Two Most Excellent Ideas

Sorry for being away.  My mother likes to read these and I have a few things to say, so once more back to the keyboard!


And speaking of keyboards, I purchased a new Dell laptop when I started to get crashes on my old Toshiba.  It was a bunch of years old and quite heavy, but it provided good service.

The new Dell has a 5 times the memory but a worse keyboard (kb).  If you worked on kbs for most of your career, then one picks up habits and expectations.  The new one doesn't have as much key press as I would like and it also has an enormous touch pad near the space bar.  I keep hitting the touch pad in some combination with other keys and it moves the cursor back some and occasionally up a line or two.  I tend to type along and not notice this.  It's a mess to correct some of this.

The other thing that bothers me is the lack of home/end keys on the numeric keypad.  Oh, they have a num lock button, but it doesn't do anything!  So when I want End it's a bit of a stretch.


Back to golf...

I've been having some success, but still an issue with longer clubs.  The driver has been a mess for the most part and I've been scoring by not using it.

I've scored well on occasion; shot a 34 on the front 9 at Los Positas.  My under par 9 hole scores are quite rare in my golfing adventures.  Three birdies and one bogey.  Lots of kick in pars and I managed to hole 3 or 4 25 footers.  It's an easy game when the putts drop from the other side of the moon.

Last night I ran across a video that talked about just spinning and letting the club square and come around when it wants to.  That was useful, but the question is where one should spin from and here is where Monte Scheinblum came back into his own. 

Monte makes the point that the arms have to go back parallel with shoulder plane.  If it's too low then you get stuck and do horrible things from there (this is my issue).  If you take the club back above the plane then you are coming over the top and will typically come over the top from there.

I'll look up the videos and put in links to them below.

I went to the range today to try a few of these things out.  Specifically the items were:

• take the arms back correctly per Monte
• then spin in place and let the club do what it will, with no hand or arm or shoulder manipulation
• loosen the hands so they don't affect what the club does either in cocking or uncocking

I took the arms back with the shoulder turn, which was easy for me.  I let the  club do what it would as I turned the shoulders.

Coming back was a spin and it was easy to do that from my legs and then all the way up.  I was able to keep the head still and not slide (another thing I am very good at).

This all worked quite well -- ok, better than that, I hit a couple thin balls but all the shots were straight, high and solid.  Now, I can hit the ball pretty well at the range.  I'm greatly admired there and once one of the pros brought a student over to watch me hit.  But on the course was a different issue.

I'll be very optimistic in this current iteration as everything I was doing was quite easy for me.  Nothing was hurried or hard.  The wind up and spin out were easy.  My distance looked pretty good and my long irons were much higher. 

Not sliding forward maintained the full loft on the irons and sent the ball towards the heavens. 

Here is the spin video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mA10dnvJX4

Here is Monte on arm location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px50pNlcqPo&list=RDWrSSRIX_61s

I'll update this as I take it to the course.  I tried this arm and spin stuff with all shots from chips to bunker shots, through the irons and then 3w and driver.