Bertholy's Golden Exercise

[philly golfer]

Can any one please explain how Bertholy's Golden Exercise is done and number of reps recommended for each session?

[LowPost42]

Re: Bertholy's Golden Exercise

Perhaps you can provide a link to said information?

[GregJWillis]

Re: Bertholy's Golden Exercise

This is all I could find...
The Secret of Golf
So you have to buy the book, me thinks.

[ubizmo]

Re: Bertholy's Golden Exercise

I've looked at this book, "The Secret of Golf" in the bookstore. It's pretty interesting, although I suppose it could mess up your swing, and your mind. It consists of a fairly large number of short chapters, each of which presents somebody's claimed "secret" of the golf swing. So Bertholy's "golden exercise" is just one short chapter.

I've read about Bertholy's methods here and there on the web. I guess he was pretty well known in the 1950s and 60s. From what I remember (I love reading stuff like this) his method had different stages. Stage 1 involved doing a slow motion swing with a weighted club or a piece of lead pipe, and holding certain positions. This was to be done every day, anywhere. Then he said to forget about it when playing golf; just doing the exercises would gradually change and improve your swing. The "golden exercise," I think, came in stage 2. It involves swinging the club back with one hand well down the shaft, as you can see in the picture at the site that Greg linked to. Then you swing down with the hand there, but you release it before impact, so that you're striking the ball with only the left hand holding the club.

I haven't tried it myself, but that's what I remember. There are some books on Bertholy's method, but they seem to be out of print.

[Al56]

Re: Bertholy's Golden Exercise

Although I find the site itself of limited value due to the high level of noise, I did find the explanations of Bertholy's method quite illuminating (don't use the approach since it appears it would take quite a while to ingrain). Here are the relevant links I found through searches a while ago:

Single-Axis Golf Forum
Single-Axis Golf Forum
Single-Axis Golf Forum
Single-Axis Golf Forum

Hope they help.

[ubizmo]

Re: Bertholy's Golden Exercise

There's a lot of interesting stuff in all those Bertholy threads, but the thing that jumped out at me was Bertholy's instruction to pause long enough at the top of the backswing to spell "one." I never thought of doing that, but stopping at the top has done more than any other single thing to help my swing lately. Very easy to forget to do it, too.

Edit: there was also a lot of discussion of Bertholy's idea to start the downswing by swinging the lead knee toward the target. I never heard of doing that.