Palmer 60/40 Golf is a simple system that can help you improve your swing, and your game, by identifying and correcting both technical and instinctive mental or physical flaws.

Warne Palmer is a Class A PGA Golf Professional in the Northern Ohio Section of the PGA of America and an Instructor of Golf at Avalon Golf and Country Club in Warren, Ohio. This book is the culmination of his forty years of experience as a golf professional and educator.

The fundamentals presented in this book have been developed over the years while instructing students, and can be taken advantage of by all golfers of any age or skill level.

This system will help you increase the number of solid shots you hit during a round by focusing on your own golf swings and tendencies, identifying whether your game's weaknesses are caused by technical flaws (60%) or physical or mental errors (40%), and providing a comprehensive series of drills and checklists to address your weaknesses and improve your swing from the tee, on the fairway, on the green, and in a variety of commonly encountered situations.

The 60/40 Golf Philosophy

The five distinct groupings of clubs - wedges, irons, hybrids and fairway metals, drivers and putters - require slightly different swing techniques, but there are also concepts that connect all full swings. Palmer 60/40 Golf addresses the five distinct swings, presenting proper technique, common errors and flaws, and simple drills, checklists and exercises to enable you to improve each of the basic swings, along with tips on equipment selection, specialty shots, and more.

Full swings are best thought of as technical, practiced movements. This is one area in golf where we want to be more robotic than athletic, as we try to repeat these swings as closely as possible again and again. When we play golf we are faced with the task of making corrections in our swings one shot after another. In order to be able to self-coach ourselves through swing flaws and adjustments, it is incumbent upon us to learn our own swing characteristics and fundamentals well enough to be able to quickly analyze the flaws in each shot.

This analysis is facilitated by refining our golf swing through a series of technical movements and concepts that we deliberately attempt to repeat over and over again, week by week and year by year, while recognizing the fact that we are constantly changing physically as we continue to age. Progress will never be in a straight, ascending trajectory; we will experience good days and bad days. However, the more self-awareness and knowledge we gain regarding our golf swing, the better equipped we are to improve and make positive adjustments.

As we go through the five groupings of clubs and swings, please keep this idea in mind-missed shots will always be a result of the combination of technical and instinctive factors not matching-up perfectly during a swing. Most of the time, the flaw in the previous swing and correction necessary prior to the next swing will be technical. Identifying the cause of a flawed swing is not a perfect science. But the more we know about the fundamentals of the five basic golf swings and our own swings, the greater likelihood we have of identifying the flaw or problem that created the negative result on the previous shot. The second part of the self-coaching process is determining what adjustment, if any, needs to be made before the next swing. Having a mental checklist of your common swing tendencies and the resulting causes and effects in your full swings can be vital.

As a golf course forces you to change from one swing type to another while playing, executing proper swing mechanics in succession requires a delicate balance of emotional, mental and physical control. This is an extremely challenging and unrecognized aspect of hitting as many quality shots as you can during a round of golf.