nachosgrande

Reviving this thread for 2014. One of the most important feel tips I've ever read. This one tip immediately got my arms/hands in sync with my chest/body and eliminated the two-way block/flip miss. I've struggled with sucking the club back behind my body for almost 20 years and no instructor was ever able to give me a feel tip that was simple enough to consistently repeat...until now. Golf is a much easier game to play when you are swinging on plane. Thank you so much for this nugget.

Just play a Par 54 course. Seriously, I started playing golf at 12 and shot a 74 when I was 14. That summer I posted a lot of rounds in the mid and upper-70s. I never worked on the range. I just played every day. I was self taught up to that point and my parents paid for me to have lessons that winter to take my game to the next level. Swing changes ruined my ball striking and I spent the majority of my high school golf career doing my best to avoid hooking it off the course. I no longer shot in the 70s and was more of a mid-80s player. Senior year I found my swing and got back to the point where I was regularly posting scores in the mid/low 70s from the tips at tougher courses. Biggest improvement was I became fairly automatic with my wedges from about 50-115 yards. I've always been a terrible short game player, so the key for me breaking 80 is ball striking and greens in regulation. If I happened to have the rare good putting day, I could shoot in the low 70s. My advice is to do whatever it takes to keep the ball in the fairway off the tee and then play the most conservative approach possible if you are outside of 160 yards. Do those things and you will regularly break 80.

Shot a 73 on a Par 71 layout yesterday. Was at even until I spun one off the green and into the drink on 17. I don't have a handicap, though I'd say it would likely be in the high teens prior to yesterday's round. Four previous rounds were all in the 91-95 range, and I hadn't broken 80 since June 2012. I'd been having a terrible time for years with pulls and pull hooks, and gone down a slew of roads to alleviate the problem. After pull-hooking my opening tee shot (and scrambling for par), I went to the second tee with the thought of getting to "pitch elbow" on the downswing. I'm not even sure why I thought of it to be honest. I was so hung up on getting in the correct backswing positions for the longest time, I figured I would just mentally focus on the downswing and impact zone. For the first time in forever, I hit a long pure power fade. I carried that thought throughout the round and I struck it more crisply with my woods and irons than I probably have in the last 15 years. Power fade with the woods and a penetrating baby draw with the irons. Didn't focus much on the backswing at all, other than the thought of getting to a nice spot in which to slot the club to pitch elbow on the downswing. And once I got into the slot, I just threw my right hand and left side at the ball with everything I had. Felt great to be able to fully release like that without the fear of hooking the ball. Really hoping this is more than a one day fix, as I had almost given up on ever playing good golf again.

Shot an 87 yesterday on a par-73. 4 doubles and a triple. Other than those holes, I played ok. My course management needs a lot of work. I'm just not thinking my way around the golf course right now, and my misses (constantly short-siding myself, fairway bunkers, etc.) are turning par/bogey holes into double/triple holes. For instance, hitting driver on a 325 yard hole and driving it into a grove of trees next to the green instead of just playing something to 250 in the middle of the fairway. Took me three shots to chip my way out of the trees and on to the green. Turned a good birdie opportunity into a 6.

1) non-ready golf guy 2) crappy multiple practice swing guy - the one who spends three minutes taking one smooth practice swing after another. then he finally addresses his ball and hacks at it like Charles Barkley 3) club thrower/smasher guy - it's just embarrassing and unbecoming of a golfer. it's all the worse when this is a crap golfer, which it usually is. 4) patronizing guy - played with a guy that would clap and hoot and holler whenever a woman golfer would hit the ball in the air. 5) ball searcher guy - the guy who spends 10 minutes looking for balls whenever you come across a hazard...and I'm not talking about looking for his own lost ball...just others to fill up his bag. I enjoy playing with pretty much everyone else.

It's not all about the long ball or accuracy...it's about both. You remove either from the equation and you can kiss a good score goodbye on a reasonably long course (say, 6700+). As for distance...I had been struggling with my driver so I had started to just play my 3H off the tee of late. I can carry it about 230-240 off the tee and it keeps me in play but it wasn't allowing for many quality birdie looks. Had a eureka moment two weeks ago with regards to my driver setup and managed to get it all straightened out in two range sessions. Played yesterday and birdied three par 5s. It's a lot easier to score when you can hit driver/6-iron into a 510 yard par 5 for a look at eagle.

Shot a 74 (+4) from the whites when I was about 14 or 15. Shot 75 (+3) from the tips three or four times during my senior year of high school. For nine holes, I've shot a handful of 34s. Usually followed by a 42-45. I generally gave up golf when I entered college, so I've only broken 80 three times in the last fifteen years. And all three of those occurred on easy courses.

1) Webb Simpson - 276 2) Lee Westwood - 277 3) Tiger Woods - 278

So after 20 years, I've finally bit the bullet and hooked up with a golf instructor. The progress I've made during two months of lessons is unbelievable compared to the progress I made on my own during those 20 futile years. Obviously, I'm working on a bunch of things simultaneously, but here's the two I've worked on most recently: 1) Working on removing all extraneous independent hand and wrist movements from my putting stroke. I just discovered that I'm way handsier than I realized with the putter. I've started staring only at my hands (not the ball) to make sure that they don't break at all during the putting stroke. It forces me to initiate my putting motion with a movement of the shoulders and it has been working wonders for keeping my putting stroke on line. 2) I've recently ingrained a proper one-piece takeaway (I used to be an insider yanker) and now I'm working at developing a feel for the proper moment to begin the upward move with the right arm to the top. I struggle with delaying it and allowing the club to swing back inside, which gets me laid off at the top and leads to a nasty hook. I'm doing a lot of mirror work at night and have been playing around with a Medicus iron at the range. My goal for this season is to break 80 more often than not. My longer term goal is to shoot even par for 18 holes from the blue tees. My previous best round was 2-over. That was 19 years ago, so I figure that I'm due at this point. :)

Sorry to dig up such old thread, but I thought I'd share my two cents since I recently bought the M85T. I have the 9.5 and adjusted the face 2 degrees open. I'm not one to make ridiculous claims, but this thing is absolutely huge. And I'm not lying when I say that this added a good 15 yards to my drives. My spin rates were really solid (right around 2300) with this compared to clubs like the R11, Ping I15, Adams Speedline, etc. I'm hitting a very consistent high draw ball flight and the ball just seems to fly for days off of this thing. A good drive for me with my R5 was in the 270-285 range and I'm hitting this thing 285-300. It might be the lighter shaft (60g vs. 83g) or the "cupface" technology? Whatever it is, I love this club and the results I'm seeing on the course. I picked this thing up for $79.99, and at that price, it's the steal of the century. Also, as an fyi, one of the quotes above about the adjustable face is actually incorrect. When you set the club open, the loft effectively decreases (not increases). So with my 9.5 set open, it plays more like an 8 deg.

Played a course for the first time on Saturday and shot 104. Course had lots of blind tee shots, elevation changes, and multi-tiered greens, so I wasn't expecting to score all that well, but to go from 78 and 79 in my prior two rounds to 104 was humbling to say the least. As you can imagine it was a complete meltdown - OB on seemingly every tee shot, chunked chips/sand shots, a shank, 4 4-putts, terrible decision-making, etc. I even threw in two quads and a hextuple-bogey. Oddly enough, I was actually striking my irons really well. Hit 3 par-3s in regulation and the other was just off the green from 200. I hadn't shot a 100+ round since I was about 12 or 13 years old. Almost bad enough to make me want to quit golf altogether. Yuck.

Sadly, I encountered tons of cheating at the junior and high school levels. Our opponents would frequently try to cut stroke shaving "deals" with my playing partner and I before teeing off. These were guys who were always in the newspaper basically "playing" to scratch during the season. Then come sectionals (with a monitor/scorekeeper), they'd typically blow-up and shoot an 85. I had a childhood friend that ended up becoming a teaching pro that would literally use the old hole in the pants pocket trick when he'd hit a shot in the trees/ob. The funniest thing we caught him doing is when he sped ahead in his cart and switched my drive with his. My drive was about 25 yards further but it was on a pretty steep downhill lie, whereas the ball he hit left him with a flat lie. Anyways, he refuses to admit that he switched the balls, so my Dad (who caught him in the act) and I just eventually let it slide. I put my shot safely on the green from the better lie and he pull hooks his into the next tee box.

I saw this happen to my wife a few years back at the East Potomac Park golf course in DC. She hits a nice drive down the middle of the fairway and as we are approaching her shot a fox runs out, stands over her ball, looks right at her, then bends down, snags the ball and runs off into the right rough. My wife starts chasing it, screaming, and wildly swinging her club. Fox finally drops it into a hole in the ground and darts away. When we get to the spot we find a hole with about a dozen golf balls in it. :)

My father always just told me to hit it as hard as I could. A good way to help him develop a feel for solid contact might be to spend more time hitting chip or pitch shots. Once he gets a good feel for those it should start to translate to his full swings on the range. Also, if you want to go the instruction route at some point you might want to look into the First Tee program in your area ( I think they start at age 7). Cheap (or free) instruction and it will be fun for him since he'll be around other kids his age. I know some folks whose little ones participate and they love it. Looks like there's one based in Modesto. http://www.thefirstteecentralvalley.org/Club/Scripts/Home/home.asp And like others have said...just keep it fun.

Thanks, Iacas. Yeah, I shot the video before reading the camera/video FAQ, so I'll hopefully have some better down-the-line footage in my next upload. I'll try working on the wrist hinge at my next range session. I've just really started to focus on correcting the fanning wrist motion - it's really deeply ingrained from my junior golf days. :) Anyone have any opinions on my impact positions? I feel like I'm maybe pulling my hips away from the ball to create "space" instead of just turning/firing through the hitting zone. Any tips for getting this all in synch?

Hello, This is the first time I've ever experimented with video - and therefore the first time I've ever seen my swing (and it's faults)! I'm self-taught and just getting back into golf after about 14 years away from the game. Since taking the game back up in April, I've managed to get my scores down from bogey golf into the high-70's but I need to get my ball striking consistent if I'm going to get down into the mid-to-low single digits. When I feel like I'm swinging well, my stock iron shot is a slight draw or straight ball with a mid trajectory. I manipulate my setup to play a controlled fade with my driver. As for equipment - I've been playing tommy armour 845m musclebacks with TT S300 shafts. Anyway, I've uploaded DTL and caddie view videos of me hitting iron shots. I started off hitting solid/high slight pulls which during the course of the practice session devolved into a parade of disastrous smother hooks. From what I can tell, my swing plane looks ok, but I have this downward driving move at the beginning of my downswing with a lot of extra head movement. I also have a feeling of running out of space or getting stuck on the downswing. Is this related to my takeaway being too flat/inside? As you can probably tell, I also fight rolling the hands open at the beginning of the backswing (any fixes for that?) and was experimenting with the Joe Dante early wrist hinge in an effort to keep the club square. Any feedback or tips would be very much welcomed and appreciated. Thanks! Swing Academy - down the line Swing Academy - caddie view

You'd be surprised how far some amateurs hit the ball. I'm a smaller guy 5'7", 150#s, and when I played high school golf I legitimately averaged 280 yards off the tee (which includes some mediocre hits in the 250 range and some rockets in the 290-310 range. I think my swing speed was clocked around 117 back then. Point being, I wasn't nearly the longest hitter in the conference I played in. There were plenty of guys who were longer than me, including a guy who was physically smaller but averaged over 300 yards off the tee. This guy had the most insane swing speed I've ever seen. My father and uncle, both considerably larger than me, were real long ball hitters back in the day. I've seen my Dad land the ball (more than once) on a green 330 yards away. So, I have no trouble believing the guys on here who claim to be long ball hitters. They definitely exist. I agree that your better weekend warrior is probably somewhere in the 220-240 range, but there's a lot of single digit guys out there who can really launch it.

Knocked a 3 wood to ten feet from 245 yards out. Two-putted for bird.

Shot 79 (+6) on 7/9. 8 GIR, 5 FWs, 30 Putts, 3 tap-in birdies on par-5s. That's two consecutive sub-80 rounds since ditching my game-improvement shovels and going back to an old set of MBs. I just can't seem to get comfortable with the oversized look of the newer equipment. Most exciting aspect of the round is that I seem to be regaining the driving distance I had when I played as a teenager. After playing very little golf over the past 14 years (maybe twice a year), when I came back to the game in February I noticed that my average tee shot had fallen way off - averaging right around 250, compared to about 275-285 at my peak in high school. On Saturday my GPS calculated my average driving distance at 267 yards, with the longest being 287. And this is at sea level, no wind, and early in the morning on soft fairways. :)

Played hooky from work this morning and posted a 5-over 78 from the blue tees. Ball striking was solid but I didn't make a single birdie. Missed about five opportunities in the 5-15 foot range.

I messed around with this exact putter yesterday at GolfMart for a good 30 minutes. I fell in love with it and didn't want to leave the store. Too bad it runs for $270. I just don't have the cash or game to justify that kind of scratch.

I went with the firm flex TT FeatherFlight shafts on the irons, stiff FeatherFlight in the wedges, and the stock stiff UST 70 and 80 shafts in the 3 wood and hybrid. I've always played TT dynamic gold S300s in my irons so I was a little worried when their fitter suggested the featherflights and firm shafts - wasn't sure if I'd like the lighter club weight and added flex, but so far I love these shafts. I had them cut down .5", so perhaps that firmed them up a bit. I found the torque on the UST 70 on the 3 wood was too high for me. The club felt entirely too "whippy" and I was getting a ballooning ball flight and losing distance. I was barely hitting it 200 yards - compared to my old three wood that I hit in the 240 range. I've sent it back to have a stiff M2T shaft installed, so we'll see how that works out. Didn't have any issues with the UST 80 on the hybrid though. I'm just killing that club. Been playing it off the tee on tighter holes and it's pretty much automatic - 210 yards & dead straight. Just to give you an idea of how the shaft flexes are performing in the context of swing speed - I was on the launch monitor at GolfMart this weekend and my driver swing speed was pretty much locked in at 108mph. Also got an SP3 putter - an anser-style blade - and so far it's been an upgrade over my Nickent pipe putter. Since it was so cheap I'm planning to experiment with it a bit. Going to cut it down to 31.5", add some tungsten powder to get the swingweight up to D3, and slap a Fatso grip on it before the weekend. I really struggle with overactive hands, so I'm hoping this set-up will get me headed in the right direction. I'll try to get some additional pics of the hybrid up in the next day or two.

Here's a (not very good look) at my set. I've demoed the Burner 2.0s and these are nearly identical in terms of look and feel.

Nice choice Squirrel. Assuming the shafts are a good match, I think you're really going to like your new irons. They've added a ton of consistency back to my game. It's nice to be actually firing at pins again instead of just hoping to catch a part of the green. :) Let us know how you're hitting them once they arrive.

I bought an entire set of clubs from putter to 3 wood (sans driver) from GigaGolf in April. I went with the TRX V.ll irons with the firm featherflight shafts and so far they've performed admirably. The TRX 3 hybrid and and my SP3 putter are great clubs too. I've played all sorts of brand name clubs in the past (Taylormade, Callaway, Cleveland, etc.) and my Gigagolf clubs are right there with them in terms of quality. Also, the TRX V.11 irons are plenty forgiving - so I don't think you'd need to go for the super game improvement irons. The workability is decent - but nothing like I could with my old forged blades.