Adding loft - casting / flipping??

[jimmybrad]

Not sure if the title is 100% accurate but I am definitely adding loft. I swing my driver about 100mph but sometimes carry about 220 yards with no roll.

No swing thought or drill seems to help, is there anything obvious I am doing? sorry about no video from DTL, this is all I have at the moment.

 

[BraxtonFullerton]

It would be helpful to know what each of those shots produced, ball flight wise. The left video looks like you are very body-passive and are casting the club. But you finish very low and not with a full follow-through, so I'm assuming you weren't hitting a full shot there?

 

The right video looks like a full swing and your body looks slightly more active but you're still not ripping your hips open at impact:

 

 

Because your hips are closed, your entire body is stacked behind the ball instead of in front of it. Here's Adam Scott for comparison:

 

 

His entire lower body is already open at impact, his weight is driving into his front foot and his entire body is moving towards his target while his hips are clearing to the left. I can't completely confirm, but it looks like you're early extending to make this move, a DTL video would confirm.

 

Work on your first downswing move being a little bit of a "squat" to get your hips into it and to make sure you're opening them early enough in the swing.

[golfarb1]

Below are 3 screenshots , at the top  , early transition and the third  at about 8:00 going down .

Note , the distance between your knees are close to same amount in early transition as they were at that top

In the last  still , it becomes obvious that your downswing is dominanted  incorrectly by lateral motion and not correctly by rotation 

Suggestions

Setup

Flare out your left foot 1/4 turn towards the target . This will encourage more hip and knee rotation to start the swing . 
Drill 

Too  ball strikers  start their downswing via lead hip rotation  , which automatically  results in increased distance between the knees. 

Place an upside down ball bucket or a soft medium sized ball between your knees  at setup. Then drop the bucket / ball in early transition via rotating your lead hip and lead knee 

 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2022 by golfarb1

[Valtiel]

Agreed with @BraxtonFullerton that in general there is under utilization and probably a general misunderstanding of the role your lower half is meant to play that is partially leading to this pretty severe casting/flipping issue. A down the line view would be really helpful as well as I suspect there are some club path issues contributing to this as well, but we'll focus on what's going on with the hips/legs here:



I'm going to compare using the same Adam Scott reference Braxton used above. Right out of the gate, your stance is very narrow for what looks like a longer iron, and your ball position is too far back with too much shaft lean. You're basically setup to hit a really low punch shot here, and the casting/flipping is partially in response to that since I assume that isn't what you're trying to hit. Your clubface is also quite shut at the top which i'll reference later. Your first move sees very little pressure shift into your trail side, meaning you're staying very stacked on top of the ball (ok for a wedge, not so with a longer club). As you reach the top we see most of your rotation accomplished by your left hip swinging out in front of you (bad) as opposed to your right hip turning back (good). Check out the AMG video linked at the bottom for the fundamentals on that.

Compare to Adam where we initially see a pressure shift into the rear side as the first move followed by the right hip turning up and back. That "up and back" move is key, because while different pros execute this differently, what they don't do is what you're doing which is more of a slide with your left side collapsing inwards. This gets you drifting to the outside of your trail foot which we can see in how your foot rolls outwards. This is not a powerful or balanced position required to make a good move into your lead side. Notice how stable Adam's foot is in the last frame.

Next we see what happens in transition:



The critical thing here is that you're already starting to move UP to start the downswing. This is severe early extension since that upward force is meant to occur *right* before impact. This is where some of the misunderstanding about how you're lower body works is starting to create problems. In it's simplest terms we want a pressure shift to the right in our initial takeaway which we use to turn the right hip back, then a re-centering in transition with a little lateral movement just before the backswing completes to then kick off the downswing by doing the opposite; pressure shift into the left side to turn the left hip back. We see Adam setting this up by re-centering and loading into the front side.



Into the downswing we see the problems caused by these sequencing issues. The jumping/extending you're doing with your legs in transition completely desyncs your lower and upper body rotation, which results in your hips stalling in the second frame as you flip/cast to catch up with your arms. We can see on the right with Adam that at no point do his legs/hips stop moving, and the extension/upward movement that you did right in the beginning of your downswing is instead occurring right at impact.

How you've gotten in these positions is tough to unwind, hence why you've struggled with finding drills or instruction to fix it. Your setup is one big issue as mentioned above.



You'll want to drop your trail foot back almost one full foot width to be closer to what we see with Adam here, assuming this is a decently long iron in your hand. From that better balance position you can try working on the lower body fundamentals in the link below, but there may still be some elements of your swing path and clubface control that a down the line video will be necessary to go over. The shut clubface at the top might be something you're mitigating as well, or it could be your attempt to reduce loft, hard to say. 
 

 

Edited June 7, 2022 by Valtiel

[jimmybrad]

Ok thanks, a lot to take on.

I found a DTL video if it helps. Although it is from a different day.

 

@BraxtonFullerton@Valtiel @golfarb1

[BraxtonFullerton]

So seeing DTL as well as the face-on view. Yeah, that stand-up move is killing your swing... so fix that right at address, stand a little taller to the ball, feel your back as relaxed. You want to make a flowing, easy swing, I feel like you're clenching everything and maxing out your muscles and that is why you come up and toward the ball.

 

So that's setup, for the downswing, you need to initiate with your lower body first. Hips firing and let the rest of your body follow it... feel like your front hip almost pulls you away from the ball. Try doing the "one leg" method by Shawn Clement. This should pretty much force you to compress the ball and to focus on rotating your hips.

[Valtiel]

3 hours ago, BraxtonFullerton said:

So seeing DTL as well as the face-on view. Yeah, that stand-up move is killing your swing... so fix that right at address, stand a little taller to the ball, feel your back as relaxed. You want to make a flowing, easy swing, I feel like you're clenching everything and maxing out your muscles and that is why you come up and toward the ball.

 

So that's setup, for the downswing, you need to initiate with your lower body first. Hips firing and let the rest of your body follow it... feel like your front hip almost pulls you away from the ball. Try doing the "one leg" method by Shawn Clement. This should pretty much force you to compress the ball and to focus on rotating your hips.

Lots of great stuff in that Shawn Clement vid, particularly the notes about not needing your trail leg for power which can get you out of the feeling of needing to fire it out in the downswing and ball position since I think that is one of the issues @jimmybrad is dealing with. 

Thank you for the follow up vid btw @jimmybrad, please check out the big post I made linked below as the DTL vid you posted shows you are doing all the exact same things with your hip rotation that I broke down there. I could put your hips in the same box as I did with @BMB's and we'd see the same issues: