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You have met Chris’ brother Joey and mom Bev, and now we get a look at young Chris. It’s pretty amazing how much Chris has grown over 3 years, and that change in body dimensions has definite effects on the swing. Chris is building up some muscle now but previously he was quite thin, and it isn’t easy for skinny people to feel the connection between the upper and lower bodies that allows the swing to synchronize properly. The disconnect is apparent in the first swings Chris showed up with today, as his right leg and knee overdrive and his hips get fully facing the target before he gets to impact. This leaves his arms well behind him, and since the movement forward is a bit out to the right (out of the box) his right arm winds up trailing the right side of the trunk and then releasing out to the right, where the miss is then two ways. There are a few options here, one of which is to speed up the arms so that they will catch up. Another would be to slow down the legs, and since I didn’t want Chris to feel like he wasn’t hitting it as hard as he could with his arms, hands and upper body (see Hogan’s Five Lessons) I chose to try to slow down the overdriving right leg.
The drill of choice to start with is the right leg back drill. I had him pull his right foot well back from the target line and flare it out, then in the swing the idea was to keep the foot fairly flat until after contact. You can see here that after a couple of tries he got the idea and the results are immediately noticeable (with the video slow motion). After a few of those we went to a normal stance and tried to keep the right foot flat, and that produced a much more s in sync downswing as well. And when we went to the full swing the feeling stuck around and the swing looked better. Even a couple of drivers flew nice and straight. The idea would be to do the drills in order and advance to the full swing, then go back to the drills and do it over again a few times. Chris does a lot of things quite well in his swing and hopefully this will have him playing better right away.
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