Incremental Swing Changes
Posted by Double Eagle in Instruction
So, you went and did it. You decided to retool your golf swing. Now what? Jump in and change everything? Hang on and let’s step back for a second.
Hopefully, you decide to make wholesale changes with the help of a pro. That will make life so much easier. But what if you decide to tackle it yourself, as I’ve been doing? I’m planning on resuming my lessons shortly, but it’s true that I did start the process myself.
The best piece of advice I can give is to make the changes incrementally. Your golf pro would probably have the same philosophy with modifications to your swing.
Let’s consider my own swing. This winter, I decided to make a switch to a one-plane swing, specifically the version that Jim Hardy teaches. I read his Plane Truth for Golfers book and his Plane Truth for Golfers Master Class books.
After digesting all the information in there, I compared it to my swing and concluded that I needed to change the following:
- Widen my stance slightly at address
- Bend over a bit further at address
- Get used to a flatter back swing
- Have a much flatter left wrist during the back swing
- Get used to turning hard with the upper body through impact
- Get used to keeping my weight more centered through the back swing and down swing, with no right tilt to keep me behind the ball
- Have much more passive hands (that’s something I needed to improve in my old swing too)
- Get used to pulling my left arm across my chest in the back swing to keep me on one plane
And that’s just the big stuff!
Imagine if I showed up at the range and tried to start doing all that right out of the gates. It would be impossible to make any progress.
The better plan is to attack those changes incrementally. In my case, I decided to attack the big movements first.
At each range session or round, I decided to focus on one of the big changes. First, it was getting used to the flatter plane. Then, it was the flat left wrist in the back swing. Then it was keeping the weight centered. Then it was turning hard with the upper body. I would choose one thing and concentrate on that, while keeping the other things in mind.
To do this effectively, you have to be willing to accept poor shots while you’re adapting. Anyone who has ever had a series of lessons has probably had a pro ask that a drill be performed repeatedly without focusing on the outcome of each individual shot. The point is to commit the change to muscle memory, not to start hitting good golf shots right off the bat.
Incremental changes don’t just mean changing one piece of the golf swing at a time. It also means that you might make incremental changes to each of those pieces, so that no single change is too radical. You might find that you start to revert slightly in some areas, so you might need to make the same change several times before it sticks.
For instance, consider my situation with keeping my left wrist flatter in the back swing. When I set out to do that, I made a change, but it wasn’t the change. It was a move in the right direction. I’m going to have to visit each of the fundamentals multiple times so that the changes aren’t too drastic. Each time, I’ll get closer and closer to the final product.
In my case, I’m about 30-50% of the way there. I’m starting to make the movements, but often I have to use conscious thought. My swing thoughts are usually whatever key I want to work on that day, whether at the range or on the course. That helps me keep the fundamentals in mind without getting overly mechanical.
I’m going to continue isolating and working on individual pieces of the one-plane swing. Now that spring is here, I should be able to practice a lot more, and I hope that the changes will come much more quickly.
If you’re going to the trouble of making big changes in your swing and are set in the idea of doing it alone, then do yourself a favor and break down the changes and make them incrementally.
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