Lesson of the Week: Fixing Stu’s Barkley Move

I first worked with Stu 20 or so years ago, and he was the second student I had taught who had developed the “swing yips”, notably demonstrated by Charles Barkley in his celebrity golf appearances and his work with Hank Haney on the Golf Channel (which, by the way, ended in failure).  The first guy I saw afflicted with this was a big lefty, a former baseball player, who could not understand why he would get completely stuck at the top of his swing, jerking back and forth in an effort to start forward.  This was not an every -swing problem: its intermittent nature made a “mental problem” diagnoses more likely, but after I had the idea of imitating his swing with the question in mind “why wouldn’t I want to come down from here?” my epiphany was that from the position I was in at the top I couldn’t hit the ball until I revamped it and could come down and meet the ball with the face of the club.  It had more to do with weight distribution and balance than anything, for when I put myself into his top of the swing position, it occurred to me that it was no wonder he couldn’t get himself to move forward.  With his foot pressure firmly on his front toes he had no where to go until he redistributed it and could move into the downswing: thus, the “glitch”, or “yip”, in the middle of the swing.  Stu, as you will see in the video, has the same issue, except in his case the problem is not getting his weight too forward on his feet, but rather too far outside of his right foot with the added problem of his right arm pulling back behind him, the combination of which has him leaning his upper body to the left with no brace on the right side with which to drive his hips to the left.  As he rolls his right foot outward, and leans left due to the arm pull back he reaches a point at the top where the time it takes for him to start the lower body forward and around becomes the stall at the top.  As Stu focuses on bracing his right leg and starting from a more centered set up, he should be able to change his sequence so that his lower body can initiate the downswing with no reason to wait at the top.

Join the forum discussion on this post