Just Keep Swimming

[Duke of Hazards]

Cool. I'm assuming there's a net off to the left?

[jasonfish11]

Nope just dry wall. Lol yes

[jasonfish11]

Here is a less washed out pic of the tv. And clarity that is the best drive I've hit on it.

[DougE]

Monster!

[Duke of Hazards]

I think I'd be too nervous hitting inside the house even with a net. That's pretty sweet all the data it shows.

[jasonfish11]

I think I'd be too nervous hitting inside the house even with a net. That's pretty sweet all the data it shows.

I've read many places it takes 2-3 months to get the comfort to swing fully. Given I've been hitting in the room for that long before getting the monitor I haven't noticed it. But I was aware of how nervous I was early on. I short armed a lot of swings.

[Duke of Hazards]

How high is the ceiling?

[jasonfish11]

It's 14' in that room where I swing. It's 6' on the other side of the room. It's the room over the garage so the dimensions are odd.

But 10' to the fan. Luckily my wife doesn't like the fan so I'm not worried about taking it out.

[DougE]

Did you go for the free 6 or 12 month financing offer, or just pay for it up front? It looks like a sweet set up. Either way, probably money well-spent on your game if you take it seriously, which I know you do. We now have one of those super-duper ones at my club, with all the bells and whistles, and I can use it whenever it's not being rented by someone by the hour. I'm supposed to pay by the hour myself, but so far, since I'm pretty friendly with everyone who works there, and the owner hasn't been around at those times, I haven't had to pay any fee. I don't think I'll ever get comfortable hitting inside though. Good luck with it---and the windows in the garage, if there are any. I expect your fairways-hit stat to go up and your handicap index to go down real soon.

[jasonfish11]

I get my performance bonus in April. So I just paid in full.

So far haven't gotten a ton of use. Spending most of today on yard work

[DougE]

After getting jealous of Fish's set up, I decided to install a practice room of my own. What'd'ya think?:

[DougE]

NOT!!

[jasonfish11]

After getting jealous of Fish's set up, I decided to install a practice room of my own. What'd'ya think?:

Didn't know you could get an aqua Team Titleist bag.

[DougE]

My wife's?

[jasonfish11]

My wife's?

Not buying it, we know it's yours. I don't see your wife having pink grips with a turquoise golf bag. I don't know her but I find that hard to believe.

[jasonfish11]

I keep getting amazed at how far I can hit the ball with what feels like a chipping type swing.

I know "feel isn't real" and all that crap, but I hit the ball further with what to me feels like a 60-70% backswing than a full backswing. My new "full" backswing with a 7i still leaves the club short of parallel, but when I take it back and attempt to not have my arms go past parallel to the ground the ball goes 5 yards further. It amazes me.

A normal 7i for me goes 160-165, and the dispersion is larger. I'm not spraying it everywhere but every now and then I'll hook one I'll hit a push slice. With the "short" swing that doesn't happen. Just a little tight draw or fade.

You think it would be a simple thing to just implement, but I know when I get on the course my illogical side of my brain will take over and it will be hard to actually bring myself to do it. I just know when I get out there and pull 7i from 165 my thought will be "got to hit a good one to get it there." Not "ok nice easy short swing."

[jasonfish11]

So hitting balls on the simulator recently lead to a revelation for me.

I control my clubface with body rotation. It always made me scratch my head when I'm hitting a push and the fix is to turn harder. To me body rotation correlated to club path. It's because my entire life I've heard dumb commentary saying things like "to hit a fade you just turn harder.". Well that's not true for everyone. For me all that does is make me start the ball more to the left.

I realized that this misconception, along and others, have lead to 20+ years of compensations in my swing.

I've been gradually unwinding those compensations over the last 3 years. Unwinding them obviously makes me need to fix the root probablem or else all goes to shit.

When I do things properly (for me) now I have very little curvature on the ball. For me this is keeping my arms in front of my hips/body. Making sure I lead my transition with my right elbow. Then turning as hard as I can to square the face. This leads to a square face with quite a bit of speed. The best part is it's super repeatable for me. It's such an easier swing than my old John Daly swing.

So I must say thank you to all of the tv experts out there for your complete uselessness at helping me.

I'm sure their advice works for some people. But my new golf swing idea matches my beliefs on religion. There are 8 billion perfect golf swings out there one for each person. Just like there are 8 billion religious beliefs in this world.

[MattF]

I keep getting amazed at how far I can hit the ball with what feels like a chipping type swing.

I hit the ball further with what to me feels like a 60-70% backswing than a full backswing.

I'm not spraying it everywhere but every now and then I'll hook one I'll hit a push slice. With the "short" swing that doesn't happen. Just a little tight draw or fade.

Amazing how much more control you have with a shorter back swing, isn't it?

I've been using a "3/4" swing for a few years now and I really like the results.

[jasonfish11]

Ok so here's my review after a couple weeks and 1,000's of balls hit. Note that I've only used the driving range feature and haven't paid for any of the simulation parts of it.

So before I get into the actual launch monitor and it's capabilities, a warning first. If you do this you MUST get a good mat, or build a good mat. When I first got my mat i got a semi-cheap one knowing I had a plan to modify it. It would only take 20ish shots with out modification before I felt it in my elbow. So I modified it to help prevent injury. Here is what I did...
https://golfsimulatorforum.com/forum/bu ... around-175
Saturday I probably hit 300 balls on it and don't feel anything in my elbow/wrist. Just some sore muscles and blisters.

I'm really glad I didn't have the launch monitor prior to fixing the mat, because I would have "powered through" the elbow soreness. Who knows how that could have ended up.

Ok the monitor. I'm going to be mean and start with the bad.

The bad.
- It misses 1 in every 4 or 5 shots, this seems to be more frequent with my GW and PW where I'm hitting full wedge shots. I'm not quite sure if it's something I'm doing or just the monitor itself.
- Occasionally the spin numbers are just off leading to a bad calculation of what the ball will do. Example I was hitting an 80 yard LW the other day. I hit what felt to be a good shot (didn't skull it) and it went 125 yards. That is about 30 yards further than I've ever hit a LW when struck well. The launch angle was normal but the spin was around 2300 RPM instead of 9500 that I normally get. This has only happened 1 or 2 times so far.
- There is a 2-3 second delay between strike and the output on the screen. I actually enjoy this it gives me time to envision the shot based on feel and see if I'm right. But I put it in "the bad" because in reality it would be instant if they could do it.
- The blisters on my hands
- You go through more balls/gloves. The balls get kind of chewed up by the netting. I'm on my 3rd or 4th ball already and it's only been 1.5 weeks. Luckily they are just junk ProV's (hi Doug) that I find around the course. I have a basket of "found" balls in my garage. So this won't cost me anything for a while.

Now the good.
- Being able to practice any time I want
- Being able to practice any yardages I want, real driving ranges only has flags/fake greens at certain yardages.
- Being able to instantly see results instead of just hitting into a net and guessing.
- It's fun

I have already noticed an improvement in my wedge game. Today at the driving range I hit my first 6 balls at the shorter "wedge" flags that were at 55, 75 and 105 yards. All 6 of them landed w/in 20' of the flag and it was normally my left/right dispersion that was off more than my long/short. Now that's only 6 shots, so the stat nerds (me included) will say "sample size." But it's pretty noticeable when you are standing over a shot and you are confident in how hard to swing for that given distance.

[Duke of Hazards]

Awesome. Thanks for the review. Do you plan on getting any sim add-ons down the road?

[jasonfish11]

I do but not sure when. I need to upgrade my computer before getting some. So it's added expense.

[jasonfish11]

Check out that club head speed. I know it's calculated but it can't be that far off.

I was positioning the ball. First time it has recorded that as a shot.

[jasonfish11]

Awesome. Thanks for the review. Do you plan on getting any sim add-ons down the road?

So I got a free trial of "fitness golf"

I played it's knock off pebble beach last night. The graphics were pretty blah. I didn't even bother trying to putt, I just set it to auto complete putting (meaning it was an auto 2 putt unless you were inside 6'). Chipping was pretty difficult as well. I tend to hit all of my shots inside 50 yards completely on look/feel. I don't pull out a range finder, I look at the hole while I putt. So chipping/putting on a simulator for me is really just an effort in futility. After missing the first 3 greens I just kind of started slapping my chip onto the green and taking my 2 putt.

Other than the chipping/putting it was nice to attempt to play specific holes. But I tend to do this in my driving range practice anyways. So it's not massively different for me, except the hole in my mind is now on my TV.

Other than that it was kind of odd "aiming" with the computer and then trying to hit everything straight. Example if I have a dog leg right, my normal tendency is to aim down the left side and hit a cut, so I feel like I'm aimed left not straight. But with a simulator you tell the computer to make the "center line" on the left side of the hole. So you are still aiming dead straight into the net. Basically you are making every shot a "straight" shot, which I guess isn't how I play golf on the course (never realized this before though). So that's a little different too.

Oh and I "birdied" #7 after sticking a GW to inside 6'.

[jasonfish11]

So I read about super speed training. It involves heavy and light clubs. But essentially you just focus on swinging as fast as you can w/o hitting the ball.

Since shortening my swing I've noticed my ball speed drop from 155ish to 145-150. But I was making more solid contact so it was going as far or further on average.
So I messed around with the launch monitor this morning and just focused on how high I could get ball speed while keeping my swing "short".

By just focusing on speed I was able to get to 155-160 ball speed. I feel if you spend 10-15 min a day swinging as fast as possible you could train yourself to gain 5-10 mph in swing speed pretty quickly, and if you make sure you aren't over swinging it would probably not hurt your accuracy.

I think I'm going to end every launch monitor session working on speed and see what happens over a month or so.

[jasonfish11]

So my chipping has been terrible my last 2 rounds.

Last round I had 10 holes with a shot from inside 50 yards. I got up & down 1 time, and "2-chipped" 3 times. Actually one was a 3-chip, but the 2nd chip was the hardest chip I had all day and I landed it 3' short of where I wanted. So I don't really see that one specifically as poor execution. If I'm w/in 3' of my landing area on all chips I'd be extremely happy, even if the occasional really tough shot doesn't get on the green.

I could blame 2 of them on the concrete bunker and the fact that I had to chip over GUR to a short sided pin that runs away and I was too lazy to move the ball, but I put the ball in a bad area so I got what I deserved.

Anywho, the point of this was today at the range I spent the vast majority of the time chipping. I re-realized something. When my arms are extremely relaxed, almost treat them as if they are limp noodles, my chipping gets MUCH better. The problem is I've come to this realization about 3 times now. So obviously it's not natural for me to have that type of "floppy" arms in my chips/pitches.

I actually feel that the "tension" isn't the problem it self. When I chip with "floppy arms" it really forces me to accelerate through the shot. When I do this the ball comes off dead and spinning a lot. So I have to hit it harder. I believe my issues have been a lack of acceleration through the ball, and this "limp arm" feeling forces me to instinctively accelerate.