Online Students: John Lamendola

I’m guessing that by now if you have been a member of the website for a while you would almost be qualified to give one of these lessons yourself, especially one with the pattern that John exhibits here. This, like most of the swings we see in the online lessons, is nicely athletic and is one that most people would watch and say something like “you have a great swing – why do you have to keep tinkering with it?” (John is a former professional tennis player and is crazy enough about golf to have a Trackman in his basement). Of course, these are people with little knowledge of what it takes to be a consistently good ball striker. They can see that the swing has nice rhythm and nice looking lines, but the details are not apparent when you simply watch at full speed. We don’t need to slow John’s swing down to make some comments about the set-up, and as you would expect I would prefer a more upright stance and much softer arms. John’s especially tight right arm causes some common problems in the backswing, as it remains stuck to his side in the takeaway and stays pinched in front of his chest going back. I am a big fan of soft arms at address (home plate) and a wider start to the swing, with the upper right arm being higher, deeper, and more spaced away from the side when the swing gets to left arm parallel. As we have seen time and again the pinched right arm halfway back leads to the upper arm looking for more depth as it gets to the top, and when the arm does that late in the backswing it almost always drops either vertically or even backwards in transition, and when the hands drop back the right arm gets stuck behind the right side, setting up an overly wide and in to out approach to impact. One thing I always encourage my students to ask themselves is “would I or could I throw a nice low sidearm ball with that movement”? The answer is obviously “no”, and understanding how the swing relates to the throwing motion is one of the most important discoveries anyone can make. There are other items of interest here, but you can watch the video and check them out.
 

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