Is YOUR golf swing a lot of BS – and you don’t even know it?

Is YOUR golf swing a lot of BS – and you don’t even know it?

A new video in the golf videos section of this blog tells you how your golf swing might have a lot of BS to it, and how you may not even realize it, and finally what to do about it.

Is YOUR golf swing a lot of BS – and you don’t even know it?

Is YOUR golf swing a lot of BS – and you don’t even know it?

A new video in the golf videos section of this blog tells you how your golf swing might have a lot of BS to it, and how you may not even realize it, and finally what to do about it.

Long Drive Regionals in St Louis, July 2012

Most long-drivers do not take golf lessons. (Based on survey information collected at the recent long-drive regional qualifier in St Louis).

They miss 6 out of 6 shots to a grid 50 yards wide, and blame it on everything possible such as bad luck, bad weather, poor mental preparation, cracked driver etc. etc. They NEVER blame it on swing mechanics.

Are they gamblers at heart and not true golfers? They hit endless rounds of six-shots at $40 a pop and keep trying to make it from the Locals to the Regionals, and most of them put in hours and hours a week on fitness training and golf practice, but sometimes do not even hit one of six shots in the grid.

How to tell them that it’s mainly their mechanics that are faulty. They’re trying to make the longest possible levers by going up on the lead toe during the backswing, getting their arms and hands up to the sky, and then they hope to dump all that body mass down at the exact spot where it’s required in the fraction of a second when the club is attempting a passing acquaintance with the ball!

 

How will this Long Driver return his club to the ball? What ‘undo’ movements does he need to make? He must rotate his body forward, drop his right side/trunk down, allow his very elevated right upper-arm to drop closer to the body, do work against gravity to bring his clubshaft back to a ten o’clock or so position (which is its position of maximum potential energy), rotate and then straighten his lead knee and plant back his lead heel. (Not to mention a change of wrist position and fore-arm position!) If he does not time all these movements correctly, or if they overshoot (ie. rotation does not stop in time to allow the arms to drop down from the inside), he spins around his trail thigh and hits the ball crooked! Big deal that he has the capacity to hit it 360 or more yards on the fly! The question is whether he can do it to order.

Another one pasted below. How many separate joints does he move? And, how many muscles must act as prime movers, synergists, stabilizers and antagonists for such complex movements? Are all the moved joints able to return to impact in correct sequence?

MGSS – a new adjective to describe it!

What a treat to explain The Minimalist Golf Swing System to people with a background in anatomy! They GET IT. However, because it’s so different (or in the words of people who’ve tried it, ‘weird’, ‘counter-intuitive’, ‘unnatural’ etc. etc.!) it’s best to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’.

So last weekend, at a gathering of 50 chiropractic students who attended a Motion Palpation Institute’s ‘Golfer and the DC’ seminar, class-room time showed a bit about the evolution of all things golf, after which it was all driving-range hands-on teaching/learning.

 

1. The golf ball has had millions of dollars of research put into it to progress from a feathery to the ultra-sophisticated thing with precise numbers of, size of and depth of dimples, not to mention high-tech materials.

2. Golf clubs have evolved from mere shepheards’ crooks to blobs of metal to oh-my-gosh tools that claim to cure slices and hit the ball a country mile and who knows what else.

3. The golf swing has evolved too —- look carefully at the change

All the chiropractors could see – good golfers, many of them – was a change of apparel!

SO, the moral of the story is, the golf swing has evolved in as random a manner as golf apparel has!

What should happen is once one has a plan for what the ball must do (for instance, in a full-swing, travel maximum distance, be straight and have ideal trajectory for the club being used), one should decide how the club must arrive at the ball (maximum speed, from the inside, and at a shallow angle), and then place all the body’s main joints in positions from which they can make the downswing most efficiently, based on their design, and on where they require to deliver the club!

The easiest way to do that is to separate the role of the arms and the role of the body. Allow only ferris-wheel movements of the arms and only merry-go-round movements of the body (and ne’er the twain shall meet). MGS really does this!

So, many attendees said, “Man this is crazy – but it actually works”! One asked, “I really like this but how should I explain it to my friends when I look so different?”

The reply from the intrepid inventor of the MGSS, “Well, ask them if you should have a rotation/coil/twist of your body during the backswing, then tell them, why do you care if I finish my rotation/coil/twist before my swing has begun? That way all I have to do is get my arms in place and I HAVE to make ideal contact!”