fersman4

Stephan on evolvr.com analyzed my second video and told me what I expected: that I need to do more inside-out. And he gave me a new visual/drill to help me do it better. He told me to feel like my back faces the target longer during the transition. Makes sense to me! Looking forward to giving it a shot. Also a little worried because I've been striking the ball much better the last couple days. But I gotta keep my mind focused on the long term.

I don't know what's right and what's wrong, but when I used to have a wider stance, I sometimes had trouble shifting my weight forward. So by narrowing my stance, I actually ended up with better consistency of ball contact. Edit: And I just now saw how old this post is. Silly me.

Here is my latest swing video, composed of "natural" full swings. My natural full swing is slowly evolving from over-the-top to inside-out. The drills and visuals given to me by the evolvr.com folks seem to be working, but I think I'm only about halfway there. It's certainly easier to do the right things in a slower swing, so I'm still working at slower speeds to improve my muscle memory of the correct swing path. Oh and Sunday's round wasn't pretty. It's safe to say my swing path was all over the place, and that hurt my consistency, both contact and flight path. Somehow my short game showed up and minimized the damage. Still didn't win anything because I'm not a sandbagger.

Thanks for the response. One less thing to worry about. I was at the range today practicing what I'm supposed to practice and as my path stabilized (still needs work) so did my contact. I guess you know what you're talking about :D

So what do you all think: do you think vision focus has a significant impact on ball contact precision, or do you think it's primarily a muscle memory thing? Or is it half and half? Another way to ask this quesiton is: how much do you focus on your ball during the swing (on a 1 to 10 scale I'd say I'm a 3). First, I'm working with evolvr.com on my swing, so I'm not looking for any new swing thoughts or practice drills to muddy the waters. Anyway I'm not really very atheletic, and my eye-hand coordination naturally leaves a lot to be desired. In general I would say that my ball-striking suffers greatly from poor contact. This last round when I didn't hit fat or thin due to path issues (that's what I'm working on with evolvr), I tended to hit it off center, losing distance and sending the ball off in the wrong direction. This is nothing new...it's always been like this. I would say that I am rather lazy with my vision focus. My brain is working hard trying to make sure my body is doing the things my instructor is telling me to do. Most of the time during the swing and impact my eyes aren't focused on anything really, like the ball just happens to be in my field of view, as does the grass surrounding the ball. I'm relying almost entirely upon my body's muscle memory to get the clubface to the ball. But because a mishit is an inch off center in any direction, it gets me wondering whether I should be striving for more precision with the help of vision focus, not just improved muscle memory.

I can empathize. My back causes me trouble, though in my case it's because I'm overweight. Once it starts to hurt my swing stops working like normal and I tend to swing in order to protect myself from the pain. In my case I tend to hit over-the-top even more than usual. I'm about ready to go to a chiropractor so that I can function while I continue my weight loss program.

Most likely yes. That's what I figured too, but I just couldn't stop.

I'm with ya here. I like idea of using bounce to stop from hitting fat from tight lies (it happens to me once or twice per round). Here is the video posted in the other recent topic by mvmac: http://thesandtrap.com/t/39411/quickie-pitching-video But after trying to hit 150 balls from 20 yards out on the practice green using this technique, and hitting about 10% of them thin and only about 2% of them to within 6 feet, I'm inclined to think I'm not ready for that method. I was getting to the point that I was intentionally hitting fat and off the toe just so that I didn't hit it thin, and though the ball went in those cases, distance was far from consistent with very similar tempos. So I'm prepared to use my inferior technique for now until I can get some real help, and not just a generic video.

I'm using one of those "deep faced" drivers and hitting up. I have a rather average swing speed (100 MPH or so). I tend to have trouble getting center face contact, but at my handicap that's practically a given. So I'm curious what an instructor would say about my switching to the newer kind of driver. Is it more forgiving or less forgiving? Would my swing speed lend itself to one type of driver or the other?

You slice the heck out of the ball. I'm no instructor but despite all the flaws and issues you mentioned, the slice would likely be the top priority of any instructors. Also you seem to be a rather naturally atheletic person, so this may not apply to you, but if I tried to hit the ball as hard as you do, all kinds of bad things would creep into my swing. At the top of the list would be poor contact at least partially related to a swing path issue. I think you may need to prepare yourself to slow down your swing to get consistency, but again, I'm no instructor.

Man you can smack that ball! Does center face contact come easy to you?

I've been working off and on throughout the last few days at home without a ball on what Stephan wanted me to work on, and this morning I brought it to the range. Most of my work on the range was with a slow tempo with the ball teed up a little. Stephan wanted me to hit the balls off to the right of my target using the key points I identified in the video. Early on I found that if I rushed the downswing, I was neglecting to "drop my hands", and the ball would go straight instead of right. I also found it difficult early on to do a proper weight transfer while I was concentrating so hard on what I was supposed to work on. However I made the conscious decision to not care about that, and just keep working on the path (Stupid Monkey?). The video shows a sample of swings throughout the session. The swings get progressively closer to what I'm supposed to be doing. By the end of the session I felt like I had made some good progress. Being more comfortable with the swing changes the weight transfer came back, and I was dropping my hands better at normal tempo. No doubt the swing still feels a little weird, and I'm not sure I'm getting "inside" enough yet, so I need a lot more repetition with Stephan's drills. After the last swing in the video I saw a half-bucket of balls that someone left around, so I did more practice off camera without teeing up the ball. Some of them were full swings, great-looking draws that started off right of target. I'm happy to see some progress, even though I know there's tons more work to do. I've got a Men's Club round on Sunday and I don't want to look like a complete duffer.

Someone else pointed me to this post: http://thesandtrap.com/t/54840/simple-specific-slow-short-and-success-the-five-s-s-of-great-practice

Got my first Evolvr analysis back. And not surprisingly it's about Key #4, namely correcting my over-the-top move. I'm very pleased with how Stephan Kostelecky described the problem, and provided some visualization for what the correct path is. And the drills he's going to have me do are much "smarter" (for lack of a better word) than what I expected or heard and read before, so I'm excited. I'll give another update after I put in the time and work.

I believe in the Stupid Monkey post they talk about exaggerating the thing you're working on over and over again and your body learns to replicate something in the middle over time. Have you found this to be the case?

Well here is what I submitted to Evolvr.com. Feel free to make observations, but I have bought into the Stupid Monkey philosophy, so I intend to focus my practice only on whatever the Evolvr folks come back with.

Oh, I've never been to the Member Swings section before. I suppose it does make more sense there, and once I'm ready to give a true evolvr.com testimonial, I can post on that later. Moderator, please turn this into "My Swing (fersman4)" under "Member Swings".

At the advisement of iacas, I took the plunge and signed up for the evolvr.com monthly subscription. I uploaded a couple videos I recorded today to get the ball rolling (pun intended). So I wanted to share a record, a blog so-to-speak, of my progress, in case someone else who visits these forums was interested in the journey and the results. I'm 33, I've been playing for 14 years. I'm 5'9" and 100 pounds overweight, which is probably causing my back pain, but I'm on a diet and exercise plan, so hopefully that goes away soon. I have had only a handful of in-person instruction sessions with a few different instructors, but it's been at least 8 years since the last one. Other than that I've tried to improve my game piecemeal through putting knowledge (occassional watching the Golf Channel, reading forums, books, and magazines) into practice. Though I'm not really hard-core about all that, I can be seen on the driving range with a video camera from time to time. My index is 17.4 right now, the highest it's been in 7 years. At this time last year it was at its low of 12.3. I belong to the Men's Club of a nearby public course, where I participate in around 10 group and individual tournaments per year. I don't really win any money, but that's because I don't sandbag ( is he joking? ). I probably play 20 to 25 rounds per year. Here in Colorado, the golf season is only about 6 months long, so in the winter you spend a lot of time doing drills in your livingroom, and only actually playing 1-2 rounds when the snow clears if you're lucky. Needless to say it's easy to get rusty here. Since it's golf season, I'm hoping to get into the habit of either playing or practicing at least twice per week. Would love to do more, but I got a job, wife, and a kid to otherwise occupy my time. Living in Colorado does have its advantages: playing at 5,000 to 6,000 feet every round makes me feel like The Hulk (estimated distances for decent contact): Driver: 240-250 yards 3-hybrid: 210 yards 4-hybrid: 200 yards 5-hybrid: 190 yards 6-iron: 180 yards 7-iron: 170 yards 8-iron: 160 yards 9-iron: 150 yards PW: 140 yards AW: 120 yards (approach wedge?) 54 degree wedge: 90 yards 60 degree wedge: 70 yards Notice the lack of a long wood, and the gaps in the wedges. I have yet to find a long wood that I would hit more consistently off the tee box than my driver. As for the wedges, any shot between 95 and 135 yards and I'm screwed. I haven't hit a good AW in over a year, and I don't seem to have any luck hitting my PW or AW at partial strength. My natural ball-flight is a slight over-the-top fade, often a little heavy, so when I'm on the course or the range I try hard to fight it and hit a draw instead. Unfortunately going against my natural swing produces inconsistent results. Sometimes I hit a beautiful high draw, sometimes I hit a push fade off the toe, and sometimes I just hit it plain fat. As a matter of fact, fat shots infest my pitching game too. Frankly I believe the greatest room for improvement in my game is shots within 50 yards. I've been keeping detailed stats for years now, and my numbers indicate that just over 50% of my strokes come from within 50 yards, including pitches, chips, and putts. I hit about 35.1 putts per round, and about 19.9 pitches and chips per round. So if I want to shoot lower scores that has to be the best place for me to improve. However my stats also indicate that if I hit the green in regulation, I'm going to get a par over 80% of the time, so I could stand to use some long-game improvement too. And, hey, if I hit more GIRs, that means fewer short game shots per round. Anyway that's my background. Once I get feedback from the Evolvr folks and work my way toward the Stupid Monkey badge, I'll give another update.

I know this has been asked numerous times on this site but I haven't yet found a definitive answer. Yell at me if my question doesn't belong in this thread. My intention is to use my existing digital camera (30 fps) to submit to evolvr. Will they even accept that? I have had my eyes on the GoPro line for aviation purposes, but I don't yet have the money to pull the trigger on that one. And even so there's the "fish-eye" thing going on, so I'm not sure if it's suitable for golf swings. Will the evolvr folks accept GoPro movies?

I suppose "reasonably solid and reasonably consistent" is subjective. My idea of solid and consistent could be far away from what a good player thinks. I think what I should take away from your statement is that I should not be satisfied with how I'm hitting the ball now, nor should I consider my short-term problems during the learning process to be worse than my current swing, because a good player would consider my current swing to be junk. Okay evolvr.com, here I come!

Quote: You've not tried evolvr.com. You should. You shouldn't try any golf instruction at all if you think that you'll be able to "do it" and "get it" IMMEDIATELY, and it sounds very much like that's the kind of person you are. That's not how you make long-standing changes and improvements to your golf swing. The concepts are simple, but it takes work to master them. I am a practical kind of person. I know that I could be hitting the ball much better, and I know doing so will take a lot of time. It is true that it's difficult for me to go from hitting the ball reasonably solid and reasonably consistent to hitting the ball terribly, given that I have a Men's club tournament round next Sunday. But if I knew it was going to lead to a better swing, I am the kind of person that would pursue it, even if it meant shooting in the 100s for a while. The problem is I doubt I am on the right path to making those changes because I don't have the feedback to know whether I am doing things correctly. Actually the only feedback I have right now is that I keep hitting the ball fat. So let me ask a question, and based upon your authority as an accomplished golf instructor, I will trust and follow. Which option would you have me choose: 1) Go see a local golf instructor who doesn't know anything about 5SK, who can provide immediate but possibly flawed feedback on what I'm doing wrong (sorry, I just cannot bring myself to ask someone the "nine questions" at least until after a few sessions) 2) Record my swings on video and use evolvr.com, where I get terrific advice and feedback, which comes hours after the practice session in which I just hit a bucket of balls doing the wrong things. I honestly don't know which is better for my long-term improvement, so I'm looking to your expertise to help me make the right decision.

Thanks for the title change iacas. I'm fine with that.

Well I see no obvious way to change the thread title. Anyway it seems like what seemed simple at first is not so simple after all. Do I cast? Yeah probably a little, if casting means that I let my wrists relax in the downswing so that I don't force them through impact. You always see those videos of instructors talking about casting and in their example the shaft leans backward at impact. That's not helpful because my casting isn't so obvious as that. I'll consider making a video, but as I've said elsewhere I learn best with immediate feedback. I guess I better just wait until I get an instructor because I'm just not going to get things right on my own. 5SK sounds terrific, but since I live in the middle of the country (Colorado) where golf instruction is at best somebody's part-time job, 5SK is a pipe dream for me.

So the head stays behind the ball, and the core of the body gets in front of it?

I thought I'd give the 5 Simple Keys ideas a try. At least the first two (steady head and weight forward) seem simple and important enough that I could start to work on them on my own, especially because there isn't a 5SK instructor within 1000 miles of me. I guess my normal iron swing I keep my head fairly steady on the backswing, but I lurch my entire body, including head, forward a couple inches in the downswing as part of the weight transfer. So today when I kept my head steady in the downswing it got ugly. So many fat shots, and if they weren't fat, it was poor contact anyway. Seems the bottom of my swing arc is farther back with a steady head. Sound about right? Well how about this: the ball position is already in the middle of my stance with my 7-iron, so if move it back, I'm going to be hitting my 7-iron with 4-iron trajectory. I'm sure it's hard to diagnose without seeing my actual swing, so I guess I'm hoping some knowledgeable folks will reply with generalities. For example, if the center of the "circle" of the swing arc is behind the ball, how could the bottom of the swing arc possibly be after the ball unless you add some unnatural compensations?