I think the time away from the course has been great for me. I have spent much of the last 6 weeks at home in the evenings reading here and working on my swing. I decided in December to try changing from an angled-hinging hitter with a short, really fast swing to a swinging procedure after starting over with Building Blocks.
My biggest problem was my pivot. Brian spent a lot of time with me in my second of two lessons trying to get me to rotate my hips more in the barrel. I finally got that a couple weeks ago. I think years of believing I should restrict my hips to create power led to an exaggerated Never Hook Again like pivot, without the ability to get to the inside of the ball. I have been hitting baby pull hooks and bigger pull-hooks for years now. I get it now. I feel like my hips really move early and throw my arms behind and up, and I try to turn them a lot and early (moving my arms to pull my pivot back does not work for me at all). I also found that a much flatter shoulder turn helps me more to the inside on my backswing and then get to inside of the ball (I am not very flexible).
I realize now that I was keeping so much weight on my front foot (I had some "tripod lessons" that have taken a while to unlearn) that I was actually having to move weight to my back foot to start my downswing. I try to get my weight much more into the inside of my right instep so I have weight to move to left heel to start my downswing.
The 100 word Manzella pivot description was the key for me. I now feel like I have leverage from being able to push up from the ground, before it was like I was trying to generate speed from just spinning in zero gravity.
While working on my pivot, I have also been experimenting with swinging vs. my old swing (crappy hitting) the last two months. I got to the point in my basement "practice area" (my wife may kill me soon) that I felt like I was actually swinging great with just my left arm (but much less fluid with right hand on club). I kept working trying to feel like I was just swinging two loose ropes attached to a club moving by my pivot.
So I finally got a break in the weather this week to test it out on the range for an afternoon. I went determined to see if I could just swing my arms like they were ropes (something I saw mentioned by Tongzilla I think). I also had decided to go back to float loading (this is more how I swung the club when I was 16 and had no idea what I was doing and could actually hit the ball a decent distance) and also using a little lagging club takeaway and a little Sergio Garcia straighter right arm on my takeaway (in looking at my swing over the winter my swing just looked really cramped to me). I felt like my hips just threw my very relaxed arms around and up (my backswing was short before, I think because I didn't really turn my hips), then I let my arms drop while getting into my squat, and then I tried to gradually apply rotation as my arms fell without interrupting the falling momentum, and then the club just got sort of automatically slung through impact. The "Sergio arms" helped me with my float loading.
I hit the ball very, very straight and much longer than before. No hooks. I can't wait to test it on the course. I was blown away by the magnitude of the difference on the range (I don't have a handle yet on the actual distance difference). The difference between swinging and not swinging is just enormous for me, and I had never really experienced it before despite having played golf on and off for 25 years. I really loved how relaxed and unmanipulated the swing felt and how much less hurried it seemed than my old swing. I am very excited about all of this (as you can probably tell).
Ok, two questions for now (I am sure there will be more).
1. I notice that if I really relax my wrists and try to catapult the club underhanded (so to speak) with my swing that it is easy to get into the bent right wrist position in the backswing, but if I want to just fling the club out there with the greatest speed possible that my left wrist just bends some in the follow through and right wrist straightens (sort of a mirror image of backswing). If I try to keep the left wrist flat all the way through finish (which I can do) it sort of interrupts the flow that seems so relaxed. Is this just because I am doing something wrong?
2. I need a longer right arm, but I realize that's not really an option. But, seriously, I find moving from swinging left-handed to keeping that flow with both hands on the club is the hard part. Getting in a position with elbows closer together and insides of arms sun-side up does help. But keeping the smoothness with right hand on club seems like the hard part. How do you improve flow when you move from swinging with left arm to swinging with both? Is this a weird question?
My biggest problem was my pivot. Brian spent a lot of time with me in my second of two lessons trying to get me to rotate my hips more in the barrel. I finally got that a couple weeks ago. I think years of believing I should restrict my hips to create power led to an exaggerated Never Hook Again like pivot, without the ability to get to the inside of the ball. I have been hitting baby pull hooks and bigger pull-hooks for years now. I get it now. I feel like my hips really move early and throw my arms behind and up, and I try to turn them a lot and early (moving my arms to pull my pivot back does not work for me at all). I also found that a much flatter shoulder turn helps me more to the inside on my backswing and then get to inside of the ball (I am not very flexible).
I realize now that I was keeping so much weight on my front foot (I had some "tripod lessons" that have taken a while to unlearn) that I was actually having to move weight to my back foot to start my downswing. I try to get my weight much more into the inside of my right instep so I have weight to move to left heel to start my downswing.
The 100 word Manzella pivot description was the key for me. I now feel like I have leverage from being able to push up from the ground, before it was like I was trying to generate speed from just spinning in zero gravity.
While working on my pivot, I have also been experimenting with swinging vs. my old swing (crappy hitting) the last two months. I got to the point in my basement "practice area" (my wife may kill me soon) that I felt like I was actually swinging great with just my left arm (but much less fluid with right hand on club). I kept working trying to feel like I was just swinging two loose ropes attached to a club moving by my pivot.
So I finally got a break in the weather this week to test it out on the range for an afternoon. I went determined to see if I could just swing my arms like they were ropes (something I saw mentioned by Tongzilla I think). I also had decided to go back to float loading (this is more how I swung the club when I was 16 and had no idea what I was doing and could actually hit the ball a decent distance) and also using a little lagging club takeaway and a little Sergio Garcia straighter right arm on my takeaway (in looking at my swing over the winter my swing just looked really cramped to me). I felt like my hips just threw my very relaxed arms around and up (my backswing was short before, I think because I didn't really turn my hips), then I let my arms drop while getting into my squat, and then I tried to gradually apply rotation as my arms fell without interrupting the falling momentum, and then the club just got sort of automatically slung through impact. The "Sergio arms" helped me with my float loading.
I hit the ball very, very straight and much longer than before. No hooks. I can't wait to test it on the course. I was blown away by the magnitude of the difference on the range (I don't have a handle yet on the actual distance difference). The difference between swinging and not swinging is just enormous for me, and I had never really experienced it before despite having played golf on and off for 25 years. I really loved how relaxed and unmanipulated the swing felt and how much less hurried it seemed than my old swing. I am very excited about all of this (as you can probably tell).
Ok, two questions for now (I am sure there will be more).
1. I notice that if I really relax my wrists and try to catapult the club underhanded (so to speak) with my swing that it is easy to get into the bent right wrist position in the backswing, but if I want to just fling the club out there with the greatest speed possible that my left wrist just bends some in the follow through and right wrist straightens (sort of a mirror image of backswing). If I try to keep the left wrist flat all the way through finish (which I can do) it sort of interrupts the flow that seems so relaxed. Is this just because I am doing something wrong?
2. I need a longer right arm, but I realize that's not really an option. But, seriously, I find moving from swinging left-handed to keeping that flow with both hands on the club is the hard part. Getting in a position with elbows closer together and insides of arms sun-side up does help. But keeping the smoothness with right hand on club seems like the hard part. How do you improve flow when you move from swinging with left arm to swinging with both? Is this a weird question?
