Any help is greatly appreciated. Swing feels lost.

[Ethan DelGrosso]

     My story: I started playing golf a few years ago and immediately became immersed in the art of the golf swing. I’ve taken in so many different swing thoughts and videos that my game can get a bit overwhelmed. I’ve never really held a consistent swing (consistent meaning not trying to make and changes) for more than a month or two which obviously isn’t good but I don’t mind the strive for perfection since I don’t play competitively and more for fun and self growth. Even though I’ve learned a ton its very hard to pick the right things in your swing to work on and I often find myself having a lot of revelations or new understandings about what Im doing or retrospectives on what I thought I knew. As a whole my swing is obviously better than in the past which I recognize but I still cant help nit-picking and changing. I’m very tall and lanky and have loads of athleticism and mobility as I’m a semi-professional cyclist.
     Offseason work: My last swing of the season was November 17th then I took a chunk of time off to go race my bike in europe and returned to golf January 14th. At the time I had been working on getting my arms more in front of my body, as at least to my eye it seemed like my right arm got behind me in the backswing. When I returned to playing I had the same idea of just swinging naturally but keeping my arms in front and I hit okay. Once I started working things got seemingly better as I kept working on arm structure. From there I worked on getting rid of early extension then I noticed high launch and somewhat low spin and decided to get a Pro Sender to help (its worth noting that in retrospect the launch monitor could’ve read high or I could've been hitting too high on the face, although I still got good smash factors).

      At first I thought the Pro Sender was magic and helping my swing but I’m not so sure anymore. For a bit it seemed to help and I got to a good point before I played a round on the 12th with no woods and struck irons great and flight seemed fine. I kept trying to refine since then and now just trying to swing the club I feel completely lost. I just don’t even feel like I can hit the ball with a club in my hands. Ill backswing then just stop cause i feel so off. Top of the backswing and backswing as a whole look gross, I’m coming way over the top rotating poorly etc. etc.

      Help!: If theres anything in my swings people can identify to help get me back on the right track it would mean a lot. Even if its just which swing you think is mechanically best. My local club opens in a month or so and I really wanted to have a swing I could be proud to finally just go play and try to score. Ill be able to work with the pro once he starts up again but I know I cant keep my hands off a club till then and would like to bring a better swing to him. I’ve included swings below from some key points where I showed distinct differences or patterns. All 7 irons.

In order of attachment to post 

• Mid July trying to feel more athletic and natural setup and starting swing with hips.
• November 17th feeling right arm rotate and stay in front of body
• January 14th First day back just kind of swinging 
•  February 3rd Working on early extension 
• February 11th swing felt good enough to play a round the next day. Working with pro sender trying to hold wrist in the cradle.
• February 18th started noticing more over the top and hitting all pull draws
• February 27th completely and utterly lost don’t know how to start the swing don’t have any feels cant hit a ball to save my life

   

[Valtiel]

The detailed breakdown and multiple videos are really helpful, just need some clarification regarding which is which since they aren't uniquely named. IMO the swing from this video is the "best":



It's the only one in where you seem to shift more correctly in transition and maintain depth better. All swings have common points though in that you lose pelvic depth and your rotation stalls causing you to end up in various somewhat contorted positions at impact, usually this upside down "J" shape:



It would be very useful to see a face on angle. All of your swings aesthetically have good lower body rotation going back, but they all stall and jump like this at impact, unable to get clear. I suspect it's your often overly long and deep backswing getting your hands/arms in a position where they simply can't get back down in front of you in time compared to your hip speed. A face on view would clearly show them lagging behind the lower body if that were the case, if so then we can recommend some fixes. 

[Ethan DelGrosso]

@Valtiel I really appreciate the response! In my own (most recent kind of diagnosis of faults I would completely agree with your diagnosis. I meant to include face on but I couldn’t attach enough videos. Here’s a few. 
 

Blue pants was from October 21st. 

 
Black shirt was a wedge from February  11th.   

 

Grey Sweatshirt was from the same day I posted about feeling very lost. 

 

 

Seems to me like I may be getting the arms too across the chest and having very little lag in the downswing. 

[Valtiel]

10 hours ago, Ethan DelGrosso said:

@Valtiel I really appreciate the response! In my own (most recent kind of diagnosis of faults I would completely agree with your diagnosis. I meant to include face on but I couldn’t attach enough videos. Here’s a few. 
 

Blue pants was from October 21st. 

IMG_7874.mov 6.53 MB · 1 download  
Black shirt was a wedge from February  11th.  IMG_8519.mov 7.45 MB · 1 download  

 

Grey Sweatshirt was from the same day I posted about feeling very lost. 

 

IMG_8913.mov 6.04 MB · 1 download

 

Seems to me like I may be getting the arms too across the chest and having very little lag in the downswing. 

Perfect, thanks. As expected your arms are definitely trailing significantly forcing a lot of stalling/flipping at the bottom:



One of the "goal" positions in a well sequenced swing is when P6 is reached (shaft parallel to the ground in the downswing) that the lead arm is pointing towards or very close to the trail foot (orange lines) and the hands are in front of or very near the trail thigh. You will see *some* exceptions to this at the pro level, but rarely does it deviate much.

Thankfully there are a couple very clear correlations here, namely shoulder turn...



...and bad matchups between ball position and lateral movement in the downswing:



The main pattern(s) that you seem to be struggling with is when all three of these elements either combine or 1-2 of them get too prominent.

In the shoulder turn image above, you've achieved around 130*+ of rotation which is excessive, and not coincidentally this was the swing pictured above that had the most severe disconnect between the arms and body in the downswing. Job #1 is to keep an eye on your shoulder turn because everyone has both a range they can turn back AND a speed at which they can unwind. Turn too much and you simply can't get back down in time. 

In the gif with Adam Scott above you have a much more "standard" shoulder turn, but your lateral shift is both excessive and a bad matchup to your ball position. Adam is on the higher end as it relates to lateral shifts and you can see you're shifting *more* than him and your ball position is also at least two balls back of his, fractionally back of center. These can't work together, because as you can see Adam shifts into alignment with his forward ball position, and you shift well ahead of the ball which forces the arms to lag well behind to make contact. If you held the angles and got your hands ahead like Adam above you'd miss the ball.

Ball position IMO is the the easiest thing to tweak first, you fairly consistently play it too far back for how much you shift laterally in the downswing. You need at minimum one ball forward of where you tend to be. Second is backswing length/shoulder turn and keeping that from rotating too far. In your "best" swing I highlighted in my previous reply:



Your hands are still very high (distance from the ground) and deep (distance behind your right shoulder). This is much better than your earlier swings which were even further out of bounds, but compare this to most mid iron swings on tour and you'll notice this is still pretty excessive. Rarely do pros get all the way to parallel like this short of longer irons/fairway woods, and those that do have very specific compensations in their swings to get down to the ball that you don't have. Combine all that with the problems you have with the arms in the downswing and at impact and there is a strong case that you need to be shorter/more compact and quicker with the hands and arms.

More details on the general problem of the "6-8 Ballerina" position as Monte calls it here. If any of those "lead with the body/passive arms/hold the lag" feelings apply to you then I would look at the proposed solutions there too.

Edited March 1 by Valtiel

[Ethan DelGrosso]

@ValtielTHIS IS SO HELPFUL. I think the biggest problem I’ve run into when learning, is the face on view. I have hundreds of videos down the line, but only 4 or 5 face on and I just haven’t been able to see the things you’ve highlighted or haven’t given them enough attention. I really appreciate the advice and am excited to work on these things. Its so interesting as I’ve learned more how the swing is like one of those murder mystery suspect boards. 

Its so hard track down the real culprits sometimes and not get caught up working on the wrong things without knowing their causes. I really appreciate you helping me with these dead ends!

[Valtiel]

18 hours ago, Ethan DelGrosso said:

@ValtielTHIS IS SO HELPFUL. I think the biggest problem I’ve run into when learning, is the face on view. I have hundreds of videos down the line, but only 4 or 5 face on and I just haven’t been able to see the things you’ve highlighted or haven’t given them enough attention. I really appreciate the advice and am excited to work on these things. Its so interesting as I’ve learned more how the swing is like one of those murder mystery suspect boards. 

Its so hard track down the real culprits sometimes and not get caught up working on the wrong things without knowing their causes. I really appreciate you helping me with these dead ends!

No problem! And it is a lot to keep your head around. I regularly lose track of the spinning plates and have frustrating practice sessions only to reflect on it later and think "you idiot, you completely forgot to keep an eye on _______" and then everything falls back into place when I focus on that thing next time. Focus too much though and you might lose track of *another* plate and the cycle continues, because not only do you have to be aware of all the general fundamentals, but also what your individual tendencies are within them.

That is why I tried to highlight what I did, because having video like you posted over several sessions with different approaches and feelings makes it far easier to paint a picture of repeating patterns that you might be (and sounds like were) missing. Definitely a "you don't know what you don't know until it's pointed out" kind of thing. Hopefully that gives you a few things to get a foothold, please follow up here with future videos. 👍

[mizunotpz]

I see this in a lot of swing groups on FB as well where people try to fix their swings just looking at DTL view. But we need the 2D to understand (3D even better of course) more. 
early extension ie standing up, hip stalling, body gets ahead of the arms. Valtiel has mentioned all of it. Just wanted to comment and say he spot on. 
A lot of half shots Fleetwood style I think would be a great way to fix this. Along with understanding how to turn your hip properly.

[Ethan DelGrosso]

On 3/1/2024 at 4:37 PM, Valtiel said:

No problem! And it is a lot to keep your head around. I regularly lose track of the spinning plates and have frustrating practice sessions only to reflect on it later and think "you idiot, you completely forgot to keep an eye on _______" and then everything falls back into place when I focus on that thing next time. Focus too much though and you might lose track of *another* plate and the cycle continues, because not only do you have to be aware of all the general fundamentals, but also what your individual tendencies are within them.

That is why I tried to highlight what I did, because having video like you posted over several sessions with different approaches and feelings makes it far easier to paint a picture of repeating patterns that you might be (and sounds like were) missing. Definitely a "you don't know what you don't know until it's pointed out" kind of thing. Hopefully that gives you a few things to get a foothold, please follow up here with future videos. 👍

I spent my last few sessions working on all feels to fix what we discussed but I cant seem to find something to stick/fix and am still super uncomfortable. I have however, laid out a bit of a plan of attack. The biggest problem with my swing besides anything positional is I’ve tried to change way too much way too fast. I’ll often have awful tempo and feel lost at the top. What I did today was take a stock length standard grip 8 iron I had from a family members set and set up a swing with the idea of just swinging like I would in a store when trying something. I basically walked into the shot set up fast and said go and the swing was basically autopilot. What I noticed was dramatically better tempo then when I’m grinding 10 feels with my own clubs and no awkward feelings in the body. My plan is to take a bit of time each day with this mindset just to burn in something repeatable. Once I have a repeatable swing that I can claim as my own I will start to work more technically on the swing now that we outlined what to work on. Thanks for all the help! Heres those swings from today. Obviously not positionally good but I’ve just gotta set something consistent as a base to work from.