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My two most common misses for full swing are 1) pull / hook and 2) push slice, in that order.
Push slices occur much less often when using the shorter backswing that you see here. It’s short compared to my previous overswing, but probably still long enough. So, shortening the swing has been a way to reduce the number of times I get blocked.
But the pull hook still occurs with this “short” backswing. It’s not uncommon to hit a good drive up the middle and pull hook an approach shot into trouble.
Regarding ball flight, distance is not bad (driver goes 290, 300 or more if I’m lucky). But the trajectory appears abnormally high to any good golfer I play with. This is true of both woods and irons. Also, whenever there’s an opportunity to be tested by radar, people who know more than I do say that the backspin rates are excessively high for all clubs. So, club fitters have tried to offer solutions. Seems like it would be better to just set up equipment in a standard way and force myself to fix the swing.
Contact is clean if I do two things. 1) press hips aggressively toward the target to start downswing, and 2) feel like I’m holding my right wrist cocked as long as possible through impact. It’s usually possible to do both. But if the wrists uncock early, then contact is bad. The clubhead hits the turf behind the ball, or I stand straight up to prevent that.
In my mind, the next thing to try would be weakening my grip again and teaching the right shoulder and hands to come out more toward the ball during transition, then driving everything else 45 left. Have tried that a few times now but haven’t yet been able to pull it off. Each time the swing just sort of degrades, so I’m stuck on something. There’s got to be a way to take steps in the right direction though.
Hope that is useful information.
After reading John’s email and watching his swing in action I make a couple of set up suggestions followed by mostly backswing thoughts. John has excellent motion and rhythm, and it appears that his clubface angle is a major factor in his tendency to miss to the left. At address I want him to center his body mass instead of pushing his hips forward into more of an impact look, and I’d like him to bring his hands back towards the middle of his body as opposed to forward leaning the shaft. When he brings his hands back, he will get a better read on his grip, which tends to look weaker than it is when pushed forward, and make it easier to weaken it a bit. Next, I would like to see John rotate the clubface sooner in the backswing, bringing it to a more toe up position by P2. He is using left arm pronation to plane the shaft by P3, but the closed face angle indicates that his right forearm is resisting supination, causing his right shoulder to abduct (lift) and retract (pull back). When the right shoulder is jammed in transition it cannot easily respond to the rotation of the body and thus the hands drop straight down, keeping the shaft, which had crossed at the top, steep of the plane early in the downswing, from where it will try to flatten late. As we know, steep to flat works well in the very early downswing because it gives the player the chance to steepen the club later, which in turn encourages rotation of the lower body. If John can get the right forearm to supinate along with the pronation of the left all the way to the top his shoulder will stay protracted and he will be able to adduct the upper arm, externally rotate the shoulder, and supinate the right forearm just after the transition movement has pulled the left arm into the downswing. This will bring his hand path out toward the ball and help flatten the shaft with the face quite a bit more open than before, which he can then square by supinating the left forearm and adding flexion to the left wrist.