Rookie on the Green

Today we headed out to the Braemar Golf Dome in Edina, MN, to get in some mid-winter practice.  This was the first time I’d hit balls in a dome before.  According to the website, Braemar’s dome is “the largest and longest-hitting in the Twin Cities area with 46 tee areas on two levels.”   The prices aren’t bad — $10.50 for a half hour on a tee with unlimited balls (that’s on weekends) and $7.50 per bucket during the week.  Two people can share a tee, so Matt and I alternated on one tee and it worked well to have short breaks between each hitting session.

It’s pretty close quarters on the tees.  You can’t take your golf bag in, so you have to just carry in the clubs you want to hit.  Definitely a great way to get some practice in while the weather outside is so nasty.  I’m sure we’ll go back quite a few times before spring arrives.  The picture’s a little blurry, but here I am hitting some balls.

It’s been a long winter and we still have a few months left here in Minnesota!  In hopes of fooling myself into thinking golf weather will be here soon, I booked a few lessons at GolfTec in Edina to get my progress back on track before it’s time to get out on the course. One of the things I worked on in the lesson was shoulder turn and shoulder tilt on the backswing.

Shoulder Turn Before

My instructor used a photo of Michelle Wie to show me where I was going wrong in this before shot.  On the backswing, my shoulders weren’t “wound up” enough, not rotated far enough in the direction of the red arrow.  As you can see from the green arrows, my left shoulder lines up with the inside of my left leg, and Wie’s left shoulder is rotated to the point over her right, or back, leg.  You can also see the yellow “70″ shoulder turn number.  At GolfTec, green numbers are good, yellow numbers need work and red numbers are bad.  So that’s what we have to work with.

My instructor had me focus on getting my shoulder turn closer to Michelle Wie’s above.  Then I took a few practice swings with a Swingyde Golf Swing Training Aid, pictured above.  It was really amazing how this helped me get the feel for where everything should line up, both on the backswing and on the follow-through, without doing anything funky with my wrists.  In my swings after that, I tried to remember what it felt like with the Swingyde.  Maybe I need to get one of those things… it made a big difference.

Shoulder Turn Before and After

Here’s a look at before and after from the side — big improvement on the shoulder turn (nevermind that my head is turned to see what I did).  You might also notice that my hips turned too much, too though.  More on that coming up.

Here’s another before and after from the front.  The challenge through this process was that when I worked on getting my shoulders turned enough, my left shoulder wasn’t tilted low enough.  When I got the shoulder turn and tilt fixed, my hips rotated too much, as I pointed out before.  So the trick is to fix the shoulders and keep the lower body solid, and that’s going to take some practice.  Here are a couple of the drills my instructor gave me to work on this:

1.  Line Up the Clubs.  You need two golf clubs.  Get your feet like you’re setting up to hit the ball, in an athletic stance, shoulder width apart.  Put one club on the ground, shaft touching the inside of your back foot, pointing out in front of you (perpendicular to the target).  Take the other club and hold it straight across your chest with your arms crossed against your chest.  Rotate your shoulders to the right, as in a backswing, until the club at your chest is parallel to and directly above the club on the ground.  This helps get the shoulders rotated enough and helps you learn a good weight shift in your swing.

2.  Table Drill.  This one also works on weight shift, but also keeps your hip tilt from going too far.  You need a golf club and a table.  Stand with the table off your right hip.  Line up your feet as though at address.  Hold one end of the golf club in each hand with your arms extended about waist-high.  Rotate your upper body so that the club stays parallel to the floor and to the table, and clears the table.  You should feel the weight shift into the inside of your right leg on the backswing.

So, that’s what I’m working on this week.  My instructor left me with an after shot next to Stuart Appleby to show me the things I was doing right and for a little extra encouragement!  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to practice some of this stuff in a golf dome this weekend.

In Minnesota there’s still snow all over the place, and spring is nowhere in sight.  Tomorrow we’re looking at a high of 4 degrees, low of -10.  So there’s no chance of getting out on the golf course any time soon.  So what do you do to keep up your game when it’s not possible to go out on the course?

I still have some lessons left in the package I got at Golftec, so I signed up for a lesson every two weeks for the next two months, in hoping of reviving some of the beginning golf know-how I absorbed last summer.   The Golftec lessons are inside a Golfsmith location, so that’s a big plus, and there’s also an area where you can practice hitting the ball.

I went to my first lesson in a couple months yesterday and will post more later on how that went and what I learned.  Going to a lesson made me want to get out on the golf course in the worst way.  So I think my husband and I might go search out a golf dome to hit a few balls this weekend.  Other than that, it might be time to book a golf trip somewhere warm.