Markdd91

Will do, I think I take for granted the assumption that my grip is good, which is not necessarily true!

I think lax scoring is pretty prevalent in the game with “breakfast balls,” free drops, and whatever else people feel they are owed are the norm. All of that is fine, as long as you don’t claim these scores as legitimate…or try to qualify for the US Open 😂

Shot a 98 today at my local municipal course. We played from the blues which is just over 6000yds here. Managed three pars and avoided any huge blowup holes. Spent more time than I would have liked in the woods, but I got a round of golf and a nature walk for the same price I suppose 😂

I play with a few buddies on rotation, one of them started to get real “serious” about his playing a few years ago. He legitimately thought he was going to be a professional golfer in his mind. I hadn’t played with him in awhile and he started posting all about breaking into the 80’s and even claimed a high 70’s score a few times at our local course. I was thinking wow, I can’t wait to see him play again, he must have had an amazing improvement. When I finally got to play with him I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was still awful. The only thing that changed was the way he was scoring himself. He would give himself 2-3 mulligans a hole, completely skip counting some shots, move his ball from unfavorable lies. The works! The kicker is, he completely thought his scores were legit in his own mind. After a while my other buddies and I made a game out of counting his strokes without him knowing and then comparing it to his score card. Easily a 20+ stroke difference. We stopped playing with him after a few rounds of this, it was really just a drain dealing with his nonsense.

Alrighty. I had a previously planned round of golf scheduled this morning with my buddies, I really don’t feel ready for that, as anyone following probably knows, but I figured I would try to make the best of it. I got up an hour early so that I could go out back and try to work on just a couple small things before I went. I tried to just focus on the first two Covid drills and really focus on getting them right. Erik, please let me know if my form is still off on these, and ignore me mumbling to myself 😂 Obviously, none of this will fix my steep and OTT tendencies so I tried to just really focus on trying to make a more shallow swing while I was playing. On the positive side, I have gotten very consistent on striking the ball. I make very solid contact practically every swing and the ball carries well…on the flip side my miss was still a very hard slice. I had several good shots today, about 4 drives that were dead straight, but I think that these are likely times when I was still too steep, I just happened to get lucky and got the club face perfectly squared up prior to impact. I managed a 98 today, which is right about where I ended last season scoring. Im happy to be breaking 100 more often, but I know I have a lot to work on to get this right and make some real, sustainable progress. I think this next week I am going to focus on finding a way to make an overly shallow downswing and see how that feels. Then maybe I can work it back and find the happy medium? To be continued.

Noted, thanks for your feedback Erik, it’s greatly appreciated!

I can accept hard truths. I will go back and look at what you pointed out in the drills. Day 4 and 5 I was literally just trying to make the shaft do what I think it’s supposed to do, I can’t even do it standing still, never mind adding and further action to it? I don’t expect to fix my swing in a day, or even within one golf season. I’m just surprised by how hard it is to enact a change when I see what I’m doing wrong…which is probably because the list of things wrong is longer than the right lol. Im going to keep working, even more slowly.

I had about an hour to try to work on my swing. I am trying not to get frustrated, but I am competitive by nature and it’s hard to watch myself make the same mistake over and over again. Started with the Covid drills: Day 1: Day 2: Day 3: Day 4: I feel like I don’t have any issue with drill 1 and 2. I think my wrists are doing the right thing and I feel like my left should rotates where it should. I’m still struggling with keeping my backswing from getting too long and across the target line, but I feel like there’s improvement there. If I can get to the point of no longer needing to think about this, I think it will help my focus on my downswing. Once I got to my full swing, I looked exactly the same as before, way. Too. Steep. I keep rehearsing, watching myself in the camera to see what “feel” or movement flattens out my downswing, but so far no luck getting it into a real swing. I did slow my swing way down and really focus on this and this was, what I think, was my “best” swing today. I am all ears for how I can get myself out of this steep downswing, or atleast make more efficient progress on it. I am playing my first round of the year tomorrow, any advice on playing while also trying to fix your swing?

So I am at a training until later this evening, so I’m trying to plan out what I’m going to do later on, and make sure I understand the issue I am trying to address. I plan to go through Covid Drills 1-5 with video and see how it looks. Am I correct that my back swing is the cause of my overly steep down swing, leading to way too steep of an approach that has the shaft at my neck at 5? I’m assuming if I fix my backswing, the downswing will follow suite naturally?

I know this is a decade old, but this is phenomenal advice, thank you Erik. When I was in high school we had one of the best bands in the country, our director was strict and knew his stuff. I can still hear him yelling at us, “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect! Although I understood this to be a very simple, and accurate, statement, I haven’t applied it to my golf game for some reason. Taking 100 bad hacks at the range isn’t making me better, time to break it down and work on putting the pieces together, simply, specifically, slowly, and short.

Thank you for this, I am definitely trying to go too fast. I am going to slow down, work these drills a lot more, and try to make some lasting positive changes!

Much appreciated!

I am a police officer in a city south of Boston, 6 years so far. I work the midnight shift to give myself more time for golfing, although it doesn’t always work out as planned haha.

So I went out and tried to just think my way into changing, but that clearly doesn’t work. Even when I “feel” like I change my downswing to keep my left arm tight, it is still way away from me. Also, still working on trying to stop my backswing from wrapping around my head too which is another frustrating battle because I don’t do it on a single practice swing, and then do it every real one. I think I need to work on some drills to fix this stuff, because my swing actually feels really good and I would think there was nothing wrong without the guidance here, thankfully I get the chance to try to fix it instead of continuing the same mistakes over and over again. This DTL should be better, I don’t know why the last one didn’t stay in slo-mo

I’m going to have to do some slow motion videos tomorrow to really analyze and see what I’m doing here in comparison. I feel like I am in pretty similar position at P4, but that definitely changes drastically at P5.

Definitely see that now!

Definitely see that now, will try to fix that tomorrow afternoon! Do you have a suggestion on why I am getting into that position and how to fix it actually? I am looking at it now and have no idea why I’m doing that.

It’s been awhile since I posted here but I didn’t make much progress last year unfortunately as life got busy. I am back to working on it now though and this is my swing today. I am still super inconsistent and just started filming again to try to figure this out. The biggest change I’ve made so far is to try to stop my backswing from wrapping around my head and going across the target line. I THINK this was causing some problems on my downswing with casting and with the club face being WIDE open on impact. I still think it’s an issue but this is drastically better. I’ll take any advice on this issues or the plethora of others that I’m sure are there! Unfortunately it looks like my old video no longer works but I’ll make sure to keep them going forward.

Will do, and noted for the videos. Thank you!

I started to check out the Covid Practice Plan Challenge and I have already found multiple faults in my swing that I was nowhere close to identifying before. First is with my grip/ early backswing. Looks like my right hand is too far on top of the grip, which gives me a very straight arm as well as leaving my right palm not pointing down in the early backswing. I definitely need to soften up my trail arm and got the elbow closer to my side. I’m guessing this is creating issues later in my swing as well. The second issue is my trail elbow is all jacked up. It’s getting way behind/around me and bending greater than 90 degrees. I believe this would create the casting/over the top issue I’m experiencing. Thank you iacas for putting that together with the drills to work on and correct these issues. This gives me a place to start and hopefully I’ll be back with some improvements to show!

I've been Playing Golf for: 4 years off and on. My current handicap index or average score is: 100-110 My typical ball flight is: Slice The shot I hate or the "miss" I'm trying to reduce/eliminate is: Slice and overall inconsistent contact, seen most with driver. So I’ve been playing casually for a few years but I am really trying to focus on improving now. I do a lot of swing research and spend a lot of time at the range working on my game and I’m getting incredibly frustrated because I think my swing is decent and should produce at least above average results but clearly that’s not the case. No matter what I think about my swing the results are the truth. What I THINK I see in my swing is I am coming over the top and I’m not clearing my hips properly. This is causing me to slice the ball with an out-to-in club path swiping across the ball, and also causing me to basically hit the ball on my tiptoes which I think is creating low point inconsistency and my terrible consistency in general. The fact that I can’t get off the tee consistently absolutely kills me on the course. I have very little trouble with my irons other than a very rare mis-hit, but I’m usually in the woods left, right, or hitting 50 yard ground balls giving me terrible 2nd shots and then it’s mentally down hill from there. I don’t know how to fix my issues, or if I have even identified them properly and I appreciate any guidance I can get! Thanks!! Videos:

Oh for sure my swing needs improvement, and is my biggest weakness in the grand scheme but I was putting for birdy twice, par on multiple occasions, and almost always on the putting green in 4 shots. I have to think that if I could have putt just a little better than Hellen Keller breaking 100 was reasonable.

Shot a 114 today. This was my 5th round of the year (just started playing seriously in August). Although my score was not my personal best my swing was the best today it has ever been. Consistently making good contact and getting off the tee without too much issue, even managed to hit a few fairways. too many 3-4 putts really killed me, I’m convinced I was playing 90’s golf other than my putter. Can’t really be mad about it, swing felt great.