Welcome again, class! Just to refresh your memory...
Each day will have 2 posts -- one for righties and one for lefties -- and will be same besides for the diagrams and some commands so that it will be clearer if I especially write them for every sort of player. The posts may be scheduled one minute aside so both posts will show up at almost the equal time. Any of you who have questions can depart them within the feedback of the appropriate "handedness put up," which should cast off loads of confusion. And yes, this is the publish for proper-handers.
Alright, nowadays we're going to analyze the "practice" swing we're going to use for the next couple of lessons. You can examine this exercise swing proper there in your personal outdoor due to the fact you do not need to hit balls on this lesson. Learn this swing at domestic before heading out to the range; when you go to the range to practice, I don't need you losing some time.
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:
We are not going to apply all of Hogan's drill. Hogan designed it especially to educate his swing, at the same time as I want you to be able to use it irrespective of what your swing looks like. Here are the adjustments we're making, which sincerely make our practice swing easier to apply:
- 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 paintings in this practice swing, snatch clubs and head for the outdoor. One should be your driver since that's the hardest one to hit a draw with. Once we get that down, drawing the alternative golf equipment will seem easy.
Lay the opposite club down on the floor. This is your purpose line, and I need you to grab your motive force and take your address role with it. Look at this primary diagram to look what we are after:
Now just practice swinging your club backward and forward like Hogan did. Remember, keep your top fingers in contact with the edges of your chest at all times and don't swing your hands 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 performed this for a touch at the same time as and feel comfortable with the practice swing -- connection can be a brand new sensation for you if you do not commonly do it all through your swing -- we want to adjust your foot position for a draw. Take a study the next diagram.
There's no exact distance that the trailing foot need to be moved again, but 3 or 4 inches is a fairly standard quantity. And unless you had your feet right up in opposition to that intention line club, calculate that new foot position from the trailing foot's authentic toe function.
See how the arrow pointing from the trailing foot is not pointing the same route it become in the first diagram? THIS IS IMPORTANT! It must be inside the same relation to the swing direction (red line) that it become while you installation in the first diagram. You can get in this role through just lifting your trailing foot and turning your hip away from the membership you laid at the floor. (And before you ask, the lead foot's position does NOT alternate. We still want to get grew to become in the direction of the goal when we hit the ball, and if we change the lead foot we're going to make that a great deal tougher 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 exercise swing till you get comfortable with it. You shouldn't sense like you are wobbling ahead or backward for the duration of the swing. In reality, in case you angled your trailing foot nicely, it must sense pretty just like your ordinary 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 hold his college students from converting direction too rapid at the top, Armour truely had them remember, "One, , pause, three." It might not take much practice to figure out how fast or slow you need to matter with the intention to swing at your very own great velocity.
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 tomorrow's lesson.
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