Hold The Pizza!

August 18th, 2016 — Day 15–386 days till 2017 GTC

The key to a nice inside to out golf swing is a steep back-swing and an much more shallow down swing. When you come at the ball from a more shallow plane, the club face is square to the ball for a much longer period of time, thus giving the club a much larger margin of error and reducing the probablility of a miss hit.

Through my work this summer, I have worked to get the from a shallow take back and an over-the-top swing path, to going back and forth on a straight line. Take a look here at a good swing from a previous range day:

While this is an excellent swing, and a great improvement on where I started the summer, it is still both back and down on a very steep path. A swing like this will produce a good shot nearly every time, but the reason that change is needed is that a swing that is a bit off has a higher chance of producing a mishit. I don’t care how naturally talented you are, or how much time you spend hitting balls, every swing cannot be perfect. So the next step moving forward is to build a swing that is not only great on the good swings, but also more forgiving on the lesser swings, and for that to happen, I need to shallow out my down swing. To have a shallow downswing, I need to adjust my swing so that the light blue line (downswing), shifts from the right side of the dark blue line (back-swing) to the left side of it. While this sounds like a simple enough change, in practice it is actually quite difficult. My body simply refuses to make the first move from the to be down and to the inside.

I wish that I could say it is just in my head and I need to train my brain to think differently, but, unfortunately, there are some mechanical issues that I have identified that will not allow my body to do this.

This first change that I need to make is at the very top of my back-swing. This change is called “hold the pizza”. Currently, at the top of my swing, my right wrist is straight and if I were to open my palm, you would see that it is facing parallel to the ground. Holding your hand like this, even without a club in your hand, it is easy to see how your first move forward would be right over the top, in the same way that you would throw a baseball. But, throwing your club forward as you would a baseball is the last thing that you want to so. So, as one might gather, my body natural motion is fighting what my mind wants to do the whole way.

The correct placement for my right wrist and hand at the top would be for my palm to be facing straight up towards the sky. If you were to pause my swing right there and remove the club from my hand, you should be able to set a pizza tray on my hand without it falling. From this position, it becomes much more difficult for my elbow to throw the club forward and over-the-top. The path of least resistance becomes the club almost falling backwards into an inside slot.

For about 10 swings, I was realy focused on getting my palm towards that sky, and as is very predictable with any swing change, I encountered all kinds of funky stuff. Repeatedly topping balls, and hitting shanks off the hosel, I felt like a new golfer hitting the range for the first time. But, then, I began to get used to the feeling, and the resulting swings resulted in a drastic improvement in ball striking. As you can see when comparing the swing at the left with my swing at the top of the page, this was producing a much more shallow swing path (both in the take away and the downswing.) There are still some corrections to be made, as I would like to have a steeper backswing, with this shallow downswing, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

When implementing this new swing, I found the it feels much more pure and square when I made solid connection with the ball. Additionally, the ball took on a new flight path. The ball would push out a bit further to the right and draw back to the middle a bit sharper at the end. I like that this produces a different ball flight, as that makes is more identifiable if my swing breaks down on the course and I don’t know why.

until next time,

Miller