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I spent the week down in the Orlando area playing and teaching and had a chance to spend some time with Kent Long, who has seen me for a few hours in the recent past and was looking for more feedback on his attempt to understand and feel exactly what happens when the club changes direction in a golf swing. He has taken lessons from quite a few well known instructors, but still had a hard time getting his mind around the combination of things that happen to set up a good approach to impact, which is, of course, the key to attaining that high level impact that everyone is looking for.
In our first lesson I worked quite a bit on Kent’s backswing, and I told him that as long as he shut down (bowed) his left wrist right from the takeaway, pinned his arms low against his body, then dropped his hands and swung out to the right he would never get the feel he needed to lean the shaft forward at impact. I figured it would take a while to break his old habits and that we would have to do more work to make significant progress, and when you watch the video you can see that I was right on this point.
Kent has a very mechanically oriented mind and in well versed in the workings of machines and engines, so his questions are specific and well thought out, and he makes go through the movements in detail. He left this lesson with a better understanding of what he needs to think about and what it should feel like, and you can see by the swings he makes at the end of the lesson that he is getting the idea, even though he is not hitting any balls. On this point I’m sure some of you are wondering what good all the information and understanding will do if he is not applying it to the ball, but there are many people who just want to understand what they need to do, then have time to digest the information before testing it out. I try to accommodate the individual in front of me, so if they don’t really want to hit any I am OK with that. Of course, eventually it has to put to use, and I’m sure I will hear from Kent how that is going.
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