bankquant

I had this problem when I first started, broke nearly every graphite shafted club in my bag...3 in one range session once, nearly back to back. The common factor for me was swinging too hard and mishits on the hosel. Even if it was previously hit on the hosel and then I hit a well placed ball on the club face it was still breaking. As i got better and moved from hosel mishits to toe, upper face mishits the problem went away However, i just noticed a crack in the metal at the base of the clubface in my driver the other day...still hits fine for now but I'll probably get a new one soon.

Been working on my flexibility a lot lately. I've been taking yoga classes about twice a week and have noticed a huge improvement in my overall flexibility. Today i stretched for awhile before practicing, then i did about 10 mins of mirror work trying to imitate a Dustin Johnson or Jason Day swing...maintaining my spine angle throughout the follow through. Similar to the below. However, when I went to hit balls afterwards I could not hit a single one. I shanked maybe 50 balls in a row off to the right. One after another...it was terrible. It took me another 50 balls or so to back to the swing I had before. I dont really know what the issue was. I didnt have my camera setup. Not sure I should try to pursue this change or leave it alone. I didnt feel like the flexibility was an issue for me but so some reason i just couldnt make solid contact.

In the face on driver view it looks like my hips return to the original place relative to forward/back, however on the down the line view it looks like they still hump forward (lateral to the target line) in the downswing. Should I be trying to eliminate this 100% keep my hips seated back in the downswing?

Been working on a more center hip turn. It feels different for me but not sure if I really see it in the result. I have also been working on tempo and have seen some great improvements when I maintain a steady tempo throughout the swing.

When get the rare driver shot where you are not slicing it, is it still shorter than your average 3wood shot? This was my big problem for the longest time. Usually didnt even keep my driver in my bag so I wouldnt be tempted to use it. Almost every shot was a slice and would almost always go shorter than my 3wood because of the slice and also usually put me out of bounds or in an unplayable lie. It still somewhat this way. My average 3 wood is probably between 240-250 while my average drive is probably 250-260. However, I've gotten somewhat more consistent with my drives where its somewhere between a slice & fade most of the time now and I know if I hit it straight and clean my drive will go 280-300. With the possibility of a 40-50 yard pickup it now worth the risk to hit driver. Focus on your club face through impact and getting your drive to go straight along whatever your current swing path is. Then you can either adjust your stance to accommodate or work on fixing your swing path.

Got the day off. I'll work on this today. Thanks

It teed up high on the face on view because i had to back up to make room for the camera angle and that was the best i could do with their rubber tees. Normally its off the ground of tee'd nearly flush with the ground.

So this is one of those problem areas for me. My hybrids. As I explained in my previous post I just cant seem to be consistent with them at all. I'll probably get 1 in 10 good shots vs maybe 9 out of 10 with most of my other clubs. I'd really like to know what I'm doing wrong and why the result here is so vastly different than my other clubs.

Yesterday was a weird session. Ive been trying to figure out how to hit my 2 hybrids that came with my set, 3h and 4h. I just cant seem to make good contact. I'm either popping them up off the top of the face or slicing terribly. Tried moving a little farther up in my stance and then started getting low hooks. I had maybe 1 semi-decent shot out of probably 30. it went about 215yds with a slight fade. Not great considering I hit my 5 iron pretty consistently 220. I'll get some video of me using these clubs next time since its something i'd like to work on. However, after I booted up another 18 holes on the same course where I previously shot the 83. But this time I shot a 76! Again, not really comparable to actual scores because every lie is perfect, though the simulator takes length off if you are hitting from the sand or rough. It also gives an auto-gimmie from 3 feet or less. I also gave myself a mulligan on the first tee after slicing it into the woods on the first shot. It is interesting though because my first 5 or 6 rounds playing courses on this simulator were much worse than my real life scores because I couldn't judge greens or put chip/pitch shots into perspective. Maybe i've just learned to sort of game the system for what it likes when it comes to pitch and putt speeds. I wonder how all this practicing on a simulator will translate to my real game.

Disclaimer: Not an instructor Looking at your latest face on video the big thing that stands out to me is your setup for your irons looks like a driver setup. You are angled backwards like you are trying to create lift on the ball through impact. Try setting up with no spine tilt. Don't worry about creating lift, the angle of the club face will do this for you. You want to feel like most of your weight is on your front foot (left foot) through impact not hanging back on your back foot. Also, are you standing on pavers? Try standing on something where your feet can grip.

Great practice today. Started off with just hitting PW to in-between shots, 50yds, 75yds, 100yds. Then did only about 5 shots with 8 iron and moved to driver. Felt comfortable with all clubs. A few mishits with my PW. I tend to shank it off the toe or heel when trying to dial it down. From there I moved on to playing a full 18 holes on the simulator. I really wish i could get out and play for real, especially after watching the Masters. But its tough to do when living in Manhattan. Anyways this was an absolutely amazing around. I normally score worse on the simulator because its almost impossible for measure the putt speeds correctly. I ended up shooting an 83 which is actually 2 shots better than my best round in real life. I hit almost every fairway with every single driving going long and straight or with a bit of a draw. The only fairways i missed is where it rolled through and ended up in the first cut. Almost all my approach shots put me right on the green or just off. Putting is always hard to get right but somehow it was working for me today as well. Had my longest drive on the sim as well, 305yds straight down the center. After finishing the round I setup my camera on the tripod and recorded a couple videos. The front angle is not great because its as far away from me as I can get before it butts into the wall. Not really sure what my focus should be for my swing right now. Suggestions are welcome.

Short practice after work yesterday. I tried using my tripod and propping my phone (GalaxyS7) up against the handle. I heard that at 720p in records at 120fps. Not sure how I can tell the fps on the videos but I might use my camera that locks into the tripod next time just because it will be easier to get better angles. Also I'll try linking the videos directly to google photos because it seems like when I upload to youtube its cutting out frames https://goo.gl/photos/UMYyXrRz8kHXhNgA7 Result: https://goo.gl/photos/Bt4aEerVdv656swk9 Result:

Thought I'd most to give a little closure here on why there smash factor is always reading around 1.35 on average. A couple days ago someone came in with one of those blue swing speed radars. Like this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00124P7SI/ref=s9_acsd_hps_bw_c_x_1_w I assume this is probably more accurate than the simulator because its measuring from 10 inches away instead of cameras in the ceiling but who knows. However, every swing I took with this was roughly 10mph less than what the simulator was telling me. So a shot like the below reading a smash factor of 1.37 really comes out to 1.49 if I take 10 mph off the swing speed and keep the ball speed constant.

Googled goat humping videos...think I need eye bleach now

Good session in the simulator today...short but helped me work on something I realized a couple days ago. If i stand up a little taller for my drives I'm much more likely to hit it straight or even draw it slightly. Really seems to be helping my slice. I hit about 10 in a row between 270-290 yds in the sim

Starting this up again after recently getting back to the game after moving to NY a year ago. I am finally living in the building where I have access to 2 HDGolf Simulators. Had a thread in instructions about the smash factor read-out. I'm going to forget about that for the time being because it seems like it is kind of a meaningless stat for the simulator. The total distance, ball flights, swing speeds, swing path, face angles seem to match reality rather closely so I've finally been able to see some interesting patterns. I'd like to setup a camera to record next time I'm there. So far I;ve only had my wife come down and film me a couple times. The first big insight that I discovered yesterday is that I have far too much forward shaft lean in my driver swing. This has worked for me in my irons because I can control the face better with my hands but with the low loft of my driver the forward shaft lean means that I am either always going to push-fade-slice it right if I dont close the face or I will snap hook it low left by shutting the face prematurely. Next step is to remove a bit of the should lean, take a bit more of a neutral grip, setup with a neutral shaft lean and try to make contact with little to no shaft lean. I'd so like to extend more arms more throughout the swing...staying down longer through impact and reaching through the swing. This will probably take time as it means increasing my flexbility. Also, my normal driver swings range between 111-118mph on the simulator, getting up to as much as 128mph if i push it. I'll set a goal to keep this under 110mph while I work on my form. My back and hands feel terrible after each session.

Well, I'm not too concerned so much with my swing speed absolute numbers. More about the relative numbers, assuming the simulator measures in a consistent way. So if my avg swing speed measured is 115mph during a normal shot I can focus on increasing that speed relative to my baseline. However, based on my past experience using other simulators or swing speed monitors I'd say its pretty accurate. Especially since I have 2 simulators giving me the same readouts. The total and avg distances I'm seeing on simulator #1 seem pretty accurate based on my real-world experience on how far I drive the ball (using GameGolf as a reference). My avg distance with my cheap $40 driver is about 250 off the tee which includes all my slices and miss hits. When I look at the accuracy chart and only count the shots that landed in or at the edge of the fairway that average is closer to 270 with the longest shots being in the 280-300 range. Before I got GameGolf and before I started using cheap drivers because I was breaking my previous drivers I know my longest drivers were around the 330yd range

So I tried contacting HDGolf about the differences between their 2 machines but so far no response However, I found a few videos online of pros using their machine and when they show the stats I never see the smash factor above 1.4 so I guess I should worry about it so much and just focus on making good contact and total distance. At 6:50 in this video they show driver stats for Jerry Kelly And then this one with Jamie Sadlowski, I don't think his smash factor ever reads above 1.35 but he gets a couple drives out to the 400yd mark.

So I probably should have done this before. There are actually 2 golf simulators that I can use I just wasn't using the other one because it didn't seem to be working properly. I would always get way less distance that simulator #1. However, I figured I'd try it and see what it was recording as my swing speed. Funny enough its giving me roughly the same speed as simulator #1. Where my average '90%' swings are somewhere between 110-115mph and my full power swings at 120-130mph. The big difference here is that I can almost never get a smash factor above 1.25 on this machine. Typically its sub-1.2 which translates to very low ball speed and shorter distance. So now It has me thinking that niether machine is calibrated correctly. I'll probably try to call the manufacturer and get their opinion and see if there is something management can do or I can do to calibrate the machines. Here are 2 swings from yesterday that I recorded after hitting the gym Here is the result of that swing. 125.7mph swing with 149mph ball speed (smash factor of 1.18). Not great. Swing 2 - face on Swing 2 result: 124.8mph swing speed, 155.8mph ball speed (smash factor of 1.25). My grip is super strong. I've been trying to make this more neutral but for the higher swing speeds I can hardly ever get the club face turned over in time without this grip and then i slice it terribly. I can probably work a more neutral grip for my 90% swings.

I'll add this video link for reference. This was about a week ago. When I slow it down it looks like I might be hitting closer to the heel instead of center. If I remember correctly this went pretty straight per the simulator and probably had 250yd carry with about 115 swing speed. I'll try to get a dry erase marker soon or dr. scholls foot spray to see where Im hitting on the face next time.

Moved to NY about a year ago and pretty much stopped playing golf completely but recently moved somewhere where I have access to a HDGolf simulator. Prior to moving here I was about a 15 or 16 handicap. I started playing golf about 5 years ago when I was 27....am 32 now (5'10 ~165lbs) I've always had issues with hitting my driver more than anything else (pop-ups, slices, snap hooks, etc). I normally just hit 3wood off the tee cause I can get it out about 250-260yds much more consistently than my driver. But now that I have access to this simulator I can get some interesting stats and hopefully I'll be able to fix my driver issues. I attached some screen shots of some of the shot data from my session today. I normally range in club speed between 115-120mph but was working on dialing up the speed today. My max speed today was 128.2mph. However I only got 154mph ball speed out of this. As you can see from the attached screenshots my smash factor is really low throughout all my swings. When I'm not trying to smash it hard and swing about 115mph I am still only getting a smash factor of max 1.35 which translates to about 250-260yds of distance. I probably took 100 driver swings today and it never went over 1.4 . I can't figure out how to translate my swing speed into more ball speed. If off center hits were the problem you'd think that I would occasionally hit one in the sweet spot and get a high smash factor but that hasn't happened yet. And honestly a lot of these feel like I am hitting it flush. I also have 2 different drivers, plus one cheap one thats available in the simulator and its the same for all 3. So what gives? How can I improve my smash factor?

New lowest score even though I felt like I played terrible. Putting was pretty bad, driving accuracy was terrible but i didnt have too many complete miss hits or OOB shots. http://www.gamegolf.com/player/abh84/round/489060 Its funny, a couple months ago I would range from 110 to 90 and then back up to 110 again. Ever since I broke 90 for the first time, my last 5 rounds have been 86, 90, 87, 88, 8

New lowest score even though I felt like I played terrible. Putting was pretty bad, driving accuracy was terrible but i didnt have too many complete miss hits or OOB shots. http://www.gamegolf.com/player/abh84/round/489060 Its funny, a couple months ago I would range from 110 to 90 and then back up to 110 again. Ever since I broke 90 for the first time, my last 5 rounds have been 86, 90, 87, 88, 85

Just picked up GameGolf on Friday, played my first round yesterday. Really like the system so far, took a little getting used to and building it into the shot routine though http://www.gamegolf.com/player/abh84/round/471122