Manuel De La Torre Swing Focus

[juststeve]

bortass:

The concept is simple but execution remains key. Don't be discouraged short term. You will hit a lotr of balls before you learned to execute consistently.

You may get to the place where you can play without thinking about swing, but for now you should focus on the swing every time you use a club,

 

Steve

[bortass]

@juststeve I agree that the concept is simple but execution may not be. I am quite interested in seeing how this goes because I saw what I consider to be positive changes just from the basics that I garnered from that video. I won't be surprised or discouraged if I hit some bumps on the course. I've been there before in the past when making changes.

[bortass]

My copy of Understanding the Golf Swing arrived yesterday. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but want to share what I experienced on the range yesterday.

 

I hit some full 8i shots after warming up. The results were very good. A high straight ball flight which I think were mostly true fades. I rarely hit true fades and my push fades seem to be off the toe, so this is kinda new to me. I decided to try my driver since I no longer use it because I can't seem to hit it since coming back to the game. I had the ball forward and the clubhead in the middle of my stance based on comments I read in some threads on MDLT's method. My first two were pretty good, nice and straight, and it devolved from there. I started to hit my standard push slice with driver again. I went back to 'normal' address position and no dice.

 

A light rain was starting, so I put on rain gloves when I put the driver back in the bag. I mention this because I lost a lot of feel in my hands once i donned the gloves. I starting to shank partial PW shots. Ball comes out low, couple feet off the ground, heads right and curves way right. I was on the left side of the range and the balls were running in front of people all the way on the right side. Embarrassing to say the least. It got to the point where I was trying to figure out why. Just swinging the club din't clear it up even with starting the downswing with my arms. I was able to get strings of good partial shots followed by shanks. Full swings were mostly shanks with some tops.

 

I think trying to figure out why I'm mishitting it was a mistake and may have made it worse. I also wonder about the gloves.

 

Is this normal? What I find interesting is that I have completely changed my standard miss. My previous standard iron mishit is a high push fade off the toe. Now contact is near the heel and I go low and very right. A full swing with my 8i is either a great shot, by my standards, pretty straight with just a little curve and high or a shank, which is horrid, with the odd top thrown in the mix. I have lost the middle ground of the playable push fade miss, lol.

 

I'll start reading the book and keep at it. The good shots are just too hard to let go of.

 

EDIT - Section 3, page 110 Shanking. Looks like I need to read this section to try and understand what am doing to cause the club to be further from my body then it was at address.

[Nels55]

I have a lot of experience with the shanks and I still hit one occasionally but I don't have any worries about them anymore. The best cure that I have found is to practice hitting the ball on the heel, toe, fat and thin. By doing this you will learn to hit the ball on the center of the face a lot more often. I use tape on the face of an iron to see where I am hitting it. It is tedious and hard work but worth it in the end. I got this particular drill from Adam Young and I would also suggest that you read his book 'The Practice Manual'.

As far as the shanks go they are no big deal. It is simply a matter of moving your strike pattern from the heel to the center of the face. Contrary to what most golf teachers will tell you there is usually no particular mechanical reason for shanking the ball it is more of a hand eye coordination deal then anything else.

[juststeve]

A likely cause of your push fade is that you are allowing your center to drift forward before contact. The cure, within the MDLT method is not to deviate from the method by changing our ball position, but to give attention to keeping your center stationary. You can experience that by maintaining an equal weight distribution, right foot left foot until impact.

 

Steve

[bortass]

@juststeve The good news is the push fade went away on the range once I started to use the little I knew about this method. The ball strike moved from toe to heel. Now I need to clean up whatever is causing me to shank. Reading that section of the book has me thinking it's my weight. I think that I feel my weight more in my heels versus an even balance. I'm hoping to get out there again soon to see if i can figure out the cause(s).

[juststeve]

A drill that Manny used might help. You address the ball properly, take the club back with your hands, then using both arms return the club to the address position, centered and square to the ball. No speed here. Repeat over and over again.

 

Steve

[bortass]

@juststeve I read the section on shanks in Understanding the Golf Swing. It's all I've read besides the foreword and introduction. I am sold to say the least. Manny gives five reasons. I was thinking my balance may be off, so I paid attention to that at the range. Still had some shanks. But on one of them I noticed my left shoulder going down which is one of the five reasons. I applied the correction from the book and viola, great shots. I still had the odd shank here or there but it was night and day from yesterday.

My impact moved closer to the sweet spot and I feel like i nailed some full shots. I even hit a mid height fade with my 4i. I almost never hit that club and I was very pleased with the shot shape. It wasn't a low ballistic arc. the ball dropped near the end from what I could tell. I mixed in full 7 and 8 irons and I got mostly high fades that started left and curved right staying close to my target line. the range is on the top of a hill, so I can't judge distances but they seemed very good to me.

I can't express how excited and positive I felt when I left the range. Now to actually read the book and try to understand things more!

[Hilts1969]

you sound like me in that details are important to you. I would love a swing like mannys but I feel unless I had gotten lessons directly from him it won’t work for me. I bought the book and tried it but the main messages were just to simplistic. Use your hands to swing the club over the right shoulder and the upper arms swings the whole club to the target are far to vague concepts for me.

It worked okay with irons for a while driver was a disaster although in fairness it was a weakness anyhow. It just freed my mind for a while but the swing looked exactly the same. Too inside too flat too steep and Early extension. I think if manny had got his hands on me like I saw he did in a video with a student it would have been awesome but i would have probably used different feelings to the basic ones in the book.

[Fuscinator]

Watching him swing the guys in his class showed me a lot. It seemed vividly clear what he was after. For him, his description of what he does may make perfect sense, but it's based on his experience, his sensations. If 50 different people made a movie from the same book, they'd make 50 different movies.

[juststeve]

That is why Manny never taught feels or sensations. He only taught people what to do with the club understanding that moving the club correctly would feel different to different golfers. What I feel when I swing was different from what Manny felt, but it was what permitted me to move the club as Manny prescribed. You should focus on the what, what do I do with the club and the feel of doing it will come with repetition.

Steve

[juststeve]

When someone says "it worked ok with the iron for a while" implying that after a while it stopped working we come to a teachable moment. Why did it stop working after a while? I suppose it could be that the universe changed and what worked for while no longer works, but that seems unlikely. What is more likely is that Hilts1969 stopped doing what he was doing when it was working ok. The remedy is not to find something else to do, but rather to do what he w2as doing when it worked OK and the to practice until he did it better and more consistently. I you want to adopt a new swing concept you have to work on execution.

 

Steve

[bortass]

I'm curious about something. When you tried the method, did you try to fix your ball flight or did you try to fix your swing flaws? At the end of the day all that matters is what the ball does. Everyone is going to have a different swing. Manny talks about it in that clinic video. Even Monte does to an extent in his videos. He talks about most and tends to have ranges. You want to be somewhere between the extremes, etc.

 

We are all different. For some people TGM is the holy grail of the golf swing. I doubt Manny's approach would be easy for them to adopt since he essentially throws positions etc out of the window. His premise is you swing the club to here and then here. Your body takes care of the how without much, if any, thought. For me this is great. I deal with big picture better than micromanaging. So when I tried the method and was shanking the ball all over the place, I didn't know why. I still don't know why in a technical sense. I do know that my left shoulder dropping was the main cause from what he wrote about curing shanks and what I determined on the range. The fix was pretty simple. I think it's all of two or three sentences. A swing method that is on the surface 'simple' and has documented fixes to ball flight issues that also are simple, aka non technical, is great for me. If I cared about PP1 and PP2 then this method wouldn't seem to work so well for me as it has in a short period of time.

[bortass]

Quick question for those of you who use this method. Do you have the shaft of the club in the center of your arms as described? Even with driver? Manny says hands in front of the ball isn't good and I have had a forward press for pretty much as long as I can remember. So I may need to work on that and see what happens when I am at the range next. I already hit my iron pretty high, so it'll be interesting to see what happens if I'm not delofting them a little at address.

[Hilts1969]

Not really fella I have swung okay with irons many a time while I have been playing golf. I had been trying something that made me play worse, saw manny swinging which was a thing of beauty and dived in.The simpler message of it help get rid of some clutter in my mind. If I wanted to just hit my irons okay and my driver bad I wouldn’t have looked into it in the first place. When I did the method my swing didn’t change much and the results are no better than I have swung most of my life.

its not an insult to mdlt like I said if I could have got a hands on lesson with him it would have been different. You can get your hands over the right shoulder and swing the whole of the club to the target using your upper arms from all sorts of wacky positions. I only commented because a fellow tinkerer made a post and I saw a similarity in the way I look at the swing.

 

 

[juststeve]

Club head in center of stance shaft and handle pointed at the center of the body. Manny considered this to be the most balanced position. Arm speed insures that the handle is forward of it's address position when the ball is hit. No need to think about that..

 

Steve

[bortass]

Thanks, I'll look into it the next time I hit balls. I'm not about to mess with it on the course. I appreciate the info.

[juststeve]

Where are you located. Perhaps there is an instructor near you that can help.

 

Steve

[Hilts1969]

That’s a tough one to answer but I only saw my swing on video just before i bought the book and tried the swing. Visually before and after didn’t look any different. I didn’t know what positions etc were supposed to look like at the time but I saw other golfers and knew I was relying on just ability alone. My dispersion with irons has always been pretty decent whatever way I throw the club at it but ball striking and distance were the main reason I was trying to improve. Basically I had very little pivot and was all arms.

Like I said the irons were okay the driver poor.

[Hilts1969]

I’m the U.K. mate so it wasn’t an option at the time. I’m getting there now anyway if late 70s is classed as decent. If i finally stick with what I’m doing and actually make an effort to putt well I should be okay fingers crossed. I won’t look as graceful or be as good as manny unfortunately. Pure poetry in motion that swing.

[juststeve]

In the UK you are more likely to find an Ernest Jones teacher. I know Vivien Saunders taught Ernest Jones at one time but I don't know if she is still working.

Steve

[Dennisavery]

Most modern instructors teach that on the backswing the wrists are to gra wedually hinge until the top of the backswing at which point they are to be at a 90* angle. If you don't bend your wrists but lift the club with the arms the club would be straight up in the air.

On the forward swing they teach to hold that angle as long as possible to lag the club to get more power and keep from flipping the club..

MDLT says to bring the club back with the hands. Since the natural inclination is to bend the wrists he does not tell you to do so.

On the forward swing he says to start the swing with the arms. He says nothing about the hands because the hands do nothing. By doing nothing they naturally hold the angle and lag the club. The wrists will naturally unhinge at the appropriate time to accelerate through the ball.

You do not have to be told to do what comes naturally. To do so only adds confusion. Manny takes the six positions of the golf swing and turns it into two.

I hope this clears some things up.

[OrangeGravy]

This describes me almost exactly. 3 degenerative discs, arthritic shoulders/hands and I'm in the 80's every round. A blowup is 88-89. If I could hit an iron even half decent most of the time, it would knock 5 strokes off my average round. When things get out of wack, I just have to remember the simplicity of this to get things back on track.

[Hilts1969]

 

I took it to mean and it’s only a guess on my part is that the arms in the downswing is just a clever/simpler way of saying get the elbows working closer and back in front of the chest. If you move over the top you will find your upper arms work towards the ground, if you lead with the right elbow and ignore the left then it naturally works more towards the sky.

[Fuscinator]

AAAAAAAAH, now I get it! Thanks!

[dlygrisse]

This is a great post! You have it exactly right IMO.

[juststeve]

Great post indeed but there was more. Manny believed that if one tried to move anything but the club deliberately they would be bound to move it too soon, too late, too much, or not enough resulting in the body and the club being out of sync. When the body moves purely as a reaction to the motion of the club they remain in sync. Not a bad thing at all.

 

Steve

[Dennisavery]

Concerning the golf swing as a circle, I watched a video today of MDLT on the Golf Academy. He said if the swing is viewed directly from the front view, the swing looks elliptical, but if the swing is viewed from above, perpendicular to the swing, as he and his brother filmed it many times, it is indeed a circle.

Dennis

[bortass]

I've been reading a little more of the book over the last couple of days. I haven't seen anything outlandish so far, not that I expected to. I feel it's well written and the fact that he is quick to point out what the likely results of a mistake are is very helpful. If your shoulders do X, it cause the plane to do Y, and you'll hit a push. Throw in the chapter where he breaks down the major mishits and how a deviation from the pattern causes them and the fix and the book seems well worth the price, which wasn't much at all.

 

I'm very glad I stumbled on this thread and started down this path. It may be a flash in the pan but I just shot a PR for a 9 hole round. I just swung the club. No thoughts about make sure to do X, Y, or Z. It was nice and pretty carefree. It's nice to see what is possible!

[Timber82]

Stick with it bortass, it's a great way to play. Like you I stumbled across it by chance around 12 months ago. I've scored better with a clearer mind and as a result enjoying it more than ever

It has taken some discipline as so much you read or every tip I get from well meaning playing partners is something body orientated. People think you're crazy if you tell them you're using a club/arm focussed swing, so I've given up explaining it

When you've finished the book there's another mdlt thread about 40 pages long full of gold (a lot of it steve reminding us not to 'add' anything to what manny taught!)