Lesson #1
May 16th 2021
Hey Charles! Here’s what we worked on in our 1st lesson. To start, I noticed your posture in your setup was a little too bent over and low. We talked about how this can cause loss of posture while you’re swinging and ultimately will make it harder to keep your swing direction neutral or “on-plane”. It should feel taller more relaxed with less bend in the knees.
The main goal of this lesson was to stop topping the ball and take a divot with every swing. You can see in the videos and pictures above how your current swing would make that difficult. From the “Face-on” view you’ll see your left arm bending and essentially getting shorter paired with a left wrist that is going into a cupped position. Both of these positions move our swing circle way above the starting position (the ground) and make it difficult to take a divot.
From this “down-the-line” view we can see the root cause of the problem mentioned earlier in regards to your swing circle raising above the ground/ball. Because you are lacking hand depth in the backswing you end up having to come into the ball with a very steep shaft angle that doesn’t allow you to continue rotating. Instead you have to slow down your body rotation, shorten your left arm, and break your left wrist to redirect the club in order to have some chance of making contact with the ball.
After working on getting the hand path deeper, more behind you, in the back swing we can see some better swings with more turf interaction. You’ll also notice in the face-on pictures that your left arm starts to stay straighter through the hitting zone compared to before. Your practice swings we’re really great, consistently taking divots, but with the ball it proved to be more difficult as the swing would go back to its old habit. Hopefully this will get easier with more practice and with your hand injury healing up. Below you’ll find the first youtube video you’ve probably ever watched that is actually directed towards your individual swing haha.