The Taly Mindset is a device that challenges conventional thinking in golf.  It was invented by an engineer who loved the game of golf and wanted to play better. You can read my full review here. The device is now used by many touring pros and teaching pros across the country.  One of the most famous teachers who routinely uses the Mindset to teach is Lynn Blake.

The DVD is a big improvement over what used to come with the Mindset.  Although the pamphlet the came with it before gave some indication as to how it should be used, it really was not detailed enough and left questions unanswered.  It left it up to the golfer through trial and error to figure out what to actually do and how to do it.

The new DVD answers the questions that every golfer needs answered when using the Taly Mindset.   If you can understand the thought that went into the development of the Taly Mindset then you can learn to use it effectively.  And it will change the way you approach golf.

I found the DVD gave me new insights to really understand how to use the mindset.  There is a lot more to it than the pamphlet covers the DVD is an excellent complement to the device.

The new DVD comes with purchases of the Taly Mindset for $89.99 or can be ordered from the Taly Store for $49.99. If you have a a Taly Mindset, I highly recommend the video.  Taly Williams is offering a discount to Taly Mindset owners.  They can use the coupon code “MYDVD” when checking out at the Taly Store.

In a few minutes the Tour Striker brought my ball striking back.  An hour and half and two buckets of balls later, I’m feeling much better about my ball striking.  The difference is dramatic.

Sadly, before this session I was having trouble hitting my 8 iron 150 yards.  It was extremely frustrating.  This afternoon, my 8 iron was a much more respectable 165-170 average carry, with several carrying 175-180.  Now that’s what I’m talking about.

I knew I was on the right track when I started to hit what some low bullets with the Tour Striker.  These bullets went no higher than about 30 feet, but they carried about 200 yards.  The Tour Striker pro that I use is the equivalent of an 8 iron, so that’s some serious contact.  In an earlier conversation I had with Martin Chuck, the inventor of the Tour Striker, he assured me that when I’m hitting those low bullets, it means I’m very close to excellent contact, just millimeters away from perfection.  He’s right.

Shortly after the those low bullets, with a minor adjustment I began to hit them high, super high and solid, and they just carried forever.  It felt so good after this past month of less than perfect ball striking.

It was frustrating, but I did get my initial launch monitor spin rates.  They ranged from 2400, to 4200, but most of them were right around 2800.  Like I said, it was a weird day of practice.

I was pretty frustrated so I did some more work in the evening and figured some things out.  It came down to some basics, posture, take away, and clearing the hips.  Correcting these 3 made a huge difference and let me get through the shots more efficiently.

Looking forward to taking these corrections out for a spin tomorrow.

My recent fittings have shown my spin to be in roughly between 2800 on good swings, and 3200 on my poor swings.  My mission is to get this down to a paltry 2200.  A Bridgestone Ball Fitting made some recommendations based on my numbers:  105-107 Swing speed, launch 11.8.  It recommended 2200 rpm as my ideal backspin to optimize carry and total distance.  This means I need to reduce my backspin roughly 1000 rpm give or take a few.

First things first, I need to confirm my current spin rate. I’ve started to make some changes but I think it’s important to get an accurate assessment of where I stand.  I’m sure this won’t be an easy mission, but I think it will be one well worth the effort.

Interesting article with an in-depth look at Luke Donald’s stats.  With Luke Donald ranking low on the driving distance category you would have expected him to rank higher in accuracy, given that his low ranking in distance would put him at a disadvantage on approaches from the rough.

I’ve always considered myself a decent iron player, but I’ve made a concerted effort as well to improve my accuracy off the tee.  I’ve noticed an improvement in my scores from that.  Here’s what Luke had to say about his improvement in this area.

“At the beginning of the year the focus was to get my percentages up, getting it more in the fairway, hitting more greens,” Donald said. “I think the last few years — I’ve said this before — I think I got it to a point where I was trying to hit the ball too hard.

“My swing got to a place I didn’t really like, and it was affecting me quite heavily off the tee. … For as far as I hit a ball, I needed to hit more fairways than I did.”

I was encouraged by my practice session on Monday evening.  This morning it was a slightly different story.  I hit a couple of toppers which right away told me that I had too little shaft lean.  When I corrected that I hit a number of low flat stingers.  The balls took off low, stayed lower than 30 yards high and carried about 175 yards into the fog.  They felt solid.

I decided to reach out to Martin Chuck, the inventor of the Tour Striker to tell him about this month long test with his product as well as to get some advice on how best to take advantage of the time.

Based on his suggestions I will be working on the following over the next 30 days.

Tour Striker Practice Game Plan

1. Learn how to let the club land with forward lean. Do this with both hands and with each hand individually.
2. Monitor where you are touching the ground with hands together and individually. Seek to get similar results with the club landing inside the left heel.
3. Hit some “9 to 3″ shots trying to get the leading edge of the TS as close to the ground as possible. Keep the left arm on the upper chest, don’t chase the target line.
4. Get use to anticipating the “thud” of touching the ground, not smashing, just touching.
5. Take this “9 to 3″ into fuller swings with a focus on balance and rhythm.

I plan to take about a week with each of these guidelines (give or take a few days).

Low Flat Bombs

The exciting thing about hearing from Martin was that to cure my low flat bombs I need just a touch more shaft lean.  So things are not that far off.  All in all it was an encouraging session.  I had a lot of very solid strikes and my distance control feels somewhat more consistent.

I’ll be working to add that little bit extra shaft lean and see what happens with these low flat bombs.

It is amazing by how much Tour Pros are missing the fairway, but it doesn’t seem to cost them that many shots even with the new grooves.

The equipment may be more forgiving, but given the club head speeds these guys are generating, they require even more precision to hit them straight, or as Faldo said “the ball comes off sideways.”

How do you play?  Do you play bomb and gouge, or fairways and greens?

What I mean is that everyone’s “career” with golf, whether playing professionally or playing on the weekend with buddies goes though periods of highs and lows.  Whether it’s missing 5 or 10 cuts in row, or shooting 10 strokes above normal for your last 5 or 10 rounds, we all go through tough times trying to get that little white ball into the cup.  We all get into occasional slumps.

I’ve been on a bit of a slump myself.  After shooting some of my best rounds of the year several weeks ago, I have fallen into a deep fog, where it seems like I had lost all control of my golf ball.  We’ll at least until today, although the seeds of the discovery were sown a while back, but I’ll get to that shortly.

The slump seems to have come out of nowhere.  My last round before the slump was a 77.  I’m not yet a scratch golfer so 77 on a tough par 72 course from the back tees is just fine with me.  However when the slump started it began a downward slide in scores.  Before I knew it I had several 88s, a 90, and the dagger in my heart was 97 in the member member tournament yesterday.

Although I wasn’t sure how I would fix it, I firmly believe that I will.  I also know that I’m not the only golfer to have gone through slumps either.  Jack Nicklaus, Steve Stricker, David Duval, Davis Love III, Ian Baker-Finch and many more have gone through their share of slumps.  Steve Stricker came back from “no man’s land” to world #3.

How they fixed their individual slumps is another story, but knowing that even the worlds best players go through times like these, gives me hope that I can get my game together, and take it to even higher levels.

I also believe that whatever happens can be a blessing in disguise.  In my case, the slump made really dig deep and address some swing flaws.  I knew that I didn’t want this inconsistency any more and I became determined to find a way to fix it.

Last night, hours after coming home from the the worst score of the season at that tournament, I had a thought that turned into a deep examination of a flaw, what caused it, and how to make it go away.  I remember something that my coach Eben Dennis said to me in a discussion we had about Jamie Sadlowski.  The more I thought about that conversation, the more I realized he was right, although I still wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

It was a moment where I challenged a deeply held subconscious belief about the golf swing.  And as I worked with that thought, things began to click.

My major flaw had come into being a long time ago as I had decided that I was going to learn how to create big time lag.  Sure enough I learned how to create lag, but the way I did it, made it extremely timing dependent when it came to releasing it through the ball.  As Eben put it, I was “dragging the club head” through the finish.  This drag made it really difficult to square the club face at impact.  I also realized that this dragging result, was not the cause of my mis hits.  It was actually an effect of a different flaw.

I realized that if I wanted to play well and consistently, I need to address the root cause and not just band aid the effects.  I set out to discover the cause, and I believe that I have found it, at least as it pertains to my swing.

Something else interesting happened along the way.  If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that I’ve analyzed Rickie Fowler’s swing.  Well, I now believe that my previous analysis of his swing, was incorrect.  I was simply looking from the outside in, at what he was doing.  Well, the reason I bring this up, is that without trying to copy him, my swing seems to now have some of the same characteristics of his swing.  What’s more is that now I have a better sense of where his consistency comes from.

When I look at video of both swings together, side by side there are some pretty clear similarities, but there are also some major differences.  Now let me repeat this, I did not set out to copy or imitate Rickie Fowler’s swing.  It’s unconventional, and I think most golf teachers would steer clear of that, but there are some elements about it that work very, very well.

The main element about Rickie’s swing that I understand now, is that from start to finish, it never gets to a point where he has to “save it with his hands”.  He doesn’t really get stuck to where he needs to flip it or where’s going to block it (the way Tiger Woods often does).  In fact his whole swing is designed to bring the club head back to square at impact in an extremely efficient way.

I bring up the Rickie Fowler reference because as I watched video of my swing, it reminded me of Rickie’s but in my own way.  And like I said, I’m not trying to copy him.  I was just trying to find the most efficient way for me to bring the club head back to square at impact, and it’s probably just a coincidence that there’s any resemblance to his swing.

So how did this swing perform?

At home, I use the driving range on my dancin’ dogg simulator basically to look at two statistics: club face angle, and swing path.  From the day that I got the simulator, I always had a difficult time getting my face angle to square.   I would occassionally be able to do it.  The reason for that, is that the dragging effect I talked about above, made it very hard to square the face.  Recently it’s gotten somewhat better, where I could keep the face in the +2 to plus 5 degrees open.  With a path enough from the inside these allow for little draws, or baby fades.

With the changes that I made last night, and this morning, I was able to keep the face 0.0 to 0.7 degrees open, consistently.  This is essentially a square face.  That is a dramatic improvement.  You can imagine how shocked I was when I was able to do this 20 times in a row.  But I didn’t just want to take the simulator’s “word” for it.  So I went to the driving range to see if the results held up there too.

They did.  I don’t remember ever hitting the ball as straight as I did this morning.  And it just kept happening, ball after ball.  I believe that I will be out of my slump soon, and in a weird way, I have the slump to thank for this.  It got me to the point where I knew that what I was doing before, just was not going to work in the long run.  I knew I had to get to the root of the major flaw and fix it.  So, thank you Slump, you’re a great teacher in disguise.

1. Not every shot is a full shot.  The more you can learn to master partial shots, the more control you’ll have approaching greens.
2. Dealing with the wind.  Lower trajectory shots fly better in the wind and are less likely to be taken off line.  Have a short shot and it’s a windy day? Take more club and use a partial shot to take the wind out of play.
3. Helps your short game.  Partial shots are all about feel, control and imagination, learn to do this and it will make your wedge game and short irons so much more effectively.  It will also open up more of the green enabling you to play safer shots to tucked pins and still get the ball close.
4. Learn solid contact.  Partial shots require you to stay within yourself.  The more you practice these the more you’ll learn to feel how a solid shot feels.  Trust me, it transfers to your long game and full shots and makes you a better ball striker with every club.

Take the 30 day challenge: wedges and learn how to control your irons and wedges with more imagination and creativity.  You’ll learn valuable things that will help your entire game and make you a better player.