(full speed)

Looking back at these videos now it's insane to me that I get to parallel, I thought I was taking a ****ing half backswing

I can barely recognize that swing from a few weeks ago. THIS is why I think working on the full swing needs to be compartmentalized and in a way separated from the rest of the golf game.

If I have time later I'll put up some comparison pictures, but it's safe to say your swing looks MILES better.

How's your distance with your clubs been? Judging by the angles of you're arms are swinging at the same speed you should have picked up quite a few mph.

Here's how your club/body looked when lead arm is at the 7:30 position..

Before:



After:



And when your hands a frame before being on top of the ball.

Before:



After:



So that means your club is travelling quite a bit further in the same amount of time, and given the same arm-speed you should be hitting the ball harder and launching lower, although it might appear to be similar sing more speed+lower launch usually means a similar apex height.

I wonder if the fact that you haven't played regularly has anything to do with such quick improvement, because you just don't see improvement like that in such a short time. Whatever you're doing I really wouldn't change, I can see all sorts of other good things that are now happening in your swing, for example transition, and I wonder if it's the case of one thing helping the other.

Lastly, I like to look at where the clubhead is when the club is on a direct line with the lead arm. My ghetto physics tells me that's that moment when the clubhead loses stability AND max velocity, and this starts to decelerate. If you haven't hit the ball from there you're not only going to flip and add loft, but you'll be hitting the ball while the clubhead is losing speed, imo.

Previously, you had about a foot of "deceleration and adding loft"



Here is the one from yesterday... Pretty much at impact, maybe a hair before but I may have caught this picture a little earlier than the previous...



You're sooo close to being right there dude. Just for a visual here's Rory, who I think hits the ball higher than most, meaning theoretically he'd hit that same position earlier than most on tour:



I messed up with the red line but the ball is a couple of inches in the air.

The new clubs come today, so the only club I've been hitting is my 56 degree (which the fitter said had a 6.0 shaft). This is a strange club to tell how much more distance I'm getting, but I'd say really good ones go further-- but some still jump pretty high. So yea, I'm not sure, and I might never really know since my swing is going through so many changes while I change to these stiffer clubs. I'd say it feels more pure when I catch it though. To give a heinously bad analogy that makes me hope not many people are reading this: it used to feel like I was swinging a sword, now it kinda feels like I'm swinging a mace or something (which I guess makes sense, I'm using my wrists as the fulcrum and moving the fulcrum in front of the impact point).

This is likely to be it, I basically went in thinking I was horrible and never got too caught up in any one particular swing since I was constantly tinkering.

Yeah the Dungeon's and Dragon's analogy makes perfect sense. Eventually when you get a little more time practicing what you've been doing, you can work on getting your lower body working in an even more powerful way. A lot of the ills I saw in early swings wrt that have already been magically fixed though.

My guess is you are going to be absolutely smashing the ball in a few months. The full-speed video already looks like someone who's generating a good deal of speed.

Also when you get a chance can we get a down-the-line view in slowmo with an iron? I'm curious as to how that looks compared to earlier swings.

I got the clubs in, but they're 1/2 inch too short I think (fitter said whatever I had was good and these are shorter, probably normal length), so I'm gonna get them lengthened, hopefully will be pretty quick. Also gonna get these same shafts on my hybrid.

I did hit a few at the range and they do feel pretty awesome, actually not as heavy as I thought but I'm super into it. Carried the 4 iron what felt like 200y a couple times, I guess it's not really that unlikely in altitude.

Probably spend a few days or a week getting these adjusted and buy a putter and hit a few hundred putts and try to learn how to drive it as well.

good stuff on your improvement and the new clubs...

had my first day on a golf course with my new project x 7.0 tour driver shaft.. in theory way too stiff for my swing but they really seemed to work for me. and what i love is i can swing really hard and the ball flight stays the same. and i can work the ball - certainly not optimally - that i could never do with R or many S shafts. with those i had no idea where the clubhead was at any time. misses were all over the place. with super stiff, generally don't have misses so far but if i do i think they are minor-moderate and predictable flight.

next stop is probably stiff, heavy for my 7i through pw and then i'll be substantially complete. maybe new gap wedge too.

You have improved a lot. As those pics above show you have maintained lag prior to impact way more now than at the beginning. Now it's time to keep the hands from flipping through impact.

Here's is the perfect drill for you. I been trying to find it for awhile to show you and finally found it...


I will do this drill just with my driver by gripping the shaft 2/3 of the way to the head and make full swings without the handle hitting my side. It works the same way but you could easily make one of these out of one of your old clubs.

Yea that drill seems interesting, I have no idea what the results will be, I'll mess with it at some point soon. Probably could use these old clubs too when I get my new ones.

So I went to a different fitter at this place I've been using the range, he said my old clubs (which the original fitter said were a good size based on some of the results of the tape on the bottom of the club thing or w/e) were ~3/4 of an inch longer than these new ones. He said that for my size it'd be pretty irregular to have clubs that were 3/4" longer than "standard." So he's going to put 1/2" on these new ones, which seemed like a fine compromise.

Also I demo'd a stiff graphite shafted hybrid, holy **** it was hard to hit and I felt like I couldn't really get any distance on it (but my longer iron shots are all ****ed up since I've been changing the hinging on my swing).

Here are some DTL shots from today, I'll just say that these look horrible to me. I had no idea I was coming back so shallow and down so steep, that seems horrible. I was trying to take it "straight back" and have that be pretty steep, then I assumed I was flattening out in the transition when I was firing my hips. I was not correct about that...

6/14: 2 buckets

I was trying very, very hard today to go up vertical and keep my hands loose and come down. Results at the range continue to improve, better misses, hits are awesome and have some draw (meh, or hook) on them, etc. but I'm not sure I can really fathom how I could possibly come up steeper and drop in more shallow than I already am, or how I could get my wrists to break even further past the ball.

Swing looks awesome in those last vids.

I also hit a few with my driver just to get a baseline for where I'm at with this club. Was trying to be a bit more narrow and upright, use some of the principles of hinging that I have been working on with my irons, and just not get back to far. Results were quite good in a small sample.

ty, but I'm kind of panicked about how I come down steeper than my backswing. Basically every video I've ever watched and everything I've ever read has been that 99% of pros come up steep, drop their hands and tuck their elbow a bit and come through that way. It's weird to my that my swing looks like that on video but I'm hooking the **** out of it when I hit it well (the other occasional miss is a push slice), I would have expected a steep swing like that to still be my old slice, but good hits are all draws bordering on slices.

First off, don't freak out. There are plenty of pros that bring the club back steeper than they are coming in. It does sound like you have a pretty big in-to-out swing based on your ball-flight, but I wouldn't worry about that too much for the time being.

As far as why you start the swing shallow, most of it is at the very start of your backswing. One of the first things you do is start with a little wrist c0ck, and physics would lead me to believe that it's VERY hard to cock upward when you start the swing that way.... so instead there is a bit of a roll right afterward and that gets you flat and to the inside.

I've been down that road before--I swore my club was vertical but it was as flat as can be... And when I tried to go more vertical it would still be flat, only deeper and more stuck.

The way that I fixed my backswing plane was to do a lot of drills and mirror work. The drill that did it for me was to take he club back with the feeling that the handle is leading, basically dragging the clubhead for the first few inches. Because you're not c0cking early, the club has no choice but to come up correctly when you start that way.

Let me know if that works for you... I'll try to find a video.

[edit] Here's a good article with video

I tried to find a video of the lesson I took with Kelvin Miyahira where he gave me a different drill but it's on a different comp. I'll try to explain it using words.

Set up as you normally would with a club near a wall in a manner that your facing the wall and front of the clubhead it barely touching the bottom of the wall or baseboard. Now take a backswing and don't let the front of the clubhead leave the wall until it moves about six inches.

With your current swing, you'll naturally want to bring the club inside with a wrist c0ck or rotation of the forearms. Concentrating on keeping the clubhead against the wall will make that impossible to do.

Try some of those out and see if it clicks.. When it does you'll be pretty amazed at how easy it was.

I tried to find a video of the lesson I took with Kelvin Miyahira where he gave me a different drill but it's on a different comp. I'll try to explain it using words.

Set up as you normally would with a club near a wall in a manner that your facing the wall and front of the clubhead it barely touching the bottom of the wall or baseboard. Now take a backswing and don't let the front of the clubhead leave the wall until it moves about six inches.

With your current swing, you'll naturally want to bring the club inside with a wrist c0ck or rotation of the forearms. Concentrating on keeping the clubhead against the wall will make that impossible to do.

Try some of those out and see if it clicks.. When it does you'll be pretty amazed at how easy it was.

I tried to find a video of the lesson I took with Kelvin Miyahira where he gave me a different drill but it's on a different comp. I'll try to explain it using words.

Set up as you normally would with a club near a wall in a manner that your facing the wall and front of the clubhead it barely touching the bottom of the wall or baseboard. Now take a backswing and don't let the front of the clubhead leave the wall until it moves about six inches.

With your current swing, you'll naturally want to bring the club inside with a wrist c0ck or rotation of the forearms. Concentrating on keeping the clubhead against the wall will make that impossible to do.

Try some of those out and see if it clicks.. When it does you'll be pretty amazed at how easy it was.

regarding the side views: i put my cursor directly over the emblem on your hat when the video starts and it reveals a bit of backward & forward sway during the swing.
one of the things that has always amazed me about rory & others is how still they can keep their head pretty much still while their body is doing all those crazy things below it.

Agree with Seadood. No reason to panic. You don't come down very steep in reality. You would like to drop the clubhead a little more behind you, but you really aren't far off there.

If you want to fix that you have to learn to relax your right hand/wrist at the start of your downswing. This will let gravity work to your advantage and the clubhead will fall. A good drill for that is to have a wall behind you (or imagine one) and at the top of you backswing back up to the wall so the club head is against the wall and as you swing down keep the club head against the wall as long as possible. If it is a wall that will damage your club then just put a headcover on it. You aren't making full swings. just getting the feeling of the clubhead staying back against the wall on the way down.

6/15: 2.5 buckets, the first bucket was terrible. I was dying to hit some balls while trying to go straight back and have a steeper backswing, but I am also still working on hinging and not casting, and also keeping my right leg straight, and also a few other things...

So then I went back a few hours later and really took like 45 seconds between shots, concentrated on taking it back slow and straight and not having a full backswing and I hit them much better. Like really good. I think I could have gone out and 3 putted my way to a 90 today.

I spent some time doing some mirror work and the drill with the clubhead on the wall between range sessions today. I think it did wonders. My swing isn't so bad at this point in time that I need to be thinking about more than one thing.

I'll probably take a few days off and post some videos early next week when the clubs back from getting lengthened