Latest Lesson and Tournament News

Here is my latest lesson. I will post later with a discussion on moving the hips forward. From what I can tell most people I see struggle with this concept, especially me.





I have my first major tournament starting tomorrow. I will be defending my Member-Member championship tomorrow. It is 5 nine hole matches and the winner of each of the flights go into a horserace to determine the overall champion. Last year, we faced chip offs on the first two elimination holes of the horserace and then watched the eventually runner-up miss a two foot putt to win on the last hole. In the play-off I hit a great 8 iron to about 15 feet and my partner lagged it up to about 2 inches from the hole and we won with a par on the first play-off hole. 


I don't know what to expect this year. My handicap is one stroke lower and my game has been up and down for the past month or so. I will report later.

Round Updates

Fairways:             9/13

GIR:                     9/18
Putts(GIR/total):   2.33/34
Scrambling:          2/9
Score:                   85 (+15)

This is a case where the stats lie a little bit. I hit the ball very well in this round, but the end my putting was terrible. I also has 1 triple, caused by a poor course management decision, 3 doubles caused by some bad luck and poor course management. I was missing the ball left more than usual which I like more than missing it right.

Power Accumulator #3

PA#3 or #3 for short this is the angle formed between your left hand and the club shaft. The term and numbering system comes from "The Golfing Machine" written by Homer Kelley. Homer was a engineer by trade who loved the golf swing. Sound familiar? He broke the swing down like a physics book. Numbering power accumulators, pressure points, aiming points, very scientific. I have not read the book because I am worried I will get lost in the scientific detail. Sometimes all you want to do is hit the ball close to the hole, not worry about how you accomplish it. 

I am aware of some of the terms because the stack and tilt guys use them. I can tell you one thing, I struggle mightily with #3. My first lesson that I posted shows that prior to starting with those lessons I never loaded #3. This caused me to lose the lag on the start of the downswing. Even in my latest swing I have struggled with #3. In the S&T swing we want #3 to be loaded by the time the left arm is parallel to the ground. 

In the photo here, I have still not properly loaded #3. The club is not at a 90 degree angle to my left arm. When I am really struggling my club is even worse than in this photo.

I have gone out and started to do some research on how I can do better at this. My research led me to Mac O'Grady. He was a tour player in the late 80's and has one of the most efficient swings I have ever seen. Lots of leverage. He does a great job loading #3 as you can see in this photo.

His club shaft is perfectly parallel to his left arm. A perfect job of loading #3 at the perfect time. So I looked a little deeper into his swing sequences and determined that he was starting to load #3 right from the start at his address position. 

His hands seem lower at address which would help him load #3 much faster. As you can see in my address position I have a long way to go to properly load #3 as Mac does.

I will start to try to incorporate this into my swing to help load #3 better.

Frustration

The journey to a better swing will always be a bumpy road. I have hit a major pothole. This weekends round was a total disaster. When I went back to look at my swing on video, I have slipped in multiple areas back into my old bad habits. Now, I need to start from the beginning and work on the fundamentals I learned in my first lesson that I last posted. 

I have to realize that this is not going to change overnight. I am only able to practice once or twice a week and that is going to make this change take time. Old habits are hard to break, especially when referring to a golf swing. My patience is being tested.

Part of the reason I am so worried is I have a tournament coming up in 2 weeks and having this bump in the road is not great timing. I have to realize that I need to work on my short game more to compensate for the lack of full swing quality. Part of the reason my round was so terrible was my short game was awful. I actually putted decently, I made a couple of nice birdie putts, but my chipping and sand play were downright terrible. I also got some bad breaks. On the first hole my ball buried so deep in the bunker I could not play it out, on the 7th hole I got another terrible lie in the bunker leading to a double bogey. I did have some bad swings, probably 5 that I can recount that were awful, but mainly I would charge the terrible round to bad course management and some bad chipping.

Fairways:             7/13 (all 6 fairways missed were in the right rough/trees)

GIR:                     5/18
Putts(GIR/total):   1.60/30
Scrambling:          3/13
Score:                   84 (+14)

One big big positive was the par 5 scoring, I was 4.3 average on the 3 par 5's, with 2 birdies. 

The Golf Evolution

As I mentioned I have been taking some lessons with The Golf Evolution and their evolvr program. The results have been no less than stunning. Here is my first lesson. Everything here I have worked on and pretty much have down.

Enjoy.

Swing Thoughts as of Today

Swing thoughts. I had another lesson this week, I will post an update of my swing later this week, but in the meantime I thought I would outline my swing thoughts as of today. In the past I would choose my swing thought literally on the range before the round. Now I attempt to keep the same ones for longer periods in effort to keep the mind clutter free.

During set-up:

Right hand more under the grip
Hips more forward
Right shoulder lower than left

Swing thoughts:

Set wrists early (90 degrees)
Hands inside
Push #3 around the body
Turn shoulders more level to start

Chipping thought:

Hinge and Hold

Putting thought:

Push the tack

Round Update

From this weekend:

San Jose Country Club


Fairways:              6/13
GIR:                     6/18
Putts(GIR/total):   2.00/29
Scrambling:          6/12
Score:                   77 (+7)

Extensor Action

Sounds strange, extensor. Sounds like a muscle thing. When I read about it on wikipedia (the source of all knowledge these days) it doesn't make any sense. Some complicated muscle movement term used by doctors.

Why is it in my blog, because it has really helped my golf swing. General instruction will tell you that you should have the club reach parallel at the top of the swing. I think that is all well and good if your shoulder turn is equal to a tour players. For most of us that is impossible. Extensor action to me means that the right arm is at approximately 90 degrees to the shoulder turn. I think the actual definition is more complicated than that, but that is what works for me.

The first image here is my position at the top of the swing a few months ago.

According to general instruction this would be pretty good. My club could double as a clothes line. Sadly though, because my shoulder turn isn't that big my shoulders stopped moving and my arms kept on going. This means at the top of my swing I would start to cast the club and lose the power that I wanted to save to hit the ball. If you look at the second photo in this sequence, when my arm is parallel to the ground the club is almost already outside my hands. Not a good position for solid contact.

Now after learning about extensor action and how to apply it to my swing my new position at the top is dramatically shorter.

This translates though to a much more powerful position of having the hands lead the clubhead as shown in this photo.

The second photo set hits the ball higher, further, and straighter. All good things for golf.

First S&T Lesson

Up until recently instruction for stack and tilt (S&T) has been difficult to find. Mainly one has to surf the internet and find the bulk of the instruction from forums. Dana's forum had been my main source of instruction since I switched to S&T. Lately he must be busy as the site has slowed down in terms of information, there is still a wealth of information there to search through even though there isn't that much new stuff. While on Dana's forum I learned of a S&T school in my area that Mike Bennett would be teaching at. The class was run by Paul Gorman a S&T teacher in Marin (about 1.5 hrs from me).

Mike is one of the two inventors of S&T and is a great teacher. Sadly though this was a class with 4 people in it, and while at the class I learned a great deal, I wasn't able to take much from the class to the course with me. Certainly there are some fundamentals that I still utilize today but it was only 4 hours spread out over 4 people and difficult to move from the half swings I was working on to full swings.

I later went to see Paul for a follow-up lesson and we worked on moving my ball position up, something I still work very hard on today, and getting my shoulders to a more square position at impact. This was a great lesson. I have struggled with losing the ball to the right and weak, since this lesson I have not had this problem nearly as much.

The only problem is that driving to see Paul is not easy. 1.5 hours means 3 hours of total driving and a loss of most of a day to have a lesson. Below is a video I took the day before and the day after my lesson with Paul.




Last Round update (Here I will post the stats from my last round in an effort to watch my improvement)


Village Country Club


Fairways:              6/14
GIR:                     13/18 (a new record for one round)
Putts(GIR/total):   1.92/33
Scrambling:          2/5
Score:                   74 (+2)