Welcome again, class! Just to refresh your reminiscence...
Each day may have 2 posts -- one for righties and one for lefties -- and might be equal except for the diagrams and some instructions a good way to be clearer if I specifically write them for every form of player. The posts can be scheduled one minute apart so each posts will show up at almost the same time. Any of you who have questions can go away them inside the remarks of the best "handedness put up," which have to cast off loads of confusion. And yes, this is the post for left-handers.
Alright, nowadays we will learn the "exercise" swing we're going to use for the following couple of lessons. You can examine this exercise swing right there on your personal outside because you do not need to hit balls on this lesson. Learn this swing at home earlier than heading out to the range; while you go to the range to practice, I don't need you losing a while.
Yesterday I told you that it's based on a time-tested drill. That drill was developed by none other than Ben Hogan. Here's a short video of Hogan demonstrating his drill on the old Ed Sullivan Show, which was a very popular weekly variety show in the 1950s and 1960s. (Ironically, I remember the show primarily because of a little Italian mouse puppet named Topo Gigio. It was a regular on the show for nearly 9 years, and I loved it as a child. But I digress...) Here's the video -- sorry, my left-handed friends, but Hogan was a rightie:
We are not going to use all of Hogan's drill. Hogan designed it particularly to teach his swing, while I need you so as to use it irrespective of what your swing seems like. Here are the adjustments we're making, which surely make our exercise swing less difficult to use:
- First of all, we aren't making a full swing. I don't want your hands to go higher than your shoulders. This will shorten the swing so it's somewhere between a half- and a three-quarter swing. That means that your lead shoulder won't turn all the way under your chin, which will make it easier for you to stay stable over the ball.
- Hogan's arms separate from his upper body at the top of his swing. (They have to if you're making a full swing.) But I want your triceps -- the muscles on the backs of your upper arms -- to stay in contact with the side of your chest throughout the practice swing.
- While it's not required, I'd like for your lower body to stay quieter than Hogan's does in the video. Focusing on turning your upper body more will help improve your coil (giving you more power when you swing normally), and it shouldn't be a big strain since we aren't making a full shoulder turn with this practice swing.
To work on this exercise swing, grab two clubs and head for the backyard. One must be your motive force in view that it really is the toughest one to hit a draw with. Once we get that down, drawing the alternative clubs will seem clean.
Lay the opposite membership down at the ground. This is your intention line, and I want you to grab your driving force and take your cope with role with it. Look at this first diagram to peer what we're after:
Now just exercise swinging your membership from side to side like Hogan did. Remember, maintain your higher palms in touch with the perimeters of your chest at all times and don't swing your palms above your shoulders.
See that arrow drawn on your trailing foot? It's there for comparison to the next diagram. If you normally stand with your trailing foot slightly open (like your lead foot) then feel free to do that. Ironically, Hogan is doing the same thing in the video even though he makes a big deal of the foot position shown in this drawing! The important thing is that whatever position your trailing foot is in, you want to move parallel to the swing path line when you drive forward during your downswing. You don't want to move out over the ball or stand up away from it.
After you've got done this for a bit at the same time as and sense cushty with the practice swing -- connection may be a brand new sensation for you if you don't generally do it for the duration of your swing -- we want to modify your foot position for a draw. Take a have a look at the subsequent diagram.
There's no exact distance that the trailing foot have to be moved back, however three or four inches is a reasonably typical amount. And except you had your feet proper up against that intention line membership, calculate that new foot function from the trailing foot's original toe function.
See how the arrow pointing from the trailing foot isn't pointing the equal course it was inside the first diagram? THIS IS IMPORTANT! It ought to be in the identical relation to the swing path (purple line) that it changed into when you installation inside the first diagram. You can get on this role via just lifting your trailing foot and turning your hip away from the club you laid on the ground. (And earlier than you ask, the lead foot's position does NOT trade. We nevertheless want to get grew to become toward the goal once we hit the ball, and if we change the lead foot we will make that an awful lot harder to do.)
This is one of the places where players trying to play a draw mess up. We want to drive off our trailing foot the same way we normally do... but if we leave our trailing foot pointing straight, the way it was in the first diagram, our trailing ankle, knee, and hip will act differently from normal. We want our move through the ball to feel as much like normal as possible; it's just at an angle now.
Try this model of the practice swing till you get snug with it. You should not experience like you're wobbling forward or backward in the course of the swing. In fact, in case you angled your trailing foot well, it must experience pretty similar to your regular swing.
Okay, we've got one more thing to think about... your rhythm. If you start down too fast, you can mess up your draw. (Think about all those pros on Tour who try to hit the ball hard and, instead of getting a little draw, hit a big push or push-slice. We're going to stop that before it starts!) This problem is easily prevented by using a simple trick that 3-time major winner Tommy Armour, aka "The Silver Scot" and the pro who Harvey Penick said had a big influence on his own teaching, included in his own instructional book How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time. (Before Hogan wrote Five Lessons, Armour's book was considered by many to be the most important instructional book around.)
To keep his college students from converting route too fast at the pinnacle, Armour definitely had them be counted, "One, , pause, three." It may not take much practice to figure out how rapid or sluggish you want to matter as a way to swing at your very own quality pace.
If you take a little time to get this practice swing under your belt before you head out to the range to hit balls, you'll eliminate virtually all the problems that keep you from consistently hitting a draw...EXCEPT for squaring your hands at impact. That's what you have to learn in order to hit a nice little draw, and this practice swing will allow us to focus on that without a dozen swing thoughts in our heads. So even if it takes you a few days to get comfortable with this before you head out to the range to hit balls, it's time well spent. Using this swing will make it much easier to learn the first step -- how to hit a draw on the range.
Which is in which we're going to take this little practice swing in the following day's lesson.
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