Videos: Lesson of the Week | Wayne DeFrancesco

Lesson of the Week: Jamie Kilmer, PGA Part 4 – More Right- Arm and Shoulder Work

This video should help anyone who struggles with an inability to get the hands more forward at impact with an iron. The culprit is right arm and shoulder pull back (right shoulder retraction), which in transition causes all sorts of issues. Jamie’s overuse of his right shoulder to increase his turn causes his upper body to lean toward the target before the lower has a chance to initiate the forward motion, leaving the arm stuck up and behind him while his head struggles to stay behind the ball. The feeling needs to be that the right arm and shoulder do…

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Lesson of the Week: Max Rosenberg Making Great Progress – Shallowing the Shaft in Transition

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

It took us a while, but Max finally got the hang of shallowing the shaft in transition, which is a big deal as it encourages his pivot to stay deep and rotate in order to get the shaft on plane at P6. As he has been steep in the forward swing his whole life this presents a different set of circumstances for just about everything he does. One thing to remember is that a player’s swing prior to changes has a feel and a memory as the hands learn to put the club on the ball, and these tendencies do…

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Lesson of the Week: Romano Bootha- Change in Posture Makes Huge Difference

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

Romano is a young aspiring PGA Professional working toward his PGA of America Class A certification. Part of the requirements for even getting started is passing the Player Ability Test (PAT). It’s 36 holes in one day and it takes a total of around 156 to pass. The PGA doesn’t like to discourage apprentices like Romano and now if they miss qualifying he or she can still use the best 18 hole score and add it to a score shot in the next attempt. This may sound like an easy task, but the game is so hard that just wanting…

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Lesson of the Week: Max Rosenberg

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

Max is taking a year off from his job to see how good he can get, and we will follow his progress at least a couple times a month. The first goal when I start with a student is to assess their already formed patterns, keep what works, and change what I see as detrimental to learning to be a superior ball striker. We are also focusing on short game and putting (of course), but some lessons (2 hours once a week) get going on the swing and stay there as we have now identified the most stubborn items and need to spend more initial time focusing on those. The good news is that Max, despite being around a 10 handicap, has things going on in his swing that you would expect to find in much better players. It didn’t take much for Max to get his hands forward at P6 and sustain impact past P7, which for a teacher means that he was able to accomplish one of the most difficult things for lesser players to achieve. I see Max’s major issue as the steepness of his downswing approach and the resulting problems with a release action that wants to drive straight down the line with the face staying square. It doesn’t help that Max is 6’7” and has played with a vertical motion all his life. In general we would like to take advantage of his size and strength and make his swing more efficient, which means keeping his right arm more in front of him in the backswing and shortening his swing length. After that we will keep working on getting him to fell the shallowing of the shaft in the downswing and a release that moves more around on an arc.

Lesson of the Week: Stacy Kress- Trying to Lessen Right Hip Spinning

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

Stacy, the daughter of my good friend Richard Kress, has been a student of mine for over 20 years. Richard is one of the world’s most avid golfers (he’s taken at least one lesson from every teacher you can possibly name) and kept bringing Stacy for lessons even when it seemed that she had no affinity for the game. She was unfazed by her failures and kept at it, and eventually she won the women’s club championship at Woodholme when she was 17, upsetting a 5-time Maryland State Women’s Amateur champion in the process. She went on to play D1 golf for Penn University, and was chosen Freshman of the Year. She now resides in West Palm Beach and is a member at Bear Lakes, where she won the club championship last year as well as the Tri-County Women’s Amateur. Stacy has always had an idiosyncratic right shoulder and scapular movement in transition, and she has always tended to lift as she gets to the top of her swing. When she lifts, she is extending her right hip flexor, which in turn leads to spinning the right side of her pelvis and leaving her arms and hands trailing behind. To improve the synchronization of her upper and lower I try an old trick used by Butch Harmon to keep the right heel down longer and encourage the foot to roll inward instead of shooting straight up. You will see here that by restricting the upward motion of the heel and foot her pelvic rotation slows down and her arms move further down without the hips spinning open.

Lesson of the Week: Scott Kremer- Posture Induced Hip Depth Issues Leading to Path Problems

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

After watching Scott hit his first few shots, I knew that we could make some serious progress right away given that he was setting up well back into his heels. His shot pattern was a pull draw that turned into a major pull hook, and it was obvious that after setting up in his heels he was moving toward the ball immediately in the takeaway with his hands and arms as well as his hips. This is a common issue that gives the player a backswing that has a large progression from P1 to P3, an upright appearance at the top, and no room for the right arm to get in front of the body without pushing the hands well away from where they started at address. Once I got Scott to set up more out over the ball and concentrate on trying to deepen his right hip in the backswing, we could then talk about the feeling of the left arm staying more against the chest and the club approaching the ball from more behind him. We then added the idea of keeping the hips deep in the forward swing and aiming the lateral movement more to the left instead of straight out to the target, which reduced his lateral slide and gave him the feeling of sidearm throwing. The shorter swings we filmed at the end of the lesson with the help of the Spine Board looked particularly improved, and Scott left feeling like he was definitely on the right track.

Lesson of the Week: Phil Cargile- Big Improvement in 2 Hours

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

This video is a bit long but if you hang in there and watch the whole thing, I think you will find it quite instructive. Phil is 55, around a 10 handicap, and has a swing that looks much better than it works. His issues are classic; takeaway slightly inward and behind him, overuse of the right arm at the top, hands dropping behind him starting down, right leg firing under him in early extension, and a “stuck” clubhead at P6 leading to an overly in to out path through impact and a pronounced flip release. Phil has come to me in person once in 2016, once in 2017, and now twice in 2018, and you will see that while he definitely improved his right arm pullback the rest of his pattern is stubborn to say the least. By the end of the lesson you will see with the help of explanations, drills, and swing aids (the Sheftic Spine Board) Phil gets a different look and feel and makes some swings that show great progress.

Lesson of the Week: Frank Goldman 2- Deeper Hips, More Width

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

Frank has come a long way in a few months of lessons (around 15 hours), especially since he almost never has a chance to practice. He does play a few times a week, however, usually with business clients at great golf courses such as Deepdale and Maidstone on Long Island. In this video I contrast Frank’s first swings with his latest, and while his signature issues remain the same he has made some headway in creating a more controlled backswing, which has made his ball striking more consistent.

Lesson of the Week: Alan Grabush- Working on a Quirky Backswing

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

I’ve been working with Alan off and on for over 4 years now, and while we have made significant progress at times with his ball striking we have never been able to rid him of the hitch in his backswing. The biggest issue is that Alan doesn’t feel what he is doing, which means he is not aware of it unless he sees it on video. He can perfectly position the club in the mirror, and he can perform reasonable stop and go drills from different starting points, but in a full swing there is a pattern of movement that causes his hands to move toward his head in transition, which creates a steeper plane than he would like while also making difficult the task of getting the upper right arm in front of the ribcage in the forward swing and the hands further forward on the approach and at impact. In the past I have failed to account for his body motion in assessing why the arms should move the way they do, but in this lesson, I do a bit of hands on holding of his head during the swing, and the results are very encouraging.

Lesson of the Week: Frank Goldman- Overcoming Shoulder Mobility Problems

By Wayne | Videos: Lesson of the Week

Frank works in New York but lives in Baltimore where he is a former member of my club, Woodholme CC. Working in the Wall Street world of finance Frank gets invited to play some of the courses clustered in the New York area from Westchester out to the tip of Long Island, which happen to be some of the best courses in the world. He never practices, but he is tired of not being able to play at a level that would produce a decent score on a difficult track. He decided he wanted to get better, so he contacted me about taking a series of lessons. In his first visit I could see that this would be a project, but the good news was that he is an athletic guy and had a good feel for the general motion of the swing. I saw right away that his major problem was the common issue of right arm folding and pulling behind him in the backswing, which made it impossible for him to get his hands far enough forward at P6 to forward lean the club on an iron shot. When I told him that he needed to make a better upper trunk turn in the backswing and keep his hands wider at the top with space under his right arm, he pointed out that his left shoulder had an impingement that made it hurt when it stretched to a certain point. I knew right then that for Frank to have his right arm stay more in front of him his swing would have to be radically shorter, and if we were able to accomplish that he would then have to train his hands to feel the lag of the club and to square the face as they passed in front of the ball. I referred him to my M.A.T specialist who is working on his shoulder, and we have consistently worked on gaining space with the right arm while keeping it from over bending. Thus, stop and go swings are a staple of the lesson, after which we switch over to impact drills to train his hands what to do were he to get them as forward as we were hoping.

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