Lesson #4

At the start of our lesson I noticed your trail leg bending an excessive amount like we’ve seen before in previous lessons. Always keep an eye on it and make sure both legs and knees match. On the downswing we can see you’re still under the plane a little too much. Your misses will typically be fat shots and the occasional thin/top if you over compensate. (click on photos to enlarge)

From this view we can see how the trail leg has much more flex than the lead leg at setup. This shifts the center of your weight behind the ball. The next frames actually reveal what I think may be the root cause of your overly shallow plane. We can see the head move dramatically forward with a very big lateral bump. I also believe your early release is a result of the body getting too far ahead of the arms and then the hands have to play catch up. Next time we need to address this by keeping the head more steady and improving your vertical force since you already have plenty of lateral and we’re already working on more rotational. A great golf swing has a blend of the 3 forces, lateral, rotational, and vertical. You can see your lead leg is not straightening through impact which means you’re not pushing up and off the ground.

Here you’re working on swinging with an alignment stick gripped with the club under the left arm. If you trace your target line with the end of the stick your club will be perfectly on plane. You can see when you take it back and through you still point it a little outside the target line and then the club dumps under the plane. The club then exits out to the right through impact because of it attacking the ball from inside.

Hitting half shots while holding the stick got you closer to being on plane. We can see however that on the downswing the stick is pointing well to the right and outside the target line. Therefore the clubhead travels under the ideal swing plane. You rotate nicely and are able to get the shaft back on plane by the time impact happens.

I introduced the ball push drill to help you understand and feel a more on plane hand path. The hands need to move up, around, and in, after impact so that no flipping or stalling of the chest occurs. You can see the before and after is a big difference. As I mentioned earlier notice your lead leg difference between the two. One is flexed and one is straight. When flexed it makes it much harder to get the proper hip and shoulder turn.

After the drills we can see some improvement. Setup looks much better with the trail leg not over bending, takeaway is a little less inside. On the way down the club head gets more in front of your body and therefore closer to the ideal swing plane. At impact the shaft matches the line perfectly and the strike was right in the middle of the club face. After impact we can see the shaft exit much closer to the plane line.

You first session with the SuperSpeedGolf sticks. Swing was much more on plane when you weren’t thinking about it! More sessions with these and your club head speed will go up and stay up.

At the end of our lesson you were smashing your driver. Superspeed sticks helped quite a bit when paired with a more passive and controlled club face. You get your hand path in, up, and around much better now. The shaft is exiting a little right because that is just the nature of the driver being the longest club and hitting a ball off a tee. Good work, let’s keep it going!