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Ryan is an archetypal member of this website: an avid golfer in search of ideas beyond the stock instruction offered by most teaching pros and media outlets, he stumbled upon my swing analysis videos on YouTube and joined the site almost immediately. Ryan has an interesting back story (you can look it up on the website under “My Goals and Aspirations”) as his biological father was a mini-tour bum (not meaning to be harsh: I was one of those for a while myself) and he was disinclined to have anything to do with golf when he was young. As it turned out the guys he worked with played a lot of golf, and when he traveled for business he had plenty of time during the day to tee it up. A good athlete in just about every other sport, Ryan has found golf to be a struggle. I didn’t include the swing of his I have from 2 years ago, but believe me when I say he has improved drastically.
In the lesson I focus on timing in transition, more specifically in getting Ryan to think about starting his lower body movement sooner in order to “catch” the upper trunk, arms and hands while they are still moving backwards. You will note in his swing that the club tends to cross the line and move to the right just as the lower body moves forward, which steepens the shaft early in the downswing and leads to an eventual out to in path into impact. To get the sidearm throwing action that I feel is essential to a good swing Ryan cannot wait so long to start his swing forward. This issue is a leftover from his old swing which evidenced a large amount of hip slide to the right in the backswing, so it is likely that never having a good base to drive off of has led to a relatively slow lower body movement in transition. With Ryan’s hands dropping vertically from the top his legs (as usually happens in this particular pattern) are slow to unwind, and his upper right side tends to tilt back as he gets to impact. I suggest split hand punch shots to get the feel for “covering” the ball with the right side of the chest. This action, combined with a quicker catch of the backswing with a more aggressive and earlier lower body drive forward and left, should really help Ryan make another big jump in his swing mechanics.
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