Golf Instruction Blog

Woburn Golfer Wins Volvo Champions Amateur Pro Team Competition. 

I'd like to say a huge Well Done and Congratulations to Kevin Aherne who has just won the prestigious Volvo Champions Pro Am in Bahrain.  Paired with Paul Casey and Darren Clarke, 4 handicapper Kevin made 3 gross birdies and 2 net birdies to help the team to a 16 under par winning total.  Casey posted on Twitter after the round “Our Am Kevin was a legend.”

Kevin described the experience as “the most memorable of my golfing life”, adding “both Paul and Darren were fantastic, helping me on the greens and with club selection.  I was playing with two legends of the game, both were true gentlemen.”

Kevin has worked hard on his game over the past couple of years and thoroughly deserves all his success.  He has a very good natural golf swing, we have mainly worked on his posture, alignment, ball position, and swinging the club with good body rotation rather than with his hands and arms.  He does the simple things well, and it was no surprise to me that his game stood up so well under the pressure of playing with two Ryder Cup golfers.  Congratulations Kevin, you should be very proud of yourself.

You can read a full report on the tournament here.

I’ve had a reasonable start to the winter season. I won the NPGA Pro Am at Kettering last month, shooting a one under par 68. I have played four of the winter Pro Ams at The Bedford GC, finishing 3rd twice. Despite the frost we managed to get the Thomson Tour event at Chesfield Downs played on Wednesday. The course was in really good condition for winter, and I shot a one under par 70 to finished tied 2nd, mainly relying on my short game and some good putting. Despite making 5 birdies I made 4 bad bogeys and wasn’t really happy with the way I hit the ball.

So, found some time to get in the studio yesterday evening. I’m much happier with the way my hips and legs are moving in the backswing now. I’m getting my weight nicely onto the right heel, and getting loaded properly into the right glute. On the downside, as I mentioned in a previous post I’ve always had a battle with my right arm coming away from my chest and getting too deep behind me in the backswing. From here I tend to throw the club over the top and can either hit a cut or a pull.

I watched the latest instruction video from RotarySwing.com which deals with getting the club from the takeaway position to the top of the backswing. There are a series of drills to do without the club and the ball which break the backswing down into its individual elements. After practicing each move for a few minutes, I noticed that the drills gave me a much flatter left wrist position than before, but the feeling that the clubface was massively shut at the top of the backswing. I was slightly incredulous at the time, as I couldn’t believe that this was 'correct', but after checking the position in the mirrors and then on the video, I could see that the ‘shut’ feeling, actually put the club in a much better position at the top of the swing.

             

This is one of the hardest things to overcome when learning, or indeed helping someone else to learn the swing, especially if an existing movement pattern is very well established. ‘Feel’ and ‘real’; that is what the golfer thinks is happening, and what is actually happening are often miles apart, leading to a lack of trust in the new movement, and a speedy reversion back to the old habit. This is why it is so important to use either mirrors or a video camera when making changes. Your eyes are perhaps the most reliable and trusted source of feedback, so it is vital to make the best use of them when you are learning. You need to see what is happening, and then be able to relate that to what you are feeling, as the feeling can often be deceptive.  The other key point is that it is much easier to make changes to a movement by breaking it down and practising without a club and definitely not by hitting golf balls.  The feedback you get from your eyes is much more reliable than the feedback you will get from a golf ball.

I’m writing this after reading Chuck Quinton’s excellent article about Ball flight teachers on the Rotary Swing blog.  This is perhaps the most common sense I’ve read in one place about the different approaches to teaching the golf swing.  Chuck was in turn responding to an email I received from another golf professional about a piece I wrote on this blog last month about changing my backswing by working in the studio, rather than hitting golf balls.

Chucks’ response is very black and white as it was addressing a specific issue; that of long term improvement.  Unless you have a clear understanding of the biomechanics of the golf swing, and work towards implementing them correctly, you will always be chasing your tail and putting Band Aids on top of Band Aids.   As we all know, you can make any golf swing work if you are very talented and hit enough golf balls.  Most of us do not have unlimited practice time and bundles of talent.  I believe there is a ‘best’ most efficient way to swing a golf club, and at present, Rotary Swing Tour is it.  Working towards this model is the route to long term success.

 However, in the ‘real world’ as we know, things are rarely black and white.  Varying shades of grey are much more common.   I suggest that as professionals we come across situations every day where the teacher and student together need to make a decision as to whether a Ball Flight lesson is required, or a Movement  lesson.   As a good teacher, I feel I should be able to do both.  The student is the customer, and unless I have the kind of relationship with the student where we can talk about what is happening in his or her game, what their immediate and long term plans are and can come to an agreement about exactly what direction we should take and when, I probably shouldn’t be teaching them.

 I had a typical situation with a student recently.  Steve is a very good player, a 1 handicap. He has a good, well grooved golf swing, but has a very shut clubface at the top of the swing and as a result, is prone to hooks and blocks and has trouble controlling his distances with short irons.  We started working together on RST in April, but made a decision to leave the major changes till after the season had finished.  We sorted out Steve’s strong grip, bad ball position and poor balance and posture and he has played some good golf this year, culminating in him reaching the final of his club Scratch Matchplay championship.  He came for a tune up lesson this week as he was hitting his wedges poorly, with a lack of distance control and the odd bad pull.  These are all symptoms of the shut clubface at the top of the swing.  But the last thing I want to do the week before an important match was to give a Movement lesson and have Steve going out and playing ‘Golf Swing’, rather than playing golf.

It was clear in this situation that a ball flight lesson was required.  I explained to Steve what I thought, and how his swing differed from the RST model, and what I wanted to do.  He agreed, so we got him set up slightly open with his wedges, to open the face slightly at address and move the ball forward, and to exaggerate the feeling he has anyway of holding the clubface off through the ball.  The result was what felt like a little fade with his wedges, the opposite of his natural drawing ball flight.  Due to the loft on the clubface the ball doesn’t actually move left to right in the air, just floats and sits which makes distance control easier and also gives some protection against the pull, the real problem shot with a short iron.  After 45 minutes practising this ball flight, Steve started to feel like he had much better control of his distances.  He will practice some more this week and I’m confident he will play well in his final.  On Sunday we will head into the studio and start work on the big issues in his swing, safe in the knowledge we have all winter to get them fixed and to get Steve feeling comfortable and confident before the season starts again in April.

One point which is often brought up as a justification for just teaching someone to change their ball flight, is that by changing the ball flight, the movement itself will change.  This has some validity.  If you teach a slicer to draw the ball, eventually the movement will change to allow the club to come more from the inside.  However, I’m not sure how efficient this method of learning is, or how lasting the changes will be.  I have the feeling that you would need to hit a huge number of golf shots to effect significant change,  I know from my own experience over the years that it wasn’t until I learned to move properly and understood the cause and effect relationship of movement of the body and movement of the club, that I really began to get control of my ball flight.

I am absolutely committed to RST as a swing model and a ‘Method’, for all the reasons that Chuck explains in great detail in the Blog and on the website.   My long term goal for myself and for every single one of my students is to help them swing as efficiently, correctly and safely as possible.  RST helps me understand what is going wrong in a golfer’s swing, understand the compensations which exist to allow the golfer to hit the ball well sometimes, and to plan and implement a programme of improvement. 

But at the same time, I still consider myself a tournament golfer, and I know how it is virtually impossible to play your best golf while thinking consciously about your swing.  Chuck’s Mushin Golf articles describe a great mindset to play well.  I just like to focus totally on the target and let the ball go to it.  There is a time and a place to work on the Movement, and a time and place to focus on just flighting the ball to the target.  It is up to the teacher and the student to communicate and come to a decision about the best way to proceed to ensure the student both enjoys his golf and improves his skills and technique in the long run.  As an RST instructor, I know I have the depth of knowledge and understanding to deliver the right lesson at the right time for all the people I work with.   As a Movement coach, I can give either type of lesson.  A ball flight coach is more limited in his options. 

I’ve been working hard on my own game over the past few weeks. I played poorly in the National Assistants at East Sussex National at the end of July and that gave me a real kick up the backside as I felt I was playing well going into the tournament.  On my good days I can play some really good stuff, but my ball striking is still too inconsistent, especially in tough conditions as was the case at East Sussex in the first round.  Despite some decent driving, I just wasn’t controlling my golf ball well enough with my irons.

I put myself on video when I got back and there were some things I really didn’t like.  My posture was sloppy, I wasn’t loading into my right glute and right heel in the backswing, my right arm was loose and away from my body, my transition was weak and I was sliding rather than turning in the downswing.   All of which was leading to big pulls with my irons, and weak cuts with my driver.

Here are a couple of pictures which show the issues.

  

My first point of call was my posture.  I needed to get sat back into my glutes and get my weight going down through my ankles. I then set to work on my backswing.   I have always had a problem sliding my hips to the right and getting onto the ball and the outside of my right foot.  It’s much better than it used to be before I started implementing Rotary Swing Tour principles, but it still creeps back in.

The main point I want to stress here is that I stopped hitting  golf balls when I was working on this. One of the main conclusions I have come to is that a golf ball is a very poor feedback device when it comes to gaining information as to whether you have made a good movement or not.  You can hit a pretty decent golf shot with a not very good golf swing, and you can shank it with a movement that is very close to perfect. 

You can draw a couple of conclusions from this.  This first might be that if that is the case, why work on the swing at all?  Work on your short game and putting and accept the bad shots and learn to recover from them.  It seems to work pretty well for Phil Mickelson.  I actually think this is a great plan for most amateur golfers, except for the fact that very few people want to learn about and work hard on their short game.  Everyone I talk to wants to hit long straight golf shots and to look good doing it.

This brings us to the second option; which is to work on the movement of the golf swing in a time and energy efficient way.  To cram as much learning into as short a time as possible, and to make that learning as durable as possible.  I promise you hitting golf balls is not the best way to learn the movement of the golf swing.  Hitting balls is useful to see what the results of the change in movement pattern might be, but it is nigh on impossible to actually make the changes while worrying about where the ball has gone.

Most of my time was spent without a club and a ball, in front of two mirrors, one in front and one down the line, making small movements, chunking the movements down, chaining them back up until I could feel and crucially, see in the mirrors exactly which parts of my body were doing what.  Once I could feel it, I picked up a club and went over the process again, watching the effect that small changes in body position would have on the relative positions of the shaft and the clubface.

I know a lot of people are struggling with the top of the backswing position, and maybe focusing on the right arm and shoulder elevation.  I thought it might be a lack of flexibility that was causing the problem.  As soon as I got the right heel in the ground and into the glute, the right arm just started behaving itself with no effort at all.  So if you are struggling with the movement of the arms, go back and make sure you have the weight shift and turn in the takeaway nailed down first.  If the body works properly, the arms will follow.

The key point for me is that if I hadn’t been using the mirrors, I wouldn’t have spotted this.  It was so obvious. Weight on the heel and in the glute, right arm in a good position.  Weight on the ball of the foot, right arm wings out and gets behind me.  Instant feedback.  For years I have been working on keeping the right arm tucked in.  I could have written a novel in the time I have spent hitting balls with a bloody glove in my right armpit.  What happens when the glove comes out?  The right arm flies away, because the problem isn’t the right arm, it’s the way the torso is moving over the hips.

 Here are a couple of pictures with my backswing starting to look somewhere near where I want it.  Next step is Move 3, the transition.

   

Here is a great explanation about how learning and teaching of the modern golf swing has evolved over the past 80 years
  

Taking the club away from the ball is the crucial first movement in the golf swing.  This video shows how to do it correctly.



As Ben Hogan says in his famous book, 'The Modern Fundamentals of Golf,' the golf swing is a chain reaction.  The takeaway is the first link in the chain.  If you get this wrong, it is very hard to get the rest of the swing working properly.  If you get the takeaway working properly, the rest of the swing just flows.