I have a question from Neal Walker. In fact, this really isn't a question. I think Neal is making somewhat of a statement. I think it's a pretty good one and we all might want to hear it because it's relevant to most of us here. Neal says, “This one is a shout out. I was excited to discover the PPGS system, as I have been experimenting with a limited turn backswing for about a year and have been quite pleased with the results in my game.
“When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. I like to use the example of how a carpenter swings a hammer to achieve the optimal combination of power and accuracy. He brings it straight up over his head to the zero gravity position (does not break his wrist), and accelerates it vertically down. If he were to take the hammer farther back behind his head it would produce less power because at the beginning of the swing he would have to work against gravity to lift the hammer back to the vertical position…and he would most likely miss the nail as well!”
Great comments! We also got a response to that from Gary T. Gary adds, “Nice analogy, makes sense. It's funny how we do so many ordinary things everyday correctly, without thinking about it, such as the hammer, yet we try to break down the golf swing into a hundred tiny movements.”
Well said, Gary. One of the biggest issues in golf is that, as we get older, we lose our childhood simplicity of grabbing a club and just swinging and swinging until we hit the ball pretty well. When we hit it pretty well and we sense the feel and just keep swinging that way. As we get older we become more analytical, we read more, we think about it more, we concentrate on it more. We try to turn the swing into connecting the dots, as Gary was saying at thinking about such things.
The more we get analytical and break the swing up into parts or dots or segments or whatever, and think about how much I turn my wrist here and do that and do that, we basically are crippling ourselves.
Because the golf swing, from takeaway to impact, is no more than about 1.2 seconds. Impact itself is about one half of one thousandth of a second. Some people think they want to practice impact. You can't practice impact. That would be like me telling you go get a hundred feet from me and start running toward me as fast as you can and I'm going to stick out my foot and I'm going to trip you and we're going to practice tripping. It's happening to fast. You just do it.
Any of you that have been on the site for a long time, you know I'm big about feel. What do I say about practice swings? Practice swings should be made at the ball They should be perfect setup and perfect swings, so that when you get a swing and it feels right, from take away to impact to the finish, and you're balanced is good, the swing felt good, it was flowing and everything, and everything was there and that's it. You say that's the one. That's the feel you want. And what do you do?
You just developed and sensed the feel. You feel it. Next you step up to the ball and swing the feel.
My comments have always been, set up and swing the feel that you just felt in your practice swing. So feel the swing and swing the feel. Forget about connecting dots and all these different segments of the swing. Heck, if you had to think about how you had to take every step, you had to have your heel hit the ground and move across the foot to the toe and then the next foot move, you couldn't walk very fast, if at all, and probably fall down.
Let's get back to making good practice swings. You have to know what the swing is. You have to understand the movements you want to make. But let's turn all this from analytical into sensing and feeling.
Set up and swing the feel.
You're all going to play golf the way you want to play it and shooting scores you know you can shoot.
The Surge!