How to Get Better at Golf
Every week at Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate, a new client stands on my lesson tee and tells me what’s wrong with their golf swing. Then they hit ten shots. And almost every time, what they described and what the club actually did to the golf ball are two completely different problems. Which is why I was moved to write this month’s blog: 5 things that make you a better ball striker. It’s the most common conversation I have in golf training in Orlando, and it happens somewhere on my lesson tee every single day.
That gap between you and sustainable golf improvement is not the effort you’re making. Or your talent level. It’s in the information you are choosing to consume or not. And how you’re applying that information, if at all.
Your working definition of a ‘good golf shot’ is probably very different than mine or any other good golf coach. Not because you’re not smart. Nobody has ever handed you a good definition for your skill and your experience level. Instead, you’ve been collecting tips, fixes, and positions the entire time you’ve been playing golf. Thinking these things would make you a better ball striker. You’ve never been told what those positions were supposed to produce at the bottom of the swing.
I’ll make that statement again. What these positions are supposed to produce at the bottom of your swing! At Impact! Where everything matters! Where being a better ball striker is measured.
And as you become think you’re on your way to become a better ball striker and feel as though you’re ‘more accomplished,’ these tricks and fixes and short-term solutions get so crowded in your head that you’re too tense to make a free swing because you’re too worried about tracking the club through the swing. Versus focusing on what matters most: impact conditions.
Here is something to consider. Every shot you have ever hit, your best and your worst, traces back to a short list. In thirty-plus years of coaching, I’ve never needed to reply on more than five items that makes a golfer a better ball striker. Three of those items happen at impact. One decides whether the first three are even possible. And the fifth one happens before you ever take the club back.
Learn to connect your results to these five, and golf stops being mysterious. It becomes diagnosable. That’s the entire point of this post. Having you concentrate your practice efforts on these 5 things that make you a better ball striker.
1. Where Your Club Bottoms Out
Your swing travels on an arc. That arc has a lowest point. With an iron off turf, that lowest point needs to live in front of the golf ball. A few inches in front, on a shot that comes off the way you want.
Ball first. Turf second. In that order, every single time. This one item all to itself is considered by some golf coaches as the single most influential position that is preventing you from becoming a better ball striker.
When that sequence is off, you already know the symptoms:
- Fat shots that come up twenty yards short and thin shots that scream over the back
- Wildly inconsistent spin, so the ball releases on one hole and checks up on the next
- No workable distance control, which means no realistic club selection
- A golf swing that looks fine on video and produces nothing
Here is the part almost nobody tells you. The center of your swing arc isn’t in your hands, and it isn’t in the clubhead. It travels with your sternum. Wherever the middle of your chest is pointing at impact, the bottom of your arc sits underneath and slightly ahead of your sternum. Which is why hanging back on your trail foot puts that low point behind the golf ball no matter how hard your hands try to rescue it.
When I put a client on our Smart 2 Move 3D force plates, the golfers who strike the turf consistently share one trait. Their pressure has already moved into the lead foot before the club gets back down to the ball. The golfers who chunk it are still traveling away from the target when the club arrives. Same swing on video. Completely different 3D pressure mapping. It’s the first thing we look at in our Orlando golf lessons when a client tells me they hit it fat.
If you’ve read what I’ve written about the chip shot, this is the same principle on a smaller scale. Low point control isn’t an advanced skill. It’s the first skill you must master to become a good golfer.
2. Where Your Clubface Points At Impact
Improve where your clubface aims at the moment of separation, and your start line improves. That’s not a theory. It’s close to arithmetic.
Ball flight technologies have measured this for more than two decades. With a driver, the large majority of where your golf ball starts is determined by where the face is looking at impact, not by where the club is traveling. For the right-handed golfer, a face open to the right means the ball starts right. Face closed to the left, the ball starts left. Opposite for the left-handed golfer. This is not a myth or an assumption. It’s an indisputable fact.
Most amateur golfers who come to see me or one of our staff golf instructors in Orlando are obsessed with fixing the club path. Does swing path matter? Of course it does. But it’s time to realize it is not the priority. It’s second in line behind fixing the face of the golf club at impact. A clubface you can control makes almost any reasonable path playable. And you see this every day when watching professional golf. Most tour players’ swings naturally produce a fade or a draw. A neutral path has never been a requirement for good golf.
No matter the amateur client I coach, I find something to be true in almost all cases. The offline swing path came second. It began as a compensation your body invented in order to survive a clubface it couldn’t manage. Improve the face at impact, and the path frequently cleans itself up before I ever say a word about it.
Your clubface lives in the back of your lead hand. Not in your grip pressure and not in your shoulder turn. This makes it critical that your lead-hand position allows the clubface to return to a square position at impact. Flex the back of that lead wrist, and the face closes. Let it cup, and the face opens. That’s a small joint doing an enormous amount of work, and most golfers haven’t once felt it move on purpose. We record it on OnForm and step through it frame by frame at impact, because where your face actually was and where you felt it was are rarely the same place.
All golfers who become “efficient” with their swings and their ability to have each shot they make travel to the intended direction of the shot, learn very fast how to control the club’s face at impact. One of the ways all golfer must journey through to become a better ball striker.
3. Where You Strike The Face
Hit the sweet spot. Everybody’s heard this one. But most amateur golfers have no clue where they are actually making contact. To become a better ball striker, the first two items help you put the golf ball in the middle of the club face every shot.
I keep a can of foot spray in my bag for exactly this reason. Two minutes, a dozen golf balls, and clients stop asking why a good-looking swing produced a golf ball that went nowhere. The pattern on the face answers the question for them. And should convince them that function supersedes form any day of the week. It’s the cheapest diagnostic in golf training in Orlando, and it’s the one almost nobody runs on their own.
Strike location off the center of the face costs you in three ways:
- Distance, because you lose ball speed you already paid for with your swing.
- Direction with the driver, because heel and toe contact adds curve you didn’t ask for.
- Confidence, because the shank and the toe rocket are the two shots that live rent-free in your golf brain.
The most obvious number to follow using FlightScope to determine a center strike is smash factor. With a driver, the practical ceiling sits right around 1.50. Most golfers I coach start around 1.35. With most, if not all, of the “distance they lost” coming from a very poor strike location on the club face. Not swing speed. You don’t need a faster swing. You need to ensure that every swing you make provides the optimum opportunity for the ball to make contact with the middle of the club face.
Here is something to consider. Arccos has now tracked more than five million rounds in a single reporting year, and the average male amateur drove the golf ball 224.0 yards in 2018 and 224.1 yards in 2025. Eight years of new drivers, new shafts, and new golf balls, and the number hasn’t moved a full yard. Equipment isn’t your bottleneck. Contact is.
4. Speed You Can Actually Repeat
The first three items are all about what the club does to the golf ball. This one determines whether those three are even available to you.
I’m not anti-speed. Speed is worth having, and you can train it. But speed you can’t organize or balance isn’t speed. It is noise, non-essential movements that are robbing you of speed. And sacrificing the first three keys mentioned in this piece.
Your equilibrium lives in complex system of sensory functions that rely on your brain’s and body’s ability to coordinate those functions against a horizon. When you swing harder than your body can coordinate, that sack is sloshing, and your brain quietly stops managing your clubface and starts managing your balance instead. When this happens, the low point of your swing moves with the balancing act. Altering what could be an efficient and effective clubface position into one that hits the crazy shots you’re asking questions about.
I’ve written about this twice now, in “Are You Swinging at 80%” and again in “You Can Only Swing as Fast as You Can Balance.” I’m not going to repeat those arguments in this piece. Want more information about this? Click the links and read the other blog posts.
The short version is that your usable speed is capped by your balance, and almost every golfer I meet is attempting to play above their balance cap. Which is why balance work shows up in nearly every golf training Orlando session we run, no matter what the golfer walked in wanting to fix.
Being a better ball striker does not demand more speed. It demands consistent speed you can repeat every golf swing.
5. The Decision You Make Before You Swing
The first four happen in about two tenths of a second. This one happens while you’re standing behind your golf ball with all the time in the world. And in my experience, it costs my clients more strokes than any of the other four. And many golfer ignore this one decision when asked what will make them a better ball striker.
The 2026 Arccos driving report makes the case better than I can. Among the best amateurs, those playing at scratch through 4.9, 88% of driver tee shots stay in play. Among golfers above a 30 handicap, 45% of driver tee shots end in a recovery or a penalty. Nearly half. The separation between the best amateurs and everyone else isn’t distance. It’s trouble.
Mark Broadie’s work in “Every Shot Counts” arrives at the same place from the math side. A recovery shot and a penalty stroke cost you far more than a drive that finishes fifteen yards shorter and in the fairway. You already know this. You just don’t play like it. Or should I state, you don’t make decisions that allow you the opportunity to keep the ball in the fairway.
So before you swing, ask yourself three honest and humbling questions:
- What is my actual carry number with this club, not my best number ever?
- Where is the miss that doesn’t cost me a stroke?
- Am I playing a tee box that gives me a shot I can actually execute?
I built the September post around that last question, Why You’re Playing the Wrong Tees, because it is the single fastest scoring change available to most golfers, and it requires no swing change at all.
You can strike a golf ball perfectly and still make a bogey. Ask me how I know. This is the piece of golf training in Orlando that golfers skip most often, and it’s the one that shows up on the scorecard fastest. To become a better ball striker, the decisions you make are critical. And if your first decision is off, then everything from that point on is compromised.
How To Actually Improve These Five Better Ball Striker Skills
I wrote this post to build awareness. For some of the average amateurs reading this post, it should be enough information for you to make sustainable improvement to your ball-striking abilities. Sometimes, awareness alone will start moving the needle on your next practice session, because you’ll finally be paying attention to what matters most.
But awareness alone is slow. What speeds it up is four things working together:
- Feedback that tells you what happened, not what you felt. Impact tape, foot spray, launch monitor data, video
- Skill work that varies the task instead of grooving one rehearsed motion
- Technique changes made only in service of one of these five keys, never for their own sake
- Understanding, so that when the ball misbehaves on the 14th hole you can diagnose it yourself
Those four things are the entire structure of our golf training in Orlando. Feedback first, so you can see what actually happened instead of what you felt. Then skill work. Then technique, but only when it serves one of these five. And understanding underneath all of it, so you can coach yourself on the 14th hole when I’m not standing next to you.
Here is something to consider. Notice what isn’t on that list. A brand new golf swing. Or a brand new golf club. Or a band-aid tip that will last about 2 holes. In thirty-plus years, I’ve almost never needed to rebuild a golfer to get them shooting lower scores and becoming a better ball striker. The skills are usually already in there. They’re just pointed at the wrong five things.
Conclusion: Five Things, Not Fifty
Your next bad shot came from one of these five things listed that make you a better ball striker. Not 50! Likewise with your last great shot.
Where your club bottomed out. Where your face was pointing. Where you struck the face. Whether you were balanced enough to control any of it. And what you decided before you started.
That’s the whole list to become a better ball striker. Everything else you’ve been told is either a way of influencing one of these five or a distraction from all of them.
My suggestion to you is to master the 5 things that make you a better ball striker. Never waver from these 5 items. Keep them in a priority system that defends itself when you are distracted by information that does not matter. When all else fails, realize that these 5 things that make you a better ball striker are there for you to return to. And recover with.
I’m John Hughes, PGA Master Professional of Instruction, and along with our staff of certified golf instructors in Orlando, I coach golfers year-round at Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate. If you want to know which of these five is genuinely costing you strokes, we can identify it in a single hourly session of Orlando golf lessons using FlightScope, OnForm, and our Smart 2 Move 3D force plates. If you’d rather go deeper, our group golf schools in Orlando give us multiple days to work through all five and to take them out on the golf course, where they count.
Either way, stop guessing. Guessing is the slowest possible way to become a better ball striker. Ending the guesswork is exactly what we built our golf training in Orlando to do.
