How to Improve your Golf Swing at Home – 7 Simple Ways

When you hear advice about improving your golf swing, a lot of pros don’t consider that many people cannot afford to play at a course all the time.

This, however, shouldn’t be a barrier to improving your golf game. In this article, we explore the many things that you can do to improve your golf swing at home – without spending money.

1. Use a Mirror

Using a mirror is like having your own coach. While you cannot swing fully and properly while looking in a mirror, it can be useful for the following aspects of your swing:

• Observing your posture.
• Seeing how you position the club and align yourself up to the ball.
• Seeing how your swing looks at the top.
• Making sure that your downswing is aggressive and has a good angle of attack.

In my own experience, I used to have a really poor angle of attack. Experts recommend that you should have a lag (angle) of less than 90 degrees to sufficient attack the ball. Sometimes, I would have a lag of 150 degrees.

Swinging infront of a mirror allowed me to make a correlation between the right angle, and how this feels in my golf swing. I then replicated this when I was at the driving range.

Overall, a mirror is an extremely effective way of observing your swing in slow motion, and consequently making the necessary adjustments.

2. Utilise Tutorials and Drills

Often, we can be embarrassed to try out new things at the driving range as we feel that people may judge us.

However, when you are at home, this doesn’t matter. When you have the free time, you can watch tutorials on youtube, and then re-enact them at home.

You can pair this with the use of alignment aids. Combining the lessons that you learn from various tutorials, and practicing these techniques using alignment sticks means that you will gain a better feeling for the correct technique, which will subsequently better-prepare you for when you next hit a ball.

3. Exercise

Improving your golf swing at home doesn’t solely come from practicing your swing. It can also come from external activities such as working out and exercising to build the necessary muscles for golf.

In my article on increasing golf swing speed, I addressed the various explosive exercises that you can do. The same applies here. You are aiming to develop the fast-twitch muscle fibres in the muscles that you use for golf. This will result in a more powerful and stronger swing.

Consistently practicing the following exercises at home will likely help you to swing more strongly in your next round:

• Swinging with a weighted club.
• Medicine ball throws.
• Kettlebell swings.
• Jump squats.

Again, you can learn how to do these exercises here.

In addition to working out, you can also employ the use of flexibility exercises such as stretching and yoga to help you develop a smoother swing.

4. Practice Swinging

If you have enough space – for example in your garden – you should spend time just swinging your club.

If you are a beginner, this can be extremely useful as it creates muscle memory with your swing. This is important as it means that you can focus on implementing techniques to improve your swing rather than focusing on your actual swing itself.

If you want to improve on this technique, you can also visualise hitting different types of shots such as fades, draws, backspin shots, as well as practicing in varied tempos to smoothen out your swing.

5. Use an Indoor Hitting Net

While this is definitely a luxury for most people, if you can afford an indoor hitting net, I would highly recommend that you buy one.

This is without doubt the best way to improve your golf swing at home as it allows you to replicate the driving range without causing any damage to your home.

If you have an indoor hitting net, you can start to implement the above techniques on a regular basis without having to go to the driving range at all.

6. Record Yourself

During my countless sessions with a professional coach, the one thing that we did consistently (every lesson) was recording my swing.

Even though he utilised an app that allowed him to break my swing down, recording yourself at home will allow you to analyse your swing and make adjustments.

I would recommend that you follow this process:

• Either set up your camera face on, or down the line. Alternate between these two angles as they provide different insights.

• Select the slow motion recording function and start recording.
• Get into position and swing as you normally would.
• Stop the recording.
• Watch it back and look for any potential issues with your swing before implementing changes.
• Bonus tip: compare your swing to professional golfers that are similar to you and try to see what they do differently.

It can be difficult to quantify if the adjustments make any difference to your swing (as you aren’t hitting any balls). However, recording and analysing your swing will enable you to create a couple of techniques to remember to implement when you next hit a ball.

7. Use Visualisation

Visualisation can be an extremely useful tip to improve your golf mentality.

Set yourself up for a normal practice shot. Then, swing and hit the imaginary ball. Upon contact, you should imagine yourself hitting an amazing shot with great technique, which goes in the desired direction.

Sometimes, doing consistent visualisation of golf shots can lead to improving your confidence on the course, which will then lead to actually hitting better shots.

Summary

So, while the driving range and the course are always better for improving your golf swing, there is no reason why you cannot do the same at home.

While it is harder to quantify success without hitting a ball, working on your swing at home will lead to you gaining a better understanding about your technique. Then, you can implement new strategies when you can next hit a ball.