Quote:
Originally Posted by airair
(Post 92174)
My problem has been - and is - trying to use upper body power (OTT) to kill the ball and see it ballon and curve to the right.
If I were to use less upper body power and force - does that mean I should try to use more of the lower body - especially in the downswing/thru impact? Would firing the hips thru impact be a good idea and something to work on? Does that help getting thru the ball better, better weight shift and increase ball speed and make the shots straighter and longer? It's raining today, so I haven't tried this out yet. Some comments about the whole idea is appreciated.
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Air and anyone similarly afflicted (which is all of us) , in my opinion this is where the MacDonald , Wild Bill Melhourne exercises and drills show their brilliance. Golf frustrates us to no end and in response we employ our intellect to design "moves" which often only make the whole motion more un natural and interrupted. When scything grass (not that people do that very much these days) do we fire the hips? Purposefully ? With our minds on our hips? Id answer yes, no, no. The hips fire , so to speak, but as part of a whole, ground up, motion. No more , no less than what is needed without much thought to it. Todays golf advice to freeze the hips in the backswing and fire them like crazy in start down is not natural or a prerequisite to good golf. Hogan didn't do that . Snead , Jones etc etc the list is lengthy.
This may sound like crazy talk to some but the transformative power of the continuous motion, back and forth , drills are amazing . You can go from shankz to sweetspot in minutes! They get you out of your golf mind and into a motion , a natural motion
with lag and drag in both directions. The entire body working as co-ordinated whole , or a sequence of levers if you will (see the glossaries definition of the Pivot). Hogan did Melhourne like drills for twenty minutes in the locker room prior to taking to the practice tee. He displayed his version of the drill on the Ed Sullivan show , wrote about it in his book. Something he learned from Melhourne I imagine as they did work together.
The orbiting club head doesn't seek out the ball , it seeks out its own delivery line. The body is the root source of this angular or circular motion but the direction of the club head line of flight (more precisely the right forearm and sweetspot plane) through the line the ball sits on is the responsibility of the lag pressure point. The lag pressure point directs the body! Golf can be seen as the body throwing the arms off or out but it is a directed throwing! In a mechanical analogy .... The blades are powered by the rotor but one of the blades has a sensor which is used by a computer to meter force and provide directional feedback .
Attaching a rocket to your hips won't help your OTT move as much as a fine tuning of your entire system.
I prescribe:
-MacDonald exercises.
-Melhourne drills. Continuous swinging , brush in both directions while walking a line of six or seven balls. 3/4 swings with a sand wedge , hitting little 40 yard shots . Lag in both directions . Like a perpetual motion machine . Let the arms flow and move independently , in different direction (up and down) from the pivot which moves around.
-take the tension out of your arms with the exception of right arm Extensor Action and a little right elbow bend which raises the primary lever on the backswing ... slightly (say 18" or so although Homer would not like me quantifying it like this but I did for impact. It isn't very big!!!) Take out excessive lifting , especially left side lifting. Swing the club like a rock on a string to top. You don't lift it the entire way to top, some of the lifting is powered by the swing away!!!!!!
-make no effort to hit at the ball upon impact, the ball the just gets in the way .
-your body swings the arms , the hands are just clamps!!!! The body and the arms move independently of each other , in different directions except for a brief period in start down given a Turned Shoulder Plane. Which will cure your OTT thing by the way.
If this doesn't work you need to get away from the golf ball for more training, more decoding of the hit impulses. The ball makes us do weird things. We start to kill snakes instead of scything grass. You know how when cross country skiing you can fall into a rhythm and seemingly go forever..... golf has a similar ideal rhythm (unique to each person perhaps) but its lost on the observer when we confine the motion to one singular swing at a ball. Repetitive motion will reveal the rhythm . Hence MacDonald , Melhourne and who knows where they learned this from? Some ancient Scot perhaps? Anyone know?
Most people think a lesson from Lynn would require a slide rule , pencil and note book and then they find its really more like dance lessons. You can talk about the complex mechanics of something as simple as walking to no end or you can just start walking! Thats what most lessons are like with Lynn, not saying he can't go deep , oh he can go deep , for sure . For most its a lesson about Alignments yes , but in MOTION. The latter by itself can create a good deal of the proper Alignments. No need to pose them (which would ruin motion)... they weren't got that way by the greats , Hogan for instance.
An observer looking at still photos of the mechanics of walking could conclude its akin to standing on one leg and then the other with some falling in between . Perhaps golf instruction took a wrong turn when golf books started to describe the positions seen in still photos?
As for your shots falling to the right......got to get into the flail . Make yourself a golfers flail out of wood and screws. See how this is what you are swinging. The left wrist uncocks and the whole thing rolls over . The whole thing, the entire primary lever, left arm and club. Now see how some of this rolling is a product of the pivot turning and that the roll isn't really that big . Now see how momentum or CF wants the club to uncock and the primary lever to roll. Now see how the club shaft points at the line on both sides of the ball. You were not doing this before when your shots fell to the right.
OTT takes the path left , a common compensation is to hold of the roll to keep the face from pointing left . Shots that go left to left are so awful and we cook up a subconscious compensational holding off of the face to avoid them. Often with a tell tale chicken wing finish. Power drops off as in effect we are hitting lob shots with vertical hinging . Great around the green but not so good elsewhere. Which leads to us swinging harder and harder . A perfect storm of bad impact dynamics ensues.
My apologies for rambling .
