My Swing (billchao)

[billchao]

Went back out after dinner and did a Mevo+ session. I deleted two shots I thinned badly. I probably should have deleted the 195yd shot, too.

• AoA looks like an issue. There are a few positive AoA swings. That means I hit them slightly fat, I think. I certainly didn't hit them thin.
• FTP is definitely an issue. I play a push so the three pulls, while being well-hit, would not be good results on the course.
• Club Path is good, I think? It's within a 5° range.

I just like hitting golf balls and generating loads of data.

[billchao]

Practiced a little today. Focused on AoA. Went fairly well. Also I think the shots where I randomly hit the ball with 5°R FTP are just toed.

[billchao]

 

Starting to put everything together. I’m surprised I toed the DTL shot. I tend to miss towards the heel when I add the sit piece.

[iacas]

3 hours ago, billchao said:

I’m surprised I toed the DTL shot.

I was just going to say that. 😄

[billchao]

52 minutes ago, iacas said:

I was just going to say that. 😄

Yea I didn’t hit many on the toe today. It’s just coincidence that I caught one of them on video.

Got the club head or the trail elbow a little behind me I think?

[iacas]

Yeah it gets trapped a bit. It could probably flex sooner, so it can extend during the early downswing instead of "tucking."

[billchao]

Last practice before my first round on Sunday. It’s going to be wet.

 

I think I overdid the sit stuff last time and low point was inconsistent, so I backed off of that. Added the right elbow folding earlier, so basically the backswing is just turn and fold.

Downswing is simply, “hit the stupid ball.” I think I get too caught up trying to make swings and forgetting the point is to hit the ball in the first place, so I really just want to focus on making the club hit the ball and not simply letting the ball get in the way of my swing. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I struck it really well today.

FTP is a bit of an issue but the grouping was good (granted it was 10 shots). Might have close the face slightly at address or something, or just play the push-fade if I’m not going to miss left at all.

[billchao]

 

Alright I think I'm starting to remember how to swing a golf club now. Right elbow high in the backswing and hands away from the target in transition.

[billchao]

Teaser pic:

[billchao]

Long post warning... I've been kind of putting it off because I didn't want to do a quick update after the Erie trip with @boogielicious. A short post wouldn't have done it justice.

Spoiler

I'm going to keep my personal feels behind spoilers, in part to make them easier to find again and also because they're mine and not necessarily useful to other people.

I arrived on Saturday, 4/30 and got introduced to GEARS. @iacas showed us a lot of what GEARS can do and what information it provides. It was all very interesting to a golf geek, but definitely way more information than a typical golf student would need to know or see during a lesson. I suited up afterwards and we recorded my swing:

So right off the bat I can see that I'm getting the club across the line. It's something that always creeps back as an issue in my swing that Erik and I have definitely worked on in the past (this is my shortcoming as a student, and it will come up again later). We didn't do any instructional work because we had an outing the following day:

It turned out to be an interesting one. Conditions were poor and none of us had played much prior to the event. I tried to just enjoy it, but the golf was ugly. Erik gave me a tip to keep my swing short which I'm certain I failed miserably on. My short game was terrible and I kept hitting the ball fat, which was disastrous given how soft the turf was. I putt well, though I didn't make any long putts. I did end up breaking even on the side bets by winning two skins. I would have been happy to donate anyway. I really enjoy doing these TST outings.

On Monday we started working on my swing. Erik came up with four points for me. The first thing we did was alter my setup. I was a little too far away from the ball and too bent over (50° or so). We were looking for something around 60° I think, as that was about my spine angle at impact. This turned out to be easy to do with GEARS because I was able to get in address position and just look at the monitor to see what my spine angle was and adjust if necessary. Once I got into the correct position, I just learned how that position felt to me and could replicate it.

Blue is before, Yellow is after. We also moved my ball position forward by almost a full ball.

Spoiler

It feels more like I'm leaning forward than bending. The forward part is important because I need to make sure that my weight doesn't get into my heels for balance reasons. It's tied into the fourth point.

The second point had to do with my hips and how much I turned. I don't remember exactly how it went, but we tried a few things and kind of moved off of this point very quickly (in fact I forgot this was a point until reviewing my notes to write this post). In the end we found that I could maintain good hip slants by keeping my knees soft at address and if I turned too much in the backswing it was kind of ok since I also turn too much in the downswing. Essentially too much hip turn wasn't hurting my swing and trying to alter that did some other funky things to it, so we kind of just left this as "soft knees" and moved on.

Spoiler

At the time, I was getting too stiff-legged in the upright posture so the feel required softer knees. I've since found that the leaning forward feel takes care of the knees automatically.

The third point was the hardest one for me. This was the piece to eliminate the club getting across the line and all the chaos that happens as a result of it. The object was to get the club laid off and the line of extension coming out of the butt of the club pointing somewhere along the target line. We tried a bunch of different feels and I remember really struggling to find one that worked. We settled on something in the morning session and I spent most of the day practicing it only to have to tweak it again during the afternoon session. It may have taken all day, but I finally found a feel for it.

Spoiler

No wrist cock or hinging feeling in the backswing. Jon Rahm feel. Rotate the forearms early and hard throughout the swing, feels like the club is horizontal at A4.

This feel is particularly important for me because we observed on GEARS that when I felt active hinging it caused me to hinge too much and in the wrong direction. I'd get like 85° of forearm to clubshaft angle in the backswing to 70° or something in transition. Passive hinging resulted in a much more palatable 100° to ~90°.

The wrists hinging across the line has always been an issue in my swing and it's only just occurred to me that it might be due to the way my boxer's fracture healed in my right hand. It limits my mobility in my right wrist and I can't extend it as far as I am able to with my left hand. Trying to hinge beyond a certain point causes my right hand to radial deviate and rotate slightly which is movement along a different plane. This kind of stuff fascinates me.

 

You can really see the difference in the top view.

Tuesday was the final day of instruction. We started the morning off by going over the previous day's work. The first swing on GEARS of the day produced the strike in the previous post and we joked that we were done, time to go home. We were pretty comfortable with where I was in regards to the backswing piece, so we moved onto the downswing piece. Erik showed me how I turned and kept my right hip high instead of it drop a little in transition. Then he asked me how I would make that happen and fortunately I knew the answer because I had this lesson before 

But seriously, I got it on the first swing. Erik taught me this one already. Twice. I knew what I needed to do, but just stopped doing it after a while for whatever reason. Never said I was a good student, but will openly admit to being rather dense.

 

These two captures are from different points in the swing, but you can see the pelvic trace on them. Notice on the top swing (before), I've moved towards the ball 0.6" and will continue to move even more towards the ball at impact. Bottom swing is impact and I've actually moved away from the ball 0.2", which is basically nothing.

Here you can see in the old swing I moved 1.3" towards the ball at impact.

Spoiler

Feel here is right knee bends and right hamstring flexes while left glute pulls back away in the 8 o'clock direction (if my left foot and right are 9 and 3, respectively) away from the ball and breaks "through the wall."

I went off to practice on my own after the morning session and was hitting the ball really well. At some point during the day, we did some short game stuff. There wasn't a lot for me mechanically, but my setup wasn't right. I was keeping my weight forward by pushing my hips forward and creating a lot of axis tilt (which I'm guessing is why I kept hitting fat on pitch shots). Erik showed me to set up with my left leg more vertical and dipping my right shoulder more, which gets my weight forward and also opens my hips slightly. I also did a little putting practice through the three days but most of it was just to get the rust off. I've been putting pretty well since my mechanical changes from last year.

In the afternoon we got on GEARS with driver. For me it was mostly the same stuff as my iron swing, with one additional move: throw the clubhead more. We didn't spend too much time on this because adding this additional piece caused me to lose the previous ones and they're the most important for now. Plus, it's kind of just flipping at it, which I can manage to add down the road.

You can see the difference in the swings from adding the additional driver piece here. Blue has too much shaft lean and hands are too far ahead of the ball at impact. Clubface control was better with it, too, but even without it my driver should be much more manageable.

The weather wasn't great the first week back and I was dealing with a minor injury, so I only practiced mapping and mirror work. I did hit some balls a couple of times this past week, including a rare driving range appearance yesterday:

 

Wind was blowing from my left so it exaggerated the left to right movement. I was hitting some pulls, though. I wasn't pulling the ball in Erie. Might have gotten the ball position a little too far forward. I think these look pretty good for the most part.

[iacas]

20 minutes ago, billchao said:

I arrived on Saturday, 4/30 and got introduced to GEARS. @iacas showed us a lot of what GEARS can do and what information it provides. It was all very interesting to a golf geek, but definitely way more information than a typical golf student would need to know or see during a lesson. I suited up afterwards and we recorded my swing:

FWIW I only did this to show them both all the things they could see. I wouldn't do this with a normal student, just these two (and a few others) in case they ever remembered something they wanted to see.

---

The swings at the end looked quite different.

As for the pulls… watch the left wrist arching a bit too much and/or the club tipping out because it's a bit too laid off and begins to steepen ever so slightly in transition. You can see that a bit more with the driver than the iron. Ideally it's still almost "laying off" a little the whole backswing.

Note (Bill knows this, but to others): we don't actually want Bill to be laid off. We just want him to not be so far across the line, and right now, it feels like it's almost horizontal (from DL view) and pointing well outside the ball/target line at the top.

[billchao]

9 hours ago, iacas said:

As for the pulls… watch the left wrist arching a bit too much and/or the club tipping out because it's a bit too laid off and begins to steepen ever so slightly in transition. You can see that a bit more with the driver than the iron. Ideally it's still almost "laying off" a little the whole backswing.

I’ll keep an eye on it. It’s just doing it a little bit less? Or at a slower rate?

[iacas]

2 hours ago, billchao said:

I’ll keep an eye on it. It’s just doing it a little bit less? Or at a slower rate?

At a slower rate. You can see in the swings that it starts to steepen late in the BS.

[billchao]

 

Haven't been able to practice as much as I'd like, but I did get about 40 minutes in today. It's looking pretty good, I think. In the past, I'd be searching for new feels this far removed from my lessons because the ones that were working then no longer worked, but I'm still doing the same feels as I had in Erie. I'm doing it at speed and I think I'm overdoing the laying off the club bit and it's tipping out in transition. I think that's a good sign. I'll work on laying it off slower next time and see how that goes.

I did play on Sunday with the new feels for the first time and played better than I've been playing so far this year. Still not scoring really well, but part of that is adjusting to different misses. And hitting my irons too far now that I'm making centered contact 😜

Have to watch my aim on the course again. I'm so used to pushing the ball I think some of my "pulls" on Sunday were actually just straight shots and aimed too far left. I hit the ball well overall. Pretty excited for this season.

Can't do the throwing thing with the driver, though. Tried that on the course, it wasn't good. Definitely not ready for another piece.

[billchao]

So after a brief discussion with @iacas confirmed that I was indeed laying the club off too much and bowing my left wrist slightly, I altered the feel today. Instead of really exaggerating the club feeling horizontal in the backswing, I did it so that the club felt parallel to my shoulders. With being bent over in a golf position, the shaft extension line points on the target line instead of outside it. That was always the end goal, but apparently I have to practice doing that as the swing feel instead of the exaggerated one.

 

These look better I think. Might still have to exaggerate more with the driver, but I'd have to get that on video to find out.

[iacas]

That looks better.

Yeah, you just got so good at the exaggeration it was getting to be too much. 😄

[billchao]

Trying to practice more. I'm starting to hit really good shots on the course so I'm seeing what I can do when the swing is working correctly. Unfortunately, I'm also hitting some really awful misses (topped balls and fat - really fat - shots) and I want to figure that out. Didn't hit any misses on Monday when I practiced so nothing learned then. Today I definitely did, even at slower speeds.

 

Yea, I know I'm not exactly wearing the best outfit for swing analysis. I hadn't intend to post these swings originally. My original thought from playing on Sunday was that I might be overdoing the knee/squat thing, but looking at the video, it looks like I'm just leaving my arms up in the downswing and then having to steepen the shaft late. It's kind of like the opposite of what I was doing before Erie?

I wanted to see what it would look like if I brought the arms down earlier so I made some swings with the throwing the hands out feel from last year. That ended up like this:

 

But I can't do that and the knee thing at the same time. I think at some point these two swings have to come together, but for now I have to go with the one that I hit the ball solidly more consistently with. I don't know if that's the second swing feel to be honest - I only hit four balls with that feel.

[boogielicious]

The second DTL swing looked better, less OTT. I find it hard to practice with two pieces at the same time. So I work on priority 1 first, then add 2 after a number of swings with 1, etc.