Don’t “Try” to Keep Your Eyes on the Ball

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How often have you heard, “Keep your eyes on the ball.”? Good advice?? Yes, in a fundamentally sound swing, golfers’ eyes remain on the ball through impact.? But just keeping your eyes on the ball does not ensure a fundamentally sound swing, nor does it guarantee solid contact between the ball and the clubface.

?Besides, trying to keep your eyes on the ball requires an active conscious mind to maintain visual contact with the ball.? Trying to keep you eyes on the ball potentially creates a condition known as being “ball bound.”? The harder you try to keep your eyes on the ball, the more likely you are to suffer from this condition.

The torsos of golfers who suffer from this condition jerk up and back at or about the time the clubhead contacts the ball, destroying your spine angle before you completely fall out of your swing posture, never coming to a sound finish position.? Even those the eyes are still looking at the ball’s original place on the ground or tee, there’s no telling where the ball will end up.

So, golfers need to develop a fundamentally sound swing that naturally keeps the eyes from moving off the ball without trying to keep them from moving.? I’ve said this many times, “If the mind is quiet, so too are the eyes.”? That means, with the appropriate focal attention, the eyes remain still until just past impact when the momentum of the swing turns the head forward.

The only focus that maintains both a quiet mind and quiet eyes is a Target Orientation.? Establishing a Target Orientation starts at the beginning of the pre-shot routine and is solidified just prior to initiating your swing.? But it takes more than a cursory look at your chosen target to ingrain its image in your mind’s eye.