Swing into Spring Training

The golf careers of most weekend warriors consist of interminably long off-seasons, punctuated by summers that seem to pass by in a week. In the north, winter rain and snow render courses unplayable for months on end. Even in the Sun Belt, if one thing doesn't keep the clubs in the closet, something else does: work, family, an injury.

All the more reason to think of April as an opportunity to turn golf's off-season into a season of keeping the promises that you made last summer. If you're a scratch golfer, now is the time to start fine-tuning your stroke. If you're a double-digit handicapper, now is the time to work the weak spots out of your game. And if you're a beginner, now is the time to jump-start your learning process.

Avid golfers often make their biggest improvements during the off-season, when they're free from the pressure to compete. "The off-season is a blessing in disguise," says Dave Pelz, author of The Scoring Game Bible (Broadway Books, forthcoming) and founder of the Dave Pelz Scoring Game Schools. "The feel you can get for grooving a stroke is often far superior to the feel you get when you're distracted by the hole."

To help you start the 1999 season in midseason form, we've put together a spring-training regimen for golfers -- a program of drills, tips, and exercises that come straight from some of golf's most masterly teachers. So grab your clubs: Tee-off is just a few weeks away!

Tips for Swingers

A smart training program starts with a clear plan. "Goal setting is essential, but make sure that your goals are process-oriented, not out-come-oriented," says Jeff Troesch, a sports- psychology consultant at the David Leadbetter Golf Academy, in Bradenton, Florida. "Don't say, 'I want to be a scratch golfer.' Say, for example, 'I want to be a better bunker player -- so I'm going to commit to hitting a specific number of bunker shots at regular intervals.' "

The key, says Scott Monroe, director of golf instruction at Nicklaus Flick Game Improvement, in Boca Raton, Florida, is to get a club in your hands. "Many of my students play about 50 rounds a year -- and some of them play just 10 to 20 rounds," he says. "So I try to get them in the habit of swinging a club at least 300 days out of the year."

According to Mike Hebron, a PGA master professional, a floor-to-ceiling mirror can be an invaluable training device. Here are two of Hebron's favorite drills for developing and maintaining a flawless swing:

When you set up to swing, Hebron advises, your arms, wrists, hands, and club should all be aligned to form an angle that matches the slope of a roof. To align your stance in this way, apply a piece of masking tape to a mirror so that the tape duplicates that slope. Now take a step back, face the mirror sideways, and stand as if you were preparing to strike a shot. Swing the club in slow motion, checking to see whether its shaft is at the same angle as the tape.

Next, stand as you did for the previous "shot," but this time, face the mirror directly. Place two pieces of masking tape on the mirror, with each piece tracing a vertical line that extends from the insteps of your feet, through a point that is just outside of your shoulders, and up to the top of the mirror.

Again, swing the club in slow motion, checking the mirror to make sure that your upper body (except for your hands and arms) does not move outside of the lines indicated by the tape. As long as you remain inside those lines -- starting with your backswing and ending with your follow-through -- you are positioning your upper body correctly.

Another easy-to-rig drill, devised especially for people who slice the ball, comes from Captain Bruce Warren Ollstein, a frequent guest expert on ESPN, CNN, and the Golf Channel. Ollstein suggests that when practicing your swing indoors, you place a two-by-four on the floor so that it is parallel to, but just outside of, the ball's intended line of flight. (The board should lie just beyond the point where you would normally place the ball.) Slicing is caused by following an outside-to-inside swing plane, so an errant swing will graze the two-by-four on the downswing. Repeating this exercise will help you escape that plane -- and thereby straighten your swing.