One of my favourite Olympic sports to watch is javelin. It’s not just cool to watch a human being launch what is essentially a missile into the air using nothing more than their own strength, but it’s also because it reminds me a lot of golf (and not just when golfers get angry).
Yes, it’s true that golf is quite literally a stick-and-ball sport, but in many ways that’s not the best way to think about it. Ask top coaches, and they’ll say the golf swing is most similar to a throw.
“Golf is all right arm, right arm, right arm, right arm, because believe it or not, golf is mostly a throwing sport,” Golf Digest No.3-ranked teacher, Sean Foley, says. “We’ve been calling it a release for generations. The fact of the matter is we just don’t really let go of the club. We throw it at the ball.”
Whether you’re throwing a club, a ball, a javelin or a punch, the reason why coaches like thinking of the golf swing like a throw is because the underlying principles are the same.
Why it helps
The reason is because of something called the “kinematic sequence”, which is a fancy way of saying the order in which different parts of your body move as you swing.
Golf Digest Top 50 coach Claude Harmon III had a great analogy in a chat with fellow top 50 coach Chris Como. He says to think of your downswing as a race between four horses:
- Your lower body crosses the finish line first
- Your upper body crosses second
- Your hands and arms finish third
- Finally, the clubhead comes fourth
That specific order is what an ideal golf swing sequence looks like, because it creates a chain reaction in your body to deliver maximum speed into the clubhead.
And that’s what happens when you throw something.
Here’s a composite image of Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem’s astonishing 92-metre, gold medal throw. Notice how his body lands and turns. His arm is lagging behind as his upper body finishes turning, before he uses it to launch the javelin forward.
He’s throwing a different object, in a different direction, but it’s the same sequence.
So if a good thought is to feel like you’re throwing a ball as you swing, there are just a couple of things to keep in mind…
Thought No.1: Throw the ball forward on full shots
On longer shots you want a full extension of the club, so top 50 coach Michael Breed wants you to feel like you’re throwing to a spot about “six feet” ahead of the ball you want to hit.
Thought No.2: Throw the ball towards the sky on short shots
As Mike Malaska demonstrates here, on shorter shots you want to deliver more loft, which means releasing the clubhead harder and earlier. To do that, feel like you’re throwing a ball underarm towards the sky.
