These weren't very good swings for the following reasons:
1. They were recorded when the wind was blowing about 25 mph and it was difficult to feel the swing.
2. I've had issues with shoulder and neck pain the past 2 weeks.
3. There was some new things I was working on that are different from these swings. But for the purpose of this journal post, I wanted to go back to how I was swinging before I started to experiment with some new mechanics and I was a little rusty. I hope to go into some of the new things I was working on later this week on the blog.
So, let's look at the big changes in these videos. The biggie being how upright I have the shaft in the backswing with a more 'across the line' look at the top of the swing:
Here's an old swing from December:
It's not that one is 'right' and one is 'wrong' or one is 'better' or 'worse' than the other. In fact, the bottom (December) picture looks prettier. But, what I am using is the Stretch Shortening Cycle. The SSC is defined as:
An active stretch (eccentric contraction) of a muscle followed by an immediate shortening (concentric contraction) of that same muscle.
A simpler way to think of it is when you 'torque' a muscle one way in the backswing, it will 'un-torque' in the opposite direction.
So, if we want External Rotation of the right shoulder in the downswing a good method of doing it is to internally rotate the right shoulder on the backswing.
Fred Couples is a good example of this:
And so is Ryan Moore:
Now, in the December swing I had the right shoulder internally rotated in the backswing:
As George Gankas has explained, you can have this 'look' and have the right shoulder internally rotated as there is some rotation/roll of the forearms that go with it. The reason why I changed is that when that picture was taken I was having issues getting the forearm rotation/roll right and for me...it was a maintenance issue.
With this type of move:
There's less maintenance for me. Mainly because if I over-do it I can still recover. With the December swing (green shirt), it's too much about getting the forearm rotation just right.
The only issue with the more across the line move is that you really cannot have a short backswing with it because you need to have time to allow the Stretch Shortening Cycle to go into action. As you can see, neither Moore nor Couples have short golf swings.
So while it doesn't look pretty, it works better for me because I don't have the time or talent to work on it. And a lengthy backswing isn't an issue for me.
The ballstriking has been pretty good. With this swing, my Trackman numbers were the following at a True Spec Golf fitting:
One of the positives is that depending on the missed shot, I can better gauge what caused the issue:
Struck Well but Offline = Left arm jutted out too quickly in transition and chest did not rotate fast enough
Struck Poorly and Offline = Left arm pulled down too much, too soon in the downswing.
Toe Hook = Left hip didn't clear soon enough and right femur kicked in on transition (causing right pelvic tilt and the chest can't rotate and I get too steep)
Fat = Shoulders tilted down too quickly and chest did not rotate
As a result, the ball flight is better as it is usually not so high. And this shows up in the release as I don't have a 'flip' release:
But there's a good amount of a 'roll release' and thus consistency is not quite there.
The stuff I have been experimenting with success is how the quads and femurs move in transition. I really believe that if I don't pull down the arms too soon and rotate the chest, I'm likely to hit a pretty good shot. The issue for me is the lower body movements that prevent the chest from rotating or stall the torso rotation and then the arms eventually pull down rapidly to get the club head on the ball.
I will go into that in a post later on this week.
3JACK
No comments:
Post a Comment