LongballGer

Swing looks good. You get into a great impact position. If you struggle with consistency I´d recommend shortening the backswing a little bit. One thing that could improve your swing is to stop thrusting at the ball on the downswing. You should feel like your weight is moving to your left heel on the downswing. Good luck.

Pretty cool idea. Just don´t expect to magically hit the ball perfectly, even if you hit the same positions that Hogan does. Theoretically two people could have identical swings while one golfer hits the ball well and the other can´t break 100 with the same swing. That´s why you see a lot of good amateurs that have "technically perfect swings", but never win anything. The reason is that it takes roughly 50,000 swings to make a golf swing somewhat automatic. So for a normal amateur it´ll take around 5-10 years to make a swing fully automatic. Good luck.

I used to be a terrible ballstriker so I went to a couple of high profile instructors and one of them became my coach. I spent around 6 months working with him, driving 2 hours to take a lesson with him once a week, every week. I worked hard on everything he told me, but my ballstriking didn´t improve at all and I almost developed the full swing yips because I had so many swing thoughts in my head. He basically taught me the whole club needs to be parallel to shaft plane at all times, keep your right knee flexed to improve your x-factor blablabla BS. Then I gave S&T; a serious effort out of desperation. I bought the book and applied everything in it. At first I was hitting it worse, but I stuck with it and after 3 months I went from shooting in the mid to high 70s to regularly shooting in the 60s.

Thanks for the reply. I know Foley likes to see the butt end of the club point in between the feet and target line, like Charlie does in the pic. That´s how I naturally do it, too. Is there an advantage/disadvantage to doing that instead of having the club point at the target line? In other words, why should it point at the target line and not in between the feet and target line?

How is the backswing plane defined? At the halfway back point should the butt end of the club be pointing just inside the target line, or somewhere between the feet and the ball? Thanks in advance.

Pretty stupid question. Tiger never lacked motivation. Do you honestly think he´s not trying his absolute best everytime he tees it up in a tournament? The thing is competition has gotten too good and winning for him is much harder now than when he first came out on tour. Back then he was mostly playing against fat, old white dudes that he was consistently outdriving by 50+ yards. Right now the field has caught up with him. It´s gonna be interesting to see if his swing change is gonna give him an edge over the competition.

Thanks for clearing that up. Quote: I'm confused by the title and the first sentence. The shoulders are too flat so the arms get too steep. You seem to be implying the opposite... Can you clarify? No, I agree with you there. I was a little bit confused because Charlie is supposed to be the model S&T; swing. What I was implying is that if there was no lifiting of the arms his Driver swing would look exactly like this at the top (arm plane actually under the shoulder plane):

...provided you have a steep shoulder turn? It seems that Wi and Bennett lift their arms on their driver swings.

Tour average for scrambling is 56.71%. The winners on tour usually average 14+ greens per round in a tournament when they win. Of course you can lose strokes if you can´t scramble. However on tour you don´t win by making pars. You have to make birdies. You can only do that when you hit it close and hit a lot of greens. If scrambling was the most important thing for scoring Mickelson would have won the US Open instead of Rory.

Your average hacker doesn´t miss greens because he is afraid of bunkers or missing the green, he misses greens because he has a crappy technique/lacks distance. The GIR stat is a little misleading IMO. Guy A barely misses the green and has a 5 footer from the fringe for birdie while guy B hits the green, but has a 50 foot downhill birdie putt with double break ahead of him. According to the GIR stat B is a better ballstriker then A which is BS. Having said that, the long game IS the most important thing for scoring and consistency. The guys that win on the PGA Tour are the ones who hit it the closest and drain the birdie putts. They don´t win because they hit 5 GIR and chip in 8 times.

Well, occasional pushes and hooks with the driver. Contact was very solid though with the irons. Anything else you see wrong?

Ok, so here is the update. Is this better now?

Thanks for helping me. I´ll work on the changes and post an update tomorrow.

Ok, a little update on my S&T; swing. Hitting it alot better. My miss is a push though. I wanna know what I should work on to improve. I also have a question. When the backswing is short of parallel should the club be pointing at the target or left of it like Haney or Hardy want to see it? Thanks in advance. I´m hitting a 4 iron in these clips:

The long hitters/ risk takers and the guys that dress like clowns. Kaymer is a nice guy and an incredible player, but he ain´t no Trevino personality wise so he´ll have to win more majors to be considered charismatic. Even if you have the personality of a wet carrot, if you win enough tournaments people will consider you exciting and charismatic.

I agree. Ben Hogan wasn´t super human although I do believe he was a genius. Creating the swing he did without the use of a video camera and only relying on feel is very impressive to say the least. Unfortunately, after he died some people tried to milk the cash cow by selling fake Hogan secrets.

Telling him to work more on his short game is still working around the core problem though. While the short game is simpler to learn from a technical standpoint it still takes as much effort and time to develop feel as it does grooving a repeatable golf swing. Your average hacker hates practicing the short game anyways because it´s boring to him. It´d make more sense to use his limited practice time to work on the long game since it has the biggest impact on his score.

He revealed his secret in a lifetime article. It´s the cupping of the left wrist at the top of the backswing which enabled him to hit his famous "Hogan Fade".

Your average amateur doesn´t have the time/drive to work on his swing for hours everyday and constantly monitor his progress with a teaching pro. He might take a lesson and the teaching pro will tell him what to improve, but as soon as something feels "unnatural" and the hacker hits a bad shot he´ll just go straight to his old habits and never improve. It takes around 3000-8000 reps to thorougly engrain a new move properly so that you don´t have to think about it. In reality your average hacker will hit 20 balls with the driver on the range and then hit the course. It´s not so much bad instruction (although there is a lot of that out there), but it´s simply that this game is hard and people want to enjoy it. A hacker doesn´t enjoy sacrificing his free time and hitting balls for hours on the range to engrain a new move.He enjoys having a couple beers with his buddies and playing 9 holes and there is nothing wrong with that, but he´ll never improve much.

It has been proven that the long game IS the most important part of the game. It´s a myth that the short game is what seperates the pros from the very good amateurs. The tour pros play courses that are a lot harder and longer than your average muni. They´d average close to 16 GIR on short muni courses. I remember reading an "experiment" in which a tour pro was paired up with a hacker. One round the tour pro was supposed to hit all the long shots and the hacker had to chip and putt. The other round the hacker would hit all the shots from tee to green and the tour pro had to chip and putt. Result was that the score was way higher when the hacker would hit all shots from tee to green. Of course the tour pros have a superior short game compared to the hackers, but the hacker loses most shots by lacking distance, slicing too many balls OB and not hitting a lot of greens. It´s not because they 4 or 5 putt every green and skull every chip shot.

The thing is though he´s making more of 3/4 backswing. If he were to lengthen his backswing so that the shaft would be parallel to the ground his arms would be above his shoulder plane.

The whole one plane/ two plane deal doesn´t really make any sense. Some swings are a little steeper and others a little flatter, but there isn´t a single player on tour whos arms match up exactly with his shoulders at the top of his backswing position (provided he takes the club back to parallel). So nobody on tour has a one plane swing according to Hardys definition except maybe Matt Kuchar.

. I know a couple guys that used to play on the european tour and this sounds about right. Although it's more like high 60s - low 70s for hard tournament courses, mid 60s on a good day and mid 70s on a bad day.