HOW TO HIT THE BALL WITH YOUR PRACTICE SWING
There are three issues: 1) a practice swing (PS) is tension free and "aimless" - where the body seeks and enjoys freedom, good timing, rhythm, and harmony. If NOT, the PS needs practice!!! - to that very end. With NO concern for how it would or wouldn't hit a ball, with NO concern for effort or "hitting" anything: only the exuberance of SWINGING a club. No "ball position" concerns or such.
While doing it in front of a reflecting window or mirror, you get to see if you are "off plane." IOW, do direct your hands by tracing a line under your chin back and forth continuously, and experiment with expanding your backswing turn and how far you THROW the clubhead into the back swing - DO NOT LIFT IT OR PLACE IT UP THERE: IT GETS THERE BY BEING THROWN by the shoulders and body.
2) a PS involves only "throwing" WITH your shoulders throwing your arms and hands, and they hold on to the club: the hands, wrists, forearms, DO NOT TWIST, SHOVE, PUSH, EXERT, OR NUTTIN': THEY ONLY HOLD ON. This is intended to train your "big motor" (your body's center of mass reacting to falling foot to foot and turning) to be in charge WITH EVERYTHING AS RELAXED AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT LOSING STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY (not spaghetti loose - just free of tightness). IN ALL TRANSITIONS FROM UPSWING TO DOWNSWING, AND FROM FORWARD SWING BACK INTO THE BACKSWING (continuous swings here, not single one-at-a-time swinging), LEARN TO WAIT FOR YOUR WEIGHT TO FALL TO THE OTHER FOOT AND USE THAT FALLING TO BE THE ENERGY FOR THE SWINGDOWN. In the reflection, monitor that your swing center (SC) remains IN ONE PLACE (under your chin, actually, not the head itself which can rock) moving neither side to side nor up and down. THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE; THE HIPS SWAY OR ROCK SIDEWAYS UNDER THE SC and that is the big motor. The non-movement of the SC is controlled, actually, by keeping the amount of flex in the knees constant (they don't shove up or collapse down during swings).
3) Making perfect swings is what you are doing here. And once you have rhythmic easy swings that feel good, YOU MUST THEN REALIZE THAT WHAT YOU ARE DOING SHOULD NEVER CHANGE OR BE COMPROMIZED FOR THE SAKE OF IMPACT. I.E., HIT THE BALL WITH YOUR PRACTICE SWING; OR MIS-HIT THE BALL WITH YOUR PRACTICE SWING is more accurate, BECAUSE YOU DON'T CHANGE YOUR SWING IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR ACTION to try to locate the ball: you ALLOW YOURSELF TO MIS-HIT THE BALL AND THEN AFTER THE FACT, TO USE THE MIS-HIT FEEDBACK TO MAKE ADJUSTMENTS IN WHERE YOU STAND AND HOW STRONG OR WEAK YOUR GRIP NEED BE FOR DEAD CENTER AND STRAIGHT BALL FLIGHT IMPACT.
THE culprit in golf is the tension introduced by the subconscious which obeys the mandate "hit that ball in such and such a way" - a mental force which over-rides the good mechanics of your practice swing as it senses it needs to for the sake of contact and to "give you a good shot." THIS IS THE PITFALL, THE ACHILLES HEEL, THE CORE REASON FOR LEARNING BAD MECHANICS. Unknown to you, your body can and will contrive WHATEVER IT FEELS IT NEEDS TO DO in its attempt to a) hit the ball, b) square the clubface, c) make the ball go far. So THE SUBCONSCIOUS BECOMES YOUR MASTER, and if you DID do anything at all different from your practice SWING in the process, THAT gets reinforced as a "necessary part of your procedure" and it is how you "make do" from then on. But that is the problem: YOU MUST BE WILLING TO MIS-HIT. YOU CANNOT KNOW THE CORRECT ADJUSTMENTS FOR GOOD IMPACT UNLESS YOU TOP SOME, THIN SOME, TOE SOME, AND WHATEVER - such bad impacts are the building blocks of THE INFORMATION YOU NEED about where to stand, how strong or weak the grip need be, how low or high to bend over, how close or far from the ball to put the ball, how close or far from your legs you need to allow your hands to hang.
The point is that A GOOD SWING SHOULD NEVER BE COMPROMISED by impact issues WHEN YOU PRACTICE. (On a golf course playing, you use what you have, but if you are willing to postpone playing and even hitting real balls on a range while you LEARN TO TRUST YOUR SWING so as not to compromise IT, and LEARN TO ADJUST POSTURE AND MEASURING based on feedbacks in order to hit balls, you make the practice process truly efficient and pure.)
Keep in mind that this thread is not about playing golf or practicing for accuracy or distance yet on the range; it is about LEARNING HOW TO FIND AND USE YOUR BEST SWING for hitting balls. And that IS your practice swing - the one you can do, admittedly with some coaching and lots of "mindless swinging of the club" without any golf balls.
The next step in this "tutorial" - which really is about HOW TO LEARN to make successful golf shots, is this: YOU DON'T TRY TO DO THINGS DURING A GOLF SWING except the "one thing" which is simply TO USE YOUR PRACTICE SWING AND STAND WHERE YOU THINK YOU NEED TO BE, SO THAT WHEN YOU USE IT, THE CLUBHEAD WILL GO THROUGH THE PLACE WHERE THE BALL IS SITTING.
The issue is that you must NEVER ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE TRIGGERED, TRICKED, HOODWINKED, INFLUENCED, CAJOLED, OR INFLUENCED to use any muscles you don't use in your practice swing (at 50% or so effort) to make good contact with the ball.
So after you feel good and your practice swing doesn't look too bad or feel funny or unnatural or contrived, where it really is a freely swinging motion, GO OUT IN YOUR YARD WITH ABOUT 5 WHIFFLE BALLS - A REAL GOLF BALL IS YOUR MORTAL ENEMY at this point.
Set a row of them up in front of you, in a line running "north and south" [you face north...] a few inches apart. With a 7-iron, walk over near the one in the row closest to your feet, stand so that the path of your clubhead with your practice swing is two or three inches "south" of the first one in the row. Make several practice swings that brush the grass and notice where it wants to swing when you don't try to swing it either "here" or "there" - just watch how a comfortable posture and swing motion feels and notice where the club passes through the grass.
When your practice swings - mindless and easy - are consistently moving in the grass pretty much in the same path swing after swing, and the path is a couple inches "south" of the first ball, when you feel ready, INCH YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY OVER ENOUGH SO THAT THE NEXT PRACTICE SWING WILL STRIKE THAT FIRST BALL. You have to guess how many inches it is from where your path was to where the ball was sitting so that you move forward to it approximately the right amount of inches so that you don't change your swing to hit it. DON'T CHANGE YOUR SWING TO HIT IT. JUST SEE IF THAT UNCHANGED MOTION DOES HIT IT WITHOUT TRYING VERY HARD TO DO SO. The object of your effort here, now, is to see if you can manage where you STAND so that the practice swing you like and that feels good WILL go through "the ball place" that the whiffle ball is occupying. (I had a blind golfer once in a class for golfers with disabilities, and after he made continuous swings back and forth for me, I placed a ball in the path he was making without telling him I was going to do it ("when he wasn't looking"). His club hit the ball well, RIGHT UP in the air with a good trajectory, and all the spectators gasped at what "the blind man did!" BUT HE DIDN'T HIT THE BALL; THE BALL HAPPENED TO BE SITTING WHERE HIS CLUB WAS GOING TO SWING, SO THE RESULT WAS A GREAT SHOT. Needless to say BECAUSE I TRICKED HIM, HIS SUBCONSCIOUS WAS NOT TRIGGERED INTO ANY COMPENSATIONS OR IMPULSES TO GO AFTER THE BALL - SO HIS SWING WAS NOT IN ANY WAY COMPROMISED BY ANY OF THOSE INCREDIBLY SUBTLE NERVE REACTIONS THAT TYRANNICALLY RUIN GOOD SWINGS when the IRS (Internal Reactive System in our neurological brames....) jumps up MID-SWING to RUIN the fluid motion BECAUSE IT THINKS IT WON'T HIT THE BALL. ANYONE observing you, novice, child, teacher, or friend, can see immediately if there is any difference in THAT swing than in the practice swings you made when there was no ball to hit.
WE DON'T CARE IF IT DON'T HIT THE BALL; WE ARE USING PERFECT PRACTICE SWINGS AND PLAYING AROUND IN THIS DRILL TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE ARE SILLY LIKE THIS. IT JUST MIGHT HAPPEN THAT WE'LL DISCOVER HOW EASY IT IS TO FIGURE OUT THAT WE NEED TO STAND CLOSER TO A BALL, OR FURTHER FROM IT, OR LOWER TO IT, OR HIGHER FROM IT, TO MAKE DECENT CONTACT.
SO THAT IS WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT; EXPERIMENTING TO SEE IF YOU CAN PLACE YOURSELF IN SUCH A WAY THAT YOUR STUPID CLUB PASSES THROUGH THE WHIFFLE BALL'S CHAIR WITHOUT YOU DOING ANYTHING EXCEPT ADJUSTING WHERE AND HOW YOU STAND when you swing your club.