Impact flip

Hi David,

There's a few questions here. Lets address them.

The reason your hands are always behind your right thigh is that your thigh is too far forward compared to your shoulder. Basically, you have a fair amount of tilt from pelvis, and the upper body is too far behind it. If you compare your picture to the one of Jon Rahm, you'll see that your left shoulder is behind your left hip by a fair amount. But your right shoulder is about the same spot compared to your right foot. Basically, your pelvis is more forward compared to your upper body, which makes the arms look more behind. It also contributes to the flip down at the bottom. And because your upper body is behind the lower body, you have more of the pronounced lateral movement to catch up through impact.

Yes, I agree with you that most good players have a slight backing up of the head through the release, especially with the driver. I think it's a trait of a good flat spot. I'm less of a fan of the head moving forward through that phase. See Rory and Jon Rahm as examples.

When you try to make the change, which piece do you try to work on? and what drills do you do?

Happy Golfing,
Tyler

Thanks that helps a lot. I don't notice how bad I get hanging back until I video my swing. Now that I have a home simulator and a couple of cameras integrated, it should help. I'm all ears if you have any specific drills you'd recommend.

I filmed a couple more swings, and I think the issue is that I've played and practiced with a spine angle tilted away from the target for so long it just feels so weird to turn around a more central axis. I try to get my lead shoulder forward, and it just results in more slide. I need to work on keeping a more center axis, but I lose all sense of direction and power when force myself to stay stacked. I also struggle to get my left shoulder forward. It just goes down and under. Any good drills?

Hmm, by your description, you might do well with a little recipe of the push ball drill followed by a 9 to 3 to get a feeling of making contact from a more stacked spine position. You might want to combo the anti slide station to help you avoid sliding your lower body forward. When things feel awkward is when it's even more important to use video to help calibrate the feels. I'd hate for you to be on the right track mechanically, but give up on it too soon because it didn't feel good.

https://www.golfsmartacademy.com/golf-instruction/push-ball/
https://www.golfsmartacademy.com/golf-instruction/anti-slide-drill-chair/

Feel free to post videos as you work through the drills,

Tyler

Hi David,

I get the challenge of trying to work on one area (irons) while not lose the other area (driver). Sometimes you just have to work through it and prioritize one while managing the other. I think one of the unifying concepts that will help your driver and your irons is taking the shoulder blade pull out of impact. With the driver, that will help shallow out the path while helping you avoid sliding to create the tilt. That shoulder blade pull often causes a lot of clubface consistency issues with driver, and contact consistency issues with irons. I'd make that the main priority.

What does your driver swing look like?

Tyler

Thanks, I will focus on that. I just watched and played around with the feels from your "Connecting Quiver Pulls to Scapular Movement" video, and I think that will help a lot. I've seen the concept and similar videos (like axe throw) before, but your contrast to the pulling is what helped me find the right feel. Being self taught I'm trying to overcome a lot of bad habits and years of mixing swing patterns and practicing the wrong things. As you stated, the driver is hard when you pull with shoulders. For a couple years I got pretty good at just staying closed/right tilting and just swinging completely in to out. I was great in scrambles when you miss big every few shots, but I could never hit it consistently enough to play around scratch which is my goal.

Yes, it's easy to fake a lot of things and get close. Hitting really good shots here and there, but if the misses are big, then we typically have a deficiency that we're masking. It's hard to get to scratch with too many of those movements, so seems like you're on a better path. Keep it up!
Tyler