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I need to completely start over.


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Over the last month I've continually gotten worse and worse. It's gotten so bad that last night I could barely hit the ball at all. I know what a good swing and a good shot feels like, I know what it looks like, I can not find it again. Nothing feels comfortable anymore, I even got a couple lessons recently and it seemed like I and the instructor just kept getting more and more frustrated. Me of course moreso than him (he was a pretty good sport).

It's baffling, so I'm going to completely go back to the beginning. If anybody here has a tip for starting over, please post here. I'm looking for mainly cost-effective learning/training. I don't have a ton of income I can spend on lessons...however I can golf every single day at an academy...and I do. I'm going to start with stance and grip and get a pre-shot routine this time.

I will also once again start posting my swing in the "My Swing." thread...but I feel like it needs to be completely revamped. Starting with grip/stance/etc.

Joel Holden

https://twitter.com/JHolden138

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Over the last month I've continually gotten worse and worse. It's gotten so bad that last night I could barely hit the ball at all. I know what a good swing and a good shot feels like, I know what it looks like, I can not find it again. Nothing feels comfortable anymore, I even got a couple lessons recently and it seemed like I and the instructor just kept getting more and more frustrated. Me of course moreso than him (he was a pretty good sport).

It's baffling, so I'm going to completely go back to the beginning. If anybody here has a tip for starting over, please post here. I'm looking for mainly cost-effective learning/training. I don't have a ton of income I can spend on lessons...however I can golf every single day at an academy...and I do. I'm going to start with stance and grip and get a pre-shot routine this time.

I will also once again start posting my swing in the "My Swing." thread...but I feel like it needs to be completely revamped. Starting with grip/stance/etc.

Evolvr: http://evolvr.thegolfevolution.com , especially if you can practice daily.

Yours in earnest, Jason.
Call me Ernest, or EJ or Ernie.

PSA - "If you find yourself in a hole, STOP DIGGING!"

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I will also once again start posting my swing in the "My Swing." thread...

This would be a good start ...

Evolvr: http://evolvr.thegolfevolution.com , especially if you can practice daily.

... but this would be even better ...

Take a break and relax for a week or so.

... and this certainly couldn't hurt either. :-P

You could go sign up for Evolvr now, head to the range tomorrow just to film a couple of swings, then come home and upload to Evolvr and Myswing, then relax for a few days, watch the US Open, then start back up again next Monday fresh with great feedback from Evolvr and shitty feedback from me and @Ernest Jones on your swing thread. :beer:

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Thanks guys. I'll see if I can scrape up the money to start evolvr. With the new baby and all of the other stuff I've got going on...Literally all of my extra spending money goes to playing on courses, but what fun is playing on a course if you can't hit the ball.

As far as taking a week off, my father and law and I have planned out a golf outing this weekend...so now I'm trying to decide, do I practice until we play on Friday and Saturday? Or do I not touch a golf club until we get on the course?

The frustrating thing is that I love golf so much, I just want to practice and get this fixed. But at this point I'm probably just ingraining bad thoughts and movements.

Joel Holden

https://twitter.com/JHolden138

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For what it's worth, I went through something similar in the past year. I was playing well until about late July / August and my game started getting away from me. Over the winter, I developed a serious case of the shanks. It got to the point where I'd go through 3 or 4 buckets of balls without being able to not shank a single shot. I got a couple lessons and on the second one we focused entirely on release. I'd work through buckets of balls where the entire movement I made was just wrists to build the feeling of doing that and making solid contact. It was something of a revelation once I got a feel for it because it really transformed my shots from fades / slices to really strong draws.  Doing it more and more, I built it up into a full swing and now I'm playing better than before. I really get how soul crushing it is to lose your swing. For me, it really helped to start with tiny movements and building up from there. I was also surprised at how far a "just wrists" swing would go. Obviously, when I filmed it, it was more than "just wrists" but the feeling of making a tiny movement really helped me. Finding the center of the club consistently is really important and whatever you need to do to get there, however much you need to slow down, it's worth doing. I felt like such a putz standing there on the driving range with a bucket of 150 balls just hitting balls 80-90 yards with my gap wedge, focusing on release and swing path (really just release; I realized later that it was helping change my swing path to inside-out). And even then, I was amazed the balls were going as far as they were because it felt like I was doing nothing swing speed-wise. Good luck and keep the faith. I say that knowing that, back when I was in the weeds, I didn't believe anyone who told me it would come around. But it will.

Dom's Sticks:

Callaway X-24 10.5° Driver, Callaway Big Bertha 15° wood, Callaway XR 19° hybrid, Callaway X-24 24° hybrid, Callaway X-24 5i-9i, PING Glide PW 47°/12°, Cleveland REG 588 52°/08°, Callaway Mack Daddy PM Grind 56°/13°, 60°/10°, Odyssey Versa Jailbird putter w/SuperStroke Slim 3.0 grip, Callaway Chev Stand Bag, Titleist Pro-V1x ball

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Thanks guys. I'll see if I can scrape up the money to start evolvr. With the new baby and all of the other stuff I've got going on...Literally all of my extra spending money goes to playing on courses, but what fun is playing on a course if you can't hit the ball.

As far as taking a week off, my father and law and I have planned out a golf outing this weekend...so now I'm trying to decide, do I practice until we play on Friday and Saturday? Or do I not touch a golf club until we get on the course?

The frustrating thing is that I love golf so much, I just want to practice and get this fixed. But at this point I'm probably just ingraining bad thoughts and movements.

Not sure about ingraining bad movements.  I've realized quickly from this site and mostly from my own videos that they don't ever change as much as you think.

Probably, moreso, you're just ingraining negative thoughts. ;)  I'd probably vote for no practice before the weekend.  Then have no expectations for your performance (harder to do than it sounds) and you may be surprised at how well you play if you free yourself from that stress.

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For what it's worth, I went through something similar in the past year. I was playing well until about late July / August and my game started getting away from me. Over the winter, I developed a serious case of the shanks. It got to the point where I'd go through 3 or 4 buckets of balls without being able to not shank a single shot. I got a couple lessons and on the second one we focused entirely on release. I'd work through buckets of balls where the entire movement I made was just wrists to build the feeling of doing that and making solid contact.

This is exactly where I think I'm at...and it's exactly what the instructor focused on. The release, I just don't understand how to release the club head properly. Even when I actually do it properly...I don't understand what I did differently. However that could actually just be a piece of the puzzle. My stance, grip, backswing, etc all needs a lot of work I'm sure.

Not sure about ingraining bad movements.  I've realized quickly from this site and mostly from my own videos that they don't ever change as much as you think.

Probably, moreso, you're just ingraining negative thoughts. ;)  I'd probably vote for no practice before the weekend.  Then have no expectations for your performance (harder to do than it sounds) and you may be surprised at how well you play if you free yourself from that stress.

My friend that I played with last night watched my monstrosity of a round and although he isn't anywhere close an instructor...he thinks I'm getting too down on myself and ingraining negative thoughts as you said. Although it's going to be hard for me, I think I'm going to do as you said and not practice until the round.

Joel Holden

https://twitter.com/JHolden138

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This is exactly where I think I'm at...and it's exactly what the instructor focused on. The release, I just don't understand how to release the club head properly. Even when I actually do it properly...I don't understand what I did differently. However that could actually just be a piece of the puzzle. My stance, grip, backswing, etc all needs a lot of work I'm sure.

My friend that I played with last night watched my monstrosity of a round and although he isn't anywhere close an instructor...he thinks I'm getting too down on myself and ingraining negative thoughts as you said. Although it's going to be hard for me, I think I'm going to do as you said and not practice until the round.

Yeah, I don't want to give unqualified golf advice online, so I'll just chime in with what helped it make sense for me. I know "rolling the wrists" is a polarizing piece of advice, but it helped me as a jumping off point to realize that what I needed to accomplish with release was to essentially get my left palm from facing down before impact to facing up afterward on the follow through, and so the "rolling wrists" thing helped build a feeling for me of doing that by rotating my forearm rather than doing any sort of wrist bending, which I'd been doing. Later on, reading through the "5 keys" thing that this site pushes and specifically the "flat left wrist" idea, it sort of confirmed what I was doing was right.

But yeah, all of this came through playing around on the range in the weeks after my lesson. I was just as lost after the lesson as I was before, but the lesson helped identify the problem and sort of gave me an idea of what the club should look like on my follow through (with clubface essentially pointing straight down much sooner after impact than I'd have ever imagined). I didn't start making successful swings until about a month afterwards when things sort of clicked. So it's a process of figuring out yourself of how to get the club to where it needs to be after impact. With release specifically, at least for me, it's tough to wrap my head around from online teaching because all the videos are two dimensional, and it's such a 3 dimensional thing that's happening over a few axes of rotation, so online videos and tutorials didn't help me. If anything, I found them counterproductive. Play around with it.

I really wrote most of that to give you an idea of what worked for me and how the process played out slowly and in baby steps rather than to give you a lesson on release (though if it helps, all the better). You'll figure it out, but try new things and just accept that whatever your old swing was may not be what your new swing will be. And I hope that you find that exciting because you and your game will probably be better off for all this struggling.

Dom's Sticks:

Callaway X-24 10.5° Driver, Callaway Big Bertha 15° wood, Callaway XR 19° hybrid, Callaway X-24 24° hybrid, Callaway X-24 5i-9i, PING Glide PW 47°/12°, Cleveland REG 588 52°/08°, Callaway Mack Daddy PM Grind 56°/13°, 60°/10°, Odyssey Versa Jailbird putter w/SuperStroke Slim 3.0 grip, Callaway Chev Stand Bag, Titleist Pro-V1x ball

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Oh and I meant to add also that I also had a lot of issues with things like my backswing being too level, crappy swing path, some weight transfer issues, blah, blah, blah. I tried so many things to fix those over the winter hoping that it'd be the magic fix that did it. None of it helped, obviously. But once I got the whole release thing down, it was really surprising to me how a lot of my other faults sort of fixed themselves because (I'm guessing) they came from a cascade of me trying to adjust to accommodate the underlying problem. Once I started to get a feel for whipping the club through impact, my swing plane got steeper, my set up to the ball improved, etc, because the "right way" to do it feels natural now. So keep in mind to not overwhelm yourself with too many fixes and focus on basics.

Dom's Sticks:

Callaway X-24 10.5° Driver, Callaway Big Bertha 15° wood, Callaway XR 19° hybrid, Callaway X-24 24° hybrid, Callaway X-24 5i-9i, PING Glide PW 47°/12°, Cleveland REG 588 52°/08°, Callaway Mack Daddy PM Grind 56°/13°, 60°/10°, Odyssey Versa Jailbird putter w/SuperStroke Slim 3.0 grip, Callaway Chev Stand Bag, Titleist Pro-V1x ball

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You need to be really careful how you talk to yourself.  Your subconscious doesn't understand exaggeration.  It is much more difficult to shake off bad shots / score well if your self-narrative is dependant on your performance, and is catastrophically bad if you fail a little.  Things like this:

Quote:
Over the last month I've continually gotten worse and worse. It's gotten so bad that last night I could barely hit the ball at all.

are not only not true, they are silly.  You are exaggerating to make a point ("barely hit the ball at all" ?  c'mon.  Thats silly.  Even my wife who never plays makes contact with the ball more often than not.).  You might have scored worse and worse, but you proably didn't actually get much, much worse in the span of 30 days.

Your posts are literred with catastrophic self-talk - i.e. "I'm the worst", "I stink", "its all terrible", "throw it all out and start over".

Heres the thing - until you change the way you talk to yourself all the mechanical advice and lessons in the world won't matter.  Golfers tend to become exactly what they think of themselves and you have a serious self-doubt problem.  You need to change the words you use in your brain to describe yourself.

I'm not telling you to have false confidence, but I am telling you that exaggerating your faults in your own head is about the quickest way to short-circuit any improvement at all.  Compare:

"I can't hit the ball at all.  I have to throw it all out and start over.  I just keep getting worse and worse."

to

"I need to improve my contact.  I'm going to google getting my contact better and do some drills that make sense to me.  I can't play good golf without good contact, so thats step 1."

to

"Contact is all I need.  Once I have good contact, I'll make the tour."

You want to be somewhere between statement 2 and statement 3.  You are currently at statement 1.

Look, we all get frustrated.  But you need to make sure your self-dialogue is (1) true and (2) helpful.  If its neither one of those, you arn't going to improve with all the lessons in the world.

I think the best use of your golfing money would be this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Golf-Not-Game-Perfect-Rotella/dp/068480364X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid;=1402425984&sr;=8-1&keywords;=golf+is+not+a+game+of+perfect

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You need to be really careful how you talk to yourself.  Your subconscious doesn't understand exaggeration.  It is much more difficult to shake off bad shots / score well if your self-narrative is dependant on your performance, and is catastrophically bad if you fail a little.  Things like this:

are not only not true, they are silly.  You are exaggerating to make a point ("barely hit the ball at all" ?  c'mon.  Thats silly.  Even my wife who never plays makes contact with the ball more often than not.).  You might have scored worse and worse, but you proably didn't actually get much, much worse in the span of 30 days.

Your posts are literred with catastrophic self-talk - i.e. "I'm the worst", "I stink", "its all terrible", "throw it all out and start over".

Heres the thing - until you change the way you talk to yourself all the mechanical advice and lessons in the world won't matter.  Golfers tend to become exactly what they think of themselves and you have a serious self-doubt problem.  You need to change the words you use in your brain to describe yourself.

I'm not telling you to have false confidence, but I am telling you that exaggerating your faults in your own head is about the quickest way to short-circuit any improvement at all.  Compare:

"I can't hit the ball at all.  I have to throw it all out and start over.  I just keep getting worse and worse."

to

"I need to improve my contact.  I'm going to google getting my contact better and do some drills that make sense to me.  I can't play good golf without good contact, so thats step 1."

to

"Contact is all I need.  Once I have good contact, I'll make the tour."

You want to be somewhere between statement 2 and statement 3.  You are currently at statement 1.

Look, we all get frustrated.  But you need to make sure your self-dialogue is (1) true and (2) helpful.  If its neither one of those, you arn't going to improve with all the lessons in the world.

I think the best use of your golfing money would be this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Golf-Not-Game-Perfect-Rotella/dp/068480364X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid;=1402425984&sr;=8-1&keywords;=golf+is+not+a+game+of+perfect

Swear to God ... I was two sentences into this post and started thinking "he sounds like he reads Bob Rotella." :beer: Of course, then I got a deja vu that we've actually discussed him before. ;)  Anyways, good post.

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Take a break and relax for a week or so.

Yeah this is probably the best idea.  If you're still playing like garbage even after the break then start to think about doing something about it.

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I think I hit rock bottom tonight. No distance, balls now going right, left, if they go straight, they fall way short. Toe hits, and the dreaded shanks..argh. I hit em fat, thin, and fluff em..I did better when I first learned this game.

I went back to basic's, hitting 1/2 and 3/4 shots, still, some go left, and some go right,..I can't recall the last time I blocked so many iron shots, short irons, long irons..doesn't matter.

I'm beyond frustrated. :pound:

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Without seeing your swing, I'm guessing you're arm swinging (or casting). Been there, done that. Try those 1/2 shots but keep your arms close to your side. Do the shoulder turn but don't bring your hands up. It will force you to swing inside out and get your lower body into the shot to get any power. And you may just introduce yourself to the concept of lag. That's where the power and consistency comes from. I had a friend that was strong enough and athletic enough to bend me into a pretzel, but he couldn't drive a ball 200 yards to save his life. I got him to cut down his wild flail and hit half shots farther than he ever did before. And they were down the middle. I played several holes the way I mentioned and scored pretty well. I could break 85 that way. You'd be surprised how far you can hit a driver with that swing. And straight. Do everything at half speed until you start making consistent contact. It's hard to fix anything at full speed. When you start hitting the ball consistently, start adding to your swing. I have a net in the backyard and work on things like that. I can pound balls all day for nothing. Also, if you hit balls for a long time and you're starting to hurt or get real tired, you're probably doing something wrong. It's US Open week. Watch Payne Stewart's swing. Freddie Couples, Ernie Els. Those are poetry in motion.

Driver.......Ping K15 9.5* stiff 3 wood.....Ping K15 16* stiff 5 wood.....Ping K15 19* stiff 4 Hybrid...Cleveland Gliderail 23* stiff 5 - PW......Pinhawk SL GW...........Tommy Armour 52* SW...........Tommy Armour 56* LW...........Tommy Armour 60* FW...........Diamond Tour 68* Putter.......Golfsmith Dyna Mite Ball..........Volvik Vista iV Green Bag..........Bennington Quiet Organizer Shoes.... ..Crocs

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Start by hitting 20 yard SW shots by just using your shoulder rotation, no wrist cock. To hit it straight your path will have to be correct, and will cause a wide arc on both sides of the ball.  Build the swing from there making sure you are accelerating through the ball.  Remember this shoulder rotation is the same for all clubs. This is much harder to do than you would expect, but as you figure it out you will learn how to have a correct path and rotation both arm and body.  Good luck

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Not to highjack the OP's thread, but I went to the range tonight. Concentrated on path for the most part, still doing 1/2 and 3/4 shots, and doing my drills. Ball flight tightened up a Bunch, with my few full swings at nice slow tempo, I also got much better height, but distance is still very much lacking. But at least I'm getting back on track.. ;-)

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Note: This thread is 3557 days old. We appreciate that you found this thread instead of starting a new one, but if you plan to post here please make sure it's still relevant. If not, please start a new topic. Thank you!

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