Help me break 100! (Swing video inside)

Bergy37 · June 30, 2016

With your current swing...

Can you get your ball on the green..,

In two shots on Par 3's?

In three shots on Par 4's?

In four shots on Par 5's?

And, if so, can you then average two putts per green?

Im So confused with your responses. Yes, sometimes I can achieve those goals, but more than 50% of the time I can't and it's usually a result of hitting it fat, thin, shank, slice, hook or anything else besides a nice straight shot. I am looking for assistance from the golfwrx community in hopefully identifying some of my main miscues so i can work on them. If I am doing something wrong by posting in here asking for help please let me know.
Bergy, with his proposed scenario he's got you playing bogey golf (and you wouldn't have hit a single green in regulation)... breaking 100 (scoring) and doing it CONSISTENTLY has got to be a more holistic approach than just monitoring your swing.

I am definitely seeing that now. I actually have never thought about the game like this before. With my experience golfing, I should have no problem playing bogey golf. Maybe I need to keep the driver in the bag, avoid the high risk high reward shots and play within my means until I can fully get a grasp on "bogey golf" and then work from there. Thank you all for your detailed responses it really means a lot.

Bergy37 · June 30, 2016

OMG, you have my swing from ages ago. I can share my experience and how it felt to me during my swing. You should certainly improve your short game and putting but this is a comment only on your swing based on my experience. Your experience may differ but I see so much similarity that it's uncanny:

- On my backswing, I let my right knee to straighten so that I could have a nice "full" turn even with irons, also had the flat low backswing start without too much wrist c0ck.
- I felt like I was transitioning and sitting down from my backswing to impact but I didn't want to flatten the shaft too much since I just couldn't hit the ball when I tried to.
- At the impact I felt like my right hip was "pushing" the ball while my wrist was holding hard.
- I had trouble hitting it clean with downblow so I really tried to get under the ball, again using my right hip, which meant a sweeping motion.

Some playing characteristics:

- Very high ball flight, my clubs were sweeping the grass with a out-to-in path and my hand was barely ahead of the ball at the impact, if not slightly behind, all added to extremely high ball flights and short iron shots.
- Tendency to hit fat time and time again. Especially from fairways.
- Solid driver, good fairway woods. High drives that go straight and land softly even though not too long. From fairways, again, hitting behind the ball was my kryptonite. On the other hand from short roughs, I could hit some excellent shots with fairway woods and in fact preferred short rough over hard fairways.

Eventually I came up with a few shorterm "fixes" that helped me consistently break 100 without changing the swing or even much practice on short games:

- I really tried to resist the urge to hit hard with my right shoulder and arm, and concentrated on starting the downswing and swinging through it with the left side, which reduced fat shots and extreme over-the-top swings.
- More fairway woods. Fairway woods helped with fat shots and also was more forgiving than irons with even higher trajectory. I could really go for greens despite not being able to put back spin on the ball because I could hit my 7, 9, 11, and 13 woods extremely high and soft, over trees and hazards.
- Bigger driver with more forgiveness on mishit tee shots. This enabled me to aggressively go after teeshots and I was already a fairly accurate driver of the ball.

Of course those were just short cuts. But I was able to easily average around 90 with just those changes without much practice and could've gone lower if I worked on my shortgame and putting. However I had to be away from playing for a while and took that time to rebuilt my swing from ground up.

Based on what I went through, I suggest the followings but take all of this with a big massive humongous grain of salt. I hope other better more qualified posters could offer some comments on my suggestions here.

- First work on cutting down your backswing by holding your right knee flex. This will feel like you're taking almost half swing with irons and wedges but is necessary. Also you may want to consider making your initial move a bit more upright with some wrist cocking.

- Work on slotting your club on a flatter path while moving your weight more on down swing. Instead of your right hip bone hitting through the ball, feel as if your belly button and your hand working together to hit it. I found Monte's zipaway drill to be an excellent tutorial on the initial move:

- Once you have the flatter more in-to-out path to the ball, you'll have to work on your wrist action so that it's not sweeping the ball so much and the hand is ahead of the ball at the impact. Again calling Monte, his videos at Be Better Golf has been very helpful for me:

The first one particularly shows you almost exactly the hand position you have in your current swing and how to improve it.

Hope it helps and like I said other better qualified posters should help you out more here. But it's just amazing how similar your swing is to my old one!

Wow that does sound almost exactly like me. my problem before was that I wasn't getting enough hip turn so I over compensated by doing whatever weird thing that is that happens to my back leg now. I have watched all 3 of those videos numerous times by now haha. I will go through them again knowing they helped with you. Thanks again for the very detailed response!