Feel v. Video

[TN94z]

I play many shots on feel. When I make a swing change it usually does "feel" different at first and I generally hit the ball a little bad at first. That is expected. I usually give the swing change time to hit some good balls that are solid, etc...Most of the time, even if the swing change itself feels funny, once I hit a couple of good solid shots with it, the "feel" is much better than my solid shots with my old swing. I have some friends that give up quickly and I admit that I have given up quickly on some things in the past. But I have convinced myself that a swing change is a long term goal that will payoff in the end.

As a matter of fact, I am going back and forth right now between Utley's short game and Pelz's short game. Some aspects of Utley's feel better and the same goes with Pelz....not to mention the feel of the way I have been hitting short game shots my whole life. But I will stick it out until I decide which feels more natural to me and then try and get it engrained.

As far as video is concerned, if I had a good camera I would do it all by video. Feel can give you some false readings as I have found in video. When I make my backswing, I feel like I get no further than parallel at the top. Video has proven to me that I was getting past parallel amongst other bad habits. I am the type of person where, if I can see what I am doing on video, I can fix it. I have just never had my swing taped in the past.

[Brakkus]

Depends for me I changed my ball position to get behind the ball as every piece of advice said that.Although after doing this I didn't nail one approach shot from 150-170 in nearly seven months on any course.

I just lost my contact point.Going back to Jim Hardy's book for a refresher I realised that getting behind the ball would happen from about the 5 iron up naturally in my stance as the clubs got longer and now I'm hitting greens again.

My point make a change if it's right and stick with it.If you have an instructor then hopefully he has seen your swing type and advised accordingly.

Myself some of my friends are not at this point scoring much worse than me,I'm averaging 104 at the moment but I know that the shots that I'm starting to pull off will help me play at a much higher level 3 years down the line because I worked on the right technique.

Once the consistency sets in and confidence continues to grow then great shots will become more normal fair and I will make less mistakes and my scores will drop.

[Parker0065]

To answer this question I had to go pretty far back in time. I would say for the first 15 years I played the game I was very dedicated to learning a proper swing technique and sticking to swing changes. Since that time frame I have been making adjustments to my swing based on changes in my body. At 43 I am no where near as flexible as I was at 25, but with proper technique, consistant workouts, and new technology, I can still hit it as far, or farther than I did back then.

It all comes down to confidence in the instruction you are given. I studied Jack Nicklaus and Harvey Penick, and those guy's are about as solid as you can get, so if it felt wierd or wrong coming from them, I stuck with it until it felt right.