Making changes in your golf swing can be very challenging experience. It can also be very rewarding when done correctly. As I’ve been working over this past week to get back to the Rotary Swing that I teach from the Hank Haney – Tiger Woods model, I’ve made awesome progress. Awesome in that I’ve achieved my small goals and can visibly see the differences in my swing.
My small goals for the week were to improve my impact position and as a result, lower my ball flight. While I’m not doing it perfectly every time, when I do what I’m working on correctly my shots fly on a perfectly flat trajectory. My wedges are the lowest they’ve ever been and have a very stable flight that won’t be affected by the wind. This is exactly what I’m looking for.
The second piece is actually seeing those changes on camera. More often than not, when making a swing change we can do something that feels incredibly different, yet, looks exactly the same. Making visible changes in the golf swing requires that things often feel radically different. The visible changes I wanted to see can be seen below:
The changes visible in this sequence taken today show that my swing is shorter, more round and less across the line at the the top. These things have gotten the shaft going right through my right forearm in the downswing as I talked about in a recent instructional video on the Member’s Vault. Before, it was coming down steep, above the forearm. At impact, my body is open to the target line and the shaft and my right forearm are in alignment. I’m very happy to have seen such progress in four days of practice.
The second visible change you can see is below where I have put them side by side. At impact, my tendency is to let my head move laterally during the downswing and end up with the club coming in too late and I get jammed up “waiting” on the club. You can see now that my head has stayed back and I’m in a much better position in the picture on the left from today. The picture on the right taken earlier in the week shows how I’ve moved laterally toward the target with my head putting me in the weaker position. All in all, it was a great practice week with all the progress that can be reasonably expected in such a short period of time. I expect it to take me about 3 weeks to get comfortable with these changes before they will run on automatic.
I’m stuck by the comment that one can make seemingly big changes that don’t “show” on camera. I’m reminded of a Rick Smith line that says “Golf instructors should ask for a mile of change if they want an inch.”
I have a mile of videotape over the years that shows essentially the same swing…despite Herculean efforts at change. I was told by an instructor that we all had “wiring.” Changing a swing dynamic was easy… changing the “wiring” was darned near impossible. Chuck provides inspiration that Mr. Former Instructor was mistaken.
Making visible changes in a golf swing is very difficult. It takes a significant amount of time and perseverance to make them show and stick. They should be hard, it they weren’t, everyone would be a great golfer and the game wouldn’t be fun because it wouldn’t be challenging enough.
To make the change you see above at impact, which most probably wouldn’t have even recognized if I hadn’t drawn the green lines, took 4 days of practice for a total of about 6 hours working on this one particular thing because it is a very dynamic position and those are the toughest to change. I couldn’t “get” myself into this position, it had to happen as a natural result of me doing other things in my swing properly to arrive here. That’s why most people fail with their changes, they try and manipulate their swing into some dynamic position that can’t be done unless they change a-b and c first, then d happens much more automatically, although still with more work.