Rookie on the Green

From the three rounds of golf I’ve played so far this season, one thing is evident:  I have no idea what the heck I’m doing when I chip.  I went to a Golftec lesson last week and asked to work on chipping to try to remedy this situation.   It turns out that my fundamental problem was the set-up — it’s very different from just a normal golf shot, and is a little counter-intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive because you’re getting lift on the ball by squeezing it between the club head and the ground, not by scooping it into the air.

Basically, my instructor got me on the right path with setting up to chip:  stance a little closer than usual (toes pointing maybe even a little bit left, towards the hole), ball farther back in the stance, not much of a back swing.  Your hands need to stay ahead of the club head, with the shaft of the club slanting with the grip towards the front of the swing and the head lagging behind (you can see this in the “after” photo, below right).  This is all for a short chip, say, just off the green.

This is a before-and-after of what’s going on with my chipping.  In the “before” on the left, you can see that my weight somehow ended up on my back foot when I hit the ball and the club head got ahead of my hands.  In the after, you can see that my hands led the club head through contact and my weight moved through to my front leg.

Another thing my instructor pointed out that seemed to help with my weight-shift issue was that my right shoulder should come up on the back swing and then go down noticeably as I move through to contact, as illustrated above.

I also learned that for the short little chips we were working on, the backswing should only go back to about waist high, with the club parallel to the ground, with wrists hinged back.  So the motion should be hinge back the wrists and then turn through to contact.  My instructor kept saying “hinge and turn, hinge and turn.”

One helpful Golftec drill I’ll be doing is a straight-arm chipping drill.  You keep your arms extended, totally straight, and don’t allow your hands or wrists to move during the chip shot.  The motion to impact should occur because of the rotation of your body, not wrist action.  This should be done with chips in the 15-yard range.

I have a long way to go before I can chip well consistently, but I’m going to set aside some time just for chipping practice because this is costing me so many strokes right now.

Putting, Before and After

Well, this picture of my horrid “before” putting stance and much-improved “after” says it all. Nothing like seeing a picture of how badly you’re doing to knock some sense into you.

You can see in the “before” that my back is hunched over, my legs are bent too much, and my hands are nearly against my thighs.  Here’s what my instructor taught me to lead to the new, improved “after” photo:

1.  Hips over heels.  This fixed a lot of things, including having my hands too close to my legs and having bent legs and a hunched back.

2.  Eyes over ball.  With hips over heels, you bend at the waist instead of the knees to get your eyes directly above the ball.

3.  Ball forward of center in the stance.

4.  Knees not too bent.  Again, a function of hips over heels.

5.  Change grip to have left hand on the bottom for now. This kept my wrists from breaking through the putt, gave my wrists more stability and aligned my forearms closer to parallel with the club instead of at a sharper angle.  The left-hand-on-bottom grip was also simpler and felt more natural than the modified claw grip I’d tried out last fall.

Here are a couple of the GolfTec drills my instructor gave me to practice what I learned:

-Ladder drill.  Put a line of six golf balls going out from the hole in one-foot increments.  Take a practice swing before hitting each ball.  You can’t move on until you get the balls in consecutively.  For instance, if you get the first ball in, you can move to the second.  You can’t go to the third unless you get in the first and second on the first try, and so on.  Do the drill until you can go through five rotations, making every putt.

-Lag drill.  This drill helps you learn distance control for lag putts (long putts you don’t expect to make but hope to get close to the hole).  Put a club on the ground three feet behind the hole, perpendicular to the line of the putt, such that the club will stop the ball if you hit it too far.  Practice putting five balls each from 20, 30 and 40 feet.  You get no points if the ball hits the club or stops short of the hole.  You get one point if the ball goes into the hole or stops between the hole and the club.  Do the drill until you’re getting at least 12 of 15.

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.

I went in for my first lesson in about a month and was pleased to find out I could move on from a total focus on the backswing.  This time, we focused on getting my swing properly loaded up on my right heel on the backswing and then shifting weight to the left foot and ending facing the target after hitting the ball.

I told my instructor that if I picked a spot on the ground to aim at for my practice swing, the club head would consistently come through inside that mark.  I’ve had problems with lifting my upper body as I swing, so I thought that might be the cause.

Instead of upper body, my instructor had me work on this weight shifting issue because I was coming up artificially high on the backswing with my arms, not really putting my weight on my back (right) foot.  This caused my swing to kind chop down too far inside, on too vertical a plane.  What I should have been doing was shifting my weight straight down into my right heel, creating more of a wind up, so that my swing followed the natural arc through where the ball was with a weight shift to the left through the ball.

My instructor gave me a few drills to work on this:

•    Do the whole swing with feet completely together. To maintain your balance, you’ll have to do the weight shift and this will give you a feel for how it should be in your regular swing.

•    Do the backswing standing on only your right foot, and switch to only your left as you transfer your weight through the swing.

•    Use a chair to mark how far back to go on the backswing and how far forward to go on the follow-through.  Your body should be perpendicular to the ground on both the back swing and the finish, not leaning too far in either direction.

Working on this has noticeably improved my swing, particularly with irons.  The next time I went out to play, I hit the ball much more solidly and consistently with the irons.  That’s about all that improved, but I’ll take it.

I went to the driving range today and the wind was just howling.  To make matters worse it was coming directly into the range so every ball I hit had to battle straight into the wind.  Not good for the ol’ self esteem.  The ball even blew way off course on the putting green.  I did find one simple putting drill that seemed to redeem my visit.  The putting green has a little hole just bigger than the golf ball with a sign for the “little hole drill” just like this one.  Basically, you start at one foot away and don’t progress to two feet until you’ve made two putts in a row, and so on.  I got stuck at four feet for quite a while.  This drill really increased my focus and it felt like I honed in on where to aim in a way I hadn’t managed to do with the regular-sized holes.  The regular holes seemed like huge targets when I moved back to them.  This is such a simple drill, but I think it could have a big impact if done consistently.

Golftec Lesson: Arms on the Backswing

My last GolfTec lesson focused on my arms on the backswing. Yes, still the backswing.

On the arms, I had been bringing my arms around practically behind my head, left arm bent, right elbow sticking straight out, club parallel to the ground with face totally closed. My “before” swing was not pretty sight. (In GolfTec, you end up with a “before” swing and an “after” swing that you can play back when you log in to your lesson online.) The goal was still to get my arms out away from my body, left arm straight, right arm tucked under at the correct angle. My instructor had me bring my arms back to where the top of the backswing should be, focusing on the correct form, several times, and then complete the swing from there. Another exercise was to complete the backswing while holding a golf glove under my right arm to help keep it tucked in. It exaggerates the position a little, but helps you get a feel for it. Another drill my instructor suggested for me to practice was to put my back against a wall or hedge and (gently) practice both the back and front of the swing. This keeps you from bringing the club way back behind you and helps keep your arms out. My “after” swing was a huge improvement, but the challenge will be getting consistent with this and making it my default backswing.