The Big Three

After I'd finished my first golf lesson back in January 2000, the golf professional who had been teaching me wrote three words in capital letters on the lesson record he gave me. They were TIMING, RHYTHM AND TEMPO. These three things, he said, are "the big three" of good golf.

To this day there's something elusive about all three of them. Try to get someone to define "rhythm", and you'll most likely get a vague and woolly answer. Much the same is true with the other two "biggies" as well. I'm a scientist at heart, and love clear definitions. Knowing exactly what a word means helps me. And that's the case with these three.

When I started playing golf in earnest a year or so ago (I had merely dabbled on and off before that), I began to read books on the sport from our nearby library. One of them, The Swing Factory has the best discussion of "tempo" that I've come across. Let me distill some of the things I found helpful.

I can't recall that the book actually defined the term, but I had enough know-how to realise it had something to do with speed. I've a dictionary before me as I write, and it defines the term as "a characteristic rate or rhythm of activity; pace." In golf that relates to the pace at which we swing the club.

On this The Swing Factory has many good things to say. The first is that tempo is the key to a consistent golf swing. It describes it as "the master regulator of the entire system." That is to say, the overall cohesion, smoothness and effectiveness of a swing is governed by the rate at which we swing the club.

How does that work? Like this, the book goes on to say. "The right tempo enables the sequence of the swing to occur in the correct order with perfect timing." If the tempo is too rushed, you don't have time to move your arms, hips, shoulders etc., in the way they need to. Alternatively, if the tempo is too slow, the swing becomes disjointed and loses its smoothness. Movements which should flow easily from one to the other become frozen, or broken, and the stroke as a whole loses cohesion. The result is almost inevitably a loss of timing, and certainly, of consistent repeatability. The most repeatable actions are those that flow smoothly and naturally. Jerky, disjointed ones are likely to wobble all over the place.

That's enough for now on the importance of tempo. More next time.