My Golfing Passion...

Had my coaching session on 9/5/12 Wednesday to identify a fault and begin the repair with Glenn Roberts at Drummond Golf, West Beach this afternoon. I did film the entire session and edited excerpts are uploaded on Youtube and at the end of this post.


As expected the problem was nothing major even though the effect has been hampering my progress. It all related back to my injuries and years of using a golf swing that accomodated the resulting limitations. Now having regained flexibility to be able to produce a more correct and efficient swing, which was only initiated four months ago in January of 2012. What had happened is proof why coaching sessions should be followed up on with refresher courses.


All that had happened was that I had began to return to some aspects of the less mobile days. In the rotation of the body while making a swing an occaisional relapse to the upper body dominating and the lower body was not included all of the time. The obvious sign was the back foot not turning on the toes in the shot follow through. Hence too many shots were pulled to the left, also influencing the swing was a tendency to lift the front foot. Straight away there goes the stability of your body to produce an effective shot. Lastly in an unconsious effort to correct the swing and keep it stable my legs were locked upright with no flexing of the knees.
All very basic and minor faults that combined create an inconsistent golf game. Affecting reliability on the shots being played in my mind and the potential to improve. By having a coaching session the whole lot has been identified and this time the video is on hand to refer back to if another relapse creeps in.


The significant positive of this experience, was that I knew something was wrong but could not identify anything major. The effects of the faults were quite minor as I would only lapse into the �bad old ways� occaisionally. Overall this would add one to five strokes to a score in a round, my last two rounds have been, 82, broke handicap by two strokes, 84 last week and played to handicap the week before. Three weeks ago it was a 92 that round had several strokes added caused by these faults, prior to that an 85 and an 87.


In the coaching session it took no time to make the adjustments to play the shots correctly again. The big effort is to get on the range and practise, practise to ingrain the right way even further.


Returned home on Thursday and managed to squeeze in a quick nine hole amble around the course. The aim being to get used to the changes after the coaching session yesterday, nothing major more a matter of returning to the good things that I had been getting lax with. The three major ones were identified with the iron session being A) Lifting my left heel (front foot) on the back swing. This removes the stability of the platform that making each shot is based on. B) My knees were rigid and locked into place and I had to return to flexing/bending them in my stance. C) In my follow through I was not rotating so that my hips were turning and I would be facing the target after playing shots. The give away is the right foot (back) remaining flat on the ground or partially lifting and rotating.
Another fault that was creeping into my game was failing to rotate the wrists in the swing. This was again creating erratic shot play. For me these faults are not catastrophe�s, given that I have been playing to and breaking my handicap of late they are faults which are inconsistencies with my game. The cure is once identified to get on the range and play the shots until they are complete by rote.
Up until now my practice has never been focused upon this aspect of training. In part due to not knowing what was the correct game play to learn. That has now been supplied and the next step is to get it down pat.