Instructional Video Critique Topic

[4zim]

Would love to hear thoughts on this: 

 

[iacas]

That doesn't really rise to the level of "instructional video" but… you're severely limiting the area on which you can hit the ball.

That can work, but… so can other things. And you don't have to toe it in anywhere near that much.

 

[billchao]

I'm oddly pretty good at these despite being complete garbage out of standard bunker lies. I've always played them with the face slightly closed to expose less bounce, but that amount of closure seems excessive.

[GolfLug]

Now that's what I call scooping.. or is it digging? Either way, that's one hooded club head. Reminds me of Pete Cowan's axe drill.

[Ty_Webb]

Monte Scheinblum showed me this shot - I use it now - I find it pretty helpful. I'd be interested to watch a phantom camera film of it just to see what's actually happening to the ball and the club. 

[billchao]

19 hours ago, billchao said:

I'm oddly pretty good at these despite being complete garbage out of standard bunker lies. I've always played them with the face slightly closed to expose less bounce, but that amount of closure seems excessive.

Did I say I was good at this? Apparently it's a different ballgame when you're in a fried egg and you're with the slope instead of against it.

[iacas]

Except for the normal Sean Foley-isms and whatnot, and the pushing of his training aid, this video is pretty good and I've recommended it to a few people already.

Feel free to critique it, though, as I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

[GolfLug]

Got through 30 minutes and was a bit exhausted. Seriously. But that's more on me than the video. The one thought that immediately stands out is that this could easily be three lessons. A lot packed in it. 

I have to say Foley is exceptionally gifted in understanding mechanics and matchup sequences and consequences. IMO he could easily make a mediocre scratch wedge player into a really good one but I am mighty curious about how he would adjust the lesson delivery for a mid handicap or even a high cap. I wonder if it would be mediocre since a lot of this content wouldn't land at all on them.

On a personal note, I'm going to watch this a few times in the next few weeks. I confirms as few things I am doing right (hands, arms)  and a few things I need to rethink (body movement, momentum and finish).

Great post and thanks.

[Ty_Webb]

Thoughts as it goes along.

Sean Foley is short! Grant's pretty tall - I think about 6'4", but Foley barely reaches his shoulder. Obviously completely irrelevant, but it jumped out at me.

I think Grant is a pretty good student. He hears something and then says it back (or demonstrates it back) so Foley can verify that he understands the point.

50 yards and in is not the main thing for amateurs to get better at. Sure it's going to help them, but tee shots and approach shots have a much bigger impact. Those things might be harder to fix than <50 yards, but you're not going to turn a 90s shooter into a 70s shooter by fixing their short game (as a general rule - maybe there's someone out there whose short game is so bad that it takes them from 70s to 90s, but I'd be surprised if there were many of them).

He said Scheffler pushes off his right foot and the GRF is what causes his foot to move forwards. Surely that has to be him dragging his foot forwards with his leg/body? I can't imagine that's how GRF works. 

I like what he said about the easy shot is where the duffs come out and how the harder ones can be played better because you have a built in excuse. My mother has some pretty hefty putting issues. She's fine from 6 feet and out because in her mind it's okay to miss those. She's an absolute mess from a foot away because you "should" make those and she tenses up and can hardly make contact with it. That really resonates with me too. For me the reason is slightly different though. I find when I have a really difficult shot I focus on where I want the ball to go and forget about contact and speed and how I'm swinging it. After I hit the shot I sometimes can't remember hitting it. I hit a good shot and I find myself wondering what it was that I was thinking about to hit that good shot (yip free). The answer is I think nothing or maybe just the target. On the simpler shot from the middle of the fairway to the middle of the green 20 yards away it's much harder to focus on the landing spot because there are several that could work. So I don't think so much about that and instead think about yipping it or duffing it or whatever. My mind is messy sometimes.

I may be all the way wrong about this, but Foley talks about shallowers a lot and much of it makes sense from a shallow shaft plane on the way down perspective. Then he says that standing up is the easiest shallower because the attack angle gets shallower, but isn't that the different kind of shallow from everything else he's said about shallowing? Or is it that really the shallower shaft plane tends to shallow your attack angle and so really they're all talking about attack angle, not shaft plane? And now I have semantic satiation from shallow...

The other thing I'm noticing is he said early on that most people aim right with their pitches. Then he puts a club down that's actually pointing about 5 yards left of the post he's hitting to. Then he puts the other club down pointing well to the right because he wants the draw path. Grant's feet aren't anywhere remotely close to lined up with the club (or the target for that matter). I think Grant's doing that subconsciously to try to get the path to the right, but then he knows that the target is left, so it's making him swing left more, which is the opposite of what they're trying to do. 

I really like what he said about Wesley Bryan. He uses basically a full length swing to hit a 20 yard pitch. He's so good at it too. Ridiculously so, but Foley's like "when you see the super gifted ones, you watch what they can do and enjoy it, but it's not coachable". Such a good point. It feels a little bit like DJ's wrist conditions. He makes it work (very well), and you wouldn't coach it out of him, but you also wouldn't coach it into someone else.

All in all, I liked a lot of what he had to say about reducing the wrist hinge. I definitely need to do that with my pitching. I'm working on the same thing with my chipping. I'm not so sure about the draw path and what not - curious what others think about that. I do feel like my game has similar issues to what Grant described. My wedges if I'm going to miss then it's probably to the right. Occasionally I'll miss left, but that's normally because I'm worried about missing right and overcorrect. 

[JetFan1983]

My first thought is "oh wow, that's the back of the Fazio range at PGA National." Interesting comment about their range balls, which are definitely built for volume and nothing else. I don't have a problem with them at all, but other private courses around here have better range balls. PGA National just gets so many people coming thru there week after week I kinda get why they chose the range balls that they did.

I thought it was a very informative lesson. Like Grant, I'm a solid bunker player... and I understand why now after hearing this. I could definitely use a longer flat spot thru impact for pretty much every shot outside 45 yards.

Grant has complained about his driver in recent videos, and I wish they worked on that some. That would've been cool to see too. 

I remember seeing this vid in my recommended a couple weeks ago, and I just skipped over it. Thanks for sharing and letting us know you thought this was good. I enjoyed observing this lesson. 

Edited August 16 by JetFan1983

[klineka]

7 hours ago, JetFan1983 said:

I remember seeing this vid in my recommended a couple weeks ago, and I just skipped over it. Thanks for sharing and letting us know you thought this was good. 

Same here. Going to give it a watch soon too. 

[iacas]

15 hours ago, GolfLug said:

Got through 30 minutes and was a bit exhausted. Seriously. But that's more on me than the video. The one thought that immediately stands out is that this could easily be three lessons. A lot packed in it.

You probably got the gist of it though.

11 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

I think Grant is a pretty good student. He hears something and then says it back (or demonstrates it back) so Foley can verify that he understands the point.

Good point.

11 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

50 yards and in is not the main thing for amateurs to get better at. Sure it's going to help them, but tee shots and approach shots have a much bigger impact. Those things might be harder to fix than <50 yards, but you're not going to turn a 90s shooter into a 70s shooter by fixing their short game (as a general rule - maybe there's someone out there whose short game is so bad that it takes them from 70s to 90s, but I'd be surprised if there were many of them).

I read something like that in a book once.

11 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

He said Scheffler pushes off his right foot and the GRF is what causes his foot to move forwards. Surely that has to be him dragging his foot forwards with his leg/body? I can't imagine that's how GRF works.

Yeah, I've never really felt Sean's gotten the GRF stuff quite right. Very, very few good golfers push forward with their right foot.

11 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

I may be all the way wrong about this, but Foley talks about shallowers a lot and much of it makes sense from a shallow shaft plane on the way down perspective. Then he says that standing up is the easiest shallower because the attack angle gets shallower, but isn't that the different kind of shallow from everything else he's said about shallowing? Or is it that really the shallower shaft plane tends to shallow your attack angle and so really they're all talking about attack angle, not shaft plane? And now I have semantic satiation from shallow...

I'll admit that my brain zones out for about 80% of what Sean says. 😄 Particularly when he says something about myelin or the Shing-Wei dynasty (I made that up), etc.

[GolfLug]

7 hours ago, iacas said:

I'll admit that my brain zones out for about 80% of what Sean says. 😄 Particularly when he says something about myelin or the Shing-Wei dynasty (I made that up), etc.

Okay, so it's not just me. That's probably why listening to him drained my battery a bit faster. I think his style may prompt some to claim that modern instruction is 'too technical'. FWIW I don't think there is such a thing. I appreciate most of what he said minus some 'isms'. As I posted, this video bookmarked for repeat visits. I find wedge play fascinating in a cerebral/artsy way. 😊

Yes, I not only got the gist but as I mentioned in the rest of my post, some things directly relate to my own wedge play. 

 

[saevel25]

11 hours ago, iacas said:

I read something like that in a book once.

 

 

11 hours ago, iacas said:

I'll admit that my brain zones out for about 80% of what Sean says. 😄 Particularly when he says something about myelin or the Shing-Wei dynasty (I made that up), etc.

Yea, I felt the same way. 

I did find it interesting that the feel might be trying to hit a draw. I believe that Tiger and Scotty talked about the same field when they did a short game video.

Yea, the video was good overall. 

[saevel25]

I found this video interesting. 

I like these TPI videos. I find it interesting how people end up having these unique motions to hit a golf ball because they were never taught how to use their body correctly. 

I never thought about it before. When a person wants to jump, they will lower their arms, and use their arms to propel upward and extend up. If you were asked to do a high jump. You would swing your arms down and the hands go behind you as you squat.  In the golf swing, we raiser our arms up, as we squat into the left leg.  Then we use the jumping motion to accelerate the arms and create a torque (hip rotation). It's kind of the opposite. 

Though the TPI guys still say you push off the back foot. 

[iacas]

7 hours ago, saevel25 said:

Though the TPI guys still say you push off the back foot. 

Yeah, they do say that. I don't love their phrasing there as they know "better." And the TPI videos have been good lately. There's the one with the Spanish woman player that's pretty obvious in what she does badly but it's still good to see the process.

[iacas]

Oh my, no.

• It's a wedge second shot. Your angle into the green doesn't matter.
• You should not be aiming for the "side" of a 30-yard wide fairway to give yourself a better angle to hit your wedge shot. Or almost any shot after that. If the mounds on the left were a pond, or horrible bunkers, sure aim left. But they're not.
• If teeing off from the right side gives you confidence, cool, but the angle changes like 0.5°.

[Ty_Webb]

Yikes! There's so much wrong about that video. The first thing I noticed from the flyover is there is zero chance that stream is 75 yards ahead of the moguls down the right. The creek on the right side over the moguls looks like it might be only 265 or 270. If that's reachable with driver, then left side probably does actually make sense, but it's got nothing to do with the angle into the green. 

I will say I generally see a fade in my mind and if there are trees encroaching on the left, then I'll do everything I can to tee it up as far to the right as possible because I hate that cooped up feeling otherwise, but those trees don't look remotely close to in the way on the video. Maybe there's some kind of camera trickery going on and they're actually more in the way than it seems. 🤷‍♂️

The flag is back right. If it was front right (and the fairway was 70 yards wide), then the left side might be beneficial if it's firm, but you'll hit it closer a lot more often from the right fairway than you will the left rough, so aim it at the middle and go with it (assuming the water actually is 320 anyway). 

I thought the whole video was basically a 4 minute debunked cliche from the 80s.