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Hi Wayne,
I’m really excited to get your opinion and analysis of my swing. I’m 52 years old and have played golf since I was 10. I grew up in the US (Connecticut, and then college in Washington DC), and subsequently moved to Sweden, where I’ve been living since the mid-eighties.
I have always taken the game very seriously; I played some college golf at the George Washington University*, and even gave the pro level a shot one season on the national tour of Sweden. But now I’m a reinstated amateur and enjoy the game as a hobby.
I’ve always been a shortish but steady and straight hitter. Unfortunately, my search for improvement and experimentation has resulted in an erratic and wild shot pattern the past few years that quite frankly is driving me crazy. All too often, I hit it dead left or I block it way right. My feeling is that my hands flip over at impact, or are unable to square up. I’m really eager to hear what you would recommend that I work on to remedy this.
One thing that I’m especially curious about is what causes my hands to flip over immediately after impact? As my hands reach chest-level after impact, the shaft appears to be at a 90-degree angle to my arm, hardly ”Hoganesque”. I feel like my left wrist is breaking down through the hitting zone, which leads me to think that it’s difficult to get a consistently square face at impact. What causes this, and should I be trying to fix it? If I need to fix it, how do I go about it?
I’ve considered trying to simply focus on keeping a straight, or even bowed wrist at impact, but this is such a huge change that I need an expert opinion before I go that route. Perhaps there is something else that causes the left wrist breakdown that I need to fix instead?
Check out my videos and let me know what you think. This will hopefully give me something to work on over the long, dark Swedish winter at my indoor practice facility.
Best regards,
Sven Engler
Sven worked on his swing after the online video in October, but getting the pivot to work better is a difficult thing to feel on your own if you have never quite used it correctly. In this video I go hands-on with Sven to take him through the swing motion, getting his trunk muscles to wind up and his waist to deepen in transition. Perhaps the most important thing to start with is the change in Sven’s posture, which went from leaning back on his heels to getting his weight more athletically on the balls of his feet. I have found it almost impossible for normal people to use their bodies efficiently when they start back on their heels. Inevitably they move progressively toward the ball as they swing, either causing the right upper arm to get stuck behind them or the hands to come into impact from a high approach. The idea for Sven is going to be to create space so that the nice right arm movement he already has can get in front of his right side, which will in turn help the hands get more forward at impact. The additional lateral and rotational movement of the pivot will then help sustain that forward leaning feeling and get rid of the flippiness that drives Sven crazy.
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