Issue No. 2: The Tempo Number

"Good tempo" gets talked about like a mood. You either show up with it or you don't, and when you don't, nobody can tell you why. For years I blamed off days on being out of sync, which is really just a polite way of saying I had no idea what was wrong. Turns out tempo isn't a feeling at all. It's a ratio, backswing to downswing, and once I started measuring mine instead of guessing at it, it stopped being something that happened to me. Last week was about picking the shot you can live with before you swing. This one's about the swing itself, once you've already committed to it.

Every swing has a tempo, whether you're paying attention to it or not. It's just the ratio between how long your backswing takes and how long your downswing takes. Most of us never think about it as a number. We think about it as a feeling, smooth or rushed, and we try to chase the feeling back when it disappears.

I found an app called Tour Tempo with a frame counter that marks the start of the backswing, the top, and impact. Mine came out to 24:8: 24 video frames back and eight down. That is a 3:1 ratio at a specific overall speed.

The number gave me a better explanation for misses that had looked unrelated. When my lower body fired too quickly, my upper and lower body stopped working together and the club got stuck behind me. From there I could time it well and hit a decent shot, leave the face open and hit it high right, or flip my hands and hook it left. Different results, same inconsistent sequence.

A feeling is hard to train because you can't check it against anything. A number you can check every time.

Stop chasing the feeling. Find your ratio, then defend it.

You need a way to measure your own tempo before you can train it. Tour Tempo's frame counter is the cleanest way I've found. Record a swing, mark takeaway, the top, and impact, then see where you land. A spoken count can help rehearse the general rhythm, but it won't tell you whether you're actually swinging at 24:8, 21:7, or something else.

First, just measure a few normal swings. Don't pick the prettiest one. Then use the tones to work toward a speed and ratio you can repeat without thinking about anything mechanical. For me, the point wasn't to make everything slower. It was to keep my lower body from outrunning the rest of the swing.

The point isn't to memorize a number for its own sake. It's to give yourself something concrete to return to when the feeling goes missing, which it will.

Here's where it actually gets used, and it's not on the range. It's the shot after a bad hole, or the tee ball with real trouble on one side, when your brain wants to grip it a little harder and swing a little faster without telling you.

That's the moment to go back to the count instead of a swing thought. Not "keep your head down" or "slow down," which are both feelings dressed up as instructions. Just the count. Whatever phrase or rhythm matches your own ratio, run it before you pull the trigger. It doesn't fix a bad read or a bad decision. It just keeps the motion from getting away from you at the exact moment it's most likely to.

I don't have a clean before-and-after number to hand you. What I do have is a miss pattern that finally makes more sense. When the count gets off, my lower body tends to fire early and the club gets stuck. Then I'm relying on timing to square it: sometimes I do, sometimes it stays high right, and sometimes I flip it left. The tempo work hasn't made every swing perfect. It has made that sequence show up less often and kept the whole motion in sync more consistently.

The tool that got me here is Tour Tempo. No relationship with them, no discount code, just an app I actually use. If you want your own number instead of eyeballing it, that's the fastest way there: tourtempogolf.com

Hit reply and tell me what your ratio actually is once you check it. I'm curious how many of you are closer to 2:1 than 3:1.

Play well,
Connor