Lesson #5
APril 23rd 2019
Hey Jeff! Great job in today’s lesson. Here’s your face on view before we started. You load up well into your trail side but as you come down you get too much lateral shift forward which makes it hard for the chest and arms to catch up to the rest of the body. After impact you do a great job of making sure the hips and shoulders are pointing at the target and the club is pointing down the target line. (click on pictures to enlarge)
From down the line we can see the cupped wrist position at the top that I touched on a little bit. I’d prefer to have you have a more flat left wrist position at the top so that it forms a straight line down your forearm. That wrist position dictates where the clubface is pointing. Cupped makes the face open while bowed or wrist flexion closes the clubface. You do a great job of getting the clubhead on plane on the way down but your misses are still too severe when you’re swings off.
We started off with what we call the “bowling drill”. Your first move back down to the ball should be that trail foot sliding backwards as your upper body starts rotating to the ball. At first you found a way to cheat as we can see your foot hasn’t begun sliding yet and you’ve clearly already started the downswing. The foot only starts sliding once the club is pretty close to impact. If the foot doesn’t start sliding back early enough in the downswing, then the hips will not slow down enough.
Here’s right after working on both drills. Hips are more in sync with the chest/shoulders and your shaft is leaning slightly forward compared to earlier when it was leaning slightly backwards.
You picked up pretty quickly on the bowling drill and saw some immediate success so we went ahead and moved onto step 2. Now that we’re aware of how the transition and weight transfer works to improve our swing direction, we work on proper wrist angles to achieve square contact and solid hits. The alignment stick gripped along with the grip of the club running up and under your lead armpit will not allow you to flip the club. This will make you feel more upper chest rotation and proper shaft/wrist angles going into the ball.
