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About this blog

I often say that I have an ocean of knowledge, but all a student needs in a lesson is a cup.

This blog is for droplets. Little things I see and notice while giving lessons that may or may not benefit you specifically, but which strike me enough to post here about it.

Entries in this blog

Droplets

Born with Clubface Control

The next time you're on the range, try this: Get out your 8-iron. Select a target about 80-90% of your normal 8I distance away. Grip the club with an excessive, extreme strong grip. Take one swing with the sole goal of hitting the ball to the target, without much curve. Grip the club with an excessive, extreme weak grip. Take one swing with the sole goal of hitting the ball to the target, without much curve. That's it. Two swings. No practice… How'd you do?
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Switcheroo

Game 1: PGA Tour Player Switcheroo Imagine a game in which you pair two average PGA Tour players with two average 80s golfers. Team A: the pro hits every shot that requires a Full Swing Motion (roughly every shot from 65+ yards), and the 80s golfer will play every short game shot and hit every putt. Team B: the 80s golfer hits every Full Swing Motion shot, and the pro plays every short game shot and hits every putt. On a typical 7000-yard golf course, what might you expect th
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Low Rounds

When a PGA Tour player shoots a really low round - 61, 63, 59… whatever… ask yourself: did the guy have to get up and down a lot or hole a lot of chips for birdie? Or did he hit a bunch of greens, leave himself short putts, and have a decent day with the putter? When a PGA Tour player needs to rely on his short game, he probably didn't have a great round. He may have salvaged a decent round, but he didn't have a great round. Great rounds - and good scoring over the long haul - are a re
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Golfers are More Confused than Ever

Golfers are more confused than ever for two reasons. Never before has there been so much information available to the average golfer. The "bad instructors" have as much of a platform as the "good instructors." The two kind of go hand in hand. A golfer will hear "stay behind the ball and roll your hands over to hit a draw" from one guy while he hears about how he's got to get his weight forward and follow through more like Zach Johnson from some other guy.
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Weekly Lessons?

Just a question right now, because I'm actually going to post this in Swing Thoughts as it's a bit more involved than what I want for my "Droplets" blog: which do you think is better (and why): lessons that cost you $45/45min. every week or lessons that cost $120/hour every month or two? There's no one "right" answer.
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Go Back to Your First Lessons

I gave a lesson to a guy the other day who said he wanted to learn "how to play golf." He was being sarcastic, as he's played golf for 40 years or so, has made many nice changes and improvements to his golf swing, and is playing quite well for his age. Despite this, his texts from the day before were of the panicking type. I gave him a lesson. I wanted him to do two things. First, I wanted him to take his left shoulder down a bit more so his head didn't drift back and up during the bac
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Finding the Ball

When we work with students, we often tell them that we don't expect them to hit the first 20 or 30 balls "better" or even as good as they were before, we just expect them to hit them "differently." Sometimes that "difference" is better, but often it's worse. The difference is often (not always… it depends very much on what the change is…) an insight into how good a golfer can ever expect to be. You see, some golfers are just better at what @david_wedzik and I call "finding the golf ball."
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Grrrrrrr… Practice Properly You Maggots!

If you do not practice properly, you probably won't get any better. You'll probably say "that instruction doesn't work" (even though you're not doing it). The worst culprits are often the better players. They make two swings slow motion and think they have it. I'm easy at first, gently reminding them. Then I get a little firmer. Then firmer yet. But ultimately I can't go full drill sergeant on them, and whether they practice properly after having the benefits, reasons, process, etc. ex
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Small Change, Big Change

Fixing one thing like this fixed a lot of other things that come after. Proper prioritization is important. For this golfer, fixing this part of the backswing made a lot of later compensations unnecessary.
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We Didn't Work on his Downswing

We worked on his backswing. His pivot. Reducing the sway. And a little bit of setup work (the grip is quite a bit stronger - this player may need to reduce the strength eventually, but not now). This speaks to prioritization. That doesn't always mean fixing the first part of the swing that goes wrong, but often, that's kind of how it feels, because everything after that becomes a compensation.
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"What Works" is not Always Better

I often see said here on the forum that people will "try things" and "if it works, they adopt it." While occasionally that's fine, more often than not it leads to a destructive path that hinders long-term growth. Things that work "right away" are often band-aids, or compensations. Take this golfer for example: On the left, "his swing." No lessons, just an athlete that "figured some stuff out" that let him at least hit the balls somewhat solidly. He started forward, stayed fo
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A Little Goat Humping Not Always Bad

A little early extension - "goat humping" - isn't necessarily a bad thing. Justin Rose with a mid-iron: Zach Johnson with a Hybrid: Charley Hoffman with a hybrid: Tiger with a Driver: Rory hitting an iron: Goat humping goes awry when: It becomes excessive. It prevents the hips and torso from opening up at the proper rates. But no, your hips and head do not need to stay absolutely flush against their "walls."
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A Rising Tide Raises All Ships

But, unfortunately, a sinking tide lowers all ships. And that's what we have in the golf industry. We have a lot of golf instructors that just flat out suck at their jobs. They're giving bad advice to their students. They're dishing out tips they seem to have found in Golf Digest that month. They're actively making their players worse. They're using clichés and myths because they've never spent any time thinking about or investigating for themselves. Worst yet, some of those terri
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Exaggeration Necessary

This golfer is working on not delivering the clubhead AND his hands from so deep: Predictably, he often hit BIG pushes, BIG draws/hooks, and more than his fair share of shanks. Do I eventually want him to swing like the golfer on the right? Absolutely not. But he - like you - has made hundreds of thousands of swings like the one on the left. If he exaggerates in practice, and swings INward more than he eventually should, I'm good with it. I encourage it, in fact.
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Work Required

Golf is hard™. Change is hard. If you want to get better at golf, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes motivation, and it takes a commitment. It's not something that's going to come easily. Now, I do encourage golfers to work smarter, not harder. There are a LOT of drills you can do hitting a cotton ball, or making swings against a wall, or in a mirror, in five or ten minutes a day at home or in your office. But you've gotta put in at least that much time. Golfers wh
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When Practicing the Backswing

I once heard a story of a kid in Florida who practiced his backswing (at the range, with a ball at his feet) for nearly three hours. Let me say that again with a little added emphasis: he practiced his backswing for nearly three hours. He didn't hit a single ball. Didn't even make a downswing. He recorded, used a mirror, checked his video, and made backswings for nearly 180 consecutive minutes. That's madness. The backswing is an important part of the golf swing. A lot of gol
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The Last Moment of Truth

That comes from the behind-the-scenes peek from the famous Time interview with Tiger Woods: http://scoregolf.com/blog/lorne-rubenstein/the-goods-on-woods/ . Tiger, it turns out, is wrong. The golf swing is too fast. Even if you could instantly form a thought and direct your muscles to do something, it quite literally takes too long for the nerve impulse to travel from your brain to your muscles for it to do anything past about A5. That's right: if your brain hasn't told your muscl
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Attacking the Root Cause

Quick one today. Below, you'll see a player whose right arm stays pretty straight a long time. This leads to the right elbow getting a bit too far around/behind, and then it gets stuck there on the downswing. The player compensates by tipping the head back (as the right arm stays flexed a long time), and the left arm actually bends slightly too so she doesn't crash down into the ground. In the improved image, you'll note the right elbow flexes sooner. This limits the "late flexin
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Quality of Practice

Far too many people judge the quality of their practice by the quality of the shots they hit when they practice. I choose to judge the quality of my practice by how much I succeeded at learning and improving. I've had great range sessions where I didn't hit a single ball terribly solidly. I've had great range sessions where I didn't hit a ball, with a 6-iron, over 50 yards. I've had great range sessions where I know I'm going to hit a bunch of shanks, and when I do, take that as proof that
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I Fix a Lot of Setups

I know we've been talking lately about how setup is "automatic" (or it's not ), but I must say… I fix a lot of setup positions. I don't save out the images from all of my lessons. In fact, only a small percentage of the time do I feel I've done something I want to CC to myself for various reasons. But of those lessons, well, take a look: I'll often tell students: They'll answer "none" or "hardly any" or something like that, and I'll say "Great, you're right! You just have
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Some Compensations Don't Need Attention

This golfer's wrists collapsed like crazy at the top of the backswing. They don't anymore. He also had trouble hitting out at the golf ball at all. The fix? A bit of a two-in-one solution: TURN MORE. The golfer was bending the wrists so much to try to feel that the clubhead was getting near parallel somewhere. Now, he doesn't have to, and yet his arms have gained not only more depth, but more distance and can thus generate more speed as well. I'll often say to pe
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The Right Elbow… Again

Here's the swing sequence (from Analyzr) of a pretty good golfer. He took second place individually at the conference championships a few weeks ago. Here's a larger look at A3 and A4 from DL: Now, if the title of the post didn't totally give it away, a lot of golfers here would be able to spot the flaw here in a heartbeat: the right elbow migrates well around the body and gets a bit trapped on the downswing, resulting in a baby flip, not the best clubface or path control, a
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Small Things, Big Differences

Earlier today I fit a college player and a reasonably good putter with an Edel putter. His putter was a typical blade - the old PING/Cameron/Everyone-Has-a-Version classic blade putter with some heel/toe weighting. He could aim his putter, from about ten feet (bear in mind that the laser reflects back over the same ten feet, doubling the error), to about four inches outside the right edge of the cup. Not great, but not as bad as we've seen from many. His putter had a single, solitary thin l
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    • StuM
      Stage 5 - Time to Get Golfing

      By StuM · Posted

      Quick update. Foot felt better than in forever today.  Came home and did a full treadmill workout,  ok, it was beginner level, slow and virtually no incline, but I did it. For the first time in ages I hit all of my FitBit goals. Only time I felt any discomfort was while on a decline. I feel like I turned a corner, all thanks to my PT guy and some Kinesiology Tape. 😀 let’s hope I do not pay for it tomorrow.
    • StuM
      Stage 5 - Time to Get Golfing

      By StuM · Posted

      Well, I got insanely busy and fell behind on my Evolvr & 5 minute daily practice in less that 2 weeks. I even skipped my 1st week of league, that has never happened.   I need to be more disciplined! Therapist this morning decided to try something new.  He added some kinesiology tape on the foot & ankle.  That was about 8 am.  By 10am I was feeling a whole lot less pain. 😀  
    • StuM
      Stage 5 - Time to Get Golfing

      By StuM · Posted

      Met with the surgeon earlier today and he is happy and does not want to see me again unless I think something is wrong.  He said the pain is normal and will go away in time but cautioned it could be another 6 months or so.  He said he still sees inflammation and that may take another 6 months to go away as well.   He did give me some things to share with PT which should help. Now that I know to expect the inflation to last a while I need to figure out the golf shoes.  Maybe by a duplicate o
    • StuM
      Stage 5 - Time to Get Golfing

      By StuM · Posted

      Short update, still working on getting back into the full swing of golf (pun intended).  I'm now posting to My Swing page and 5-minute daily practice and will post more on the Stack Speed Training thread as that gets going so this thread my not include a lot of "Golf" but I am getting back into it. I have my 1st two golf trips in just over a month, First is Garland Resort then the TST Outing in Ohio and I really hoping my foot is up to a lot of golf.  I have 5 rounds in 7 days and I'm looki
    • StuM
      Stage 5 - Time to Get Golfing

      By StuM · Posted

      I feel I'm moving in the correct direction.  Did a range session a couple days ago and had no pain after that.  I started my Evolvr but will hold off on The Stack until I am more confident I can do "Maximum Effort" swings.  Right now I feel I am swinging somewhat normally but I'm just not confident enough to push it yet. On The Stack, I really wish I had held off ordering a little and gotten the newer blue-tooth enabled measuring device instead of the PRGR Monitor but oh well.  I'll live.
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