A Couple of New Techniques

There are a couple of things I'm doing differently today.  These have come from various YouTube videos that described the techniques and explained why they are better / good techniques.

Putting: Brandt Snedeker is a proponent of keeping the putting face square to the target.  He has a popping action to add to this philosophy.  The popping action provides for an aggressive acceleration into the golf ball.  Longer putts incorporate more wrist action. 

This is an older type of stroke.  The modern stroke is to hold the hands, wrists, and arms frozen and rock the shoulders.  This produces a stroke that must arc through the hitting area.  That makes it critical to have the ball in a consistent position.  Also the arc needs to be consistent.

The popping stroke requires none of this.  It was required in the old days when the greens were furrier and putts needed to be hit harder. 

I tried this today.  I was very happy with my lines.  I was able to hit the ball in the direction desired.  This does not always happen!  Distance control was pretty good.  I made a bunch of longish putts, some coming back and I had 3 birdies.  The club to ball contact was very good.  There was a nice click produced at contact.  Bottom line is that I will pursue this.

Pitching: There was a Dan Whittiker video where he proposed a pitching method to one of his students.  The student had a tendency to hit all his pitches to the right.  The new method requires preponderance of weight on the forward leg by bumping the lead hip out. The weight/hip is left there.  Then the swinging of the club is done with the body / torso.  The arms race the torso back to the ball, but it's a race that the arms are not expected to win.

I've tried this in practice a bit, but only today did I try it on the course.  I don't have a good feeling for which clubs to use with this and the distances that will be generated.  I hit two shots with this today.  One from about 70 yards.  I would normally have used my 56 and hit it with about a 3/4 full swing.  But I tried my 50 to allow a less powerful swing.  I hit it a little fat.  The ball was propped up in the first cut of rough and I didn't choke up enough on the club.  The line was perfect, but a touch short.

The other pitch was to a pin with not a lot of green in play.  The line was again exceptional, this one was a bit strong, but a the strength required to hit this was minor. 

I like both of these new techniques.  They are making the various shots easier to perform and they are fun!  A bit more practice should make them effective weapons on the war on par.