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Hi Wayne,
It’s been a year since my last lesson. I wanted to show some amount of change before sending something in – the first three lessons were mostly educational with minimal swing change/progress. But thanks to those I know what to try and change, you provided some good video imagery, and I video myself regularly to check on it. I was hoping for more change by now of course, but this is tough work – especially in your 50 somethings!! – Ha! Also had a lot of “life” outside of golf happen in the past year – but all good stuff. All in all, there is some progress, so I am happy for that and will just keep plugging away.
So, I can’t report any great tournaments results or even any better play over the past year. It’s been a real struggle until the last month or two, even capped off by a thumb injury that kept me from any real practice since last Dec until late April. So, regarding the work on changes, I think what happened is that I did see some amount of early success as I started to get my club face more open during the backswing, since I started out so radically shut, but then soon I hit the limits of my pivot issues during transition and I couldn’t square things back up from the more open-clubface backswing positions. So, I needed to do the arguably harder work of trying to change the transitional pivot move as you pointed out in the previous lessons. Until I could pair these moves up, with reasonable reliability – it was pretty awful results.
Of course, these faults can still be seen, but I have made some progress with both the backswing and the pivot with the shorter clubs – as seen in the iron swing, but not so much with the long clubs where the squat resurfaces. Unfortunately, my subconscious instinct for a strong swing is that “squat” action and it leaks in more on the longer clubs and I am not too pleased seeing the left heel come off the ground through impact with a driver swing (clearly no weight is on it !!). In looking closer at the iron swing, even though the left heel stays on the ground, I think I see some of the same basic motion in miniature where the inside of my left heel detaches from the ground … but I’ll let you do your work and provide your thoughts.
So, the two pivot drills I am doing:
1. put my bag on my butt while hitting balls. At address, I want to just be brushing it and then try to feel that I am pushing into it more on both the backswing and downswing. I have done this mostly with short irons… I think I need to do it with the driver or other metals too, with slower / full motion swings. thinking I am trying not to hit it more than 175 yds., but with full swing motion slowed down so I can focus on what is happening in transition.
2. slow motion backswings where I get to the top and try and start just a hint of transition move, without the dreaded squat motion, but with the left hip moving immediately away from the target line and up, trying to keep everything else in place and isolate this small simple move, I think when I do it right I can feel some real additional stretch of my left-side back muscles.
looking forward to your thoughts on where I might focus things now. Not that I won’t still and probably always need to work on the club face opening and widening of my backswing……
Rick
It is not surprising that Rick is having a bit of a struggle with the idea of how to square up the face after he opens it more in the backswing as the face is still starting back well closed. I believe Rick needs to concentrate on opening the toe of the club immediately in the takeaway with his left hand and wrist. This is of utmost importance to Rick’s pattern because I think that the effort to open the face late and the stress the closed face puts on his right shoulder has caused his upper body to lean away from the ball and feeds into the overly early use of the right gluteus muscle to “stand up”, which in this case means early extension with the left leg getting stuck in the way of the clearing action of the pelvis. If Rick were successful in opening the face I think he could deepen his right hip the same way he is doing now but then could initiate his forward swing by rotating the right side pelvic muscles from that deep position. Then, by the time he got to P5 and P6 (click for ‘P’ positions video) his hips would be deep enough and rotated enough so that the firing of the glutes would aid in the clearing of his hips, create room for his right arm to get in front of him and pass by freely, and enable him to retain his upper body angle and finish with more side bend. My suggested drills would be stop and goes from various stopping points (P2, P3, P4) and using the shaft on the knee line between the feet to monitor the action of the right leg.
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