golf ball now, I have some string on the ground to kind of further illustrate my point. This yellow line here is my target line. This is where, this is basically, and this will be an invisible line when you're out on the golf course. I have a golf ball in my pocket here. So let's say I'm outdoors or whatever the case may be, or they're supposed to represent that. I have the golf ball here on my target line. This is the line in which I want to point toward the hole. I have a pin set up here as well just to further illustrate the point. This blue line is going to represent my body alignment. So basically what you should notice is that they're just parallel. So if I take my grip and my club and I aim it down the target line toward the hole, then I am going to take my stance and my feet are going to be parallel to the left of my target line. I wouldn't want my club going down the target line, but then my feet going this way and my body turn that way or my feet going this way and my body turn that way. It would be hard to be consistent time in and time out if that were the case. So I would like everything to be parallel. So once you can do that and once you work on that, you're basically, you've got a lot of the big building blocks if you will for a solid setup. If you don't have string, that's okay. You can always use clubs. You can use a broom. You can use whatever kind of stick you may have around the house. All it needs to do is just be straight. If you have tile floor, that works as well. So in your kitchen, I've used many a tile floor, wood floor, whatever the case. As long as there are parallel lines on the ground, you can work on your alignment and get better. So once you have your grip, once you have your alignment, then we, then the magic happens and we start to move the club and work on our swing. Once we've worked on our grip, once we've worked on our alignment, we go to the swing. Really to begin the journey of your swing and hitting golf balls, I like to keep things as simple as possible. I've heard it said that you basically just want to feel as though your thumbs, once again I'm using my thumbs as a reference point for my grip, that if you think about your thumbs almost sticking them in your ears on your right side and then you come down and you hit the ball and then you stick them in your ears again on the left side, that's essentially your entire golf swing. So if you have kids or you have little ones or you have beginners, that's a really good way to think about things. But if you've been playing for a while and you want to go further in depth, we can do that as well. So we'll go ahead and start that. One of the things that I really hold dear for a golf swing is it needs to be repeatable. When you can do a certain thing over and over and over again, it doesn't matter what your golf ball does, if it just goes straight all the time or it turns a little to the left or it turns a little to the right, that's okay. If you do it all the time, then you can gain plan for it when you're on the golf course and you'll be fine. So getting back to that, one of the big things that you really want to do when you're golf swing is you want to use your big muscles. When I say your big muscles, you kind of want your chest and your core, everything in gray essentially, to be the engine of your golf swing. If you get into being a very handsy player where really your body doesn't move a lot and you're just kind of throwing your hands at it, you have to understand that your results may vary by a wide variety from day in and day out. Now granted, this is golf and that happens anyway, but you want to do everything that you can do in order to be consistent from day in and day out. So one good drill for that is going to be if you take a club, you put it across your chest, you take a stance, your feet are going to be about shoulder width apart, the ball will be in the middle of your feet. You take a club, put it along your shoulders and if you turn back, you want to get this grip into the club pointed at or behind the golf ball. If you're making swings and your shoulders aren't moving much, then you've probably got a little too much arms, not enough body and then you're going to be kind of slapping at the ball and it's going to go all over the place and you're not going to be able to gain plan for it. So if you put this club across your chest and you're able to turn back for your backswing and so you'll be able to see that basically, I mean, I can almost get to 90 degrees if you will with my shoulder turn and then turn through on this side and this side will be past the ball as well. Then that's a good indicator that you're using your big muscles and your big muscles are going to be those that repeat day in and day out and make you more consistent. So once you have done a couple drills to make sure that you're getting a complete body turn, then you can put these things into practice. So if you go back to where you have your sticks on the ground or your string, you can thereby go ahead and make some practice swings, especially if you're inside. Now if you're inside, make sure you don't allow your golf club to hit the ground. That's going to be a bad day. So you can just kind of hover it over the ground and make some good body turns back, some good body turns through. Okay, during the swing, your weight will transfer a bit. So when if for a face on view and when I swing back, I will say that maybe 60% of my weight gets here on my way through. I want 90% of my weight over here. And when you do that, that's going to allow you to get to a full finish and then you can kind of get into your trophy pose and be done. I think if you can realistically do 20, 25 of these a day or whatever you can stand or however much you want, it's going to help you. So those are kind of the keys and the things that I like in terms of the full golf swing motion. So the next thing we want to talk about would be chipping. This is a short game. These are all of the shots that are going to happen within 50 yards of the hole, maybe even more like 30 yards of the hole. So if right here I have a mat set up that I have that I purchased a while back. If you don't have that, if you have just a doormat that's kind of the right material that's not going to be too hard when you brush up against it. Or if you have carpet, get okay first from whether it's your parents or wife or whatever the case may be, get an okay that you can do this in the carpet in the house. And you can use that. Basically what we want to talk about with your chipping is I want to work on landing spots. Also you can do this in your yard. If you're comfortable doing this in your yard while staying away from everyone, what have you, you can do that as well. But what I want to work on and talk to you guys about are working on your landing spots. So when you're chipping, what you have control over is how far the ball travels in the air. After it hits the ground, the golf course will basically dictate how much it rolls, whether you're going uphill, downhill, whatever the case may be, whether it's firm and fast and it hasn't rained a lot or if it just rained and it's very soggy. All the conditions are going to come into play after that. But what you do have control over is where the ball lands. So in order to work on this and work on this at home, like I said, you can do this in your yard. You can do this inside if you have a carpet or whatever the case may be. And if you're inside, granted, this is based on your situation. Sometimes I've used golf balls in my practice and that's fine. If you need to use willful balls, if you need to use tennis balls, something softer, that's fine as well. You can still work on these things. So I want to, once again, the yellow line is essentially my target line. I have my target line where I'm actually going to chip from this hula hoop here. This hula hoop here is basically going to be a representation of where I want the ball to land. This is where I want the ball to land. And I have the pin, which is further down the target line, which is actually where I want the ball to end up. But that's, whether you have a pin there or not, because you may be in your yard, you may not have the pin. But if you have a hula hoop, if you have a car wash bucket, if you have any type of string, a jump rope, whatever, you can put it down on the ground just to kind of designate an area where you would like your ball to land. So if you put a tennis ball here, because maybe you're inside and you don't need to break things in your house, and that's fine. And we understand. You put a tennis ball down right here. You take your same grip, the same grip that we talked about in the full swing. The only difference will be in your address position in your stance. With full swing, our feet are essentially shoulder width apart. And we're making a big motion with the shoulders back and with the shoulders through. This is a little bit different. Chipping, your feet are going to be closer together. You'll have the same grip, and you'll put your club down. The difference with chipping is that essentially you're not moving your hands as much. Your upper body will move, and there's still the engine, if you will, to this stroke. So if I stand right here, I would rather not see a lot of throwing your hands at the ball in order to hit a repeatable chip. You're not going to be doing yourself a big favor by doing that. You're going to be getting a whole lot of different things when you hit shots. Some will go high, some will go low, and you won't be able to gain plan for it. So what you want to do is you want to, once again, use your core and use your body and have those things be the engine, if you will, to your shot without a bunch of wrist movement. You want to keep this to a minimum and just use your big muscles. And that will pretty much get you through the chipping motion. So we want to keep it as simple as possible. So once again, you're outside in your yard, you're inside, you've got tennis balls because they're softer. That's absolutely fine. Once you designate your spot where you would like to land it, then you come up, you take your stance, your feet are together, you look at your hula hoop, you look at your spot, and you do your best to get the ball to bounce in the hula hoop. Once again, what we're concentrating on here is from where you strike the ball to where it lands. If you can get that into the hula hoop, you're really going to be doing yourself a service when you finally get out to the golf course. So once again, we'll run through that again. Ah, see, I missed there. I mean, you know, so it happens. Try one more time, kind of close. But if you can do that and you can get close, if you can land your ball in a certain spot, then your balls will end up in a certain spot and you can game plan for it to be around the hole. So for me, with my sand wedge here, my go-to place to land the ball is halfway. So if I'm 10 yards away from the hole and I'm chipping, I'm always trying to land it five yards. So that's a spot in the middle. And I know from experience that whenever I land it halfway, it'll roll another, the other half, right, as a general rule of thumb. If I'm going uphill, I'll land it a little further. If I'm going downhill, I'll land it a little bit shorter to account for gravity and letting it take it to the hole. So now we wanna talk about putting. Putting is really the space where if you get really proficient at your putting, you can beat your buddies and you can play some good golf. So once again, I wanna start off with the grip. Now, with putting, it's very simple. So for a right-handed player, I wanna grip it so that my left thumb is once again running down the shaft. When I put my right hand on the club, I want my right hand, my right thumb to be pointed down the shaft as well, okay? Your alignment's gonna work the same way. If the yellow line is my target line and the blue line essentially would be my body line, I'm gonna wanna be parallel to my target line. I don't wanna be pointed this way. I wouldn't wanna be pointed this way. I'm gonna wanna be just parallel to my target line, okay? One of the consistencies throughout this entire process is if we have always wanted to use our big muscles and to allow those to repeat for us because they repeat more than our small muscles do, the muscles in our hands and wrists. So same thing applies here. Once you have your grip on your putter and you take your stance with your feet about shoulder width apart, you want to use your big muscles and your chest and your core to rock your shoulders. You don't wanna have a whole lot of wrist motion going on during your putting stroke. You really wanna just use your big muscles and allow them to work for you. You don't wanna hit at the ball or you don't wanna go so slow that the ball just doesn't go anywhere. You really want a nice TikTok motion and kind of cadence to your putting stroke. So once again, shoulders, just rocking your shoulders, allowing the putter to almost feel like it's swinging itself because the putter is gonna have a little bit of weight to it and it's gonna feel like it's swinging itself. If you, once again, then this will be fantastic if you have tile floor in your home or you have sticks that you can put down, you can really get a lot of good work done with your putting indoors. This is the main thing that you can work on in the house where you'll see the benefit outside when it's time for you to go back out and get out there on the golf course. Right here, I have a pin set up here just to illustrate where we'll be headed. You don't have to use that. I like using whether you have real golf balls as well. This is when you can kind of transition probably back to a real golf ball even if you're in your home. You can use coins. Coins are great because if you're using maybe a penny or a quarter or a cup holder, whatever the case, as your target, by the time you get out on the golf course and you're actually looking at a real golf hole, it's gonna look bigger than what you're accustomed to aiming at and to practicing to. So once again, I'm gonna do it just inside my target line here just so that you can see, but essentially I'll be going toward the cone down there. I'll take my grip, my thumbs will be down the shaft, my feet will be parallel, and essentially I'm just going to be rocking my shoulders and trying to hit the target, just like that. I recommend, honestly, it depends on you. Depends on how much time you have, but I would love for all of my students to try and get between 25 to 50 of these done each day. If you're an advanced player and you really wanna either playing a long time or you're really trying to advance your game, whatever the case may be, go for 100, go for 200. That's up to you. You don't need to take breaks because after a while of being in posture, you will get tired. So that's the big thing. Once again, so if you have tile or lines, as we're in a gym right now in this wood floor, we have lines on the floor, use that to your advantage. Don't be afraid to just say, okay, well this is straight back and straight through because I have these lines on the floor. You can always use that to your advantage. Even if you're not hitting golf balls, just go and get on some tile somewhere and just move your putter and go straight back and straight through. You can even switch it up also if you have some tees. If you're outside and you're familiar with tees, you can put the tees into the ground for myself. Whenever I'm indoors, obviously you can't do that. If you're in your kitchen or you're on your tile, whatever the case may be, just flip the tees upside down. If you flip the tees upside down and put them on the ground, they will essentially make kind of a gate scenario. Then you can take your putter, put your putter down and you can, so now you're gonna have the lines on the floor and you're gonna have your tees. So the goal is to stroke through the tees without touching the tees. If you need to give yourself a little bit more space, that's fine when you're getting started so that you can just kind of get the hang of it. If once you get started and you're really, and you're really getting the hang of it, don't be afraid to bump those tees even closer. I mean, to the point where you're like, man, you know, you don't have a ton of wiggle room. That's fine. Go ahead and push yourself and challenge yourself. So try and get through the tees. Anyway, if you can do this, you're really, you're gonna help out so many different things in your putting stroke. You'll help out your ball contact. You make sure you hit the ball in the center of the club face. You'll work on your path. And it's just gonna pay dividends for you. If I've got high school students and they're really trying to take their game to the next level, I want at least 50 to 100 of these every day or every evening, every morning, whatever the case may be. I'd love for you to get that done. If you do, you will see a difference when you get back out on the golf course. So, hopefully we've given you some good building blocks for each phase of the game. Your full swing, your chipping, and your putting. If you would like more information, please come by the Clyburn Golf Center and see us and see myself. I'll be there. Once again, my name is Kevin Lyles on the program director there. If you have a young person who's interested in the game or someone that you want to get interested in the game, please feel free to come by and check out the first tee of Columbia website. Come by the center and we'll kind of get you going and take things to the next level for you. So, once again, be safe out there. Take care of yourself. Please practice social distancing. And we look forward to seeing you soon.