Lesson #1

From down the line before our lesson I noticed your unique, yet functional, takeaway and backswing that goes above the plane line early with a closed club face. On the way down you shallow the shaft in transition which is great but then the club head gets too far under the plane line and you have to slow your chest down and rotate your forearms/hands to square it up. The club path then moves out to the right just as a result of coming from under the ideal plane. (click any of the pictures to enlarge)

From the face on view we can see a very narrow stance and a nice steady head. We talked about the stance and I’m okay with it for now but if you look at every tour player their stance is at least shoulder width apart. It’s a fundamental to balance and stability and being able to use the legs to pivot properly. Swinging with your feet together is a good drill to feel more rotation and smooth tempo but on golf courses with slopes and awkward situations that require improvised stances it’s much easier to have a consistent stable base to swing around for any situation. Through impact we can see a little flip as a result of being under the ideal swing plane.

We then worked on making some small, slow, swings while gripping an alignment stick with the club that ran under your left arm. This prevents any excessive hand action and encourages to swing with a lot of chest/torso/body rotation instead of a stalling, throwing, flipping action with the arms and hands. You can also see the club head stay on the plane line much longer throughout your entire swing although you are slightly under it.

You can see an exaggerated impact position with a perfect follow through. No flipping of the hands. See below for before and after looks.

After the alignment stick no flip drill your swing improved slightly by staying on the plane line for a little longer back and through. However, you were still attacking the ball too much from the inside. See below for great references of PGA Tour Players Adam Scott and Tiger Woods. Compared to Adam your forearms and shoulders are much more closed to the target which results in the different shaft positions we can see. I believe your narrow stance is why your trail leg and hip aren’t pushing and rotating to the target like his are. We can see the same trail leg action in Tiger.

The swing looked better when you were swinging under the alignment stick on the follow through but the video reveals that you were still well under the plane that resulted in a flipping action on the way through.

Here’s one of your last driver swings. Great impact position with a perfect follow through.

After the drill’s we can see that move is ingrained hard in your swing DNA. I think if we work more on widening your stance and improving your pivot with a feeling of swinging way “over the top” or to your left. Again, this is all in an effort to make your swing more on plane so that your strikes are more solid and your misses are much smaller. The more on plane we swing the club the less compensations that body will need to make and therefore can rotate freely through the ball with very little face rotation.