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Rotary Swing Golf


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I was a member of RotarySwing.com for about 2 years.  I implemented the swing and built it like the site said and went through the "program."  I thought it was good.  But as we all do, we try to learn more and his instruction over the course of 2 years became of a lesser quality than when I first joined.  Now that I know what Alison has said I know why.  It became more of an opinion and less about what the body is supposed to do.  Before I read all of Alison's posts on CQ taking her stuff I stopped my membership.  When he first "started" the Rotary Swing Tour his instruction was pretty good, but now it is very flawed.  Just like any "method" you can choose camera angles, draw lines and show video to make your point.  He didn't do this at first.  Now it's all over his website.

This isn't intended to be a RotarySwing bashing post, just what I have experienced and my review of it.

In summary,  I thought it WAS good, now just a bunch of thrown together swing thoughts, not a system.

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  • 1 month later...

Hey everyone, I am a new member to this site and wanted to share my 10 cents on Rotary swing tour.

I have been a member of Rotary swing tour for about a year and a half. I have taken 20+ lessons in person from other PGA pro's prior. My thoughts are this, Rotary swing tour is great for me. I could not be happier with my progress and there are many issues I have resolved in my swing in the last year that I could not fix in the past working with a pga pro. I find it simple to learn and I really cant believe that someone could get worse if they work on parts of the swing they are instructed to work on by the coaches at RST.

The website is what you make of it. The videos are laid out in order so there is a system from the very basics to start with to the more advanced items at the end. You get two swing reviews every month for 20 bucks and have been happy with every one.

I started at a 7 handicap and dropped down to a 5 now and have increased my swing speed by 8 mph on average.

So long story short, it has helped me but it is what you make out of it. If you do exactly what they tell you to do you will get better.

If you have a question you post it in the forum and you always get a quick response.

Those are my 10 cents on Rotary Swing Tour. I think its worth it if you can be disciplined enough to work on your own.

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I have experience with instruction under Rotary Swing.  It was not positive.

I was a 20 handicap player when I found the Rotary Swing website.  Like many amateurs I had hit the limits of my swing.  I am athletic yet I don't understand how to correctly hit a golf ball.  I've read a lot of golf swing theory and have tried different swing methods to little success.  I suffer from consistency and distance problems.  Every now and then I was able to hit solid compressed shots but that was the exception and not the norm.  Naturally the Rotary Swing marketing appealed to me.  Simple instruction that promised how to gain effortless power by lagging the golf club and releasing that energy through the ball.  Sounds perfect!

I live in Tampa so I scheduled a lesson with Clay out of Orlando who is Chuck's protege instructor.  During the first lesson Clay taught me that my swing was too body orientated.  He instructed me to swing more with my arms from the top, actively crossing my right arm over my left through impact (I'm right handed) while keeping my shoulders closed to the target.  Of course this felt extremely weak to me.  It was a weak arm flip but Clay was insistent that this was a major factor contributing to my inaccuracy and lack of swing speed.  Clay assured me that I had the fundamentals and athleticism to be a scratch golfer and that I should be able to pick up this new swing change in no time.  I spent 2 weeks practicing this new armsy downswing.  Of course I got progressively worse.  At my second lesson with Clay I explained that I was practicing the moves he instructed but I was getting much worse.  He assured me the moves were correct and that every professional golfer did them.  He said all I needed to do was continue to practice them and I'd get better.  And of course another month of practice left me significantly worse.

Now, I understand that when someone is learning new movements in the golf swing it is natural that it takes a little time to adjust.  But after 45 days I would expect some measure of progress.  So, at this time I wrote off Rotary Swing and Clay's instruction.  Clay had posted video to You Tube of one of my lessons has a student testimonial to the wonders of Rotary Swing instruction.  I then posted a comment stating that I was the student in that video and contrary to Clay's commentary I had gotten worse and not better.  Clay responded shortly afterward stating his instruction was still correct and the problem was that I didn't have more feedback regarding my practice.  He said 2 weeks to a month between instruction wasn't enough and that I needed daily feedback.  He then advocated the Rotary Swing's new online learning group.  For a nominal monthly fee I could post video of my swing and get feedback from Clay directly on a daily basis.  At first I didn't think it was a good idea.  The instruction I had received to that point hadn't helped me and I really didn't think it had anything to do with my practice.  A few emails back and forth allowed Clay to be insistent that he would improve my swing in a months time.  He sold me on the idea that his system can truly teach me how to effortlessly hit a golf ball.  He's a good salesman.

So, I spent the next nearly 2 months following his instruction via the online learning group.  This instruction consisted of me posting video, Clay taking still snapshots from my video and comparing it to a pro (normally Tiger Woods).  Clay would then instruct that I need to look like the pro.  This was the entirety of the instruction.  Trying to mimic static positions of professional golfers.  There was little to no instruction on how to actually move to get into those positions.  Every day that this went on my golf swing became worse.  It became disconnected, mechanical, nonathletic, and slow.  Of course, when Clay asked me how it was going I would tell him the truth.  He didn't want to hear this but he's very polished and didn't lose his cool.  Every time I told him I was getting worse he'd find a different part of my swing that needed to look more like Tiger's or that I needed to give it more time.  We constantly changed direction from downswing, to transition, to takeaway erratically.  Clay had no plan of instruction, only reacting to my unhappiness at getting worse and worse.  At the end I was unable to hit a golf ball at all.  I went from a decent weekend golfer with a 20 handicap to someone who couldn't beat the ball around a golf course under 120 strokes.  My friends were astonished at the transformation.  At that point I asked Clay how this could have happened.  The cracks in Clay's salesmanship veneer started to appear at this point.  He tried the old tactic of pointing out other things in my swing that needed to look more like Tiger Woods or Adam Scott or whichever pro he favored at the moment.  And then he stated that he couldn't make me better, he could only give me instruction, only I could make myself better.  Please keep in mind I had done nothing but follow his instruction and post videos daily to his learning group for the past 2 months.  I asked Clay point blank, is there anything else in your instruction beyond comparing snapshots of my swing to a pro?  He answered in the negative and that was the end of my instruction.

Afterward I went to the student You Tube video he still has posted to review my old comment and noticed it had been removed.  So I just posted another comment of my experience with Rotary Swing.  This is just my experience and I'm sharing it knowing that someone out there has probably benefited from Rotary Swing (or thinks they have).  For me it was a huge waste of time, energy, and money.

cohenmichaela,

Are you still struggling with there instruction currently? I have been a member for awhile and I know what its like to struggle with your swing. I feel for you.

I have had positive results personly on there website and I might be able to help you out as I am well informed on all there videos and methodology. Perhaps if you are struggling with a certain aspect of your swing you can describe it and possibly the group here including myself could be of great help.

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Hey everyone, I am a new member to this site and wanted to share my 10 cents on Rotary swing tour.

Local rule is you're only allowed to give your 2 cents as a new member. After 100 posts you can give 10 cents. After that it goes up incrementally. @iacas and @mvmac have been known to give a whole buck fifty but that's because they are well qualified.

;-)

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

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Local rule is you're only allowed to give your 2 cents as a new member. After 100 posts you can give 10 cents. After that it goes up incrementally. @iacas and @mvmac have been known to give a whole buck fifty but that's because they are well qualified.

Is that Canadian or US?

@Mwferguson I'm glad Rotary works for you. Done properly, that swing produces all 5 Simple Keys®. :-)

Erik J. Barzeski —  I knock a ball. It goes in a gopher hole. 🏌🏼‍♂️
Director of Instruction Golf Evolution • Owner, The Sand Trap .com • AuthorLowest Score Wins
Golf Digest "Best Young Teachers in America" 2016-17 & "Best in State" 2017-20 • WNY Section PGA Teacher of the Year 2019 :edel: :true_linkswear:

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The most annoying thing about the Rotary Swing is the bate-and-switch that goes on with their YouTube videos. They advertise all these "great drills" for various things (creating lag, compression, fixing a slice)...so you watch the 3-4 minute video from "The Lag Doctor" mumbling in some backwards accent, leading all the way up to the drill AAANNNNDDDD.....you're lead to a pay site if you want to actually SEE the drill. I'm glad I read this thread before I fell for their scam and paid for anything.

To the people/coaches/pros who post their expert advise on here for free, with no B.S., I can't thank you enough.

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The most annoying thing about the Rotary Swing is the bate-and-switch that goes on with their YouTube videos. They advertise all these "great drills" for various things (creating lag, compression, fixing a slice)...so you watch the 3-4 minute video from "The Lag Doctor" mumbling in some backwards accent, leading all the way up to the drill AAANNNNDDDD.....you're lead to a pay site if you want to actually SEE the drill. I'm glad I read this thread before I fell for their scam and paid for anything.

To the people/coaches/pros who post their expert advise on here for free, with no B.S., I can't thank you enough.

I like guys that provide free drill videos ;-)

http://purestrike5sk.com/videos.php

Mike McLoughlin

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The 5SK drills page is great.

The free Rotary Swing drills though aren't normally bait & switch from what I've seen; they give you a good chunk of information on problems, fixes for the problem and drills to get you started with sorting it out. Often the video finishes there with no sales pitch. Sometimes there's a section at the end of the video they say "if you struggle with X problem I also recommend these subscriber videos" which you'd expect from most free information on the web (not all clearly!).

Having said the above though I personally didn't get on well with the Rotary swing so I stopped my membership after a couple of months.

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Local rule is you're only allowed to give your 2 cents as a new member. After 100 posts you can give 10 cents. After that it goes up incrementally. @iacas and @mvmac have been known to give a whole buck fifty but that's because they are well qualified.

Thanks for setting me straight Ernest. What was I thinking? 10 cents? ridiculous! haha.

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  • 3 weeks later...

mwferguson,

My golf swing is actually much better now.  Although Rotary Swing pushed me to the edge of quitting I've since made significant progress and am now hitting the ball much better.  My ball striking has greatly improved in all areas.  Yardage is now back to where it should be and is sometimes even impressive (7-iron varies between 165 - 175 yards).  Most important is the reduction in mishits.  I'm only mishitting the ball maybe 10 percent of the time and trajectory is relatively tight so when I miss the fairway it's not by much.

I watched every video that was available with Rotary Swing during the time I was a member.  I believe I understood them well enough.  In addition I attended in person instruction with Clay and was part of his online instruction group for awhile.  I seriously doubt there was any misunderstanding between us regarding the videos or the instruction.  Contrary to Clay's guarantees it just didn't work.

As I previously mentioned, I live in Tampa so I've been working with Matt Mitchell who is a certified PGA professional at Tampa Downs.  His teaching is completely opposite to the instruction I received from Clay at Rotary Swing.  Clay teaches very mechanical and static positions mimicking stills of pros.  Matt teaches dynamic movements and how to swing a golf club.  Again, I'm not saying people can't be successful with Rotary Swing instruction.  However, if you're like me and had problems moving through the ball Rotary Swing was certainly not the answer.  And even when things kept getting worse Clay refused to pivot and change directions.  Instead he doubled down with the same instruction which progressively made things worse.  It was like a cult with those guys regarding actively lagging and releasing the right arm.  I don't think about lag and release anymore.  It just happens as a result of proper positioning at the top and correct body movement through the downswing.

I am no expert of the golf swing but I do know that my best swings happen when my small muscles (arms and hands) are passive and my big muscles (body/core/legs) do all of the work.  I believe this is why Rotary Swing is such a failure.  Regardless of its marketing it teaches the opposite.

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  • 2 months later...
Who cares if you think you discovered it. You obviously didn't patent it. Sounds like you and Chuck had a business difference and he went and did his own thing. I belong to his website and will soon be a certified RST instructor. After reviewing your website vs his your not even in the same ball park. Good luck. Oh and by the way using him as your front man because people won't listen to you because your a woman....really? That's weak!!! I know lots of woman Pros that don't have that issue.
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Who cares if you think you discovered it. You obviously didn't patent it. Sounds like you and Chuck had a business difference and he went and did his own thing. I belong to his website and will soon be a certified RST instructor. After reviewing your website vs his your not even in the same ball park. Good luck. Oh and by the way using him as your front man because people won't listen to you because your a woman....really? That's weak!!! I know lots of woman Pros that don't have that issue.

Forums have a "quote" feature. Please use it. Otherwise, as above, nobody has a clue who you're talking about or responding to.

And please don't make three posts in a row - just edit your previous post.

Erik J. Barzeski —  I knock a ball. It goes in a gopher hole. 🏌🏼‍♂️
Director of Instruction Golf Evolution • Owner, The Sand Trap .com • AuthorLowest Score Wins
Golf Digest "Best Young Teachers in America" 2016-17 & "Best in State" 2017-20 • WNY Section PGA Teacher of the Year 2019 :edel: :true_linkswear:

Check Out: New Topics | TST Blog | Golf Terms | Instructional Content | Analyzr | LSW | Instructional Droplets

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WTH is your problem dood?-If youre trying to promote Rotary Swing youre doing a bang-up job of it. Literally.[quote name="Dean Greene" url="/t/47209/rotary-swing-golf/54#post_970735"]Who cares if you did. Stop you idiot posts:-([/quote]

"The expert golfer has maximum time to make minimal compensations. The poorer player has minimal time to make maximum compensations." - And no, I'm not Mac. Please do not PM me about it. I just think he is a crazy MFer and we could all use a little more crazy sometimes.

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Note: This thread is 1921 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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