During a recent lesson I was asked by a student, with a combination statement and question,  that he had read or been told you can never stand too close to the ball. And he asked, in fact, if that was correct. Well, I immediately answered, “Absolutely not. You can definitely stand too close.”

Heck, if we can stand too far where we’re reaching or stretching for the ball that takes us out of dynamic balance. It should be obvious that the exact opposite could be true. We can stand too close to the ball and be out of dynamic balance. In fact, being  way too close to the ball, we’re in trouble when we swing down with our hands and arms and club to impact the ball. We could very likely start bumping our arms into our body or into our hips or into our legs and have to spin out of the shot too fast to make room. So yes, we can definitely stand too close.

But the thing that really got me thinking after that lesson for the last couple of days is that over all my years of teaching I’ve heard that question asked of me probably 100 times or more, but I’ve never had anybody ever ask me can you stand too far from the ball or reach too much for the ball?

Where did this thing ever get going that you can never stand too close? I guess it’s another one of these old wives’ tales or misconceptions that got going. But you obviously can stand too close and the body can be in the way of your arms and hands to approach the ball properly so your arms can extend out and square the club up and swing through and up to the T-Finish.

I’ve got a pretty good way you can judge that you are at the proper extension from the ball. Naturally, we know you have to be in dynamic balance, that is the weight has to be centered over or in the arches with the arms hanging relatively straight down. The way that I’ve always taught it is that when you take your athletically ready address position and you hang your arms down, if you were to look down and take a point from right where your two hands touch on the golf club, which would be your upper hand on the club. Take that very top knuckle, which is where your bottom hand would be resting of against it, draw a line straight towards your face. Proper extension would be that the line should come up somewhere between the chin and the nose.

We could maybe allow it a little bit inside the chin, not much, no more than an inch, and a little outside the nose, maybe to the eyebrows, as a margin there and test to see what works for you. But draw that line straight up, as I said, between the chin and the nose. That would mean your arms are hanging in the proper distance from the ball.

The key to all this is that many of us tend to reach too much. Why? Because reaching for the ball feels strong. If your muscles are stretched out in your arms, it feels strong and that strength give you the feeling that you can make a very powerful golf swing. But, unfortunately, when you start reaching too far, it tends to make the body bend over at the waist too much. Now what happens is that your center of gravity and your center of swing get out of balance.

The center of gravity of the body is at a point at the base of the spine. The center of gravity for the swing  is at the other end of your spine, your sternum. With the Peak Performance Swing we swing quite vertically on the maximum vertical in line plane. That means, as we turn and lift the club into the catcher’s mitt and up the tree, the front shoulder comes up to underneath your chin at the top of your sternum.

Conversely, when we swing downward and as we turn and start swinging up to the finish, as we stand up and swing up, the back shoulder comes up underneath the chin. That shows that the connecting points of the arms, which are in the shoulder sockets, the back swing lifts up to the sternum and the forward swing lifts up to the sternum. That means we are swinging around our shoulder  and that allows the very vertical golf swing we use.

Check that line out and see where your hands fall and you’ll find out what is right and what is wrong. Being directly in line with the chin up under the nose is the place you want for proper extension at address for the ball.

The Surge!

Tweet This Post

Today, we’ll talk about swinging the body versus swinging the arms.

As we know, with the rotational swing today, you get your power by swinging your body faster as compared to the Peak Performance Golf Swing which says we move the body less and swing the arms faster. We’re creating centrifugal force, swinging the arms in a circular arc, like swinging a rock on the end of a string.

When you swing the rock faster on the end of a string, the hand moves less. The symbolism in the golf swing is the rock is the clubhead, the shaft and your lower arm is your string, and the body represents the hands, swinging the rock. The key is when we want to swing our rock, the clubhead faster, we actually move the body less.

Yesterday, this came into a full picture for me with my second lesson with Larry. As I walked to the tee, he was on the far end hitting. He didn’t notice me so I hung back and I watched him hit a few shots. There’s nothing better than seeing exactly how good and what a player is doing by watching them when they don’t even know you’re watching.

I was just about really impressed and blown away with how well the setup was. He had the wide knees down perfect. He was set up very athletically ready. Takeaway was a little off but not not bad. He was in the mitt and somewhat up the tree, fairly vertical, knees barely moved and I saw what seemed to be a pretty good transition to the forward side and then a really good finish.

To reiterate what Larry’s problem was last time, he had a really bad finish. He was a 100% rotational swinger, pulling his hips out of the way really fast and finishing way left of the target. The biggest problem hitting shots was he was hitting weak bleeds out to the right. No power. They could draw a little bit but mostly they were cutting and/or being a pure push to the right. But what would happen every now and then, he’d go after one and really accelerate his hips trying to swing his arms faster. I had told him, “Larry, it just bleeds out there. Your arms are noodly, there’s no power. Every time he tried to add power he just snapped his hips faster, which pulled his arms across the ball more.

If you stand up right now, wherever you’re reading or listening to this, and try to pull your hips around really fast , watch what it does to your hands. It actually pulls your hands into what I call an under release. Under releasing means that when you pull it across fast, the hand is pulled skyward. So that opens the face wide open. Remember, release is where we swing into the forward mitt, toe up. When you move your hips too fast it pulls your arms in a way that it under releases so it goes in the mitt skyward, face up, So the face is open at address, you’re adding loft to the club and there’s the weak bleeds and pop ups to the right. If you pull through fast enough and it accelerates you hands and arms so fast that your club could be wide open at impact that you actually have shots that sound like, look like, and feel like a shank! But what they are is an open face blade. The face is so wide open it’s pointing out to the right, in some cases 100 yards right of your target and the ball goes off like a shank.

I start talking to Larry. He has had good results the last couple of weeks after his lesson. He’s hitting pretty good shots, but he’s still got a problem with the bleeds out to the right and weak pop ups. He didn’t say anything about shanks, but once we got into the lesson and I started looking at his swing  and he was complaining about distance. He said, “The few shots I hit good there aren’t really going very far. I used to hit an 8 iron 150 yards and now I’m about 130 yards.”

I said, “Larry, you got to swing at the ball, you’re arms aren’t swinging at it.” So as soon as he gets into that Larry equates swinging speed with moving and turning his body faster into the forward swing. As soon as he speeds it up one time with his body, it’s a little more of a blade type shot, weak to the right, and he’s moving his body faster and faster and the first thing you know there are the balls that look like shanks.

So I started explaining to him. “Your body’s moving too fast.” He told me he been using the rotational swing for about 8 years when he started taking lessons and every teacher he has told him that power comes from turning your body through the shot. The tarter you want to hit a ball, turn your body faster. In many cases he said that in lessons he was told that you can never move your body fast enough. The faster you turn the body out of the way and to pull your arms, the better you’re going to hit the ball and the farther you’re going to hit it.

I think that’s definitely wrong. The faster you pull your body through, the more it pulls your arms to the left, which is across the ball so: A. your hitting the ball with a glancing blow and B: because of that, even if the face is square at impact on the aiming line, because it’s cutting across the ball, it may start at the aiming line and fade. If it’s not square to the aiming line, open, the ball will start to the right and go to the right. If you’re pulling hard enough and fast enough, your lower hand on the club rotates under releasing fast enough and open enough, you could hit everything all the way to that shank.

We had to slow Larry’s body down. Because up to now, with the last 8 years of lessons, he always had to move the body faster and turn faster trough the shot. But the Peak Performance Golf Swing gets power by keeping your body as still as we can and swing the arms faster. In fact, DJ once said in a golf lesson when one of my students ask him what he did when he wanted to hit the ball father, “I hold my knees more and I swing my arms faster pointing that way (he was pointing toward the target).”

I made that reference to Larry and I even showed him by saying, “Larry, I’m going to hit a golf ball right now. I’m going to set up and I’m going to move nothing but my arms. In this case, because I’m moving nothing but my arms and I want to hit a pretty good shot, my left elbow is probably come through high, but I’ll it pretty solid and I think you’ll be impressed with how far it goes.”

So the left elbow comes up like what is known as a “chicken wing.” I stood there and used nothing of my body. No weight shift. No transfer. My feet stayed flat on the ground and I hit it dead solid perfect. The ball mark of the club showed that and Larry was really amazed. It went almost perfectly straight with almost a sift cut. Next I set up and made my normal golf swing, and it barely went 10 yards farther.

So what does that prove? It proves the power you get from your body isn’t much. What you get from your body moving too much is all the myriad of bad shots. So all body, no arms, big problem. The biggest lesson Larry learned yesterday is that the body needs to be quiet and swing your arms faster. When wanting to get back that distance he had before, which we did by the end of this lesson with no problem. He was hitting at a green out  there that he wasn’t even reaching before with his best hits. When I first showed up his hits were fairly solid, good divots, a little right. When we slowed his body down, decent hits where going on the green and he started to hit a couple over the green,

It brought a big smile to his face because he knew now he still had the distance. It was always there, he just had to find the right way to do it.

If you’re doing the Peak Performance Golf Swing and the ball bleeds out to the right, those little pop ups out there and maybe the contacts aren’t that sold, but you feel like you’re trying to make the swing, check the fact you still might be moving your hips too fast. Your body may be running away from your arms.

The actual drill I gave Larry was to feel like, in his set up, when he took his backswing and started his transition, that basically nothing moved in his body from the waist down, until impact. Once he reached impact, when he hit the ball, then his whole right side, meaning from the foot to the right knee to the right hip and shoulders, he just popped up like a Pop Tart, swing up to the T-finish, chasing his club to the finish so that he could get up there really fast and finish square to his target.

The key was, he started getting his body quiet.

The Surge!

Tweet This Post

Yesterday’s article about weight shift, sit or sink over and onto your back leg, brought out a lot of good comments and questions. One extremely good one was from Bill Kerney. Bill asked, “I see now why the hips should have a limited turn. Is there some way to integrate the idea of the bump at the right time during the backswing with the right arm at 90 degrees?” Well Bill, absolutely, there is a perfect time to do that. For starters, we have to reiterate the fact that the forward upswing starts with the lower body doing the lateral left shift or bump, as I call it, slightly before you reach the top of the backswing with the arms, hands and club. That’s the same concept as a pitcher throwing a pitch or a baseball player throwing a ball, or skipping a rock on a lake. The lower body is already striding forward while the back arm is lifting the ball up to the air to throw it. The key is, you can find a point at the top of the backswing that would be considered “the top of the backswing” where we need to start the forward swing.
	The best way to do this is what I call the Find Top of Backswing Test. You get into your normal posture and have your arms outstretched. Leaving your forward arm in a position of holding a golf club, take your back hand and place it exactly on the elbow. From there, I want you to take your back hand and lift your forward arm up to where would be the top of your backswing. That means you’re going to pull it up and lift, and you’re going to let your shoulders and hips turn, but making sure that, #1, your head does not move and #2, your spine angle does not change.
Now this is considered a somewhat static position, which means it’s the top of your backswing without a golf club. We know that, in reality, when you have a golf club and are in a more dynamic motion, your swing will actually be stretched out a little longer than that. So this is like our “pre-top” position. Now the key is, once you establish that position, this is where, when your top hand on your golf club reaches it, that’s when you make the “bump.” I’ve always had this image that there’s a bell at the position . Whether it is a church bell, an upside down desk bell , I hit the plunger, that’s the one I use. If you want to use the liberty bell, that’s fine, any bell whatsoever. I use the upside down desk bell because when my thumb comes up and hits that bell, which is ringing in my mind, that’s the split second when my whole body starts the lateral left shift, or bump, to start my forward upswing. We know the hands and the arms and the club will go a little bit higher, but the key then is that’s where you have to really hold on to make sure the wrists don’t break down. But ringing the bell from the position you find using the Find Top of Backswing Test, will give you the point that you’ll be able to start that forward upswing, that one split second before you actually reach that dynamically swinging top of backswing. Find that point, ring you bell, get your bump started, maintaining firm left wrist and forearms at the top so you don’t have the club down cocking. Ring that bell the correct way and you will see how much smoother, faster, freer and more explosively your hips will slide and then start to pull your body so you can swing your arms and club up to the T-Finish. I think you’ll find you’re hitting a lot more shots much more solidly, straighter and, very likely, with better distance. The Surge!

Tweet This Post

Today I’m going to discuss weight shirt or weight transfer in the backswing. In a blog the other day, John OB asked this of me. “Hi, Don. Regarding loading or weight transfer. First, at what point should it happen in the backswing? And second, there is another element of this segment of the swing that puzzles me a bit. Should one feel that the body weight is downward or upward or neutral during the backswing, or could either have any bearing on clubhead speed?”

Well, John, the weight shift or weight transfer should happen immediately as the backswing starts. We know that in the Peak Performance Golf Swing setup, we like the preloaded heavy right position. What that means is we should have our weight already over, onto the back leg. That means we’re behind the ball to begin with. This way, what little turn we do make, because the Peak Performance Golf Swing is a limited, is we’re already there. Any turn is immediately over and on to a flexed back leg.

The term “loading” implies that, first and foremost, when you load something onto it, you are placing it on there and it receives the weight. For example, if you were out playing golf and you sit down onto a golf cart, you have “loaded” yourself onto the golf cart. When all of the weight reaches the seat you’ll notice the cart’s springs compress downward a little bit because it has received the weight. So loading implies receiving. Because it’s received the weight, that means, just like the springs on the cart or a car compress , so must the muscles in your rear leg compress.

That means that as you start your backswing, and I believe we start it with the right, if you’re right handed, hip and shoulder, would start the turn and immediately, the turning of the hips and, since you are already on the right side, the weight goes downward. You should feel flexing in the leg and you should be able to see that the knee cap or knee joint is actually bending more. It is receiving the weight. This isn’t a whole lot, it just has to go down an inch or so. Because we’re already behind the ball to start with, this turning and loading onto the leg is moving downward.

I might also add that another way we can look at this transfer of the weight or weight shift, because we’re loading and the back leg is compressing, that you feel like you are sitting or sinking into your back leg. I like those two terms because it implies a downward compression of the leg. Yopu feel the muscles in the back of the leg, from the back of the hip all the way down to the back of your knee should be stretching, and if stretching, that means they’re getting longer.

That means they are in a position now to be able to do what? Spring up when you transition and shift to the forward finish. So think about and feel that a good backswing turn means you will set ot sink onto your back leg.

Since we know that a Peak Performance Golf Swing says that we should swing up in the forward upswing to the T-Finish, when you load onto your rear leg in the backswing and it compresses downward, that actually sets you up for a perfect swing to the finish. Conversely, the key is that people get hurt in a golf swing when you turn your shoulders and hips too much. As long as your back leg is connected to your back hip, it will actually pull the back leg straight.

I’ve seen professional golfers have their teachers stand behind them with their club pushed into the back of their knee to help keep it flexed. That can do it when you’re turning. But the simple key to your back leg not straightening in the backswing is: Don’t turn too much! Make the limited, Peak Performance Golf Swing 70 degree turn to your forearm over your toe line and the leg will not straighten. But at the same time you really need to make sure that you allow the weight to, when it shifts, load onto the leg, compress the leg a little bit so that it flexes downward, and now we’re perfectly set up to swing forward.

Again, if you turn too much and your back leg straightens, well if it goes up, the equal and opposite of up is down. That’s what happens to most golfers. The leg straightens and when they start their downswing the back leg breaks down. As the forward side turns out, it pulls the hips in and the leg breaks downward.

So we have a backwards swing. You’re going up in the backswing, down in the forward swing. What we want is down in the backswing so we can swing up in the forward swing. That’s what allows up to swing up and hit the ball and have more acceleration in the swing because we are swinging up.

You ask if weight shift had any bearing on clubhead speed. Absolutely. If you’re swing up and your arms are swinging up and your body’s standing up, everything is standing up to that T-Finish. Everything going up is going to allow more acceleration of the arms and the club and, as we know, more clubhead speed hits the ball farther.

So, yes, John, the swing should go downward in the backswing as you load onto your back leg and therefore up in the forward swing. You do these two things, you will see increased clubhead speed because it’s easier to swing up when you are actually standing up.

The Surge!

Tweet This Post

I see a lot of questions and comments in the blogs about turning the shoulders too much in the backswing and getting deep behind the toe line and over swinging.  I also see many comments about hitting both chunks and thin shots.  These problems can be cured by simply making sure your back arm (right for right handers and left for lefties) is in a right angle at the top of your backswing.

Let’s start by looking at the concept of tucking the back elbow and keeping it in close to the torso or hip.  The thought is that this provides some connection to the torso and more control of your arm motion.  There is some truth to it, but it causes more problems than it is worth and in fact it is worthless because it is not correct.

For starters, a tucked back elbow is bent at the elbow so much that it looks like a V.  A tucked back elbow is in close to the torso and thus causes a narrow width backswing.  So narrow that it causes the forward arm to bend at the elbow.  This is a major problem because the forward arm must remain relatively straight in the backswing as this is the arm that creates the width of arc.  The forward arm must remain straight because it, along with the club, is the string in the concept of a rock swinging on a string creating centrifugal force.  The wider the arc (remember, the arms swing the rock) the faster the clubhead, and a faster club hits the ball farther.

Another big problem of the back arm folding to a V is that it is being pulled inward toward the torso which is opposite of remaining wide and extended.  A golfer can actually pull their upper arm inward and tight to their side so much in keeping the arm and elbow tucked that they can actually push themselves into a reverse pivot or weight shift.  This pushes their head and spine forward ahead of the ball instead of turning and loading over and onto their rear leg behind the ball.  It can also cause too much torso turn, getting the arms behind the toe line in the Sacred Burial Ground (SBG).  And, to complete the problems, the wrists can break down and cause an over swing to parallel or longer.   This adds more forward tilt to the head and spine increasing the reverse weight shift and lays the club off into the heavy position.

The cure for all these problems caused by intentionally tucking the back elbow, or intentionally cocking the wrists and/or swinging to parallel and not being able to keep the forward arm relatively straight, is simple.  The back arm MUST “Never and I mean never, ever,” BEND, BREAK, or FOLD, past 90 degrees, a right angle.

We all know from science class that a 90 degree right angle is the strongest angle.  In keeping the body functioning in harmony with the laws of physics the arm in a right angle is at its strongest position.  Just look at arm wrestlers.  The first one to start losing their flat wrist and their right angle at the elbow as it starts bending toward a V…looses.

Practice and learn the feeling of your back arm lifting up to form a right 90 degree angle at the top of your backswing.  Keeping your wrist firm helps create the right angle.  That also helps keep your backswing 3/4 and the club more vertical.  Keeping the back arm in a 90 degree angle also helps control the shoulder and hip turn to the forward arm over the toe line for the perfect limited turn PPGS backswing.

The final checkpoint when the back arm is in a right angle with a vertical 12:00 o’clock club will be that both arms form a perfect Equilateral Triangle.  A line drawn touching both elbows as the base of the triangle will be parallel to the ground.  The final important point about this equilateral triangle with the elbows parallel to the ground at the top of the backswing is that the arms, head, neck, shoulders, and back are all in dynamic balance.  And they are strong and free from stress and strain.

I think it is safe to say that a back arm in a 90 degree, right angle at the top of the backswing is simple to do and easy to feel, monitor and check.  Back arm in a right angle at the top of the backswing is simply the “right” thing to do.

The Surge!

Tweet This Post