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Jim was visiting the DC area from California and had been a member of the website for some time so he decided to pay a visit. He had recently been to a golf school where he reported that he had worked mostly on tempo and balance. I found that to be interesting as it turned out that we wound up working on the very same things, as you will see in the video.
The first thing I noticed in watching Jim hit some full shots was how slow his swing looked. We talked a bit about what he had worked on in his recent school experience and I was not surprised that he had slowed things down as it is common for instructors not familiar with Gary Novosel’s Tour Tempo to equate good tempo with slow tempo. What Novosel found, and what I found myself after getting the idea from him to time swings with the click of the camera remote, was that the best players swung at something close to a 3:1 ratio backswing to downswing, and that the majority of players took between 28 clicks and 36 clicks from the first movement of the club to impact. He also found that most poor players were too slow, especially in the backswing, information that runs counter to the conventional wisdom that says bad players swing too fast. Jim’s numbers were around 46 going back and 11 coming down, a 4:1 ratio and vastly slower than the 24:8 average for Tour players. So, the metronome came out, and we went about trying to speed things up, which worked out nicely.
The second thing I saw once I drew the lines was Jim’s tendency to start from his heels and move his weight forward during the swing, causing his hips to run up underneath him and forcing him “out of the box”. As you have seen if you watch any of my instructional or lesson videos this pattern causes all sorts of issues, so we worked on starting more from the balls of the feet and working the hips deeper during the swing.
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