I found some practice golf balls at Play it Again sports. They are a thick walled wiffle ball construction with reasonable weight.
I've been looking at golf vids today and I was getting antsy as there were things I want to try, but the weather has been nasty. But I was able to dash out about 4:30 to the local school with a wedge and the practice balls.
I like the balls a lot. Sadly they are $4 each, but they are not fragile and hopefully will last a long time. They provide a good contact feel and they fly pretty well. They reward a good hit with a nice launch and distance is enough to differentiate between good hits and bad.
The grass at the school is quite long and quite wet, but even so, I was happy with what I was trying to do. I may throw them in my golf bag for on course goofing off when things are slow.
Which leads me nicely onto the videos.
I stumbled across a nice set of clips and lessons by Bobby Lopez on youtube. He played on the European tour in the mid 70's. His main thrust is that folks get "off sides." What he means by this is that golfers will slide past the ball and then are doomed.
His approach is to tilt back at setup, then rotate shoulders leaving a lot of room between you and the ball, then use the shoulders, keeping them on plane (which is about 30 degrees tilted to the sky) and then swap the position of the shoulders. The faster the swap, the more speed.
There is no lower body pulling stuff around, there is little to no lateral movement.
He has clips of pros to prove his points. If a pro does not move off the ball during the backswing, they will shift their head rearward as they do the downswing! There is no forward motion until the club pulls you out of the hitting position.
If you've been following the blog, dear reader, you will know that I struggle with this very thing. When at the school this afternoon I was able to do as Bobby suggests. It seemed fast and with great balance.
Hopefully the range and the weather will accommodate more testing tomorrow.
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