Can anyone help me get laid off/more shallow on the downswing?!

[LoopySwing13]

Good evening,

 

Having some consistency issues as evident by my swing.. pretty good ball striker with a above average short game which allows me to shoot 75-80 typically. I have long fought the ATL at the top but most teachers have left it as when I try to shorten it, it causes other bad things. That said, I would love to get the club a bit more pointed left to help gain more consistency and shallow out my downswing. 
 

For what it’s worth, I used to swing “hardy one plane” and have since focused more of the Gankas method of body rotation.

 

Thanks for any help! 

[Valtiel]

Some interesting stuff here! The amount of things technically "wrong" here are almost evenly offset with your ability to compensate for them and get to a decent impact position. The fact you shoot the scores you do means that you're likely pretty ingrained with this current swing motion, which means changing it can be painful, as it sounds like you learned previously. 

Since you're asking about shallowing, the elephant in the room is how far across the line you are at the top and how that basically makes it impossible to shallow in the way you likely want to. I'll get into that below:



We've got a plane line, a tush line for tracking hip depth, a head line, and a dot showing where your hands are starting. 

Nothing glaring in the takeaway, just some minor head movement back and a slightly shut clubface. 



This is the first slightly strange move. Your hands shallow out a lot here from the otherwise neutral/steeper takeaway. You would normally like to see the hands lift up more and work less behind you and flat. We also see your head nudge back to where it started after initially moving away from the ball. 



This is obviously the big move you mentioned struggling with. Being that far across the line means your options are pretty limited as to what comes next. Shallowing and getting down on to the plane you established at address would require a VERY big reroute move, too big to really be practical. Your hands would need to drop way down and your wrists would have to really fling the club out to the left to get it back on plane, sort of similar to what Matt Wolff does. On a more minor note, we also see your head moves towards the ball and turn a little bit in addition to a slight increase in spine angle, an that you're overswinging a bit. 



Here we see the reason that the necessary moves to shallow the club are so extreme, because what you're doing here is exactly the opposite in that you're rerouting down VERY steep from the top. If I just saw this one gif I would assume you're a much worse player than you actually are (no offense, i'll elaborate more below). One thing you do really well from here though is sequencing; your shoulders are staying mose closed for a good amount of time while your hips are firing. This is one of the things that saves you in the next section. 

  

Lots of stuff happening here so i'll go frame by frame. In the first frame the yellow dot is showing where your hands where going back, so we can see how much steeper they are coming down. However, through proper sequencing from that otherwise wonky backswing position, you actually manage to get the club parallel to the plane line on the way down. It is above it for sure, and you're still steep, but you've effectively "saved" the previous weirdness  and gotten into a halfway decent impact position. You do lose some hip depth though and you do stall a little bit, but you have just enough rotation to get through impact and make good contact. The little yellow brackets are showing how much your loss of hip depth has proportionately impacted where you hands have ended up, and we can see that if you managed to maintain your hip depth throughout the swing that you would have actually been able to get your hands right back where they started (see the AMG video linked at the bottom of this post for a breakdown of that and what you can do to improve it). 
 
So in summary, you're doing a lot of good to counteract the bad, but the downside is that this puts you on the razor's edge of "good" and "bad" swing depending on your ability to execute all these moves consistently. Bad days will likely feel VERY bad sometimes since there is metaphorical duct tape holding together some of these mechanics. You are saving things in the second half of your downswing which is a very narrow window that puts pressure on your ability to repeat these saving moves. Pros will either have everything setup at the top or will very quickly in transition get setup to where they can simply unwind and rotate, whereas you're getting to that place much later. I see three options for how to progress from here:

1) Embrace the ATL weirdness and work on tightening up the other mechanics around it to give yourself more time and fewer variables to compensate for. This would mostly involve changing your hip movements to maintain depth throughout the swing and give yourself more room to get back to "zero" at impact. 
2) Introduce a strong reroute move in transition ala Matt Wolff to get you back on plane earlier. This coupled with the hip work from #1 would be the formula to get the most out of your current swing IMO. 
3) Retool your whole backswing and it's positions to better line up with what you're trying to achieve. This can pose a lot of risk since you've already gone down this road without much success and will undoubtedly involve a lot of work and frustration. The temptations to revert back to your old feels will be strong and it may not be worth it in the end. 

Good luck, and i'd love to see any follow ups you have since this is a unique swing!
 

 

[LoopySwing13]

@Valtiel appreciate the feedback. I’m not opposed to changing anything in the backswing, just looking for a good place to start. I guess I struggled more with teachers trying to put me “into a model swing” versus working around what I have. 
 

It seems like the first key is to get the hands a bit higher and set the club. I have seen the drill where an alignment rod is off your front thigh running down the shaft of the club. Would that be a good drill to focus on? It almost feels like I am connected until halfway back and then the arms “dump” and I lose connection. That make it very hard to “reroute” it like Matt Wolff as you mentioned. 
 

for sure the highs are highs and the lows are lows! I just learned to play the Shot I have that day. Rely heavily on missing in the right spots and chipping and putting well.

[Scottbox]

Lots of awesome advice! I'd add something here: Your takeaway is fine, but from lead arm parallel on up to the top, there's an issue of internal rotation of the lead arm that gets the shaft moving behind you too much. This creates flat arms that get the your hands and club too far behind you. Because you're a very good athlete, to create some room, you instinctively lift a bit at the top... hence, the ATL scenario. Problem is, that makes the center of mass of the club want to move out unless you have a fancy Matt Wolff re-route move coming down. That's a lot to ask of yourself.  Here's a kinda cool video that might prove helpful, and de-mystify some of the fancy verbiage I've bestowed upon this text rectangle:

 

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CP6D4i2A0WJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

Edited June 10, 2021 by Scottbox

[LoopySwing13]

7 hours ago, Scottbox said:

Lots of awesome advice! I'd add something here: Your takeaway is fine, but from lead arm parallel on up to the top, there's an issue of internal rotation of the lead arm that gets the shaft moving behind you too much. This creates flat arms that get the your hands and club too far behind you. Because you're a very good athlete, to create some room, you instinctively lift a bit at the top... hence, the ATL scenario. Problem is, that makes the center of mass of the club want to move out unless you have a fancy Matt Wolff re-route move coming down. That's a lot to ask of yourself.  Here's a kinda cool video that might prove helpful, and de-mystify some of the fancy verbiage I've bestowed upon this text rectangle:

 

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CP6D4i2A0WJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

I like what he was saying about feeling left shoulder getting steeper on the way back. That feel seemed to help. Arms will be a WIP as that has been an issue for a while.

 

@Valtielseems like a bit less movement? Starting on line better, but again, more work to do. 

[LoopySwing13]

One new drill I found that I think works well is the alignment rod on the front thigh… @Valtiel

[Valtiel]

On 6/10/2021 at 4:33 PM, taylormade4life said:

I like what he was saying about feeling left shoulder getting steeper on the way back. That feel seemed to help. Arms will be a WIP as that has been an issue for a while.

 

@Valtielseems like a bit less movement? Starting on line better, but again, more work to do. 

FullSizeRender.mov

 

9 hours ago, taylormade4life said:

One new drill I found that I think works well is the alignment rod on the front thigh… @Valtiel

FullSizeRender.mov

I like that drill, that definitely puts you in a neutral position. To the naked eye I don't really see any difference fundamentally, so I would work with that drill for now. It is impressive how you get to impact from your normal position though. 👍