Increase Golf Swing Speed and Distance

By John Davenport

Most golfers are looking to improve their golf swing speed and power in order to improve their driving distance. In fact, the speed of your club face when it hits the ball has a direct bearing on the momentum it imparts to the ball.

Physical fitness and your golf swing techniques determine your club head speed. You have to be fit and flexible to get the maximum golf swing speed. If you are flexible enough, you should be able to pull up a back swing and let it go with all the potential energy and power it contains. Most golfers do not realize the importance of follow through in a golf swing sequence. In fact, it is a very important part because the faster you hit the ball with your club, the farther it will go. If you use a heavier club your ball will go farther, and with a lighter club it will not be able to go as far. So the first change you can make is to use a heavier club to drive farther.

There are other variables such as the loft of your club and the type of ball you are using which affect the distance your ball travels, but we shall assume that these variables are constant. As speed equates to distance, if you prepare yourself for a full follow through you will hit the ball with maximum speed. If you do not make an effort to follow through you will unknowingly pull back from the shot even before you hit the ball. So try to concentrate on where you want to end your golf swing sequence and not on what you are trying to hit. By concentrating hard on your follow through you can definitely increase your golf swing speed and distance.

Golf weight and training exercises are the best and the quickest ways to improving your golf swing speed and power. You should realize that your body dictates your golfing ability.
Therefore you should train to improve your flexibility. There are 22 types of muscles involved in the forward golf swing. If you condition these muscles properly it will definitely help you to increase your club head speed and you will be able to control your shot better.

Top golfers use rotational exercises to improve their flexibility. This primarily involves loosening the joints and strengthening muscles used in the golf swing drill. Here are some simple golf swing training exercises. Stretching exercises can range from touching your toes to twisting from side to side with a dumbbell. You can also exercise with your club round your shoulders with both arms resting on it. These exercises improve the rotational muscles and allow you to twist farther. Improve your fitness, strength and flexibility and it will improve your golf swing speed.
Click here for more golf swing speed and distance tips

To discover special tips to improve your golf swing, click this link: 10 Golf Swing Tips You Have To Know About.

John Davenport loves golf and writes extensively about how to help players to improve their game. To read his review about Golf Training Ebooks and Programs, click here:The Golf Ebooks Each Player Should Know About.

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Building Speed On The Guitar - A Commonly Overlooked Problem

By Lee Nicholas

Some guitarists have an uncanny ability to play incredibly fast in a reasonably short amount of time while others can struggle for what seems like an eternity, improving at a very slow pace with an ever decreasing likelihood of reaching high speeds on the guitar.

There are many reasons why this can be, anything from physical differences to bad posture, incorrect handling of the pick or just plain bad practice. Whatever the reason, there is often one common element that differentiates the two types of guitarist... Focus! Alternate picked straight sixteenth notes at 250bpm may be your goal because that's what your guitar idols can play at. You may have been struggling for years and still can't get past 120bpm? Now let's forget the numbers and think only about improvements in small steps.

If you are like many guitarists in this situation then the chances are your attention has been largely focused on that 250BPM goal. Now there's not necessarily anything wrong with that but unfortunately for most, that goal takes away too much attention from where you should be concentrating and that is just plain improvement at any level, no matter how small a degree.

Having long term goals are important but it's also important to keep things in perspective.
Getting from 120 to 250bpm is huge, it's a massive and long term achievement that requires a lot of concentrated, disciplined practice. If your current perfect speed is 120bpm and you are trying to reach 250bpm with most of your practice sessions having the metronome set at 200+ then you are never going to do it. You might improve to an extent but it will always be sloppy. If however you can play something with perfection at a given speed then there will always be headroom for further improvement from that current level. By setting your goals much smaller you will be always be pushing the boundaries upward with the necessary headroom to keep moving forward.

Getting from 120 to 125bpm is a very realistic goal. It's one that you can not only say you will definitely be able to reach but it's also one that you should be able to reach quite quickly. If you think that isn't a big improvement then you are approaching it with the wrong attitude. A 5bpm improvement has just moved the boundary. Do this ten times over a period of time and you have a 50bpm increase in speed.

When you are concentrating all of your efforts in these smaller increments it becomes a lot easier to spot flaws in your guitar technique. Most of the things that prevent a guitarist from being able to play fast are often small details causing bottlenecks. It might be that three fingers are working efficiently but the pinkie is holding everything else up. A common problem is also with synchronisation between the left and right hand. All of these things are much easier to correct at slower speeds, which allow you to home in and work on those specific problems.

Here's something to think about. There are thousands of amateur guitarists who already have the left and right hands well practiced and capable of a large speed increase. The only thing that's preventing this from happening is poor synchronisation. Yet, the only thing they have NOT spent any time focusing their attention on is synchronisation!

Free Rock and Blues Guitar Lessons

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How to Improve Communication Skills at Lightning Speed

By Peter Murphy

Talking is the easy part; really communicating so that you say something worthwhile and people listen to understand your message as well can be more of a challenge. If you are to exchange useful information and react with people who are resistant to your communication through fear, anger or frustration, you need to know how to improve communications skills.

1. Don't take what people say personally and strike back at them angrily. There are many other reasons why people react as they do and they are not likely to be linked to you as a person so remember that, take a deep breath, count to ten, then you can react in a more calm fashion.

2. It is fine to admit that you don't know something. Communication so often suffers from half-truths and misunderstandings; don't pretend you know something when you don't as you could be wrong and that will lead to further communication problems.

3. Respond with factual information that will help when you are asked something, rather than reacting emotionally, which is subjective and can often be negative.

4. Provide a safe, non-emotional opportunity for people to air their views without you dismissing them or getting upset or angry.

5. Communication is a two-way process; everyone in the conversation must share responsibility for making sure that the conversation works. That means that the sender of the message needs to speak clearly and simply and the receiver of the message needs to say if they do not understand and ask for clarification.

6. Listen to the other person. Give them chance to speak so that they will feel respected. People care most about being heard than they want people to agree with them. You can show that you are listening actively by asking them questions to draw out more information from them or by summarizing back to them what you think they said and asking for them to confirm if you have understood correctly.

7. Assumptions, presuppositions and judgments can all get in the way of good communication. That is because once you believe you understood something that someone is saying to you, there is tendency to stop listening well. That can distort your perception of the communication, so you can improve your communication by checking that you have understood correctly what has been said.

8. If you need to cooperate with others to complete a project, you need to be sensitive to their frustrations and priorities so that you can compromise. If you don't compromise there will be anger and resentment that will get in the way of successful communication and completion of the project.

9. Seek common ground rather than differences between you. This is another reason why it is good to state the aim of the communication early on in your conversation so that you can check out what you both want to achieve.

10. Listen to the other person. Let them feel that they are a real partner in the communication and they will be better disposed towards helping the communication succeed. Also, you will be ale to learn from them in a way you can't if you are not really listening.

It's important that you know how to improve communication skills because in your life you will need to communicate with all manner of different people for a variety of reasons.

Peter Murphy is a peak performance expert. He recently produced a very popular free report:
10 Simple Steps to Developing Communication Confidence. This report reveals the secret strategies all high achievers use to communicate with charm and impact. Apply now because it is available for a limited time only at: http://www.howtotalkwithconfidence.com/report.htm

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