Perception of the golf swing

[jasonfish11]

Lol Daly's backswing is shorter than mine by a lot.

[legitimatebeef]

[jasonfish11]

Holy shit with all the video ive seen of my swing it is still hard to believe how big the gap between perception and reality is.

I've been trying to shorten my backswing by about 1/20 of a second (3 frames @ 60 fps). That is when my left arm starts to fold.

The only way I can actually keep everything straight is to imagine that I'm stopping my backswing with my arms at 9 o'clock. When I do this my arms actually stop at about 10:30 and my shaft stops just shy of parallel. Which is exactly what I've been trying to do for the last month.

[legitimatebeef]

how big the gap between perception and reality is.

If there is anything like a universal factor in golf suckage in general, I would call this it. In other words that gap is the reason most golfers suck.

Something that just occurred to me like five seconds ago, is that maybe the advent of video and high-speed video is forcing people to try and perceive something that actually happens too fast to perceive. From a mechanics standpoint at least. Ben Hogan said a long ass time ago that during the swing you should give no thought to what the clubface is doing.

Kind of like launching a rocket. You work hard on the design and the build, then the aim and alignment, make sure they are all correct in theory. But once that ignite button is pressed, there is nothing more to do but hope that the engineering holds up.

[legitimatebeef]

Here's a perception that needs blowing up. Rotating the hips. Turning in a barrel. Seriously fuck that noise. Rotate on the backswing, sure, fine. But thinking about rotating the hips to begin the downswing, well doesn't that just get the right knee, then right shoulder workin out towards the ball? No choice but to come over the top, whole thing's just despicable if you ask me. So for me that's it with any thought of rotating hips, gone, goodbye.

[jfurr]

During my round last Sunday I had one of those Aha moments midway through. It's one of those painfully obvious things that you read about in every instruction but I had the feeling click the other day.

It's regarding the timing of the release in the swing. For a year or do I've had this awful tendency invade my swing where I hold the face open through impact, and with a exaggerated lag of the club shaft. The result is fat, shanks, weak hits, etc.

If I try to "roll" my wrists in the release I get a duck hook. And it feels wrong. So I've been floating around without a clue what I'm supposed to do.

So last round I had this awareness, that if I start the release during my downswing, but slowly - starting from the forearms (not wrists), that I get a better club path coming into the pocket. Secondly, I time the release so it happens just after impact, say when the club head is 6-8 inches past impact.

I hit every fairway on the back nine, and once I got control of the overdraw, hit every iron solid except the one downhill lie that I chunked. The sound off the club, the shape of the divot, the swing path etc., all felt great.

Hope to play this weekend and try to repeat this! Feels good to have something encouraging happen once in a while.

[legitimatebeef]

I am trying to get shallower. Part of the coming in too steep problem, I suspect, is a perception of the downswing as too vertical, too up and down. Too much like wood-choppin'. Need to key into the lateral forces in a good swing, both in the pivot and the plane itself. If I am trying to get the plane shallower, I have to get more of that sidearm-throw feeling into it.

[legitimatebeef]

Looking back through this thread I am actually somewhat impressed with my perspectives from a couple years back. I was so lost then obviously but my outlook and direction were good at least, and I can draw a straightish line of progress from then to the developments in the here and now.

In the present day I have been making big strides in the last couple weeks by adjusting my perception of the clubhead on the downswing. I used to feel like I had to prevent the clubhead from passing the hands in the impact zone ‍♀️ But now by training my focus on the clubhead and what it's doing/needs to do, how it needs/wants to swing, I am getting past some real deep, nasty issues.