Beu's Swing video

[Durtman]

Hello, I promised I'd post my buddies swing on here since he let me use his video camera. After seeing it, he's not sure what to think. He's been working on turning his shoulders more and stepping forward to get the weight tranfer going. He seems to let it all hang on his hind leg.

http://www.creativedirt.com/vid/beau5.mpg 5 iron front and rear

[Martin Levac]

Re: Beu's Swing video

First impression.

It appears that his intention is to a) produce power with his wrists and b) lift the ball. I think those intentions are caused by him focusing on where the ball will go without regards for how to send it there: c) Proper impact.

Solution is to change his intention:

a) produce power with the wrists

Do not try to produce power with the wrists, there's not enough strength in the wrists to do that. Remember the trick where you must try to lift a chair by holding it from one leg and lifting the opposite leg first? How much strength do you need to do that? Trying to produce power in a golf swing with the wrists is the same idea.

Instead, produce power with the shoulders, torso and legs. Use the wrists for control, that's what they're there for anyways. Control.

b) lift the ball

The club is lofted. Do not try to lift the ball, the club will do that just fine on its own. Loft will lift the ball no matter what you do, let the club do its job. Loft will also impart spin on the ball. The more loft there is, the higher the ball flight. The more loft there is, the more spin the ball will have. Spin has two natural functions: Aerodynamic lift and true flight. As a ball spins backwards and as it moves forward, it will lift itself just like an airplane wing. As the ball spins, it will act like a gyroscope and maintain its trajectory with more accuracy than if it did not spin. Remember volleyball and that funky zig zig service? That's because the ball does not spin and is greatly affected by the surrounding air.

Let the club do its job.

c) Proper impact

Nothing is more important than proper impact. Everything else depends on this fundamental principle. Everything that you do must have only one goal: Proper impact. Proper impact will produce more distance than an offset impact. Proper impact will produce more accuracy than an offset impact. It's a function of the physics of two colliding bodies. It's all good and well to try to produce great swing speed but if all we do is nick the ball, all that power is wasted.

With proper impact comes distance and accuracy. It's as simple as that.


So, control the club, let it do its job, focus on proper impact. In other words, grip it, aim it and rip it.

Here are some actions that he will learn eventually that will help him reach his goal:

The head is maintained as still as possible. This is simply a natural requirement for precision. The eyes are the tools we use to aim, they are in the head. It follows that to aim with more precision, we must maintain the head as still as possible. What do we aim for if not the ball? The target? Sure but we must first strike the ball precisely before we can send the ball to the target with any accuracy.

He will eventually swing with less effort after he realises that he can control the club better to produce proper impact which will in turn produce more distance and accuracy. After he has practiced this enough, he'll experiment with adding more power to the swing to produce even more distance while keeping the acquired accuracy.

His body will eventually be kept more quiet because he will make less effort trying to produce power.

If he can learn something, he can learn anything. If he can learn a bad method, he can learn a good one later on.

I go by process of elimination. I eliminate anything that prevents me from achieving proper impact. I keep what works, I discard what doesn't.

So, If I want to stay true to my method, I advise him to consider that anything I wrote here can be discarded if it doesn't work for him.


Martin Levac