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I like this lesson a lot because it is a great example of a swing problem that has no explainable cause. Dan is a very tall guy, but he is athletic and perfectly capable of making a nice, full swing, when there is no ball in front of him. When his brain knows that he is going to hit the ball his right wrist bends back, his right arm jams up, and his left arm squashes low against his chest, which means that his backswing is not going much past left arm parallel. Dan understands all the concepts involved with opening the clubface and allowing his left arm to ride up his chest, but everything blacks out when he hits the ball. We can do stop and goes until the cows come home and make them look great, but make it a full, continuous swing and the same patterns emerge. Finally, I put a shaft up to where he must make a full swing to hit it before he starts down, and he suddenly makes full swings that hit the ball. The point here is that for Dan (and he is certainly not alone) if he has something physically present to shoot for (like tapping the stick before he starts down) he can complete his swing and make a nice move to hit the ball. This is a big deal because if he can process the “feel” of this and then replicate it without me holding up the stick he will be overcoming the glitch that haunts his swing. He must use his imagination to conjure up the image of the stick being there and then function as if he is tapping it before starting forward. This is just another example of how a teacher must be tuned in to a student’s cognitive functions to change an ingrained pattern.
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