Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Re-Learning Lateral Side Bend

I had found this golfer on Christo Garcia's My Swing Evolution YouTube Channel where he made remarkable strides in his golf game by discovering lateral side bend.

Here's an illustration from Dr. Phil Cheetham's dissertation:



In this video we see a common occurrence for all golfers that start to make a wide sweeping change in their mechanics; he started to regress and then had to re-learn the mechanics in order to get back to his old form. Dr. Bhrett McCabe describes the sequence as the 'Honeymoon Phase' when everything is working greatly early on and then one goes into a 'fog' eventually. And if they stick to it and have determination to figure it out instead of quitting or tinkering with something else, they will eventually go into the 'Discovery Phase' and their mechanics will now be even more fully integrated. I believe that is what is going on in this video. Some of it is very feel and visual related which is often dangerous in golf because what one person feels and visualizes is different from another person. But, we can at least see the process of going from the Honeymoon Phase --- Fog Phase --- Discovery Phase.

The difficult part is determining when something is not working for you and you need to move onto a different set of mechanics or if you need to 'stick to it' and be determined to figure it out. 

I may be alone in this theory, but from my experience of being a consumer of golf instruction I have found that it is best to judge the results of your good swings rather than worry about the bad swings when it comes to certain swing mechanics and philosophies.  Any time you are working on your swing, there is going to be a learning curve and that will produce bad swings and bad results.  Chances are (not always, but chances are)....if you can produce better results off your good swings you are likely onto something and it just becomes a case of putting in the repetitions and quality practice time to replicate those mechanics.  Furthermore, it may just being determined to fully understand what is going on when I make those good swings so I can fully integrate them.






3JACK

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