Good advice. I cycle.

Check out this video, you can see Norman flexes his left wrist as he initiates his downswing. Not sure if I am capable of pulling that off, it feels more comfortable for me to do it at the takeaway. This swing looks comfortable regarding the lower body I see what you mean.

I screenshotted this moment here

I am somewhat of a youtube golf instructional video junkie, and imo this may be the best one on the internet. Try it out on the range.

Hey guys, I took another lesson in late June that i've been working on for a while. My coach gave me some setup pointers for driver, and also some fundamental changes to improve my full swing across all clubs:

1. Get more "swingy" with the club, or, in other words, let the weight of the clubhead do the work for you when it comes to generating lag and clubhead speed. In practice what this looks like is removing tension from my grip, hands, and arms, so that I can allow my wrists to set naturally at the transition from the backswing to the downswing, in order to create the lag instead of trying to muscle it.

2. more drills for lead wrist flexion for clubface control

As I tried to implement this stuff I had some weeks of doubt and pain, for sure. I think I have hit about 400 balls to work on these items and it's finally coming together.

I had a super productive day at the range today, and played 18 holes on a dogtrack muni course in western Colorado. I shot a 94, with 6 GIR and a disgusting amount of putts, and two birdies. Poked some 290yd drives too, it's been a long time since I felt so in control of the ball off the tee. Good stuff.

Here's some images from the range today.


7i face on


7i DTL


Driver face on


Driver DTL

Your follow through is terrible. The old pros boiled it all down to grip, stance, address position, follow through. The new breed of hack that calls himself a golf pro pretty much ignores them all in favor of gimmicks and drills.

Your arms fold up way too quickly after striking the ball. Get both arms straight at impact and hold them straight as long as you can. Another thing most of these idiots never knew is that fastest you should be swinging the golf club is 6 inches after the ball has been struck, not at the moment the balls is struck. You should still be accelerating at that point and should probably be swinging about 10% harder after the ball than you are at the ball. Both of those things are related. And if you can get those two things down you'll be ok. I'm not saying swing 10% harder. I'm saying swing your usual speed, but save the fastest part of it for beyond the ball.

There's no reason whatsoever why you should be making 50 strokes in 9 holes unless you three putt everything. Your swing isn't that bad, if you can get the arms straight, and apply the power in the right spot.

Good luck.

I gave this a shot tonight with some practice and I like this thought a lot, it addresses the lack of body turn mentioned upthread and feels very natural. Thanks

youtube Mike Malaska. his videos (and other videos that he guests in) are some of the videos that have 'clicked' the most with me.

As a brief update I have been playing quite a bit, no more lessons since July as I'm trying to really groove in the two main lessons my coach gave me then.

The result of this has been some great ballstrikes, and some different miss patterns. I'm putting up weird scoring like 2 birdies with no pars.

Now my misses tend to be a dead pull with driver, or the occasional old big slice.

With irons, I'm either hitting them pure, fat chunk, or dead pull.

Based on what i've learned I believe this is due to my path remaining over the top, which produces all of the misses I describe above (closed face leading to iron/driver pull, open/square face leading slice with driver, over the top steep swing path leading to chunks with irons).

My better strikes tend to happen when I focus on tempo and swinging in to out, so I'm working on practice on that. I'll check out Malaska's videos on this topic.

My thoughts exactly. Generally, your straight left pulls are probably from you grabbing too hard with your right hand at or just before impact which is closing the face early and squaring it up with the path. You're athletic enough that I assume you have a clubface that is fairly square to the target at impact, so it is your path that is the problem.

I haven't had an out to in swing path for a long long time, but I saw an instructor once saying that the best way to fix it is to start by trying to get your face angle in line with your path first. Basically, he is saying that if your path is 4* to the left of target line then you need to get your face 4* closed to the target line at impact. This will result in a shot that starts left of target and goes dead straight missing the target well to the left. To do this I would simply close the clubface at address by setting the clubhead on the ground square to the target. Take your hands off the club and turn your hands/wrists clockwise about 5* and regrip the club in that position and then turn your hands back to neutral position which in turn closes the face. You can't just grip the club the same you have been and close the face by turning your hands/wrists counter-clockwise which many slicers try to do.

Once you can consistently hit it straight, but left, then you start to work on correcting path. You will know you are getting somewhere when you start hitting a ball that start left and curves even more left. The more and more you start to hook it left, then you can start opening the face more and more which in the end is actually getting you closer to a face that is square to the target and eventually maybe even open to the target so you can hit a draw.

All of this should be done on the range for obvious reasons and a big key to this is using alignment sticks. Make sure that your feet are always parallel to the target line throughout the whole process. How to correct your swing path is the real hard part. There are a lot of possible reasons as to why you swing out to in. Usually it is because you start down with your shoulders which pulls the club across the plane but who knows without actually watching you.

This guy could be wrong or it may not work for everyone, but adjusting the face is easy just by regripping at address, so it's worth a shot.

For me, I was recently hooking the ball pretty bad and once I saw my club face angle and path numbers on trackman I knew the issue immediately. The face was square to the target and my path was in to out 5-6*. I did exactly the opposite of what I told you above and just opened the face about 4-5* at address. The ball started flying perfectly. A high draw! After that I didn't try to change anything because I am very happy with that ball flight, so there is some truth in it. Good luck!

This guy is amazing, I love his philosophy, thanks so much for the tip.

Progress here, some setup tweaks and face control in effect today, feeling good. Working on lead wrist flex still and not over hinging the wrists at the top of the backswing has helped shallow out the path and led to some very nice strikes. Here is today’s 6iron

This was something coach pointed out to me yesterday. Less knee flex, more bending at the waist. Nice catch.

another way to think about it

This is an interesting video, he's a little scattered. First he talks about how face control is paramount, but doesn't really specify why or how to address that (I know he has other videos on this topic).

I do like the ball throw drill for sequence work. I've found it a little hard to translate to a golf swing, maybe I just need more work on it.

I was laid up with some ski season injuries since late November, but I’m back in the saddle with back yard quarantine practice. Anyway this is probably the first time in my life I didn’t make an OTT move. I know the clubface is a little open but I’m excited about this development

For sure looking better! There is still a hint of it in there but you can play with that. I'm the king of OTT so I know what I'm talking about.

i discovered Marcus Bell videos a month or so ago and have been watching them since. you can fast forward through the intros to get to the good parts.

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...rcus+bell+golf

Hey so I just read this whole thread and much of what you're going through reminded me of my own journey down from 100+, so I thought I'd share a couple of things. But I'm going to leave the full swing stuff to the others who probably know it better than me anyways and tell you this: if you want to get under 90 and lower, there's NO better way to do it than with the short game. I've seen some pretty crappy swings on people with single digit handicaps. I've never seen a single one without a good short game though.

So first big thing for me was on chipping, and I got it from this video by David Leadbetter:



You can dispute whether it's the best technique or not, but what I found good about it is that a) it's easy to remember on the course and b) it WORKS. Setup like he says, take those three ugly little practice chips, then step up and hit the shot, remembering to accelerate at impact. Works time after time.

Second tip is sand play, and for that this is my go to video:



Again, whether it's the best technique or not isn't the point, what I like is that it's so easy to remember. Basically just two moves after setup. And it works.

Third is a really basic tip on pitches for all those awkward shots you find around the greens that don't really classify as a chip per se. Obviously there are a million variations for those depending on lie, distance, etc, but my one key thought on ALL of them is that regardless of what else I do, I want to be facing the target after the shot. You'd be surprised at how much that simple thought helps avoid skulls and chunks. I think i got that on this forum too, somewhere.

Finally with putting. Again there are a million thoughts and variations, but these are the things that helped me beyond belief:

1) read the putt from behind the hole. Whenever I read from behind the ball I do get a good feel for the side slope, but I always had a lot of trouble seeing the uphill or downhill slope and feeling the distance implications. This is massively easier to see from behind the hole. (I also tried some of that AimPoint stuff for green reading and it helped a lot too. There are a ton of videos on YouTube about it)

2) On longer putts, don't worry about stroke, worry about speed. Maybe others will agree or disagree, but for me this is massive. I make tons of bad strokes but if I have good pace on the putt, at least my next putt won't be that bad.

And the way I feel speed is to stand behind the ball facing the hole and then make two practice strokes, the first to feel a shot that would be way too hard, then the second that would be way too short. Then I just step to the ball (fairly quickly) and make the stroke that was between those two feelings. The goldilocks stroke if you will. Works great and again, easy to remember on the course.

3) Many will debate, but I can't recommend this enough: switch to the claw or pencil grip. The main reason for this is that in my opinion most bad putts come from some weird right hand influence taking over the stroke (for righties, obv). Very natural to do since that's our dominant hand. I find that if you use the claw/pencil grip it helps mitigate this pretty much completely. The reason being that if a little bit of right hand sneaks into the stroke when you're using that grip, it doesn't change the face angle. Thus you still end up hitting a decent putt even with the right hand influence. Try it.

Final tip on putting I got from a friend of mine. He told me that when he was young he taped two pencils or tees to his putter head, such that they were about a ball's width apart, and then practiced putting for an hour or so a day that way. Basically impossible to hit a shot unless you hit the middle of the putter face and it doesn't take long before you do it every time. To this day I don't think I've ever seen him hit a bad putt.




Hope it all helps. Enjoy.

Thanks for all of this Dino, I like the leadbetter chipping clinic a lot.

It’s starting to come together. Shot 91-90 in two rounds this weekend. I’ll try to get some video up.

Swing thoughts:

1. Left wrist flat (not flexed)
2. Backswing around body instead of up
3. Right hip moves back/away from ball with backswing

It’s unbelievable how much better the full swing is with this. Still fading driver a little bit but keeping it on the course. Iron misses are pin high slight pulls. Heel strike tendencies through the bag with a few shanks. Have almost eliminated fats.

That's a lot of thinking during a swing. Did you just work on these one at a time until it was natural?

my old golf instructor who played web.com tour 3 big things were 1) quite straight legs, 2) push asssss out and have straight back that is diagnol to ground (i don't know what degree. maybe 20 degrees from vertical). 3) hit the ball from the inside.

i asked him why i can hit some great shots every round and then some absolute duds..... he said "posture is everything.......... anyone reasonable athletic can hit some good shots with pretty much any setup/swing.. posture though is the key to consistency"... tom watson says the same.

probably zero relevance but my old instructor beat tiger in match play and/or world juniors... i don't know exact details but i'm sure it's true. he has never told me but many other people have

I agree, three swing thoughts is a lot, and i'm still trying to groove them in.

Mostly all three things have to do with the very beginning of the takeaway and there's no thinking about it after that (no thoughts for transition or downswing or follow through).

I think really that the "swing around" and "right hip" moves go hand in hand, and the left wrist thing is necessary to prevent a massive slice (but easy to overdo and pull balls left, too).

don't feel too bad about the OOT move

i've asked a couple of instructors if recreational golfers ever come to them with too flat swings. they said never happens.

my favorite golf instructor, john jacobs, preaches an OOT swing for the rec golfer without huge time to improve.

watching greg norman videos...... he was very upright and is considered by many as the great driver ever.

1) when he takes his arms back he never seems to make a conscious "wrist coocck".. i am struggling with this. i like bobby clampett's book that advocates a fairly early conscious move...... basically without any intentional wrist manipulation the club should come right back where it came..... i feel like when i do wrist manipulation eventually i lift the club and get really steep.... i should not clampetts book was awesome for shorter shots. but awful for driver. i think he missed a key point (he uses aiming point.. but doesn't change it for long clubs.

2) norman's shoulders are so square to target when he's finished. he really gets through the ball..... i think many of use put so much emphasis on backswing that we can't to the front foot and complete the swing....... it's all stuff that needs to be worked at driving range, not on course.