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If I look at a swing on multiple occasions I try to focus on the swing at hand rather than spend too much time going over what has gone on in the past. Improvement is hard to come by and I prefer to just take what’s in front of me at the moment and not dwell too much on what has improved or what hasn’t. Most of the time things don’t change as much as the student would like, so if I see something that looks better than before I will certainly mention it, as I do here with Adam’s hand path in transition. It is also true that as some items are focused on other items may be less focused on and actually get worse. As one of the online students remarked, it is a much better idea to keep going back to the beginning to compare swings as opposed to comparing day to day or even week to week. What is most important is to work with the swing the student presents that day, or at least the one I am looking at this particular moment (I don’t always get to these lessons right away).
Here we focus on Adam’s takeaway, which in this swing has gotten a bit handsy, the lack of push with the right leg to start the forward swing (leading to less lateral hip movement than we want), and also the rate of rotation of the hips and legs, which we can see is slow as the left knee doesn’t clear until the shaft is almost parallel to the ground in the forward swing. I mentioned in Adam’s first lesson that I thought his swing and what we needed to do with it was particularly complex, and it is not surprising that as Adam works on certain things others pop up that need to be addressed as well. Nothing about this process is easy, and if anyone tells you that it should be they are not living in the real world. It may be better to keep things simple for a beginner, but when players have advanced to a decent level and wish to get to the next level the work is much more difficult as the changes become more subtle. The real problem lies in the fact that after grooving a swing pattern that gets OK results even subtle changes feel huge. Without mental exaggeration there is little chance for significant change. Adam is working hard on this and is making progress. I will keep trying to point him in the right direction.
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