The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing: Curing Your Hit Impulse in Seven Simple Lessons

The biggest paradox in golf is that the harder you try to hit the ball, the worse you do so. In The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing, Michael McTeigue offers you a simple system of sequential body movements that produces a true swinging motion with every club in the bag. The result is increased distance and greater accuracy for all sizes, shapes, and ages of golfers for a minimum investment in learning time. The clarity and simplicity of McTeigue's frill-free approach to the golf swing leads the reader to a new experience of power and effortlessness. He truly shows how to build a swing you can trust and keep for life. If you love golf but have never played to your potential, here is a book that you will quickly come to treasure.
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Most golf instruction books are written by famous performers about how they personally swing the club, and there's no doubt the better ones can be helpful—especially if you share the author's athleticism, ambition, appetite for work, and opportunities for practice and play.
This book was written by a very bright but at the time "unfamous" young teacher whose daily bread depended on delivering permanently decent-to-good golf games to averagely endowed people with no interest in becoming slaves to the sport. He became so successful at that in his immediate community that his pupils demanded he put the system on paper for their constant reference and reminder. He called the result The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing, and sent it to a number of star players, one of whom passed it on to me. After one quick reading I believed that the book would help so many other existing and would-be golfers to such an extent that it just had to be made available nationally. Jim McQueen, one of the world's top golf artists and a former professional, fully shared those sentiments and agreed to do the illustrations, and the nation's leading golf book publisher became an enthusiastic third party.
The key to Michael McTeigue's success with his thousands of pupils of all sizes, shapes, ages, and ability levels in California, and the beauty of this book, is the clarity and simplicity and the supremely logical sequentiality of its approach to the golf swing.
Follow the easily mastered steps or "keys" in the recommended order and with a reasonable degree of patience, and in a remarkably short time, you will be experiencing entirely new sensations of both accurate striking and effortless power. Encouraged by those—and the accompanying evaporation of confusion—you will persist with these simple and clear-cut moves until they become thoroughly muscle-memorized. At that point, you will be swinging the golf club effectively and with total confidence on every shot entirely by feel, which is the closest you or anyone else will ever come to golf's "secret" (ask any champion if you doubt that). Gone forever at long last will be the Band-Aids and the gimmicks and all that frustrating stumbling from one fruitless theory to another.
If you love golf and want to play better for a lot less effort, then forget Michael McTeigue's fame quotient and work with this little gem of a book. It could make you as big a fan of his as all those happy pupils for whom he originally wrote it.

Ken Bowden
May 1985

A former editorial director of Golf Digest magazine, Ken Bowden has co-authored more than a dozen golf instruction books, seven of them with Jack Nicklaus.

See Mike's NEW book, "Bulletproof Putting in Five Easy Lessons!" A member of the U.S. Professional Golfers Association for over 10 years, Mike served as assistant professional at Bel Air CC, teaching professional at Riviera CC and San Francisco GC, and head golf professional at Palos Verdes CC. McTeigue was voted the 1995 Teacher of the Year for the Northern California Section of the Professional Golfers Association. He was a popular speaker on golf instruction at sectional meetings of the Professional Golfer's Association. He was an Approved Speaker in the Etonic PGA Section Education Program and a faculty member in the PGA's Golf Professional Training Program. He was an instructor in the PGA's Professional Training and Development Seminar Program. He was an Invited Speaker at the Second World Scientific Congress of Golf at St. Andrews, Scotland in July 1994, at the Meet the Mentors Golf Summit preceeding the 1995 Ryder Cup Matches in Rochester, NY., and the NCPGA Player and Teacher Development Forum in 1998. Mike McTeigue has been a pioneer in applying high-technology to the analysis and training of complex sports motions, especially the golf swing. His SportSense products embodied McTeigue's innovative approach to motor-learning, called Real-time Motion Training (RMT). This involves precise biomechanical analysis and customized, instantaneous auditory biofeedback as the athlete trains in the actual sports environment using his or her own equipment. Mr. McTeigue is the co-inventor of RMT products for professional instructors the Swing Motion Trainer and consumers the Golf Swing Tuner and the X Factor Sensor. He has used the Swing Motion Trainer to analyze the golf swings of more than 160 U.S. PGA, Senior PGA Tour and LPGA professionals. His work produced the "X Factor" articles with Jim McLean; the "Science of the Swing" instruction series in GOLF Magazine, the Golf Digest article, "How's Your Grip Pressure?"; and the Senior Golfer series on "Curing Your Slice"; as well as numerous articles in golf trade publications. McTeigue also authored the hardcover book and companion video, The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing, which GOLF Magazine featured as top selections. Mike graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA with a degree in Psychology, and he received his Masters in Business Administration from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.