Today, we'll talk about swinging the body versus swinging the arms.
As we know, with the rotational swing today, you get your power by swinging your body faster as compared to the Peak Performance Golf Swing which says we move the body less and swing the arms faster. We're creating centrifugal force, swinging the arms in a circular arc, like swinging a rock on the end of a string.
When you swing the rock faster on the end of a string, the hand moves less. The symbolism in the golf swing is the rock is the clubhead, the shaft and your lower arm is your string, and the body represents the hands, swinging the rock. The key is when we want to swing our rock, the clubhead faster, we actually move the body less.
Yesterday, this came into a full picture for me with my second lesson with Larry. As I walked to the tee, he was on the far end hitting. He didn't notice me so I hung back and I watched him hit a few shots. There's nothing better than seeing exactly how good and what a player is doing by watching them when they don't even know you're watching.
I was just about really impressed and blown away with how well the setup was. He had the wide knees down perfect. He was set up very athletically ready. Takeaway was a little off but not not bad. He was in the mitt and somewhat up the tree, fairly vertical, knees barely moved and I saw what seemed to be a pretty good transition to the forward side and then a really good finish.
To reiterate what Larry's problem was last time, he had a really bad finish. He was a 100% rotational swinger, pulling his hips out of the way really fast and finishing way left of the target. The biggest problem hitting shots was he was hitting weak bleeds out to the right. No power. They could draw a little bit but mostly they were cutting and/or being a pure push to the right. But what would happen every now and then, he'd go after one and really accelerate his hips trying to swing his arms faster. I had told him, “Larry, it just bleeds out there. Your arms are noodly, there's no power. Every time he tried to add power he just snapped his hips faster, which pulled his arms across the ball more.
If you stand up right now, wherever you're reading or listening to this, and try to pull your hips around really fast , watch what it does to your hands. It actually pulls your hands into what I call an under release. Under releasing means that when you pull it across fast, the hand is pulled skyward. So that opens the face wide open. Remember, release is where we swing into the forward mitt, toe up. When you move your hips too fast it pulls your arms in a way that it under releases so it goes in the mitt skyward, face up, So the face is open at address, you're adding loft to the club and there's the weak bleeds and pop ups to the right. If you pull through fast enough and it accelerates you hands and arms so fast that your club could be wide open at impact that you actually have shots that sound like, look like, and feel like a shank! But what they are is an open face blade. The face is so wide open it's pointing out to the right, in some cases 100 yards right of your target and the ball goes off like a shank.
I start talking to Larry. He has had good results the last couple of weeks after his lesson. He's hitting pretty good shots, but he's still got a problem with the bleeds out to the right and weak pop ups. He didn't say anything about shanks, but once we got into the lesson and I started looking at his swing and he was complaining about distance. He said, “The few shots I hit good there aren't really going very far. I used to hit an 8 iron 150 yards and now I'm about 130 yards.”
I said, “Larry, you got to swing at the ball, you're arms aren't swinging at it.” So as soon as he gets into that Larry equates swinging speed with moving and turning his body faster into the forward swing. As soon as he speeds it up one time with his body, it's a little more of a blade type shot, weak to the right, and he's moving his body faster and faster and the first thing you know there are the balls that look like shanks.
So I started explaining to him. “Your body's moving too fast.” He told me he been using the rotational swing for about 8 years when he started taking lessons and every teacher he has told him that power comes from turning your body through the shot. The tarter you want to hit a ball, turn your body faster. In many cases he said that in lessons he was told that you can never move your body fast enough. The faster you turn the body out of the way and to pull your arms, the better you're going to hit the ball and the farther you're going to hit it.
I think that's definitely wrong. The faster you pull your body through, the more it pulls your arms to the left, which is across the ball so: A. your hitting the ball with a glancing blow and B: because of that, even if the face is square at impact on the aiming line, because it's cutting across the ball, it may start at the aiming line and fade. If it's not square to the aiming line, open, the ball will start to the right and go to the right. If you're pulling hard enough and fast enough, your lower hand on the club rotates under releasing fast enough and open enough, you could hit everything all the way to that shank.
We had to slow Larry's body down. Because up to now, with the last 8 years of lessons, he always had to move the body faster and turn faster trough the shot. But the Peak Performance Golf Swing gets power by keeping your body as still as we can and swing the arms faster. In fact, DJ once said in a golf lesson when one of my students ask him what he did when he wanted to hit the ball father, “I hold my knees more and I swing my arms faster pointing that way (he was pointing toward the target).”
I made that reference to Larry and I even showed him by saying, 'Larry, I'm going to hit a golf ball right now. I'm going to set up and I'm going to move nothing but my arms. In this case, because I'm moving nothing but my arms and I want to hit a pretty good shot, my left elbow is probably come through high, but I'll it pretty solid and I think you'll be impressed with how far it goes.”
So the left elbow comes up like what is known as a “chicken wing.” I stood there and used nothing of my body. No weight shift. No transfer. My feet stayed flat on the ground and I hit it dead solid perfect. The ball mark of the club showed that and Larry was really amazed. It went almost perfectly straight with almost a sift cut. Next I set up and made my normal golf swing, and it barely went 10 yards farther.
So what does that prove? It proves the power you get from your body isn't much. What you get from your body moving too much is all the myriad of bad shots. So all body, no arms, big problem. The biggest lesson Larry learned yesterday is that the body needs to be quiet and swing your arms faster. When wanting to get back that distance he had before, which we did by the end of this lesson with no problem. He was hitting at a green out there that he wasn't even reaching before with his best hits. When I first showed up his hits were fairly solid, good divots, a little right. When we slowed his body down, decent hits where going on the green and he started to hit a couple over the green,
It brought a big smile to his face because he knew now he still had the distance. It was always there, he just had to find the right way to do it.
If you're doing the Peak Performance Golf Swing and the ball bleeds out to the right, those little pop ups out there and maybe the contacts aren't that sold, but you feel like you're trying to make the swing, check the fact you still might be moving your hips too fast. Your body may be running away from your arms.
The actual drill I gave Larry was to feel like, in his set up, when he took his backswing and started his transition, that basically nothing moved in his body from the waist down, until impact. Once he reached impact, when he hit the ball, then his whole right side, meaning from the foot to the right knee to the right hip and shoulders, he just popped up like a Pop Tart, swing up to the T-finish, chasing his club to the finish so that he could get up there really fast and finish square to his target.
The key was, he started getting his body quiet.
The Surge!