pinseekingdreams

Had a tournament a few days back, shot even and was in a 3 way play-off. I finished 2nd, I hit it OB off the tee and recovered with a bogey. So not bad, games definitely trending. Been still working on the same stuff we've talked about @iacas. Arms feel more up and down, club also feels more in front of me.

Loved the video tbh, was a fun watch and it was cool seeing how relaxed trump was. That was actually my main take-away from the video, he's just so relaxed.

It just wasn't cut yet, it was early in the morning. The green was covered in dew, when obviously on the course they wouldn't be. Since I was so early, the practice green probably wasn't a priority. I putted fine that day, had like 28 putts.

Another update; Few days ago I shot my new lowest round, breaking 70 (69) for the first time and I also played a tournament where I almost won (came second in the playoff), the score I shot to enter the playoff was even par. After I lost the playoff, I went to the bathroom to take a piss and ran into the tournament organizer, who knows me quite well. He said he saw me tee-off during the playoff and said "You have a such a natural swing and talent, you need to allow it to come out more." It was cool hearing something like that from someone who I look up to and it made me think, hmm I don't feel like I'm even allowing 1% of my talent to really shine. I KNOW I can play at a very high level. It was a big confidence boost. Golf swing wise, Iacas has been helping me understand how the arms work and that's really been the reason why I'm playing better now. I can thank the Evolvr program for that. The other thing that has helped a ton is a connection ball I purchased, it's basically a ball that you put between your arms. I find this helps a ton with not allowing my arms to dis-connect from my body which improves my ball-striking. The only other thing golf swing wise I can comment on is that I changed my putter from a Spyder X to an old brass Ping Anser. Essentially going from a face balanced mallet, to a neutral blade (slight toe hang), I find I can roll the ball better with the blade. Other than that, the one personal thing that is bothering me is I am dead broke right now. All my marketing clients have left, I assume they just found someone cheaper. So basically been trying to find new clients and working on my golf game.

Update; I think I've gotten over the tournament BS. What has helped me is just realizing that tournaments aren't perfect, smaller amateur events are never going to be perfectly organized. I'm a very detail oriented person, but most people aren't. In my own life, it really bothers me when details are missed but I can't let other people's lack of detail awareness bother me. I think one of the major things you need to learn in order to figure out how to play well in the smaller events is to just roll with the punches. I had a tournament a few days ago, there was no driving range, just a small net to hit into. Normally that would bother me, this time I just laughed it off. The course also hasn't cut their putting green yet, so did this bother me? Nah. I just didn't warm up my putting. I actually think that's a big life lesson, to just laugh at stuff.

What check can I do to see if my right arm is too far across (on video), is there any lines I can draw or something on the video?

Is this more what we're looking for from a trail arm position stand point. The basic feel I have here is my arms staying in front of my chest more.

I figured I'd post an update. I've been diving like crazy into the golf swing, found some archives of top teaching professionals who have recorded their lessons and some videos of them explaining concepts to students. I'm learning a ton and finally feel like I am starting to begin to understand how the swing works. One of the main things I've "picked up" is that basically what you do in your swing is a reaction to how the golf club is moving AND how your body moves. I'll use a simple example of what I mean. Take a club and address an imaginary ball. Now if you're right handed, bend your side to the right. Now look at the club face. See how the club face opens? So now let's say in your downswing you have too much right side tilt. Well that's going to cause the path of your club to kick out to the right (right of target) and you'd swing from inside - out. Now most people (and this is how I thought before too) would go, okay I clearly have too much tilt in my downswing, so I need to fix that. But what they don't realize, is there's a reason why you have too much side tilt. There's a "root" cause, and that root is probably located somewhere in your backswing. Now for the sake of this post, I've oversimplified things a lot, but this is the general idea. You can't just go "hey I'm going to work on getting rid of having too much tilt." WITHOUT fixing the root cause. And the really cool thing is, sometimes one major flaw, causes a bunch of others. So when you fix that one major flaw, the rest of your swing will start to self-correct. ____ Now what does this mean with my swing? Well I think there's things I'm doing in my backswing, that are setting up my ultra steep move and I think there are things that I do right when I do my takeaway that set up my trail arm getting stuck way behind me at the top of the swing. Going back to when I was a kid, I was always told "straight back" for the takeaway, which led to me swinging back with a super closed clubface, and I suspect this is where my "flaw" in my backswing stemmed from. So what is this flaw? I'm not 100% sure. I think I get too much hand-depth too early in my backswing, and then at around p43 (lead arm parallel) my hands are already really deep behind me, so much that I don't think they can really go further behind me, now of course I know I can't swing a club from that position, so then I lift my arms up to get some distance from the ball so I can start my downswing. And then when I lift up my arms, to create this space, the force on my shaft is now working towards the ball and because of the shaft working towards the ball, I have no choice but to come steep. Another aspect too, I think I have a very late wrist cock. Going back to when I was a kid, I was taught straight back, straight through (with no wrist cock). So now looking at my current swing, I think my wrist cock is so late, that I actually create it through the trail arm moving back behind me at around p3ish. This is basically where my "knowledge" ends, I know there are some PGA tour players that have a late wrist cock that do well (I think Bryosn is one of them), but I also think Bryson has a far less inside takeaway and his set-up is very different. But my late wrist cock might just be the result of my super inside takeaway. I have to go the range + do some mirror work to try to get a better understanding of my movements + test out what I said above.

Some good advice here. I think one major component that I'm probably overlooking is that I'm not very confident in my golf swing, partially because I am going through a lot of changes right now so I feel I have to try really hard to "mentally" get in the right state before I hit the ball. This causes me to sometimes spend a little too much time to "pull the trigger" which probably causes slow play, and then the slow play and getting a warning from the official puts me under pressure to where little tiny things get to me (like the spotter for example). If I was at a position in my golf swing to where I'm confident in my movement, and I don't need to think as much about what I am trying to do, I think these issues will eventually go away.

Okay that makes sense, and I take it early extension is typically caused by the shaft being too vertical during the downswing, which makes you ee?

That's basically my point, I'm not asking what is more effective, I'm just trying to learn more about matchups etc. But good point about rolling the arms and not early extending. I think (from what I know), that early extension is extending the arms too early, thus making you stand up (to create space for the arms extending). But I could be wrong.

My shot was so far into the woods, lost ball -> re-tee -> middle of fairway missed the up and down. I don't think it affected me after the mistake was made, but I knew the damage was done. Let me think of another example. In one of the tournaments there was a bunch of power cart issues, so while originally we were allowed to have a powered cart to ourselves (as just a single person, so my group basically had 1 guy walking and 2 in separate powered carts) this idea changed right before I tee'd off. Basically I was just about to tee off, and the tournament director came over and took everything off my cart and put it onto someone elses. But he dropped a bunch of my stuff (like my Ginger Ale) and left my scorecard on the backside of the cart, so when we drove off, my scorecard fell out. My dad ended up picking it up and giving it to me. I'm paraphrasing a little about what went on because I don't want to explain everything. But basically we were allowed to have a powered cart to ourselves, but then this changed right as I was on the tee deck teeing off and all my stuff was getting moved right while I was teeing off, lining my shot. This really irritated me. Not really because I had to pair up with someone but with how my stuff was handled and some of it dropped and I lost the scorecard briefly. I would have preferred if the director just let me handle my own stuff to pair up. Now I just always walk because there's less B.S involved.

I was just listening to a podcast with a famous PGA Tpur coach and he talked about how if you have a weak grip, it's a good idea to have wrist flexion in order to close the face. But this makes me think, couldn't you also close the face through rolling the arms coming into impact? I guess what you would call "early extension?" Of course, I'd assume wrist flexion is a better way to close the clubface than rolling/early extension, I assume due to club face stability? Just curious.

Are the slow swings more in line with the correct movement, or is the trail arm still not working properly? And what do you mean by my trail arm being too bent? I understand what you mean by behind me, but I'm not sure I understand what "bent" means.

That's fine, it's something I need to fix anyway. I'd like to eventually play in bigger events, and see where my game can go, so if this is what I have to do then so be it.

I know this sounds harsh, but you're probably right. It does seem that every tournament there is some stupid thing that happens that gets to me (that I can't control). But that might mean I'm just too sensitive.

Makes sense, I'll work on it and post an update in a few days.

Appreciate the response, I'll post less swings next time. As far as your diagnosis, I completely agree, I always felt the top of my backswing looked weird and I can why now. As far as fixing the flaw, should I just try to have my trail arm stay in front of my chest more at the top, or is there something in my backswing that causes my trail arm to get into that position?

I came across Manuel's teaching through Moe Norman, there's an old vid of Moe talking about the only two teachers he really thinks are teaching good stuff. One of them was Manuel. There's a good playlist of Manuel doing a clinic and going over his concepts, etc. I quite like his takes and applied them to my own game and shot one of my lowest tournament rounds last year (73). I did find his swing method lacked power? I just remember I hit a 3 wood at my home course, I hit it literally perfect, but it barely went 200 yards. That kind of turned me off of Manuel. I think he does have a lot of really good concepts though and tbh probably one of the better teachers you could dive into. As far as the book itself, I read it but I couldn't really recall anything from it. Except the part where he talks about how to properly address the ball, and then he went over different flight errors and how to fix them but I can't remember his words. The above video series stuck with me way more than the book ever did.

Yep, this is a good take. Especially because I think it's far easier to feel what your body has to do when you super exaggerate it, compared to what I'm doing. Appreciate the guidance.

This year I'm entered in around 15-20 amateur tournaments, and I always find EVERY tournament I enter there's some b.s that happens mid-round that gets in my head/throws me off my game. My last event, everything was going well until the 10th hole which was a downhill par 4, (the tee box is really elevated, probably by 100ft or so). There was a spotter off to the side of the fairway in the rough. On holes like this where it's hard to see if the way is clear (due to elevation) the spotter will wave a flag telling us to tee off. So the spotter waves the flag, I walk onto the tee, go through my routine and the spotter kept waving the flag as if I wasn't seeing it. My group was already on the clock at this point too, so I figured he was telling me to hurry up and hit. I kinda rushed my swing and hit a terrible shot into the woods. When we went down to the fairway, I asked the spotter why he kept waving the flag at us and he said "Oh I was trying to get the bugs out of my face with the flag." This annoyed me because from the tee off box it looked he was trying to tell us something (which he wasn't). Now I'm not really mad at the spotter, I can't really expect things to go smoothly every single time. But what I DO want to know, is how can I get better at not letting random things that happen during tournaments, get to me and knock me off my game?

I've read the Short Game Bible once fully and I'm on my 2nd read now. Everyone in here seems to think that the beginning was fluff, but I disagree. I think it was really interesting hearing how important wedge game is, and being able to get inside 2-10 feet due to the putt conversion chart. In his analysis he said that with irons you want to worry more about direction (left or right) and with wedges you worry more about distance control, since direction is easier to attain with a wedge. Basically saying if you want to get good at golf, hit your irons straighter and control your distances with your wedges better. I also thought him talking about error dispersion was extremely interesting also, essentially the way this works is due to percentages. He said if you took the best ball striker he measured (Lee Trevino), and Lee hit a 4 iron from 200 yards that had a low error percentage of 5% (That's going to be a 10 yard error, (10 yards from flag)). Due to the putting conversion chart, every foot inside of 10 feet, the chance of making the putt go up considerably, but every putt outside of 10-11 ft, the chance of making the putt is roughly the same. So 10 yards = 30 feet. Lee has a 30 foot putt. Now if you take another player, who Lee is playing against, and they have a 10% error margin. So they hit that same 200 yard 4 iron to 20 yards, so 20 x 3 = 60 feet. Basically both Lee and the player he's playing against will likely walk off with a par. Now, where this gets interesting is the closer you get to the hole, the more these percentages matter. If you hit a wedge from 50 yards with a 7% error margin, that leaves you with a 3.5 yard putt (10.5 feet), if you hit a wedge from 50 yards with a 10% error margin that leaves you with 15 feet. Now to explain the other 3 images I've attached, Basically hitting up uphill into the green = More roll out Down hill into a green = Less roll out Landing the ball on a downward or uphill slope, the trajectory the ball bounces off the slope is double the slop angle. Landing the ball in dips = allow high margin for error, because of the way the ball bounces off the dip. Landing the ball on a hump = very low margin for error, due to how the ball bounces off the slope. Downward slopes get their slope doubled, so the ball shoots hard off the down slope. The uphill slope will make the ball come up way short. I've also used this dip theory a lot, if I have a tough green to work with, I'll sometimes target landing in a dip because they're forgiving. Then of course, with Pelz there's the 3x4 wedge system (7:30, 9:00, 10:30) which we all know (and personally I really like it, helps a lot with my distances control.

Not a pro, however I've found slow swings and low-power swings to benefit me the most. I use a mirror a lot too so I can get the right feels, then I go to the course (or at home) and then I go to the course and try to apply what I'm trying to do. I like to step my progress. I start with super slow swings, until I can get what I want down. Then I do like a 3% power swing, video myself and then check to see if I'm still doing what I want. Then slowly as I keep executing correctly I start ramping up the speed. (this is over a long period). So right now in my swing, I can shallow the club out nicely with super slow swings, I can also do it at like 20%ish power, but 50% power I can't do it, and 100% power my swing basically looks the same it did before I made any changes. It's a slow process. Eventually I will ingrain the move. There's quote from Nick Faldo when he was asked if he could do everything over again, what would he change, and he said he would hit LESS balls and spend more time in front of a mirror. If you're looking to make changes, you need plenty of feedback (video, mirror, training aid) and you also need to really train your body to do the new move, this is done through slow-deliberate swings.

I could see that, I know when in my rehearsals my back swing is completely different compared to my actual back swing. I think when I swing very slow, my swing is far more on plane which (probably) makes it easier to swing my downswing on plane too.

Wondering if this sort of explains the idea that the first I think few inches of the backswing are the most important part and set up the rest of the swing? I think Nicklaus said that, and maybe Butch Harmon. Also doesn't this (sort of) explain Moe Normans reasoning behind why he put the club way back at address (I could be reaching here), but genuinely curious. Hope I don't sound stupid lol.