Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Bender is one of Golf Digest's 50 Best Teachers in America (ranked 4th) and one of Golf Magazine's Top 100 Teachers. The 2009 PGA National Teacher of the Year, Bender has coached more than two-dozen Tour professionals, including 2007 Masters champion Zach Johnson. Before teaching full-time, he competed for three years on the PGA Tour and was a three-time NCAA All-American and two-time NCAA Division III individual champion.
 
Dave Allen has spent more than a dozen years as an instruction writer/editor for Golf Magazine, Golf for Women magazine, and GolfChannel.com. He has cowritten several golf books, including Play Golf the Pebble Beach Way and Golf Annika's Way.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

From one of Golf Digest's 50 Best Teachers in America--a simple, scientific program to develop a repeatable swing
 
Most golf instruction is based on helping students emulate the best players, but, as Mike Bender puts it, would you rather fly in an airplane that was built by engineers who understood the principles of lift and acceleration, or would you rather fly in one built by people who simply went out to the airport and watched them taking off and landing?
 
Bender, the 2009 PGA National Teacher of the Year, believes that physics provides a better model for developing a swing that is as efficient, consistent, and timeless as that of Iron Byron, the mechanical robot developed by the USGA to test clubs and balls. Having coached two dozen Tour professionals, including 2007 Masters champ Zach Johnson, Bender shows you how to put the secrets of science into your own swing with a simple, proven program that will take your play to a different level and transform your approach to the game. Once you develop a scientific swing, it's your own game that will really soar.

Aus dem Klappentext

The best way to shave multiple strokes off your golf game is to develop an efficient, repeatable swing that enables you to hit the ball farther and straighter with greater consistency. To achieve this ideal swing, you need a clear picture of the finished product and a simple step-by-step process for building it, testing it, and maintaining it. Now you have it.
 
In Build the Swing of a Lifetime, Mike Bender, one of Golf Digest's 5 Best Teachers in America, shows you how to develop the same swing that boosted the careers of 2007 Masters champion Zach Johnson, multiple PGA Tour winner Jonathan Byrd, and 2006 LPGA Rookie of the Year Seon Hwa Lee.
 
Mike Bender didn't become the 2009 PGA National Teacher of the Year by offering quick fixes and compensations for deficient swings. He did it by creating a science-based, biomechanical approach to understanding the elements of an efficient, powerful, repeatable swing and devising a simple, checkable method for practicing and perfecting that swing.
 
In four simple steps illustrated by 150 photographs, Mike shows you how to aim and turn properly, get your hands on the correct downswing plane, and match up your arm swing and body rotation to square the clubface more consistently. He provides clear and simple guidance on how to make sure you're practicing each step correctly. Using broken club shafts, construction cones, and other forms of feedback, you'll discover how to check your alignment and posture, and make sure that your shaft and hands are moving on-plane in good sequence with one another.
 
There are a million ways to hit a golf ball, but only one is the most efficient way to produce shots that are consistently long and on target, and only one will help you keep shaving that handicap down toward scratch for as long as you keep playing. That is the swing you will develop by practicing and applying what you learn in Build the Swing of a Lifetime.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Build the Swing of a Lifetime

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

When it comes to using a model as the blueprint for the perfect swing, teaching professionals and everyday golfers often look at who the best players are at the moment. While I was growing up, those players were Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller. They were the ones winning tournaments and appearing most often on television and in golf magazines and books. Nicklaus and Miller had tall, upright swings with aggressive leg drives. That was how I was taught to swing the golf club, because that's how they did it.

As technology started to improve in the early 1980s and golfers became more fit, swings became more compact and rotary (for example, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman). Then, in the early 1990s, teachers started to look at the swing from a more scientific, kinesthetic background. The quality of video cameras improved, as did the computer software, making it possible to compare the average golfer's swing side by side with that of a Tour player, such as Norman, Faldo, Fred Couples, or Nick Price.

The mid-1990s saw the birth of the titanium driver and massive 300-yard drives, which demanded a stronger, more athletic body and swing. Tiger Woods came on the scene at about the same time, and ever since his historic 12-shot victory at the 1997 Masters, Tiger has remained the primary swing model for teachers all around the world. Tiger has won thirteen additional majors and countless tournaments since that time, and you'll get little argument from me or anyone else that he's the greatest player of this era. Because he's the best player, people automatically assume he has the best golf swing. So when a teaching professional brings a student in front of the video monitor and shows him how his impact position stacks up against Tiger's, it enhances his credibility as a teacher—at least in the eyes of his student.

Tiger's swing, however, is far from perfect. If it was, he wouldn't have made as many swing changes as he has since 1997. Tiger has had his struggles, especially with the driver. In a six-year stretch from 2003 to 2008, he failed to rank any higher than 139th on the PGA Tour in Driving Accuracy, and his distance also came down. He's not a machine. I'm not nitpicking on Tiger, because during that same six-year period he won thirty-seven PGA Tour titles and six majors, but what makes him great are the intangibles he possesses: his desire to win and get better, his imagination around the greens, his killer instinct, and his tremendous shotmaking ability. Tiger has all of the shots. Does that make him a model for the ideal golf swing? No more so than Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, or Lee Westwood.

The fact is, there isn't a single Tour player out there who is worthy of being "the" example held up as having the model swing. If they all had perfect swings, they wouldn't be hiring swing coaches and constantly tinkering with their mechanics. These players should be copied for how they play the game and not for how they swing the club. Now, I could teach you to swing exactly like Jim Furyk, but you wouldn't hit the ball as Jim does because you wouldn't be able to time the swing as well. You're not going to get the same results just because your swing looks exactly like his does. It takes a unique set of compensations in a very short period of time to make his swing work.

The recreational golfer doesn't know this, however. What you have are teaching professionals taking advantage of the student's uneducated mind regarding what a good golf swing is or should be. When I use Tour pros to compare swings, I use pieces of their swings that are good; I don't simply throw Tiger up there and say, "Here's how you need to swing." I may slap Tiger's impact position up on the screen because his shoulders are perfectly square, or I may put Zach Johnson's pre-impact position up to show the path his hands travel on the downswing, but I never use one golfer as the whole model.

If amateurs were more educated, they would ask, "Where does science say the shoulders and the hands should be at impact?" But they're not going to ask that because they have no identification with the principles of science and physics; they identify with Tiger and the other players they see on television and read about in books and magazines.

The Most According to Science

So, if Tiger Woods isn't the model for the perfect golf swing, then who is?

To answer this question, I ask my students to consider the following scenario. Say you were going to fly in an airplane for the first time, would you rather (1) fly in a plane that was built by engineers who understand the principles of lift and acceleration, or (2) fly in one that was built by people who simply went to the airport to observe how planes take off and land? Of course, you'd choose number 1, because you'd feel a lot safer in the air knowing that the plane you're flying in was built on the principles of science and flight, not on someone's observations. Yet golfers are conditioned to think exactly the opposite when it comes to learning the swing. They take their instructor's word—or the words they read in a magazine article or a book—and naturally assume it's correct because their teacher said it and because it's what Tiger does in his golf swing.

Now, what if I were to tell you about a machine that is designed to hit the ball dead solid perfect every time? That this mechanical golfer is so accurate that the United States Golf Association once had to replace its test fairway because it wore out the turf, in a straight line, in the center of the fairway? Wouldn't you want to swing as consistently as this machine? I know I would.

The machine, appropriately named "Iron Byron" after one of the game's all-time great ball-strikers, Byron Nelson, was retired in 2002. For thirty-one years, though, it stood on the grounds of the USGA's Research and Test Center in Far Hills, New Jersey, hitting thousands and thousands of golf balls with the same efficient, repeating swing. The USGA used Iron Byron to test golf club materials and balls to make sure they conformed to the Rules of Golf. Today, the USGA has two unnamed mechanical golfers that it uses—both developed by Golf Laboratories in San Diego—one for testing golf clubs (balls are hit out onto the range as before) and the other for indoor golf ball conformance testing.

The original Iron Byron—copies of which today are being used by several equipment manufacturers, including Nike-was capable of generating clubhead speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour. It wasn't built by golf professionals, but by engineers for True Temper, who wanted a machine that could swing like a man but do it repeatedly with great efficiency (that is, with less compensating moves). After looking at hundreds of golf swings, these engineers decided to name the machine after Lord Byron, because he possessed one of the most efficient swings of his generation.

Iron Byron was built by engineers who understood the principles of physics and science. They were able to create a machine to hit the ball within one-half degree of repeatability every time. As human beings, we're not robots, but what is it we're all trying to do? That's right: hit the ball like a machine. We stand on the range trying to groove a repeating swing as Iron Byron does, so that we can hit the ball consistently long and...