Thursday 22 January 2009 at 09:38 am
I've really been working hard the past month or so on a few key things:
* Tempo
* Spine Angle
* Stable Base (Feet/Knees/Hips)
* Extension At Impact
Jeff Ritter's swing contains all of the these things (pictured below):
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Friday 16 January 2009 at 4:13 pm
Last year's WGC-Accenture Match Play event was great. I had a lot of fun and can't wait to go back for this year's tournament. I'm excited about spending the entire week watching the pros duel it out. After seeing the spectacular ryder cup unfold, the promise of possibly seeing a Sergio Garcia vs. Anthony Kim rematch has me pumped up for the event, but there is another factor here that is making me crave match play. That factor would be the recent play of Norm. I came to this realization a few weeks ago. Seems odd, but I'll explain.
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Sunday 04 January 2009 at 10:14 pm
I was at the range today trying to fix a few things with my swing. It appears that while trying to train my body to perform the one plane swing, I have made some mis-interpretations and have created numerous bad habits and power leaks in addition to my bad habits that have always been there.
#1) Too much spine angle - Jim Hardy advises that up to 45* of spine angle is appropriate. My swing was around 38-40* before so I wanted to increase it. For some reason, my spine angle increased to as much as 50* on some clubs. This makes it pretty hard to turn through the ball and created too much of an inside move on the takeaway
#2) Lack of extension - On the backswing I was attempting to keep my right elbow close to my body to promote a tight compact swing, however, the book actually suggests to let your elbow fly a little bit. This flaw presented itself as my left arm being too flat at the top. At impact, I had no extention because of the excessive spine angle causing hunching. In the follow through, in an attempt to move the club quickly to the left (the book states the club must come left after impact or disaster will occur), I have cost myself speed when it is needed most (when the compressed ball is stuck to the club face).
#3) There are a number of bad habits that I have had since I have been making any kind of serious effort at golf. Among them are not paying any attention to my alignment and lining the ball up off the heel of the club. I guess I figured I would get around to fixing those items when I was able to hit the ball dead flush every time!
Amazingly enough, I had learned to hit the ball fairly flush this way and couldn't figure out why my yardages were getting shorter. Duh!
I was able to have some consistant success with fixing all 3 of these items today. I was hitting the ball farther and with a better trajectory that in recent weeks, while still adhering to the guidelines set by the book. I was satisfied enough with these changes to move on to something new.....delaying the release of the wrist cock until the last possible instant to increase ball speed. I didn't have much success. My first stumbling block here was knowing the difference between cocking my wrists properly and cupping my wrists (which feels like extra wrist cock if your not paying attention). The second was to understand that the wrists don't fully uncock at impact (this would be a flip), but rather, through impact.
