You can control the club, or you can control the ball. You can’t do both.

A long, long time ago there were no computers in this world, and the technology golf equipment manufacturers had was limited. Sure, there were the few innovators that gave us toe/heel weighted putters (and irons), metal woods, and graphite shafts. At this same time, physicists worked on things like splitting atoms, not designing golf clubs.

The golf equipment we have now has been designed by engineers, physicists, and others along with the help of high speed cameras, very powerful computers, and who knows what else. Millions of calculations have gone into every aspect of the design of a golf club, the shaft that goes into it, and even the grip that is stuck on the end.

Why does the back of a golf club have the indentations, weights, plastic inserts, or other materials where it does? Why do some clubs have smooth flowing lines where the club is thicker or thinner and others just seem to have a metal “bar” behind the center of the face where we are supposed to hit the ball? Don’t ask me because I don’t know. I don’t have a clue! And, you know what – I don’t have to know any of this.

What I do know is all those computer geeks and engineers and everyone else that had anything to do with designing my clubs, has made my equipment in such a way that I now have the absolute best opportunity to produce a good shot, more so than I have ever had before. I know every club in my bag will hit the ball perfectly every time, if I just let it. That is the hard part!

Before new technology became such a tremendous part of how almost everything in our life is designed, golf just had woods and irons – blade irons – small blade irons. It was either a good shot or a bad shot, not a miss that ends up 10 feet from the hole. Most of the time we were lucky to find our miss hits.

There was no frequency matching of shafts and no customizing sets by using heads that were separated into 2 gram increments. Shafts were cut, a 7 iron head was pulled out of the 7 iron bin and glued onto the shaft, a grip pulled out of the box was slapped on the end of the shaft, and here’s your new “custom” set of clubs.

With equipment built like this, we had to manipulate the club during the swing because each club behaved differently. In other words, we had to “control the golf club” because there wasn’t the technology to build a truly matched set of clubs that would behave consistently from one to the next. The only way we could begin to control the ball was by controlling the club. Fortunately, with today’s technology, we no longer have to work or manipulate the golf club during the swing.

All we have to do is backswing and downswing and not interfere with the golf club. The key is for us to let the club do what it is designed to do. I repeat, let the club do what it is designed to do. The golf club knows what to do so leave it alone! Your clubs will take very good care of you, if you’ll just let them.

The next time you go to the practice tee try hitting balls using 75% of your normal power, and rather than creating tension in your body on the downswing think of releasing the tension you created on the backswing. Don’t throw the club at the ball like you were trying to get an over-filled bag of garbage clear to the bottom of the trash can in one move so you don’t have to push it in with your hands. Let the club get to the ball on its own, don’t force it!

Once you learn to stop interfering with the club, your good shots and bad shots will go longer and straighter than ever before. It’s your choice.

Kim Anders is Director of Golf at Estrella del Mar Golf & Beach Resort in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico. You can reach Kim via email at Kanders@estrelladelmar.com or call 1.888.587.0609, Ext. 3010. Find out more about the golf resort by visiting www.estrelladelmar.com.