Get Some Rhythm

By Allen Kelly, Golf Professional, Parklands Driving Range, East Coast,

Regardless of whether your tempo is fast or slow, you need to have good rhythm in your golf swing.
A typical symptom of poor rhythm is a golfer who has trouble with the longer irons and woods.
The takeaway is slow to the top, then a quick lunge back down to the ball in an effort to hit at the ball with maximum clubhead speed.

When you have poor rhythm with the longer clubs, the tendency is to come over the top, producing a steep, cut-across forward swing and a weak, high slice or a pull, depending on the clubface angle at impact.
You also get inconsistent contact because you've effectively moved the bottom of the swing ahead of the ball when you jerk the club over the top, making it difficult to deliver a square clubhead into the back of the golf ball.
In the golf swing, rhythm describes how you divide the total time you take to complete your swing among the three main parts: backswing, downswing and forward swing.

Tempo measures how much time you take to move from your address to the top of your backswing, from the top of your backswing to impact and from impact to your finish. Rhythm is simply how smooth or jerky you accomplish the swing.
"Keep it smooth "! If you treat the golf swing like a simple pendulum and divide it into "equal" beats or counts, the backswing would take two beats, and the combined downswing and forward swing gets two beats.
For example, you could count "one-two" to the top of your backswing, and "three-four" to impact and finish.

This ratio is the golf swing rhythm. Like tempo, it's critical that you have the same golf swing rhythm for every club and every swing.