UKG86 Swing overhaul

[UKGolfer86]

Hi guys,

 

A little about my game before my question.  Im currently playing to a 12.  Decent on and around the greens.  Approach play needs some work and my driving is either fantastic or terrible, really is a case of 12-13 fairs or 1-2 in a round.  There is something in my driving which im guessing involves too much need to time it well, so if im on it that day its great, but if im off then its a real shower.. 

My mis tends to be a straight pull or a crazy high block.  Is there a glaring issue here that you think i can work on?  To my untrained eye, im seeing myself sway toward target too much at tranistion and down swing.  Is this a fault in itself, or a symptom of something earlier?  Or is it perhaps not the most pressing issue?

Any thoughts would be welcome.

[UKGolfer86]

5iron swings also

[Dpavs]

Tips shared with me that I will pass along. Your left knee is breaking down and turning inward, try to keep it moving more forward than back... it's probably going to feel like you are keeping your weight more forward when you do this but that is natural and ok. A drill that helped me is to place your behind against a wall and practice your swing... this largely helped me be painfully aware when I swayed and encouraged me not to do so.

 

That said the experts here... will probably have better advice... I am just sharing what awareness and drill helped me.

[slytown]

Its all because of your overswing. Look how far your shoulders go past 90 degrees. This is pushing your hips backward laterally rather than keeping them centered and rotating. You effectively have a reverse pivot. Then to stay on top of the ball you then slide forward too much in the downswing. This drill will help. It gets you to a good shoulder position at the top, stay more centered, and get right hip depth in your backswing.

 

 

[UKGolfer86]

Thanks for the replies.   I see what you mean with regard to over rotation of my shoulders.   Am i lacking in wrist hinge, or something else in this case?  As i dont feel like my club head has gone too far behind me which is perhaps why i hadnt clocked the overrotation of shoulders.

[snagy2000]

Practice with this, it's a great tool, if not one of the best ever made...

 

[UKGolfer86]

51 minutes ago, snagy2000 said:

Practice with this, it's a great tool, if not one of the best ever made...

 

Just had a look at this online, it looks interesting, but doesnt seem well distributed in the UK. Just Amazon and £160.00/$200.00.  How much is this in the US as i will be in Houston in December for a week.

 

By squeezing this between your feet, does that essentially keep your knee structure more solid, stopping the knees from breaking down?

[slytown]

1 hour ago, UKGolfer86 said:

Thanks for the replies.   I see what you mean with regard to over rotation of my shoulders.   Am i lacking in wrist hinge, or something else in this case?  As i dont feel like my club head has gone too far behind me which is perhaps why i hadnt clocked the overrotation of shoulders.

 

Relative to your shoulders, yes, you are not overswinging. Relative to your target line you are overswinging.

Edited October 9, 2023 by slytown

[Ironzol24]

This is my current focus and really the key to how I'm playing. My primary sort of thought is if you were starting a lawn mower, you wouldn't pull the rip cord away laterally, you pull it up and back, with your right shoulder and hip working up and away. That being said, some good drills I am working on, courtesy of Coover Golf on instagram. 

 

1) Make some practice back swings with your head against a wall or a door frame, you'll be acutely aware of if movement is occurring 

2) Setup two alignment sticks perpendicular to target line, laying against the inside of each foot. Holding a club across your shoulders, in the turn feeling like your tailbone stays over the left alignment stick while your shoulders match up with the one on the right really gets me turning more around the ball, rather than sliding back. 

This is the big one for me:  3) Mirror drills, I stand face on, and just making back swings in the mirror, it's really really really important for me and I probably do more of this than I do hitting golf balls

[UKGolfer86]

5 minutes ago, slytown said:

 

Relative to your shoulders, yes, you are not overswinging. Relative to your target line you are overswinging.

To be sure i understand you.  Do you mean my arms are not overrunnning my shoulders, but that my shoulders are turning back too far?  So reduce shoulder rotation and tidy up my left knee breaking down?

[UKGolfer86]

6 minutes ago, Ironzol24 said:

This is my current focus and really the key to how I'm playing. My primary sort of thought is if you were starting a lawn mower, you wouldn't pull the rip cord away laterally, you pull it up and back, with your right shoulder and hip working up and away. That being said, some good drills I am working on, courtesy of Coover Golf on instagram. 

 

1) Make some practice back swings with your head against a wall or a door frame, you'll be acutely aware of if movement is occurring 

2) Setup two alignment sticks perpendicular to target line, laying against the inside of each foot. Holding a club across your shoulders, in the turn feeling like your tailbone stays over the left alignment stick while your shoulders match up with the one on the right really gets me turning more around the ball, rather than sliding back. 

This is the big one for me:  3) Mirror drills, I stand face on, and just making back swings in the mirror, it's really really really important for me and I probably do more of this than I do hitting golf balls

Thanks, i just got a tripod so i can start filming my swing at the range.  I have a mirror in my gym and i think enough space to make some backswings with at least a 9 or 8 iron.  Will start doing some drills over the weekend.

[JohnnyCashForever]

31 minutes ago, UKGolfer86 said:

Just had a look at this online, it looks interesting, but doesnt seem well distributed in the UK. Just Amazon and £160.00/$200.00.  How much is this in the US as i will be in Houston in December for a week.

 

By squeezing this between your feet, does that essentially keep your knee structure more solid, stopping the knees from breaking down?

 

At that price, I would seriously consider sawing some 1x4s to the width of your stance for various clubs and using those instead.

[UKGolfer86]

10 minutes ago, JohnnyCashForever said:

 

At that price, I would seriously consider sawing some 1x4s to the width of your stance for various clubs and using those instead.

Yea, looking at it, Im pretty sure i could make an identical copy out of 5mm plastic sheets, with the adjustability, for about £10.00.

[snagy2000]

2 hours ago, UKGolfer86 said:

Just had a look at this online, it looks interesting, but doesnt seem well distributed in the UK. Just Amazon and £160.00/$200.00.  How much is this in the US as i will be in Houston in December for a week.

 

By squeezing this between your feet, does that essentially keep your knee structure more solid, stopping the knees from breaking down?

Yup, keeps you balanced and from swaying. Also helps with pivots and bringing ground force into your downswing. Ball striking will improve immensely, this is based on my experience using the product. They run $99 USD. 

[UKGolfer86]

Looking at my own videos again, i noted that my stance seemed narrower than normal and that my feet were pretty much pointing straight forward, no flare in either.  I've been out to the garage to practice the backswing in the mirror and sure enough, a touch wider and a flare of both feet a little and I'm able to make a backswing without the left knee collapsing.

 

Will get back to the range later in the week to see if this translates to my full swing.

 

[rooski]

Another thing to perhaps try before even anything else is get your grip to a more reasonable spot and seeing what that does to your overall motion.

 

You have a marginally strong left hand (pretty neutral though), coupled with an extremely weak right hand, especially on the 5-iron grip. Having your hands work against each other like that can't possible help with consistency.

 

I'd recommend strengthening the right hand rather than messing with the left hand grip as it looks pretty solid. If you look at your grip vs. Tiger's grip the different should be pretty obvious

 

 

 

Edited October 10, 2023 by rooski

[Valtiel]

Lots of a good advice here, i'm just going to add a couple things and combine it all together with some resources at the bottom:

1) The aforementioned over-swing:



There are several issues at play here getting you into a bad position that is requiring a lot of compensation on the way down. As @slytown mentioned, you have approx 140* of shoulder rotation with your driver swing, WAY too much. It's contorting you into a position that requires a lot of time to get out of, very bad for efficiency and consistency. If you can't keep your eye on the ball then generally you're exceeding your range of motion somewhere and are bending or collapsing something else to continue needlessly rotating, in this case that left side as mentioned. That combined with...



...this position tells us that you're both over-rotating your shoulders AND not setting your wrists properly. To have this much upper body rotation while the club is still this far short of parallel means you aren't setting your wrists properly at all, and the lack of proper wrist set creates a speed problem in the downswing that very commonly leads to this:



A very wide cast in the downswing with no lag or leverage retained resulting in the hands and the club trailing the body significantly. They key here is to learn to use your wrists properly and fix their conditions at the top of the swing (more on that below).

2) Wrist Conditions. You have an interestingly common combo of problems re: where the club ends up at the top:



A) Excessively deep hands (distance from your hands to your head)
B) Left wrist cupped, right wrist pretty straight (backwards from what you generally want)
C) Club getting across the line (related to B)

Individually these elements aren't fatal, or even necessarily a problem in some cases, but together its a common pattern that results from poor/incorrect wrist fundamentals and over-swinging/over-rotating. You don't need to look like Adam here obviously, but we do need to establish what neutral and generally desirable wrist conditions look like.

3) Setup. You already identified part of this, so here is a quick and dirty visual for what you want:



Right now your stance is narrow and the ball is in the middle of it, two things you'll want to correct at the same time by simply dropping your trail leg back about on foot width. Now the ball is front of center and you have a far more stable angled "post" to load into in the backswing.

As for resources, i'd first recommend two wrist related drills, the Faldo Preset Drill and the Padraig Hand Speed drills. The Faldo drill is what you need to correct both your poor wrist conditions and to help address the over-swing/over-rotation. The angles you preset at address per the video need to be paid very careful attention to, followed by the section where he talks about swinging to the top (notice the similarity to Adam Scott's neutral position there). This will set some boundaries around the length of your swing because fully set wrists act as a governor of swing length because you will feel strain, particularly in that left wrist, if you try to go too far. Swings get "long and wrong" when the wrists aren't set and working properly, hence the focus. Combine those preset ideas with the Padraig drills just to get a feel for getting that element working at speed correctly and see where that takes you first. There is a lot to potentially cover about rotation/pivot fundamentals, but that can come next.

Edited October 10, 2023 by Valtiel

[UKGolfer86]

6 hours ago, rooski said:

Another thing to perhaps try before even anything else is get your grip to a more reasonable spot and seeing what that does to your overall motion.

 

You have a marginally strong left hand (pretty neutral though), coupled with an extremely weak right hand, especially on the 5-iron grip. Having your hands work against each other like that can't possible help with consistency.

 

I'd recommend strengthening the right hand rather than messing with the left hand grip as it looks pretty solid. If you look at your grip vs. Tiger's grip the different should be pretty obvious

 

 

 

This is the most frustrating part.  I used to have an even weaker right hand and was when i was driving the best i ever had consistency wise, but my iron play suffered a lot.  I moved to a stronger right hand, stronger than in this video, on advice of a coach i see occasionally and immediately my iron play improved dramatically, but i was struggling with my driver going left.  Over time it seems i have let this start to creep back to the weaker side of things and unsurprisingly my driving improved again so I'm guessing has reinforced the need to keep the weaker hand in my mind.  So i will get that back in a better spot.

 

On a recent trip to Spain for a few rounds i noticed on a video how short my swing looked.  But i think i have mis-interpreted this as not enough rotation, rather than a lack of wrist set, hence the gross over rotation of the shoulders now.  Not a month ago, my shoulders were no where near this over rotated, so i am hoping this will be easy enough to get back to a normal amount of turn once i can get my wrist set into a better spot.  I am hopeful that getting the wrists working again will bring my distance back as i have certainly lost a chunk over the past couple of years, un-coincidentally, the same amount of time i have been a dad!  I finally found a balance where i can work on my game at the range a bit more.

 

Then as i noted and confirmed by @Valtiel, i will get a little wider in my stance, ball ahead of center.  

 

So my plan of action for today:

 

1. Work on set up with a stronger right hand and a slightly wider stance with ball forward of center.

 

2. Work on wrist set with Faldo drill with the goal of improving wrist conditions and reducing my shoulder turn.

 

Again i will get some video of this.  Once i can get my wrists working better i will look at Padraig's hand speed drill.

 

Do you think this is the right order to use the drills @Valtiel?  I figure not throwing both into one session will allow me to really concentrate on one feel at a time.

 

 

[Valtiel]

10 minutes ago, UKGolfer86 said:

This is the most frustrating part.  I used to have an even weaker right hand and was when i was driving the best i ever had consistency wise, but my iron play suffered a lot.  I moved to a stronger right hand, stronger than in this video, on advice of a coach i see occasionally and immediately my iron play improved dramatically, but i was struggling with my driver going left.  Over time it seems i have let this start to creep back to the weaker side of things and unsurprisingly my driving improved again so I'm guessing has reinforced the need to keep the weaker hand in my mind.  So i will get that back in a better spot.

 

On a recent trip to Spain for a few rounds i noticed on a video how short my swing looked.  But i think i have mis-interpreted this as not enough rotation, rather than a lack of wrist set, hence the gross over rotation of the shoulders now.  Not a month ago, my shoulders were no where near this over rotated, so i am hoping this will be easy enough to get back to a normal amount of turn once i can get my wrist set into a better spot.  I am hopeful that getting the wrists working again will bring my distance back as i have certainly lost a chunk over the past couple of years, un-coincidentally, the same amount of time i have been a dad!  I finally found a balance where i can work on my game at the range a bit more.

 

Then as i noted and confirmed by @Valtiel, i will get a little wider in my stance, ball ahead of center.  

 

So my plan of action for today:

 

1. Work on set up with a stronger right hand and a slightly wider stance with ball forward of center.

 

2. Work on wrist set with Faldo drill with the goal of improving wrist conditions and reducing my shoulder turn.

 

Again i will get some video of this.  Once i can get my wrists working better i will look at Padraig's hand speed drill.

 

Do you think this is the right order to use the drills @Valtiel?  I figure not throwing both into one session will allow me to really concentrate on one feel at a time.

 

 

I agree with that order, and leaving the Padraig part for later if that's what you're comfortable with. Two things to note here:

1) Don't get hung up on the mix of good/bad results you had before. The more faults we have, the longer it takes to compensate for them, and everything you've described so far plus what your swings look like indicate that you're compensating for enough faults that variations in results can't be reliably attributed to any one thing. We have approx 250ms to get the club from the top of the backswing down to the ball, and each fault we have eats into that time budget. 250ms is on the bleeding edge of our average conscious reaction time, so we need to set things up to "fire" properly as many of us will have little to no awareness of many elements of the club in the downswing. Start from and get into "good" positions and you don't have to work as hard to get the club in the right place, get into bad ones and start relying more and more on pure hand eye coordination.  

2) Don't be afraid to feel VERY short swing wise, especially if you're used to over-rotating your upper body like this. The last thing you want to do is jump straight to full swings and try to slap these things in. Get comfortable with the feel, particularly the wrist elements, and hit obnoxious amounts of 1/2 and 3/4 punch shots. 

[SEP1006]

Not a swing coach or anything remotely close to it but when I am off it's because I sway.

 

One very simple easy tip that keeps me from doing it is to keep my weight on my lead side throughout the swing. Just that simple for me and it consistently works and hasn't caused any other issues.

[slytown]

2 hours ago, SEP1006 said:

Not a swing coach or anything remotely close to it but when I am off it's because I sway.

 

One very simple easy tip that keeps me from doing it is to keep my weight on my lead side throughout the swing. Just that simple for me and it consistently works and hasn't caused any other issues.

 

For @UKGolfer86 this is not going to be helpful. His weight is too far on his lead side at the top of the backswing and he further leans on his lead side in the downswing. If anything, he needs to feel his weight on his backfoot more throughout the swing in order to get a more effective release pattern.

[UKGolfer86]

Tried the faldo drill today, still needs a lot of work, even with the feel of a shortened swing I'm over rotating my shoulders and not getting enough wrist set.  I've compared my videos vs Faldo in his and I was setting wy wrists too far back, so not enough c0ck still.

 

Back to the range for more work.

[UKGolfer86]

1 minute ago, slytown said:

 

For @UKGolfer86 this is not going to be helpful. His weight is too far on his lead side at the top of the backswing and he further leans on his lead side in the downswing. If anything, he needs to feel his weight on his backfoot more throughout the swing in order to get a more effective release pattern.

Thanks for the clarification on this.  

[UKGolfer86]

 

15 hours ago, slytown said:

 

For @UKGolfer86 this is not going to be helpful. His weight is too far on his lead side at the top of the backswing and he further leans on his lead side in the downswing. If anything, he needs to feel his weight on his backfoot more throughout the swing in order to get a more effective release pattern.

 

This comment seemed to sit in my subconscious all afternoon.  I went to the range again after work and really tried to work on transferring my weight to the inside of my trail foot in the backswing whilst doing the Faldo drill.  This is going to be my work for the next couple of weeks.  Better weight transfer reduced my excessive hip turn and shoulder turn, which meant that the left knee didn't need to kick out.  I certainly didn't get it right every time, but When i got the transfer correct in both the backswing and transition, the compression and power from even a 3/4 swing with the Faldo preset was phenomenal.  

 

My hip turn was good, but it felt like they weren't turning at all because of how much they were over rotating before, so keeping that in check is going to be a challenge. 

 

1 think i wanted to check @Valtiel, when doing the preset drill, im finding it difficult to get enough set, either my grip is limiting my range of motion, or im trying to set the club incorrectly.  Below is a still photo of my preset and a video of doing it, clearly the clubhead should be higher, shaft parallel.  Any suggestions?

[UKGolfer86]

Also, if anyone can advise how i can make my videos appear smaller in my posts, that would be appreciated. Cannot figure it out.

[Dpavs]

 

Does this thing really work at all? I've seen post saying how great it is and others saying it is just another snake oil gimmick.

For those who have used it, how exactly have you used it and what does it provide practice wise?

[UKGolfer86]

1 minute ago, Dpavs said:

 

Does this thing really work at all? I've seen post saying how great it is and others saying it is just another snake oil gimmick.

For those who have used it, how exactly have you used it and what does it provide practice wise?

At the risk of sounding like the forum police, do you mind taking this to another thread?  I dont want to end up with a thread full of posts on a training aid i dont currently have access to while trying to find posts relevant to my question.

 

Appreciated your first input on the left knee though!

[Dpavs]

16 minutes ago, UKGolfer86 said:

At the risk of sounding like the forum police, do you mind taking this to another thread?  I dont want to end up with a thread full of posts on a training aid i dont currently have access to while trying to find posts relevant to my question.

 

Appreciated your first input on the left knee though!

 

It felt relevant to ask since it was being recommended to you by some members. Keep in mind that if it is at all a good practice device, this can be easily fashioned from wood for far far less than what it sells for.

Edited October 11, 2023 by Dpavs

[snagy2000]

1 hour ago, Dpavs said:

 

Does this thing really work at all? I've seen post saying how great it is and others saying it is just another snake oil gimmick.

For those who have used it, how exactly have you used it and what does it provide practice wise?

It works, dropped from a 10 to 6 handicap using it...If you listen and follow Bradley's guidance on how properly to use it, you'll see improvement...He's got Tour winners using it, one who even lost their way and started using it and has won multiple times since, it's definitely not snake oil...

[UKGolfer86]

7 hours ago, Dpavs said:

 

It felt relevant to ask since it was being recommended to you by some members. Keep in mind that if it is at all a good practice device, this can be easily fashioned from wood for far far less than what it sells for.

That's fair.  Just didn't want the thread to end up just being a discussion on it seeing as there are already some about it.

 

I will be trying it in some form eventually though.