golfTEC Taught Me to Skip Stones

Okay, it’s been about 4 weeks since my swing evaluation session at golfTEC.  I’ve had 2 lessons since then.  The results: I feel like a gunshot victim who has a bullet lodged in his brain who has to relearn how to talk (Regarding Henry for golf?).  Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but you get my point, right?

Taking a look back at my golfTEC Swing Evaluation post, you can see how much work needs to be done.  The first 2 sessions, we’ve been focusing mostly on takeaway and the top position.

Here’s the progress I’ve made in that regard:

Granted, just because I got to the correct top position for that particular pose, doesn’t mean it comes naturally.  I still drill every day for that.  My golfTEC coach, Thomas Baird proclaims, “10,000 swings”.  That’s the number of swings to make it stick.  100 swings a day for 100 days.  That should do it.

So between my first lesson and second lesson I went out a few times to hit balls, concentrating on getting in the correct top position.  I thought I did pretty well, but then the problem was we didn’t talk about the downswing yet, so I was still hacking up dirt plenty of times.

The second lesson we focused on turning the hips during the downswing.  Apparently, there’s also some lateral movement toward the target as well as the hip turn.  That’s a lot to remember in a split second!  You can see some of my pictures here.

Toward the end of the lesson, Thomas gave me an analogy that made the most sense.  I was struggling putting my head around the idea that your spine angle is away from the target, your head is behind the ball at impact, but your weight is on your left side (see Appleby above).  Thomas had me pretend to skip some stones.  That was easy and it ends up being practically the same motion as the golf swing.  When I skip a stone, I look like Appleby in that picture above.

Well, I can’t say that when I went to the range with my new mantra that I was crushing balls.  Anything but.  However, I did play Melrose Par 3 course the other day and I crushed a 6-iron with that new philosophy.  Translation: progress.

Now it’s back to drills, drills, drills.  Thinking about playing a real round this weekend to test some of these new things out.  Wish me luck!