For any golfer who wants to play great golf
Posts tagged OTT
Lesson 11-5
Nov 5th
Lesson 11/5/2009
I’ve decided that over the winter I’m going to get some lessons and refine my swing. My goal is more consistency and accuracy. I think I’m already long enough that I don’t need to worry about distance as much as accuracy.
We worked on a few different things today:
Backswing
On the backswing I need to get my swing a little flatter. The swing thought is to get my hands over my right heel. This puts me on a better plane. At first it felt strange. It felt really flat, but what it did was it gave me a more compact backswing. Read the rest of this entry »
Simulator up and running
Oct 19th
So I finally setup the simulator. This will be my practice “facility” for the winter. I will get actual rounds on course when the weather cooperates.
The nice thing about the simulator is that it tells me a few keys stats about my swing. It tells me the swing path (inside out, straight or outside in and by how many degrees). It also tells me whether the club face is square at impact or how many degrees closed or open it is, and it tells me my club head speed at impact.
In my practice session today I have confirmed through hard numbers that indeeed the over the top move is basically history. 9 out of 10 swings where either coming in straight or from the inside. 10 percent were coming in from the outside but only by 3 degrees, which is not too bad at all.
The one thing I did notice consistently which bugged me is that on 8 out of 10 swings my club face was open. Most of the time it was open less than 8 degrees (which is still too much), but every once in a while I’d get one open 12 degrees or more. Really annoyed me. On a 160 yard shot, 12 degrees open face will send the ball 12 yards right of target. This is something I will definitely work on. I want the club head coming in square, or maybe even a degree or two closed through impact, with an inside out swing.
Interesting discussion on Golf WRX
Oct 3rd
I’ve been discussing the psychological effect of the ball on the swing over at GolfWRX and some very interesting things have come up. I want to synthesize the best nuggets of information from it, but I recommend reading it.
The Psychological Effect of the Ball on GolfWRX
Ben Hogan helping with the OTT issue
Oct 1st
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.
Today’s round
Sep 30th
Today I had an intersting round. I started off on the first hole with a tee shot that almost went OB, left me with a 180 yd shot to the green, hit a five iron to about 12 feet and sank the putt for birdie.
I proceeded to have a bit of an up and down day with my ball striking, but my putting was pretty good. I only needed 29 putts today, and I sank several 10 -15 foot putts to save par.
I had a few shots where I really felt that I was able to match my actual swing with my practice swing, and on those I hit the ball as pure as winter snow. Throughout the round, after hitting each shot I would rate it on a scale of 1 to 5, to how closely the actual swing matched the practice swing, with 1 being the most different and 5 being an exact match. I had my fair share of 1s and 2s, but I noticed that anything at 3 or above was always a good shot. On the 7th hole, I had a 145 yards to a back pin, with a slight uphill lie in the rough behind a bunker, and an elevated green. I took my practice swing with an 8-iron, and it felt just right. I was able to match the swing perfectly, and ended up 4 feet from the cup for birdie, and I sank the putt.
On a few holes early in the back 9 I got a bit out of synch and it showed. I sprayed some shots and got very frustrated for about 3 holes.
Are practice swings unnecessary?
Sep 26th
It’s amazing how I keep learning so much at the practice range. Today I had another mind blowing experience.
I always thought that the reason I came over the top was because I was trying to hit the ball hard. Which, intellectually, makes sense. Practice swings feel loose and easy, the goal being to feel what you want to do. Put the ball in front of me and I want to hit it as hard as I can. Right? So an OTT move is caused by overswinging.
I don’t believe that is the cause for me. I believe the cause is somewhat more elusive.
I did an experiment and recorded three practice swings with the driver, a slow one, a medium speed one, and a 100%, pedal to the metal swing. The results shocked me.
How to build more clubhead speed with less effort
Sep 24th
I think that many of us, because we want to hit the ball far, end up with an over the top move. We are trying to use our muscles to speed the club head. So we start down quick. There are two problems with this:
Problem #1
We can’t sustain it.
If we start down quickly, we need to sustain it otherwise we end up slowing down before we get to the ball. This leads to an actual decrease of clubhead speed. If we were able to sustain the acceleration with our core turning quickly out of the way we would be ok. However most of us don’t have that kind of core strength or flexibility. Since we lack that flexibility and strenght, we then must allow our body to to catch up to the swing. However the way that we do this is we allow the swing to slow down to match up with the core. If we did not slow the swing down we would probably pull hook it. Read the rest of this entry »
The Practice Swing/Actual Swing Dillema
Sep 21st
I have been talking about this issue now for a while. I wanted to show exactly what is going on so that you see the extent of the problem. I also want you to keep in mind that with the actual swing, I still manage to hit the ball reasonable long and straight.
I would love to hear opinions on what you think is causing this, and of course I am very open to suggestions on how to fix it.
Practice Swing
The hardest thing to do in golf
Sep 20th
The hardest thing for me to do in the entire game of golf is to have my actual swing look like my practice swing. This is the one thing that I believe will completely transform the game for me when I achieve it.
I had an awesome practice session today. Recorded a lot of 9-iron swings and driver swings. The same thing that I’ve written about kept happening over and over. I would have a beautiful practice swing, and I would follow it with an over the top swing. There were several times when I could have sworn that my actual swing matched the practice swing, until I looked at the video. On those shots were I thought I nailed it, I hit some really solid iron shots. But when I checked the video, still an over the top swing. Ugh!
When it came time to hit driver, I knew I was going to be over the top, the only question was how much over the top. I still managed to hit some bombs. Long, straight and with the right trajectory, from an “ugly” OTT move.
Tim said that it takes 10,000 swings to ingrain a golf move. I’ve heard other theories. 60 reps a day for 21 days. Don’t know which is true. What I do know is that a practice swing is easy and a thing of beauty, and then you put a ball in front of me and I have this urge to HIT IT.
Play like you
Sep 14th
I have a little unique move in my swing. I haven’t seen anyone else do it. I don’t think it’s wrong, per se, but it is unique. On the backswing, I let my head rotate with my torso, then when its time to start the downswing, my head quickly rotates back forward, like it was at address. It seems that when I try to keep my head from rotating at all, the dreaded OTT move shows up, and when I let it rotate, it doesn’t show up. I hit a lot of great shots today letting it rotate. Like I said, I have never seen anyone else with this move, but a lot of great players, have their own way of doing things. If it works right. Maybe this is an important part of my swing. Besides getting rid of the OTT move, this quirk in my swing, also gives me a lower ballflight. I think that’s because I’m coming in a lot shallower. I was a bit surprised at how straight many of my shots were today.
When you look at the PGA tour, a lot of great players have unique moves. Look at Jim Furyk, JB Holmes, Camilo Villegas, Lee Trevino, Jack Nickalus, etc. I don’t think my goal should be to have a text book swing, I think my goal should be to have the best swing, that I can have, based on my body type and what what works best.
