Quote:
Originally Posted by hbendillo
I try to find the right arc buy doing a few slow motion practice swings actually looking back to see how the shaft of the club goes back. I have begun to recognize when my swing is getting too flat so I rehearse the backswing slowly then take the swing. Usually I get immediate feedback if I do it right after struggling with my swing. When I find I am chunking the ball and then get it right I hit a crisp shot. I realized, and maybe someone could verify this for me, that I had to hold the club off a bit with my right arm, not let that right elbow fold back and get behind me too far.
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The "old pro," my former teacher, told me that the right arm controls the backswing. Today I believe that both arms have to exercise control, but his advice made me concentrate on the right arm temporarily, until I forgot about it, and maybe that was his intention. If such a thing helps, it helps. Getting the right arc on the backswing could be solely a matter of checking and correcting, but it also could be a matter of changing something else that is causing the problem. For example, I was paralyzed to start the swing at address without some kind of pre-movement or akwardness, and I didn't want any pre-movement. Then by chance I remembered more advice from the old pro, that he had said to put my weight back on my heels. I had always wondered just how far back that meant, but I did it and it worked. For the last few years I had been clearly toward the balls of the feet, so I moved the weight back to the heels without paying too much attention to how much. Suddenly I could start my backswing at any speed without any pre-movement and balance was much better. The backswing seemed easier to do, smoother, on line, and more "circular." Shots improved. Then I thought about how to divide the weight between heel and balls (balls of the feet I would like to call "feetballs"
). After rocking forward and backward a lot to see what is available, I have at present decided to put a light force on the "feetballs" and the remaining weight on the heels. This position is quite close to the point where I have to lift all weight off the feetballs in order to not fall backward. I haven't found a way to measure this but there isn't much room for error forward or backward. And it helps my swing a lot. The original problem was the backswing; the solution was a seemingly unrelated setup change.
Regarding the right arm on the backswing, it is pretty clear that both arms have to lift at the same time as they move to the right, in relation to the shoulders, and the shoulders have to turn a certain amount, in order to create a usable top position.
How to avoid going back inside unexpectedly?
I recommend the following exercises:
1. Practice swinging and hitting with the club going back inside and staying inside coming down. See if you chunk (hit fat) with that swing. Is so, try to learn not to. You might discover a separate cause for the chunking. You may or may not discover why you take the club inside sometimes. You could also use this swing to push or hook the ball on purpose.
2. Practice swinging and hitting with the club going back inside but looping back to a square plane, meaning the arc is for a straight shot. Again you may or may not discover why you take the club inside sometimes, but you are likely to learn something.
3. Try going back square, but flat or upright, to see what happens. This is trial and error to find the best top position.
Bonus: Check your heel-feetballs weight distribution and experiment with that.