Lesson of the Week | Wayne DeFrancesco

Lesson of the Week: Alan Grabush- Working on a Quirky Backswing

I’ve been working with Alan off and on for over 4 years now, and while we have made significant progress at times with his ball striking we have never been able to rid him of the hitch in his backswing. The biggest issue is that Alan doesn’t feel what he is doing, which means he is not aware of it unless he sees it on video. He can perfectly position the club in the mirror, and he can perform reasonable stop and go drills from different starting points, but in a full swing there is a pattern of movement that causes his hands to move toward his head in transition, which creates a steeper plane than he would like while also making difficult the task of getting the upper right arm in front of the ribcage in the forward swing and the hands further forward on the approach and at impact. In the past I have failed to account for his body motion in assessing why the arms should move the way they do, but in this lesson, I do a bit of hands on holding of his head during the swing, and the results are very encouraging.

Lesson of the Week: Frank Goldman- Overcoming Shoulder Mobility Problems

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Frank works in New York but lives in Baltimore where he is a former member of my club, Woodholme CC. Working in the Wall Street world of finance Frank gets invited to play some of the courses clustered in the New York area from Westchester out to the tip of Long Island, which happen to be some of the best courses in the world. He never practices, but he is tired of not being able to play at a level that would produce a decent score on a difficult track. He decided he wanted to get better, so he contacted me about taking a series of lessons. In his first visit I could see that this would be a project, but the good news was that he is an athletic guy and had a good feel for the general motion of the swing. I saw right away that his major problem was the common issue of right arm folding and pulling behind him in the backswing, which made it impossible for him to get his hands far enough forward at P6 to forward lean the club on an iron shot. When I told him that he needed to make a better upper trunk turn in the backswing and keep his hands wider at the top with space under his right arm, he pointed out that his left shoulder had an impingement that made it hurt when it stretched to a certain point. I knew right then that for Frank to have his right arm stay more in front of him his swing would have to be radically shorter, and if we were able to accomplish that he would then have to train his hands to feel the lag of the club and to square the face as they passed in front of the ball. I referred him to my M.A.T specialist who is working on his shoulder, and we have consistently worked on gaining space with the right arm while keeping it from over bending. Thus, stop and go swings are a staple of the lesson, after which we switch over to impact drills to train his hands what to do were he to get them as forward as we were hoping.

Lesson of the Week: Ben Skowronski- Proper Sequence and Lag

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This is my 3rd lesson with Ben, and as you will see, he is really a problem case. This is where a teacher really must know what he or she is doing to get this guy to actually compress the golf ball. Luckily, Ben’s backswing has no serious flaws, although I would like him to load deeper into his right hip and cock his wrists a bit more. This is nitpicking, however, and there are much greater priorities than perfecting his backswing. Ben has no sense of athletic sequence when it comes to the golf swing, while he can throw a ball sidearm with good form. Ben literally must build a totally new perception of the downswing and the strike of the ball if he is ever going to be able to tap into his innate athletic ability. I always start these projects with less than full shots, either a punch shot or a pitch shot, as it is much more likely that a player can feel the delay of the upper body and the club in a shorter swing. The idea is to get the hands in front of the ball at impact, and I could put a guy like Ben in a perfect approach position, ask him if he could hit it from there, and he would say “no”. The clubhead is moving so much faster than the hands at the bottom of the swing that if you have never hit a ball with forward shaft lean you just can’t figure out how the club would ever reach the ball, much less close to square, when your hands are even with the ball and the shaft is parallel to the ground. In this lesson we achieved success with the pivot sequence. Now we must deal with how the hands accept the weight of the clubhead and bend back instead of pushing the club forward.

Lesson of the Week: John Shmerler-So Hard to Change a Pattern

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Here is a 3 handicapper with what would be considered a good swing but one he would like to change for the better. We have identified the issues, and they are stubborn to say the least. John tends to get the shaft flat at P3 and heading to P4 he always stuffs his right upper arm in close to his side, finishing the backswing with some right shoulder blade pull-back. This not only affects his sequence (the right shoulder pull-back actually initiates his downswing by leaning the upper body over the lower before the lower can get started) but keeps his right arm from getting into any kind of “pitch” position where the upper arm would be in front of the rib cage with the right elbow leading. It’s obvious that John has an excellent idea of what he would like to do, as shown by his spot-on slow-motion demonstration of his desired positions. After identifying the differences between his real swing and his demonstration, john does his best to stand the shaft up at P3, which would not seem to be the hardest thing to do. However, with a ball in front of the club for a full shot the best we could do was to go from 12 degrees flat off plane to 6 degrees, while the right arm still resisted getting wider and higher. The lesson ended on a positive note, but there is no denying the difficulty in changing baked in patterns when trying to hit a ball to a target with a full speed swing. In my opinion your “natural swing”, the one you don’t think about, doesn’t really have a “feel” to it; rather, it just “happens”. It’s like you don’t notice a body part unless it hurts. If you are aware of a swing flaw and can do it properly in a segmented (stop and go) drill, then you must be able to develop an awareness of how it feels when you do what you normally do. If you have nothing to compare your everyday move to, why would it change? The real “aha” moment is when you do what you always do and say “oh, I felt that”. Only then can you try to feel something different.

Lesson of the Week: Will Levy- Stability and Perception of Swing Plane

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Will is mostly a baseball player whose grandfather would like him to learn how to play golf, and since he’s very good at baseball you might figure golf would come easier to him than most. As it turns out for whatever reason instead of swinging the club around him in the forward swing he always drops it way inside and swings exaggeratedly in to out with his legs driving out from under him to the right. This is exactly unlike a sidearm throwing motion or even a batting motion. Will is a strong but gangly kid who doesn’t control his body very well, so my focus with him is to stabilize his right leg in the backswing so that he has a brace to move forward from, and then to do anything to get him to swing more out and around to the left. The difficulty for the brain (anyone’s) is to process how a left miss (Will tends to hook the ball wildly more so than blocking it to the right due to his strong grip) can be rectified by swinging more left. As much as he swings in to out you can be sure he has the face closing rapidly by impact, so we must make sure his grip is weaker so that the face will be more open as the clubhead approaches the ball on a more proper path. His hips need to learn how to stay deeper as he aims his hip drive way more to the left, another item for the next lessons. Unfortunately, you can only do so much in an hour, but I think this is a good start.

Lesson of the Week: Scott Wingrat- Laid Off Backswing Leads to Steepening Shaft

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Scott has a nice athletic move, but his flawed takeaway has the shaft extremely behind him at P2 and laid off at P3 and P4, which he can only fix by steepening the shaft in transition. As we have seen before, the tendency when the shaft tips steeper is for the lower body to try to help the shaft lay back later in the downswing by pushing out toward the ball. Scott had a good grasp of what was going on in our first lesson, but when he came back for the second we found that his takeaway had not changed much at all, another example of how difficult it is to execute a change no matter how simple it seems. Scott can correct this with practice as he shows in his stop and go, which gives him the time to think about and feel the takeaway keeping the shaft more on plane. His sequencing is good, and he demonstrates that when he does the backswing better he has a chance to shallow the club in transition, which, along with work toward keeping his hips deeper, will make him a more consistent ball striker.

Lesson of the Week: Richard Kress- Shallowing the Shaft in Transition

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I’ve known and worked with Richard for over 30 years, and the one thing we have never been able to conquer is his tendency to steepen the shaft in transition. In this video I go over the important elements of the swing that I believe lead to better shaft movement during the swing. Transition is the most complex part of the golf swing, and in order for Richard to get the club to flatten he is going to have to improve his pivot movement (stop getting more vertical in the downswing by adding pelvic tilt), achieve more width at the top (stop folding the right arm and focus more on extensor action), and work on actively moving the right upper arm and elbow inward while the left arm is being pulled by the body. I would expect Richard’s swing to get a bit shorter as the right arm bends less and the hands stay away from the head. He is now in his early 70’s and while he can still move athletically it is not really possible to maintain a full- length backswing without making multiple errors.

Lesson of the Week: Justin Feldman: Getting Rid of Arm Lift

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Justin plays for the University of Maryland and is a member of my former club. He has struggled recently with his ball striking, especially with the driver, which is a real problem as Justin can fly the ball well over 300 yards. He has always kept the face somewhat closed in the takeaway with his right arm pinched, and when he gets to P3 he rolls his left arm up and bows his wrist, getting to the top with a quite vertical left arm that kicks out as the club flattens behind him. My goal with Justin has always been to free up his right arm by keeping space and flaring it more in the backswing, with the hope that he could then keep his left arm more down and under his chin with his left wrist retaining the same cup that it had at address. He feels more powerful when his swing is longer, so I must convince him that he can still hit it miles from a shorter, more efficient backswing. It is such an advantage to have the length he has in that he can tighten up his action to make it more consistent. Distance doesn’t mean much if you can’t locate the ball.

Lesson of the Week: Joe Shull- Posture, Setup, Routine, and Takeaway

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Joe came to the lesson with a specific wish: he wanted to fix his backswing, which he knew was putting him into poor position at the top and making the downswing difficult to manage. I first suggest a less slumped posture with the hands a bit higher and looking at him face on I wanted both his weight and his hands more centered. Joe’s grip had gotten quite strong, but he couldn’t see it because his hands were so forward at address, and even more forward after squeezing the grip and forward pressing. Getting into this setup position is crucial for Joe to be able to get the club up on plane and the face less closed in the first part of the backswing, as he needs to maintain the bend in the back of his left wrist from address to the top of the swing. Joe’s overly closed clubface and low to the ground takeaway cause his right shoulder to eventually crunch up and get stuck at the top, and there is no way the right arm is going to work properly from there. We also go over a routine that will get him into the proper setup each time, an important item many players disregard even though the prospect of changing their swing for the better depends on it.

Lesson of the Week: Paul Tibolla 2- Still Working on Right Arm Pullback in Transition

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Paul is a great example (he would rather not be) of an intractable swing issue grooved in for years into his neuromuscular pathways. Paul’s swing is notable for the pullback of his right shoulder in transition, and his upper right arm simply cannot advance far enough forward once the scapula is pulled back at the same moment he is starting his lower body forward. He has seen this over and over and knows what he would rather be doing, but the timing of his swing is dependent on the time it takes at the top for the right shoulder to feel fully turned. We have tried just about everything to change this pattern, and to his credit Paul has made some progress and hits the ball much better than he used to, although not nearly as good as he would like to. In this lesson I decide that we need to eliminate the part of the backswing that pulls the shoulder backwards by getting the lower body starting forward sooner. I had Paul visualize that his backswing ended at P3 (left arm parallel) and that he would “catch” his backswing while his hands and arms felt like they were still moving away from his head. If we can make this timing change (no easy task) then I believe it will be possible to keep the upper right arm in front of the chest and to flatten the shaft while the right elbow moves forward instead of down and back.

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