Tutelman. Com!

Dave Tutelman is a retired physicist and avid Golfer.

He has a golf section of his site devoted to golf. 

I got a lot of good info out of this. I was looking for info on 'crack the whip' and how hands slow to speed up the club.

The various videos on YouTube seem to have it backwards!

Worth a read.

This is terse as I don't have a keyboard and the phone input slows me down.

Catching up 2/11/17

Hello reader,

Here are a couple of items I've been testing.  One must keep in mind that the things are right or not and also whether I can produce it correctly.

I'm trying to get a lot of my body out of my swing.  I'm progressing towards an arms start with the body to help as needed.  ABC is the memory help: Arms, then Body, then Club.

Also as part of this is to post  a bit on the left leg.   Use the body after the club has started down. 

Monte Scheinblum talks about starting smoothly and slowly to make the run with the hands and arms - get them off the chest.  You'll also hear this from Bobby Lopez and Tony Luczak too.  See all of them on youtube.

Tony also mentioned the karate chop hand position on the way down. 

I was at the range today and hit about 130 balls.  I found starting the arms to be fairly easy to do if I started slowly.  I lost no distance with this approach and my ball flight was a lot higher. 

It's tough to start slowly particularly with the longer clubs.  This was probably mentioned in chapter 3 of the Scottish Book of Golf Instruction in 1647, second edition. 

I also found it difficult to post to the left leg.  I like to slide a bit and thus we have a mental conflict.  But when I could do it, it worked well and my directional accuracy went up.  When I can't I push to the right.

When chipping, I'm working on the takeaway.  Too much inside and I push and too much outside and it goes left.  There is a sweet spot there!  I'm using my right hand in these as well, which is new to me.  It seems to add some speed.

I'm pretty happy with the items.  I am able to take a good whack at the driver and 3 wood with good results and avoid the huge slide. 

I played 3 days last week.  We are in the tail end a drought and the mud is thick.  I played the par 3 course a few times, the last round in even par.  I hit 8 of the 9 greens.  The distances range from about 80 yards to 190.  So there was a variety of irons in play.  The greens are large with a lot of tiers and such.  They are easy to hit, but the putts can be challenging.

Promising Results 2/5/17 (or 5/2/17 for you out of the states!)

I had a little list:

• drop arms from the top of the backswing while maintaining the shoulder coil
• think about hitting with the left shoulder - and by that the arms, which have a longer way to go, must start first and go faster than the shoulder turn.
• after a full backswing, which moves the head behind the ball, stay there and just swap the shoulder positions
• Hands should be outside of the right foot at the end of the backswing

Okay.  I was dubious that I could move arms without moving shoulders.  I was able to do this after a bit of effort.  This seems to be useful to me, as it keeps me from sliding aggressively onto my left side and getting past the ball.  I seek to stay behind it.

A good backswing will move your head and torso towards your right foot.  Thus moving off of the ball.  Look at Stenson's swing.  He shifts back, then stays there.  Any weight shift is due to the arms moving over the right leg.

The hands are in position outside of the right leg too.  They have a nice path back to the ball.

This backswing will angle your body towards "right field."  So the swing plane is tilted to the right as well.

While it was not on the list, the thought to "hit the ball to right field" between first and second base came to mind.  Should it have been on the list?  I would say yes at this point.  When I tried this, I found the swing to right field to be easy to do.  It seemed I was aimed there and it required no reroute or adjustments in the swing to do that.

So, I hear you ask, where did the ball go?  A good question and if I had not tried it, I would have thought that it would be on its way to right field.  But, praise the new gods and the old, the pill went right up the middle.  We are not talking an "n" of one either.  I was able to hit all my shots pretty much up the middle with all the clubs.  It was a nice feeling and I feel confident that I can dismiss the miss to the right.

I have a tendency to push the ball and I thought that the hit to the right would compound it.  Those fears seem unwarranted at this point.

We have a game tomorrow morning weather permitting and I'm going to give it a go.

End of January 2017

I played Wente today.  It's a fairly long course for us guy who don't hit the tee shot very far.  But we played the white tees and that helped a bunch.

I think I figured out why my irons are so much better than the driver.  I realized that when I hit an iron and this is more pronounced with the short irons, I make no effort to try and square the club face.  But as the club lengths increase and I move to the woods, my focus changes to try to "help" the club face get to the ball.

Well, that makes it all a lot slower and a more miserable hit.

I recognized this about the 3rd hole and tried to implement it on the fly.  No one ever said I wasn't foolhardy!  I was pretty satisfied with my efforts.  I didn't hook and only sprayed one shot to the right.  But it landed on the fairway of the only hole that provides two fairways. 

My distance was good with the driver and my 3 wood and utility club worked well.  I had a couple of birdies, which means something as this course has greens with bent grass and there is always a lot of break.

I hit some cracking 3 woods and some great irons.  Good stuff all around.

The weather may be closing in later this week; I'll be on the home course tomorrow to keep testing.

My golf motto is "Every Day a New Theory."

Boring Part II

How shall I begin, to tell the story of my round?

Well, it started a lot like the last one ended.  As you may recall it was with 12 consecutive GIRs and two putt pars.  The same happened today for the first two holes.  Then I pushed into a trap that was short sided and uphill from a tight pin.

The TV commentators would have been beside themselves with remarks of immenent peril.  But, the hard silted, adobe clayed (to invent a couple of verbs) trap was no problem to our player.  A full wrist cock and a smooth downswing plopped the ball onto the fringe to roll out to less than a foot.  "An easy game," a foolish man once said.

But I am not here to gloat -- did I mention the two birdies today? -- I wanted to talk about some swing changes from Sunday's trip to the range.

I finally found a smooth 10% effort with some wrist unhinging early in the downswing, seemed to make the driver really easy to hit.

I was looking for new things to try, as I've become tired of doing the same old thing and expecting different results.  Old Al Einstein had some comments on that one.

In any case I was looking for less effort and less muscle.  I found that I could do it. 

But it's difficult to trust.  As I wandered through the round I was not expecting to have my usual iron distances as my swing effort was much lower.

I over hit three greens and hit a lot of shots pin high - did I mention the two birdies?  So, I must conclude with my limited sample that this lessor method does provide as much, if not more, club head speed.  I can't remember any shots that were short.

I did hit an interesting 6 iron on the last hole.  The fairway is still muddy and I think I hit it a bit fat.  The ball started low, never got very high, but about 75 yards off the club started to climb.  It finished pin high and 20 feet right. 

I mentioned trust issues with this technique and that is mostly a problem with the driver.  Since it's been the problem child for a long time, this is to be expected.  But I had one bad drive and the rest were passable and I was happy. 

I'm playing tomorrow on a longer course.  I'll see how it goes.

The course continues to dry quickly.  The fairways are mostly mud free and one didn't feel in peril for holes at a time. 

Boring!

It was a boring back nine. 

I hit all the greens and two putted every one for a smooth 36.  Lots of kick in pars.

The course is still pretty wet.  There is no roll on the fairways.  Lots of shots hit the green and spun back.  I don't think I'm hitting the ball that much better! 

The front was a different story.  Not all pars, though I did have one birdie.  My irons continue to but weapons of mass destruction.  I had a lot of good birdies chances and putted pretty well. 

I'm not sure what I shot, Hmm, after thinking about it, it was a 37 or 38, so we are talking 73 or 74 for the round.  One of my better ever, though I was not playing from lengthy tees.


I was trying to get a good wrist cock.  I usually like to roll the wrists and the club behind my back and then make a hero move to get the club head back to the ball.  That doesn't work very well and I cannot recommend it.   Taking it back with a flat wrist and a more upright motion kept the club in front of me.  It made it pretty easy to move the ball around.

It was nice to be so consistent. 

I won't play until Monday.  I'll try to get to the range this weekend and see if I can ingrain a bit of what I am doing.

I put distance clips on my clubs (http://www.distanceclips.com/), which I found very useful and a nice addition. 

I've been using a Bushnell distance finder for a number of years.  I have a gps watch, Bushnell too, that I don't turn on much.  But then I know the home course awfully well. 

Ping irons, S56s I think.  Musty Putter - wood and classic!,  Ping G30 driver with an old Olimar trimetal 3 wood that has to be 15 years old.  I like its looks however.  Wedges are TaylorMade and I think I talked about them in a prior post.

I've been playing with a pro v1x ball for the last few rounds.  Actually the same ball.  I'm not sure it's the current version of the ball, but I like the feel of it.

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!