Testing, Testing, Testing - updated

I would direct your attention to the following video by Mike Malaska.  He has a different, hard fought view of what the swing is all about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_DVuuStY3Q

If you don't watch it or you are interested in my take on all of this, allow me to summarize a bit.  I've also watched a lot of Mike's videos and my understanding is not just from the one mentioned above.

The concept that Mike calls a pivot point is where the club plane and swing plane either align or diverge.  Obviously the align on the back swing and then diverge on the down swing.

Mike suggests that the prudent golfer do a couple of things: one being to embrace and encourage the pivot points - certainly not fight them - and to bring the hands down to their starting point with the arms, not shoulders.  Moving the hands down to the start point brings them under the swing plane and allows the club to step out from the pivot point and align with the ball.  This pivot point on the down swing is about where the hands are waist high.  I believe that with the drive, it's even above that point.  (A note here, the location is important as you do not want to try and hold the angle or increase the lag or anything else; it has to happen fairly early in the swing.  Don't fight it!)

Also as a part of this, one cannot have one's body in the place where the hands are going to be.  It's not uncommon to move into this location.  When that occurs the mind figures out a way to hit the ball, but it's neither efficient nor directionally useful.   This is where the over the top move comes from as the on plane location is blocked, so the body goes around it and there you are, over and in trouble.

I think I've mentioned before that I have some alarming wear marks on my club grips.  This comes from fighting the club's position as I try to hit the ball.  Something was wrong, but I muscled on to make it work.

So I'm off to the range today to put Mike's swing thoughts into those I've been working on from my lesson with Glenn.

I was able to stay behind the ball or on sides as Bobby Lopez calls it, and to move my hands to their start position and allow the club to step out and hit the ball.

This worked quite well.  It seems that it's almost impossible to hit a hook this way -- yeah!  And out of 100 balls I think I pulled two or three, but hit the rest usually high, long, and straight.  Ah, what joy.

Ok, round tomorrow, we shall see what the golf gods will allow.

Golf Literature Blurb: I read The Haunted Major the other day.  This was suggested to me by David, my UK golf buddy.  It predates Wodehouse and had a lot of the themes I was going to incorporate in the modest literary effort I've got on the back burner.  It was a fun read, lots of Scottish accent from the caddie/pro and some of the folks in the town.  Bits of humor in the style of The Accidental Tourist.  It had some of the original illustrations in it.  Originally printed in the early 1900s.  Just a fun read.  I found it at abebooks.com, which specializes in used books.  I usually am getting the book for the cost of the shipping, usually around $4.

Update:

After I wrote this I watched a few more Mike movies.  One of the things he talked about was what the left arm does.  His view is that the let arm is a rotator and not a puller of the club.  Thus its function is to move the club in a fanning motion and not trying to pull it down and across or whatever.  Obviously the left arm will be moved at speed until the point where it starts to perform the rotation and the faster it is moving the earlier the rotation has to start.  I'm going to ponder this for awhile and not worry about it.  If I can do the stuff in the original post and hit it like the range that will be enough progress for a bit.  There is always one more thing!