Have been reading some golf books,

[cypressperch]

and I am ready to say a few things about TOUR TEMPO. The author found that almost every professional golfer had a common aspect with their swings. When he counted the number of frames for their back-swing and the number of frames for the down-swing, the ration was almost invariably 3-1. If they took 27 frames going back, then it was 9 frames to impact. 24-8, 21-7, etc. Incidently, the most consistent from shot to shot was Tiger.

The significance of this is that if a person learns this tempo, they do not have to think much of swing mechanics. If you have your proper tempo in your head and swing to it, you are forced to do the right things to get back and through on time. He includes a CD with the book that has sounds for the different tempos. You go to the range with headphones on and it is not that difficult to eventually be swinging to a certain 3-1 tempo like a pro. I have done this, and it does work.

If you cannot get to impact on time, you are waisting time somewhere. The author talks a lot about casting, and this is perhaps the most common hitch in swings that makes development of good tempo difficult.

I agree with the author about the importance of simplifying things as much as possible. It is a great thing to address a ball and be concerned with nothing but tempo.

One warning: Tour tempo is mainly for full swing shots and almost full shots. When you get to shorter shots, that tour tempo thing has a way of getting into your short game and the results are various types of miss
hits. This, however, will force you to spend a lot of time with your short game so that the negative aspect mentioned is negated.

I recommend this book pretty highly. I think that tempo should be taught as a fundamental, and it has not been. Or at least it has not been given enough consideration. What the book accomplishes could have been done in far fewer pages. The CD ends up being the most important thing.

Cypressperch