golfTEC Swing Evaluation

Last week I wrote about every golfer’s frustration: not getting any better.  No matter how much I play, I never feel that I get make significant progress in my game.  I’m a 25 handicap and although I’ll go through phases that I shoot in the low 90′s, I can never do that consistently.

My friend Travis recommended I check out golfTEC (www.golfTEC.com) which is a company that teaches people to play better golf.  I believe that most of their instruction takes place in hitting  bays inside their store locations, although my coach alluded to some short-game sessions that take place at a real course. From their site:

“Using an instructional system proven in over 1.7 million lessons with 170,000+ clients since 1995, GolfTEC is the world leader in golf improvement. From tee-to-green, clients gain skills to reach their shot-making and score-reduction goals.”

For the record, I am not compensated by golfTEC.  I’ve decided to blog about my experience with golfTEC so that it might help other golfers out there looking to improve their games.

This post will be about my swing evaluation session which I participated in last week.  My coach’s name is Thomas Baird and he explains the process thoroughly and obviously knows how to teach golf.

When you start your session, you put on some straps that quantify your golf swing in terms of a number of metrics, including shoulder tilt, shoulder turn, hip bend, etc.  golfTEC utilizes high-tech equipment so you can see exactly what you are doing.  After you take a couple of practice swings and one feels good, then your coach will display your video next to a pro’s video.  Here are some screen shots of my swing next to Larry Mize.

In these shots, a number of things are obvious:

• I’m squatting so much it looks like I’ll shortly need some toilet paper
• My upper body moves forward towards the ball during my swing
• My swing is severely coming from outside in, aka over the top
• I should probably never play golf again

Here are a few more pics of me next to my golfing idol, Tiger Woods (and to all the Tiger-haters out there, chill out and give the guy a break, you’re not his wife).

Look how my head is left of the ball and Tiger’s is right of the ball.  Big difference.  And in my swing, Tiger reaches full extension well in front of the ball.  I reach the bottom of my swing about 2 feet behind the ball!  How ugly is that?  No wonder I’m constantly digging into the dirt.

After going through a bunch of golf mumbo jumbo, my coach made some tweaks to my setup and my backswing.  See the before and after pics of my backswing.

One of the things I like from this session is that I was assigned homework: drills that I can do at home without a ball.  My drills are the chair drill, proper setup, and arms at top.  You have access to videos of these drills from their website, but I can’t link to them from here.

I’ve spent 20-30 minutes per day working on my drills.  I have to confess, I got a little cocky after my drills over the weekend and hit the range thinking my re-invented self would start blasting balls like a champ.  Ooops!  I guess it’ll take more work than a few sessions of drills.

I have my next session this week and I’m feeling good about where this is going.

To be continued…