Progress Update: June 15, 2008
Posted by Double Eagle in My Progress
It was good to get back to taking lessons this week. I had my first one in quite a while on Saturday.
After watching me hit a few shots from face on and down the line perspectives, my pro’s first observation was that my takeaway is bad. I’ve been taking the club too quickly to the inside of the line to start the swing.
This is likely due to my work with a one-plane swing. It’s very rotational and the desire to take the club back on the correct plane caused me to go a little bit in the wrong direction. It goes a long way to explaining why sometimes I don’t feel right at the top of the swing and why when that happens, the result is a guaranteed snap hook. Even when I don’t do that, I still have a tendency to pull the ball left.
After putting me in a better takeaway position, my pro gave me a good drill to work on getting in a solid position to start the swing, that he wants me to do each evening at home.
The results were immediate, though.
I got rid of those lousy pulls and started putting a series of 7-iron shots dead on target. I only lapsed back into the old habit a handful of times. The rest of the shots were right on target.
As much as it sounds like a fairytale fix, I’m still going to have to work hard to adopt this change. As soon as I grabbed my 2-iron, I realized I was going to have a lot of work ahead of me. I can’t remember ever shanking a 2-iron before, but I did it a few times on the range.
No worries. It’s a strange-feeling change that will take a lot of work to make. It’s also a divergence from the Hardy one-plane swing, but as I said last week, I’m willing to let that concept go, in favor of good instruction that takes me in another direction. The one-plane swing is one of many and isn’t the only “right” one.
It wasn’t all about identifying mistakes. My pro pointed out a couple of positives in my swing.
First, he said that I have a good athletic move through impact. Second, he said my tempo is pretty good. He said it could use maybe the slightest tweaking, but that it’s really, really close.
The tempo thing was kind of eye-opening. Normally, I’m trying to hit the ball hard. Standing on the lesson tee, I was trying to hit the ball well, with no consideration for distance so I felt like I backed off just a hair. Who wants to hit bad shots in front of someone?
It’s not that I get out on the course and choose hitting long instead of striking the ball well. In fact, I’m having trouble trying to describe the change in my mentality that I felt on the lesson tee. Whatever it was, I think it led to more smoothness in my swing. The explanation could just be a simple as backing off a few percentge points on the effort-o-meter that bought a little of consistency in the process.
In the coming days, I’ll be trying to figure out how to bottle that up and take it to the course with me.
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