For More Speed and Power… Forget About “Using the Ground”
Everybody’s talking about ground reaction forces and using the ground properly to gain speed and power in the golf swing, but it’s far more important to understand the key core movements of the great players. Focus on those and forget about “pushing off the ground” or “using the ground” to generate power. You’ll love the results.
The LPGA Tour is kicking off its 2026 season this week at Lake Nona Golf and Country Club in Orlando, and the pros are dealing with something most Florida golfers rarely face: freezing temperatures.
“It’s colder here than in the UK at the minute, which is a first,” said England’s Charley Hull during Wednesday’s media day at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions.
Even Lydia Ko, who lives at Lake Nona, seemed surprised by the cold snap. “We’re pretty much getting to below zero in celsius here, which maybe in other parts of the country they would be thankful, but when you’re in Florida it is a little bit of a surprise,” she said.
If the world’s best players are adjusting their games for cold weather, recreational golfers should, too. Here’s how to play smart when the mercury drops.
Understand What Cold Does to Your Game
Before you change anything, you need to know what you’re fighting against. Cold air is denser than warm air, which means your ball won’t fly as far. Period.
Hull noticed this immediately during practice rounds at Lake Nona. She mentioned hitting a gap wedge into the 18th hole during a previous win but needing a 4-iron during Tuesday’s practice round. That’s a difference of four or five clubs for the same shot.
Action item: Expect to lose 5-10 yards on every club in your bag when temperatures dip below 50 degrees. Plan accordingly and don’t be stubborn about club selection.
Layer Up Without Restricting Your Swing
Hull admitted she wore three pairs of pants during practice. While that might be extreme for most of us, staying warm is critical to playing well in cold conditions.
Your muscles need warmth to function properly. When you’re cold, your body tightens up and your swing gets shorter and faster. Neither of those things help you hit good golf shots.
Action item: Wear multiple thin layers instead of one bulky jacket. Look for golf-specific cold weather gear that stretches with your swing. Keep hand warmers in your pockets between shots. And don’t forget a good hat because you lose significant body heat through your head.
Take More Club Than You Think You Need
This is where ego gets in the way of good scores. When it’s cold, the ball doesn’t compress as well off the clubface. Combined with denser air, you’re looking at serious distance loss.
The pros at Lake Nona are dealing with a course that measures 6,642 yards but plays much longer this week. If they’re adjusting, you should too.
Action item: Take at least one extra club on every approach shot. In temperatures below 40 degrees, consider taking two extra clubs. It’s better to fly the ball to the back of the green than to come up short in a bunker.
Adjust Your Expectations on the Greens
Cold weather affects putting in ways most golfers don’t consider. The ball is harder and doesn’t roll as smoothly. Your hands are cold, making it harder to feel the putter. And if there’s any moisture on the greens, they’ll be slower than normal.
Ko mentioned that she still sometimes reads the greens wrong at Lake Nona despite being a member for years. Cold weather makes that challenge even tougher.
Action item: Hit putts more firmly than usual. The ball needs extra speed to hold its line on cold greens. Take a few extra practice strokes to get a feel for the speed before you putt.
Embrace the Mental Challenge
Hull said something interesting about cold weather golf: “I like the mental toughness of it.”
That’s the right attitude. Everyone on the course is dealing with the same conditions. The player who stays patient and doesn’t get frustrated by the extra difficulty will come out ahead.
Action item: Lower your expectations by a few strokes. If you normally shoot 85, accept that 90 might be a good score in 40-degree weather. Focus on solid contact and smart decisions rather than perfect shots.
Warm Up Longer and Smarter
This might be the most important tip of all. Cold muscles are tight muscles, and tight muscles get injured easily.
World No. 1 Jeeno Thitikul revealed she’s been protecting a wrist injury that bothered her late last season. Cold weather makes those kinds of injuries more likely if you don’t prepare properly.
Action item: Spend at least 20 minutes warming up before your round. Start with stretching, then hit easy wedge shots before working up to your driver. Keep moving between shots on the course to maintain body heat and flexibility.
The pros at Lake Nona this week will adapt and compete at the highest level despite the cold. You can do the same at your local course by following these tips and keeping a positive attitude.
PGA Professional Brendon Elliott is an award-winning coach and golf writer. You can check out his writing work and learn more about him by visiting BEAGOLFER.golf and OneMoreRollGolf.com. Also, check out “Playing Through” now on R.org, RG.org’s partner site, each Monday.
Editor’s note: Brendon shares his nearly 30 years of experience in the game with GolfWRX readers through his ongoing tip series. He looks forward to providing valuable insights and advice to help golfers improve their game. Stay tuned for more tips!
Brooks Koepka is back on the PGA Tour, and whether you love him or hate him, the guy knows how to win when it matters. After his LIV Golf stint, the five-time major champion returns this week at the Farmers Insurance Open.
What makes Koepka fascinating? He doesn’t fit the mold. His swing isn’t textbook. He doesn’t obsess over mechanics. Yet he’s won three PGA Championships and two U.S. Opens, regularly making it look easier than guys with prettier swings.
So, what can average golfers learn from someone who treats the game so differently? Quite a bit.
Stop Overthinking Every Shot
Koepka describes his approach as “reactionary” rather than mechanical. While most tour pros grind over swing thoughts, Brooks sees the target and hits it. No mental checklist.
This might be the most valuable lesson for weekend golfers who’ve watched too many YouTube swing videos.
How to actually do this:
On the range, hit five balls where you stare at the target for three seconds prior to addressing the ball. Don’t think about grip or stance. Just burn that target into your brain. You’ll be shocked at how pure you hit it when your brain focuses on where the ball is going instead of how you’re swinging.
Next time you play, give yourself a rule: Once you pull the club, you’ve got 15 seconds to hit. Koepka is one of the fastest players on tour because he doesn’t give his brain time to sabotage him.
If you feel tension in your hands at address, you’re trying to control too much. Koepka’s grip pressure is famously light. Loosen up until the club almost feels like it might slip, then add just enough pressure to hold on. That’s your swing thought: soft hands, see the target.
This approach works better under pressure. When you’re standing over that shot with water left and OB right, the last thing you need is a mental checklist. See it, feel it, hit it.
Play to Your Strengths (Even If They’re Not Pretty)
Koepka uses a strong grip that wouldn’t pass muster in some teaching circles. But he’s built his game around what works for him, elite driving distance and recovery skills. He doesn’t try to be someone he’s not.
Here’s how to build your game like Brooks:
Look at your last five rounds and figure out where you’re actually gaining strokes. Bombing it off the tee, but can’t hit greens? Lean into it. Play courses where distance matters more than precision. On tight holes, grip down on your 3-wood instead of trying to thread a driver through a keyhole you’ll miss seven times out of ten.
Koepka knows he can scramble, so he’s not afraid to miss greens. If you’re deadly from 50 to 75 yards, start leaving yourself those distances on the par 5’s instead of going for them in two every time.
Know when to take your medicine. Koepka in the trees at the PGA? He’s punching out to 100 yards, not trying to bend a 6-iron around three oaks. You’re in the rough with a flyer lie and water short? Hit your 8-iron to the middle and move on. That’s not playing scared, that’s playing smart.
Save Your Best for When It Counts
Here’s a wild stat: Koepka’s putting average in majors is often more than a full stroke better per round than in regular events. He elevates when pressure is highest.
How does an amateur tap into that gear? It’s not about trying harder, it’s about caring differently.
Here’s what actually works:
Decide which rounds matter to you. Club championship? Member-guest? That annual trip with college buddies? Circle those dates and treat them differently. Koepka doesn’t care much about regular tour events, but majors? That’s when he locks in.
Two weeks before your big round, change your practice. Stop beating balls mindlessly. Play nine holes in which every shot has consequences. Miss the fairway? Hit from the rough on the next hole too. Three-putt? Twenty push-ups. Koepka’s practice intensity ramps up before majors because he’s rehearsing pressure, not just swings.
Develop a between-shot routine that resets your brain. Koepka is famous for his blank expression after bad shots. Try this: After any shot, take three deep breaths while walking, then find something specific to notice, a tree, a cloud, someone’s shirt. That’s your reset button. By the time you reach your ball, the last shot is gone.
The Bottom Line
Brooks Koepka’s return reminds us there’s no single path to success in golf. His “substance over style” approach proves that results matter more than looking good.
You don’t need a perfect swing; you need a reliable one that holds up under pressure. You don’t need to hit every shot in the book; you need the shots you can count on. And you don’t need to play great every time; you need to play great when it matters.
Welcome back, Brooks. Thanks for the reminder that golf is ultimately about getting the ball in the hole, not winning style points.
PGA Professional Brendon Elliott is an award-winning coach and golf writer. You can check out his writing work and learn more about him by visiting BEAGOLFER.golf and OneMoreRollGolf.com. Also, check out “Playing Through” now on R.org, RG.org’s partner site, each Monday.
Editor’s note: Brendon shares his nearly 30 years of experience in the game with GolfWRX readers through his ongoing tip series. He looks forward to providing valuable insights and advice to help golfers improve their game. Stay tuned for more tips!
Blades Brown made a big impression last week in the California desert, and not just because he’s only 18. He put up numbers that would catch any weekend golfer’s attention. Most of us won’t hit 317-yard drives or find 86% of our greens in regulation, but there’s a lot to learn from how Brown managed his game at The American Express.
Here are three practical lessons from his performance that you can use on your own course this weekend.
Step 1: Give Priority to Accuracy Over Distance Off The Tee
Brown’s driving stats are impressive. He averaged almost 318 yards off the tee, ranking 12th in the field. More importantly, he hit 76.79% of his fairways, tying for fourth place in the tournament.
Think about that ratio for a second. Brown could have swung harder, chased more distance and tried to overpower the course. Instead, he played smart golf and kept his ball in play.
Your Action Item: Next time you’re on the tee box, ask yourself a simple question before pulling the driver. Do you need maximum distance here, or do you need to be in the fairway? If there’s trouble lurking or the hole doesn’t demand every yard you can muster, take something off your swing. Grip down an inch. Make a three-quarter swing. Do whatever it takes to find the short grass. Brown’s approach illustrates that fairways lead to greens, and greens lead to birdies. He made 22 of them last week, along with an eagle.
The math is simple. When you’re hitting three out of every four fairways like Brown did, you’re giving yourself legitimate looks at the green with your approach shots. That’s when scoring happens.
Step 2: Commit To Hitting More Greens
This is where Brown really separated himself. He hit 62 of 72 greens in regulation, an 86.11% clip that tied for first in the entire field. Read that again. An 18-year-old kid tied for the lead in one of the most important ball-striking statistics in professional golf.
How did he do it? By keeping his ball in the fairway (see Step 1) and giving himself clean looks with mid-irons and wedges.
Your Action Item: Start tracking your greens in regulation. You don’t need a fancy app or a statistics degree. Just mark down whether you hit the green in the regulation number of strokes. Par 3s in one shot. Par 4s in two shots. Par 5s in three shots.
Once you know your baseline, set a goal to improve it by 10%. If you’re currently hitting five greens per round, aim for six. The beauty of this approach is that it forces you to think strategically about club selection and shot shape. Brown’s strokes gained approach number was positive (0.179), meaning he was better than the field average. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be on the dance floor more often.
When you hit more greens, you eliminate the need for heroic short game shots. Brown only had to scramble 10 times all week, and he got up and down 70% of the time. That’s solid, but the real story is that he rarely put himself in scrambling situations to begin with.
Step 3: Minimize Mistakes And Stay Patient
Here’s the stat that jumps off the page: Brown made only three bogeys all week. Three. In four rounds of professional golf against the best players in the world.
He also made just one double bogey. That kind of clean card doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you play within yourself, avoid the big miss and trust that pars are never bad scores.
Your Action Item: Before your next round, decide that you’re going to play boring golf. No hero shots over water. No driver on tight holes just because you can. No aggressive pins when there’s a safe side of the green.
Brown’s performance shows us that consistency beats flash every single time. He didn’t lead the field in any single strokes gained category, but he was solid across the board. That’s how you post numbers and cash checks.
Give these three steps a try. Your scorecard will thank you.
PGA Professional Brendon Elliott is an award-winning coach and golf writer. You can check out his writing work and learn more about him by visiting BEAGOLFER.golf and OneMoreRollGolf.com. Also, check out “The Starter” now on R.org, RG.org’s partner site, each Monday.
Editor’s note: Brendon shares his nearly 30 years of experience in the game with GolfWRX readers through his ongoing tip series. He looks forward to providing valuable insights and advice to help golfers improve their game. Stay tuned for more tips!
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RBImGuy
Mar 20, 2018 at 4:51 am
Dead wrong
Ed
Jan 30, 2018 at 6:58 pm
Ground Reaction Forces, GRFs, are exactly that; the reaction forces that are applied in the ground from the forces and torques that the golfer generates in their golf swing.
If you understand and are able to measure the forces that are applied to the ground through the feet you will better understand what is happening within your golf swing.
If your golf swing is good then you should forget about “Using the Ground” because the ground forces are reaction forces. You can’t get extra power from GRFs because they ARE the forces that you generate in your golfswing, nothing more.
Tumba
Jan 30, 2018 at 4:44 pm
Activate the glutes
Ed
Jan 31, 2018 at 12:54 pm
To activate the glutes requires a neuro-muscular signal from your brainlet. It’s all programmed in the brainlet.
The golfswing involves big muscles. There is no ‘muscle memory’ because big muscles have an IQ of about 4. Big muscles are stupid muscles and inherently clumsy.
Joe
Feb 1, 2018 at 8:48 am
you guys have come up with a bunch of BS like band-aid fixes in the golf magazines. You do leverage the ground for more power. Just like the bad instruction that teachers say “be in a athletic stance” be ready to move. Hog wash!! You use you glutes when you load into your left side and then back to the right side.
OB
Feb 1, 2018 at 11:24 am
But you also use your leg quads to stabilize your legs, perhaps moreso than the glutes. Many golfers have big glutes but their legs are weak and useless because they can’t lunge laterally from the left to the right side (for RH golfers).
Tour pros have solid muscular legs in addition to strong glutes while most rec golfers are leg deficient because of their sedentary lifestyle. Office workers do not make good golfers.
Andrew Cooper
Jan 30, 2018 at 3:46 pm
Good stuff Lucas. “Using the ground” confuses what happens in a good swing with what you should be thinking of doing.
tony
Jan 31, 2018 at 2:15 am
… and what should you be thinking of doing…. answer that… 😛
Marc
Jan 30, 2018 at 2:15 pm
He’s not wrong that the golf instruction world tries to find some buzz word (i.e. ground forces) to latch on and run with. For a time it’s “stack & tilt” and then it’s “one-plane”, then it’s “X-Factor”. But he shouldn’t discount the presence of it either. For me, the proper use of the ground is a result of an effective sequence and motion. So, it happens anyways. You don’t need to do it on purpose.
tony
Jan 31, 2018 at 2:18 am
IOW, GRFs only happen if you generate GF&Ts in your body… 😎
Andrew Cooper
Jan 31, 2018 at 2:57 am
Think of whatever works for you. But you should never have to think of “using the ground”-anyone with any athletic sense will do that naturally, as they would do in any throwing or hitting athletic motion. The kinetic chain is hard-wired into us.
Ed
Jan 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm
Suggest you do a Wiki search on “open” and “closed” kinetic chains …. and then apply it to the golf swing and GRFs. Wald should also learn about the kinetic chains and GRFs to better understand the science because his interpretations are erroneous.
Andrew Cooper
Jan 31, 2018 at 3:32 pm
Ed, understanding the kinetic sequence is a starting point, but the bigger question is what should a golfer be thinking of doing to make that good sequence show up? “Using the ground” obviously and measurably happens, but it’s questionable whether a golfer could or should consciously try to do it, keeping in mind the fraction of a second that it takes to move the club from the top of the backswing to impact.
Ed
Jan 31, 2018 at 7:09 pm
Of course golfers shouldn’t try to consciously sense the forces their feet/shoes apply to the ground when playing. However, it should be part of their practice routine and quantified on force plates to ensure their force patterns are consistent and appropriate. Force plate GRFs reveal how and when you generate forces within your body; forces that are ALL resolved into the ground as GRFs. Force diagrams and numbers reveal everything. “Feel” only reveals “feeelings” and feeelings are emotions. Are you an emoticon golfer? 😉
Regis
Feb 1, 2018 at 5:39 am
But realistically probably less than 1% of avid golfers have access to force plate training and probably less than 10% even know what’s involved. The problem (which I think is the authors point) is that when modern teaching sets focus on using the ground it results in a practise range of golfers jumping around like mexican jumping beans. Thats true of overemphasis of any one swing ckmpknent
OB
Feb 1, 2018 at 11:19 am
But if avid golfers don’t synchronize their golf swing to their GRFs that means they have a faulty swing. Instead of seeking more distance and control from their clubs they should seek out a teacher using force plates to optimize their swing dynamics. Knowledge is power.
4right
Jan 30, 2018 at 11:23 am
Exactly HL… If you didn’t use ground force, it would feel like being suspended under water, or floating in air, slow and less energetic. I’m sure Mr. Ward’s points are valid, but the sequence is more important. The vast majority of us regular golfers get tossed in with the world’s best and that is not a far comparison… Top players have far more talent and god given abilities to play at that level.
HeineyLite
Jan 30, 2018 at 11:12 am
Question? Where do they get the energy to rotate then? The ground!!!
tony
Jan 31, 2018 at 2:20 am
No… you get the energy to rotate from your brand new club head which is loaded with power… according to the advertising. I mean just look how powerful the clubs are in the hands of the tour pros. You can buy that power and feel what the pros feeel.
4right
Jan 31, 2018 at 9:48 am
LOL
Nac
Jan 31, 2018 at 12:42 pm
So true! When you hand someone an ax to chop a tree down you do not need to tell them how to use the ground to swing the ax harder. It’s a natural move.
Ed
Jan 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm
Yes it’s natural for chopping wood but you had better synchronize your golfswing mechanics so your GRFs are proper. Somebody with a reverse pivot has faulty GRF results.
Golf instructors are learning about GRFs from force plate technology because everything that happens dynamically in your body appears as GRFs. GRF or GTH.