Golf 101: How to Play Golf

The way you hold the golf club is one of the most important fundamentals in the game. A proper grip directly influences your clubface control, swing mechanics, and ultimately your ball flight. In this lesson, we’ll explore how to build a correct and functional grip (whether you’re using an iron or a driver) and understand the subtle but important differences between them.

Your setup is the foundation of your swing. From ball position to stance width, posture, and tilt, every detail at address prepares you to move dynamically into a great backswing and strike. This lesson walks through the essential setup positions for both irons and drivers, with helpful distinctions to ensure your contact, angle of attack, and alignment support your intended shot.

Get this right, and you’re not just ready to swing; you’re giving yourself the best chance to swing WELL.

The backswing lays the groundwork for your entire golf swing. A flawed takeaway or shoulder turn early on can ripple into compensatory swing patterns that make solid contact harder to achieve. In this lesson, we focus on how to build a functional, repeatable backswing that works for both irons and drivers, covering takeaway checkpoints, arm structure, body rotation, and weight distribution.

The downswing is where everything comes together, and it happens in milliseconds. Once the backswing has loaded your body into a powerful position, the downswing is your transition into impact. This phase must be sequenced correctly to create speed, strike consistency, and clubface control. If you want straight shots, clean contact, and more distance, this is where it happens.

Impact happens in a fraction of a second, but it reflects everything you've done up to that point, from grip and setup to rotation and pressure shift. This lesson unpacks the dynamics of impact for both irons and drivers, explaining what should be happening in your body and the club to ensure solid contact and optimal launch.

You’ve hit the ball, but your job isn’t finished. In fact, your follow-through can tell us everything about what came before. A well-formed follow-through is often the result of a well-sequenced swing. But it’s also more than just a result: it’s a powerful tool for shaping the rest of your swing. By having a clear follow-through goal, you’ll naturally improve your backswing, downswing, and impact.

You’ve now got a toolbox full of swing fundamentals, but how you practice them will determine whether they actually show up on the course. Great swings don’t come from endless repetitions alone, they come from smart, varied, and realistic practice.

This lesson walks you through exactly how to take the information from this course and apply it in real-world training scenarios, including the range, home nets, or even indoor simulators.

The best golfers make things look simple, but simplicity is built on solid fundamentals. In this lesson, we break down the most common faults seen in amateur golf swings and give you practical, drill-based solutions for correcting them. These include grip, posture, strike control, and more advanced ideas like shoulder tilt and face control. By recognizing and fixing these issues, you can develop a more consistent, repeatable, and powerful swing.