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Hi Wayne,
I’m really excited to get your opinion and analysis of my swing. I’m 52 years old and have played golf since I was 10. I grew up in the US (Connecticut, and then college in Washington DC), and subsequently moved to Sweden, where I’ve been living since the mid-eighties.
I have always taken the game very seriously; I played some college golf at the George Washington University*, and even gave the pro level a shot one season on the national tour of Sweden. But now I’m a reinstated amateur and enjoy the game as a hobby.
I’ve always been a shortish but steady and straight hitter. Unfortunately, my search for improvement and experimentation has resulted in an erratic and wild shot pattern the past few years that quite frankly is driving me crazy. All too often, I hit it dead left or I block it way right. My feeling is that my hands flip over at impact, or are unable to square up. I’m really eager to hear what you would recommend that I work on to remedy this.
One thing that I’m especially curious about is what causes my hands to flip over immediately after impact? As my hands reach chest-level after impact, the shaft appears to be at a 90-degree angle to my arm, hardly “Hoganesque”. I feel like my left wrist is breaking down through the hitting zone, which leads me to think that it’s difficult to get a consistently square face at impact. What causes this, and should I be trying to fix it? If I need to fix it, how do I go about it?
I’ve considered trying to simply focus on keeping a straight, or even bowed wrist at impact, but this is such a huge change that I need an expert opinion before I go that route. Perhaps there is something else that causes the left wrist breakdown that I need to fix instead?
Check out my videos and let me know what you think. This will hopefully give me something to work on over the long, dark Swedish winter at my indoor practice facility.
Best regards,
Sven Engler
In this video lesson you will see that Sven’s problems stem directly from his pivot movement, which of course has been the main focus of this website from the beginning. Knowing that the issue of “coming out of the box” with the hips is perhaps the most prevalent and chronic of errors among pretty good players, and also understanding that the teaching community has demonstrated a surprising lack of comprehension as to how to address this problem (or an understanding that it is a problem), I chose to label the website the “Pivot Compression Golf Swing”. Sven is a perfect example of a pattern of movement with the lower body that eventually leads to a weak impact. Sven needs to compress and load in the backswing to create depth and to find a place from which to initiate his forward swing. As he works on this I suggest that he also work specifically on his impact with his irons by hitting the series of punch shot drills that I have posted in the instructional videos. Sven’s arms and hands do a very nice job in transition, and if he can get his pivot to improve I see a great chance for major overall improvement.
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