Today I had a very good ball striking and ended up hitting a lot of greens.  Here’s what I did that I believe made a huge difference.

In “5 Lessons” Ben Hogan writes about keeping the left arm tight to the chest on the downswing.

So I started playing around with this.  How tight do I keep it there?  What’s the best way to do that?

One of the reasons I thought to do this was that I noticed on my OTT actual swings that the arms begin racing towards the ball.  And I thought, hmm, if I keep my left arm tight to the chest as long as possible, then the arms can’t race ahead.

So I videotaped some swings then I went to bed last night.

This morning I got up to play around.  The course I went to had no driving range, so I couldn’t warm up the swing that way, but I knew the one swing thought that I would keep in mind througout the round.  Keep the left arm tight to the chest.  I used a little visualization on my swings, almost feeling as if the left arm got superglued to my body at the top of the backswing.

I felt super-connected throughout the swing, and even though I had my share of errant shots, I was striking the ball more solid than usual, especially with the driver where I hit a few enourmous drives on a cold day into the wind a lot of the time.  My irons were really crisp and I felt the way I did on my practice swings.  I meant to do the post swing analysis where I rated the shots on how close they were to my practice swing, but I forgot to do that.

Tomorrow I will go to the range with the camera and hit some balls like this, but I have a feeling that it will be good news.



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