Lesson of the Week: Tyler Wright

Tyler is a 16- year old high schooler from Dallas, Texas who has recently gone from being a serious baseball player to a serious golfer. His father, Larry, is a website follower and knew that Tyler’s lower body movement was suspect, but couldn’t find a teacher around who emphasized the pivot like he saw me doing in the lessons and swing analysis’ on the site. Thus, he flew all the way to Maryland with Tyler and spent 5 hours with me, and as you will see we got some great results. Tyler is a strong, limber kid, and like many juniors (and tons of non-juniors for that matter) he has fallen victim of the “big turn”, where he uses both shoulders to get the club to parallel at the top with as big a shoulder turn as possible. As you have seen in countless video that I do this type of right arm action is detrimental to making an effective downswing. When the right shoulder blade retracts backwards in an effort to aid the upper trunk turn in the backswing the upper right arm gets stretched back into a deep position at the top, and with the right shoulder pinned back as the downswing sequence starts it simply stays where it is momentarily while the left arm is being pulled into the downswing by the lower body. In many cases and in some of Tyler’s swings this pulling back of the upper right side actually leans the upper body toward the target while the lower is still loading and rotating in its backswing movement, which, of course, means that the swing is out of sequence. Even if the sequence is good the upper arm can’t make it back in front of the rib cage and thus the approach to impact is wide and promotes an unreliable throw release. Once we got the right upper arm to stay more in front of the chest and got the hands out wider at the top with a bit more wrist cock, Tyler’s natural ability to produce a sidearm throwing motion moved his right arm back in front of him and led to a massively improved impact. He immediately felt more solid contact and more ball compression at impact. The technique change produced immediate results with the driver as well, a club Tyler had not been able to control at all.
 

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