Lesson #1

Great job here of rehearsing a good routine that will allow you to have a consistent and fundamentally correct setup on every shot. Always set the club first before you take your stance and your grip. Make sure you set the clubface so that it is aiming at your intermediate target 3-6 inches in front of the golf ball. Once the face is aligned you can then build your stance (mind the ball position) and then lastly take your grip. Before you swing you can check your posture with your trail hand on your thigh and see if your fingertips are on top of your knee.

This is a test to discover your body’s natural mechanics relative to the golf swing. This test shows us how your right arm wants to move and the position that comes natural to your right hand. If we are right hand dominant then whenever the pressure is highest our bodies will always use and revert back to what is natural for it. Therefore, I believe we should build a swing around that idea.

For every right hand grip there is a matching technique of hinging the golf club. Every golf swing has 2 power levers, the left arm and the wrists. If we don’t use either of these correctly then we are not getting the most out of our golf swing. If the hinge does not match the grip, we are creating power leaks and will not have the most amount of leverage at the top of the backswing. For a side-cover golfer (you) you will want to hinge the club diagonally, meaning towards your right shoulder.

We finished with a drill that is designed to start making you feel a golf swing that is centered over the golf ball throughout the entire swing and it is driven by pure rotation. This will eliminate any sliding or swaying off the ball and start to make you feel how to be more rotary with the hips and shoulders. Notice after the shot how your weight is favoring your back foot. Even with your feet together you should train to get most of your weight on that front side by the time you finish.

This was a snapshot of your impact position in the first video of this summary. You did everything right before the shot but the result was still not satisfactory. Now there’s a deeper lesson there being that there will most certainly be times on the course when you did everything right and you felt good about the shot but the outcome was still bad. Managing your emotions and sticking to fundamentals with good course management will make these for sure bad swings not so bad. But from a mechanical stand point, your back foot stayed planted on the ground for majority of the shot which caused your swing direction to start from too far outside the golf ball. The compensation from there is to leave the face open and then you get the push slice flight. The sooner you get off your back foot, the more your swing direction will attack the ball from the inside.

This is the position you tested in. Your right hand grip should always have the palm against the side of the grip with it favoring the top half more than the bottom. This is also what we would call a neutral grip position. An easy trick to test what clubface position your current grip will produce at impact is to lay the club over your right shoulder and then cast it out in front of you with everything fully extended straight out. Notice the face position and adjust it if needed and recast to double check. If you compare your right arm position in this picture to the picture above at impact, you can see a big difference.

Much better setup and backswing structure here. Keep the setup and backswing in check and the downswing will have to change to match it. We will also continue to work on this in future lessons. Biggest thing right now is to get off your back foot earlier to make your swing direction attack the ball more from the inside.

This was a much better swing and only after a couple a tries! You can see your weight is favoring the lead side when you finish and your body is starting to learn how to rotate better back and through.

Lesson Keys

1. Posture, pre-shot routine (set club, stance, grip, in that order)

2. Right hand grip should have palm facing the side of the grip

3. Hinge your wrists in a diagonal fashion so the clubhead moves toward your right shoulder.

4. Get your weight off your back foot so that you finish with majority of the front foot.

5. Practice hitting balls with your feet together to get more centered and rotary.