The Golfing Machine is unique amongst instruction books. It doesn’t insist you replicate a particular swing, nor does it advise you which swing is ‘best’. Instead, it acts as a catalogue of sorts. The golf swing is divided into twenty-four different components, and each component can be performed in a multitude of ways. The most obvious of these component variations are listed and described, allowing you to pick and choose which to employ. It’s up to you to decide which variations are most desirable or useful, given everything unique about you and your swing.

Underpinning these twenty-four components and their many variations, Mr Kelley identifies six key features every golf swing should have. He calls them the “Three Basic Essentials” and the “Three Basic Imperatives”.(1)

Of course, the terms “essential” and “imperative” are synonymous, but there’s a reason for separating these six key features into two groups. The Imperatives are mandatory. You simply must perform them to create what Mr Kelley calls a “precision golf stroke”. The Essentials on the other hand are important to facilitate the Imperatives, but if you’re particularly skilful, you may get away without them.

Let’s begin with the Three Basic Essentials. They are: ‘A Stationary Head’, ‘Balance’, and ‘Rhythm’.

Why is it advisable to maintain a stationary head during the swing? Well, it’s not so much the head that’s important but what it’s attached to: the spine. Specifically the part of your spine just between the shoulders.(2) In medical terms it’s known as the Seventh Cervical Vertebrae, or C7 for short. If you run your hand down the back of your neck, the C7 is the first prominent bump you feel at the base of your neck. This part of your spine is the centre of your pivot, about which your arms rotate. On the backswing, the clubhead rotates around the left hand, the left hand rotates around the left shoulder, and the left shoulder rotates around the C7.

If, during the backswing, you were to move your head (and C7) by an inch away from its address position, you would have moved the left shoulder, left hand, and clubhead by an inch also. An inch makes a lot of difference during impact. It could mean the difference between hitting the ball fat (the ground before the ball), thin (hitting with the leading edge of the club), and also affect the ball’s shot shape. Any movement of the head away from its address position on the backswing, needs a counter-movement to place it exactly back in its original position on the downswing prior to impact. This is fiendishly difficult to do and leads to inconsistent shots. For that reason, it’s best to keep the head, and by virtue, the C7, in a stationary position during the back and downswing.

This is perhaps the most obvious of the six key features every good swing should have. Mr Kelley defines balance as: “holding the centre of gravity of the body inside the stance without moving the head”.(3) That is to say, you can shift your weight around during the swing, but not so excessively that it makes you uneasy on your feet. Mr Kelley goes on to say: “In every athletic activity, success seems to be unquestionably proportional to the player’s sense of balance and force - whether innate or acquired. Off-balance force is notoriously erratic.”(4)

Usually an ambiguous term in the golfing world, relating somewhat to the overall speed or tempo of the swing. But in The Golfing Machine, rhythm is defined as “holding all components of a rotating motion to the same RPM”.(5) That’s to say — on the downswing especially — the shoulders, hands and club should all be turning with the same RPM (revolutions per minute). That’s not to be confused with speed, however.

If you imagine two locations on the second hand of a clock face. One at the tip of the hand, closest to the numbers, and another point near the bottom of the hand, closest to the pin. Both locations move at the same ‘Revolutions Per Minute’. That happens to be 1 RPM. However, the speed of those two points on the hand are very different. That’s because speed is distance divided by time. Although the time taken to make a revolution for both those points is the same (one minute), the total distance those points travelled were different - the tip of the hand traveling much further than near the base of the hand.

The downswing should be much the same, with the shoulders, hands, and clubhead traveling at different speeds but remaining at the same RPM. When rhythm is off, it means the clubhead tries to overtake the hands, and the hands try to overtake the turning of the shoulders. This leads to a loss of power and control.(6)


So there we have the Three Basic Essentials of a precision golf swing. Strictly speaking, they’re not 100% necessary but without them you may struggle to perform the Three Basic Imperatives.