cartierbresson

@No Mulligans and @iacas thank you for the feedback. Will try to steady the head and improve hand path. So I can measure progress, what is an acceptable amount of inches of head movement and angle of hand path?

@iacas thanks for the video. I didn't understand it entirely but it seems like they're advocating for laying the club off at the top of the backswing. Correct? What happens when you're taking only quarter or half swings though? Do you lay the club off then too? If yes, how do you do it so quickly? If no, why not? If those smaller swings don't include laying off the club and still manage to be under plane on the downswing, why can't I use that approach for the full swing?

Thank you @mvmac for that explanation and video. I'll try the drill on the range and report back.

@Hardspoon you're right, stupid monkey discussions belongs belong on the Stupid Monkey thread. @No Mulligans it's not difficult posting a swing, just irrelevant to this discussion. Not a matter of hiding things either, since there's a video of my swing already in the Member Swings forum. @iacas thank you for your...words. @mvmac interesting what you said about hip rotation and rotation. To a beginning golfer, how much (concurrent or independent?) hip slide and rotation do you recommend? How do you then go on to adjust that amount? @billchao understand priority. I've found that simply being told what to do doesn't satisfy me: I want to know why. Asking questions isn't wrong and that's what I'm doing here. Of course, it may make it difficult to manage all that information, but I like a challenge. My purpose of starting this discussion is learning the criteria for judging hip slide. I learned that it depends on the torso, knees, hip rotational rate etc, but going forward I'm hoping to learn more. If you feel like there might be a better resource for that information, I'd love to know what.

Understand and agree about priorities. I was stating earlier that research shows us that sometimes it's more optimal for a student to learn multiple concepts at once. It simply has to be that way, because if it weren't, it would logically deduce that students learn in the same way, which they don't. I learned far worse when I was told about hip movement with respect to my upper body. But I learned far better when told about hip movement with respect to my knees. In any case, I was simply responding to the "stupid monkey" theory. I disagree with it, because psychology disagrees. Personal experience matters less (not entirely irrelevant though since they make for useful counterexamples).

@Ernest Jones thank you for your suggestions.

That's wrong and inappropriate. ADD is a disorder, not something to be joked about. "Attacking a priority problem" may or may not be helpful. It depends on the problem and the student and is one of the ways instruction is individualized. Changes to the address position, the grip, ball position etc very often happen together. Sliding and turning of the hips aren't taught separately (but very well could be and may encourage more clarity). It all depends.

@RandallT I've tried several different ways of shallowing the club. All of them work to some degree, in that I can get the club to shallow but it introduces a separate flaw. I'm not sure if that means that the flaw needs to be fix or approach abandoned. Keep my hands back more If my hands don't move almost vertically down at the start of the transition, I find it impossible to shallow the club. But forcing my hands back introduces tension in my swing. That forces my arms to get left behind and I get flippy, or they violently thrust down at some point causing the club to steepen after it's parallel to the ground. Roll my wrists (i.e. suppinate my left wrist while increasing the right wrist break) This shallows the club immediately but feels manufactured and I have a very hard time doing this reliably. It's very, very difficult for me flatten my wrist AND do all the five other things I want to do in the 1/20th of a second it takes my downswing to complete. Externally rotate my right arm so the club is shallowed This sort of works. It works for small swings but getting my right elbow in front of my body forces the face of the club to open significantly. I find it very hard to square the club (it feels like if I rotate too much I might hit the ball with the back of the club). I don't know if I need to combine this with suppinating with left wrist. Also, pn full swings just doing a right elbow drive flatten the plane. I have no clue why it doesn't. Maybe I need more reps. Slide my hips This is very confusing to me, for reasons I talk about in this thread. Do all of the above Like I allude above, perhaps what I need to do is all of the above together. I don't know if there's one big move or lots of small moves.

Yes and yes. Thank you for sharing the post. I disagree with the author's conclusions. The subject of how best students learn, while getting helpful input from educators, is more rigorously studied in the realm of educational psychology, psychometrics and cognitive science (each contribute to "Sport Psychology"). It is in those spheres where you can provable claims like the Experience Curve Effect and Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which are the building blocks of good instructional programs. Articles that rely on empirical evidence are often only partly right, because it only takes one counter-example out of the whatever million golfers there are in the world to disprove that claim. It's simply too broad a claim. As if to prove my point, I've been a stupid monkey for the 30 years I've been playing and it's not helped. Now you could try to tease my stupid monkeyness apart to verify it matches your assumptions, but I suspect you'll end up concluding that stupidness isn't binary. Which, when stated to sport psychologists, would be a fairly obvious point. What you're really asking is: how much stupid intelligence is appropriate for a particular student, which is what these people are paid to theorize about. The optimal rate of learning, for example, has far more to do with rate of repetition (something that golfing learners are often said to be cursed with). It has as much to do with scaffolding, individualized instruction, better assessments etc (video and 3d analysis in the golfing world). Scaffolding is the idea that a person learns most optimally not when he is taught something he can do independently, but instead something he can only do when there is an instructor present. In golf terms, for myself, that may mean learning how to slide my hips (something I can do independently) and separate my left knee. According to research, doing both may be more effective than doing just the former. Individualized instruction means that statistically speaking, it is very unlikely that two students learn at the same rate, so teaching them at the same rate is suboptimal. In golf terms, this could mean that at some point in time, someone may actually learn better when hosed with a number of concepts at the same time. While unintuitive, that's what science says. In any case, a person's request to be educated isn't a sign of over-education. I'm confident of my ability to distinguish between the two.

Blunt's good. They are more similar than different, but I suspect they're more different than you think. I've been to the range about 4 times/week for the past one year (4x4x12 =~ 192 times/year). While not on the range, I've been watching videos and doing mirror work, clocking in more hours outside the range than in it. That's a lot of golf moves, and not all of them are congruent. It shouldn't be altogether surprising that someone who has been struggling with the game has that many different ways of hitting the ball. Even if it is surprising, it is what it is. "Priority" assumes I know how to prioritize, but that is the very topic of this discussion. Rebuilt it to a) improve b) understand the golf swing. Doesn't matter why I got to that point. You seem to think it's entirely a bad thing, I don't. So is Hogan's Five Fundamentals. Are there other reasons other than age that you wouldn't recommend The Golfing Machine? I'm not a big fan of putting blind faith in instructors, golf or otherwise. I would argue that it is the very mindset of questioning the instructor that makes a better student. As I said before, I'm not shy of sharing my swing. I'm opposed to it for the purposes of this discussion because it's not required. I'm very happy just discussing Hogan's swing and learning more about why his particular hip slide works. That's educational.

Posting my swing won't help -- because I have about twelve of them. That's what happens when you rebuild your swing over a year -- you collect all these different ideas and can execute a lot of them, but you don't know how the puzzle fits together. My typical miss and ball flight is a slice, but if you asked me to draw the ball, I could do it. I could change my swing so I could hit a flush 3-iron with a draw. But I know that swing has significant faults, so I don't want to adopt it. I can't imagine anyone who hasn't rebuilt their swing on their own who hasn't had similar struggles, and who at some point would have asked: how do I put the pieces together, and using what criterion? What I hoped this discussion would be amount is what @iacas was alluding to earlier - how different parts of the body combine to produce the intended result. That discussion is independent of a particular swing, because the idea isn't to fix a swing flaw as it is to understand why a certain fix is being suggested. That's why it struck me that the Golf Machine may help, because the person who recommended the book told me it's based on physics, which is universally applicable in theory. When one goes to school to become a golf instructor, I imagine they don't say -- well why don't you share your own swing video so we can help you.

I live in an area with few teaching professionals and online instruction is my only real option. That said, I don't like the typical online "upload and feedback" format of instruction because I want my instructor to comment on my swing thoughts in addition to my actions, and that requires a conversation. So, I generally FaceTime or Skype with my instructor when I want a lesson. Sometimes I'm in my house and other times at the driving range. I find this format far better than uploading video, but not as good as face to face because my instructor can't physically force my body into positions and that is helpful. Video is also always a function of camera angles, which can sometimes distort reality and it make difficult for my instructor to know exactly what's happening. It's also difficult to view the swing in slow motion over Skype/FaceTime since they don't have that built-in capability. That makes it difficult to confirm swing changes.

How do I determine what's best for my swing? What do I do if I'm rebuilding my swing -- how do I know what's right for my body then? Say I'm rebuilding my entire golf swing. How do I decide how much the "proper rate" for me is? Even Hogan doesn't keep his upper torso exactly where it is during the downswing: it shifts, albeit less than the lower body. "Keeping the upper body back" is vague, because if my lower body moves 6 inches, I can keep my upper body anywhere back between 1 and 6 inches and the resulting swings are very different. How do I assess my knee extension, hip turn, shaft lean etc in relation to my hip slide? /* Update */ Would The Golfing Machine answer these questions?

This isn't about my swing, but answers to questions applicable to any swing. Those questions are: If you saw the same amount of movement in a member swing, would you consider it too much? If your answer is that it would depend on the member's particular swing, what criterion do you use to determine whether it's too much for that member? Don't get me wrong, I don't mind posting my swing video (I have in the past), but I want to keep my particular swing out of this discussion.