Some Technical Thoughts

As you, dear reader, know, I have a sad tendency to shift forward when trying to smack the ball.  It shows up in the woods more than the irons and probably not at all in the short irons.

So I set out to struggle with this and probably wrote up a lot of this in the last post, but memory being what it is, I will possibly just repeat myself; I'm at the driving range yesterday and between rain I got some hits in and some chipping.

The experiment was an attempt to swing the driver like I do the short irons.

The hitting as ok and, as usual, was a lot better there than on the course.  But I did some chipping afterwards and realized than I seem to be blocking my right shoulder from coming under the swing plane.  I worded that poorly, but what what should happen with the shoulders is that the left goes behind you and the right shoulder goes down to the ball and then is pulled up in front of you after the hit.

Thus we spin around the spine, which is offset to the back of the body.  

When I became aware of this, I was encouraged to move the right shoulder down towards the ball and it kept me from shifting forward.  I was spinning and not shifting towards when I wanted the ball to end up.

I found that the lag of hands and club were easily kept in control of the motion of the shoulders.  This led to a more stable hitting position and better contact.

I played 27 holes today on the short course.  All irons and most of those short.  I think I missed 4 or 5 greens out of the 27. 

But I was trying to be aggressive about moving the right shoulder down to the ball.   This went quite well.  The divots were beautiful and went a great distance -- they were hard to find. 

I was long a number of times; as I was getting a very efficient hit.  Distances were what I expected, but biased towards long rather than short.  I think I hit one short short of pin high.  It was wet, but I still spun most of the shots backwards a yard or so.

A lot of the shots were very pure and had that creamy feeling of a ball on the center of the club face. 

The few chips I had were also well struck.

I'm pretty happy with this new approach.  I'm scheduled to play tomorrow, so we shall see. 

I think my prior swing was a shift back and then forward, more of a shift or sweep than a rotate.  With the shoulders coming around me, it makes it easier to take a turn for the backswing and not the shift and then just turn back on the downswing.

The future beckons!