The Body and Hands in the golf swing: my mulligan

I wanted to expand on my most recent article about Kenny G and Charles Barkley.   I have received a lot of positive feedback and questions about the importance of past sports in the development of a golf game and I wanted to take another stab at how I’m using this data.

The golf swing is an incredible balance of cause and effect pushed to their limits.  Determining the CAUSE is a real problem for golf instructors because of how varied the effect can be.  Here is how I look at a simple example of a slice.  By the way, I’m kind of like a computer in these cases.

Input:
The golf ball sliced.  The golf ball sliced because the face was open and the path was coming from outside to in compared to the target line as the golf ball was struck.

Analysis:  This could have been caused by a physical restriction.  Or poor technique caused by a misconception. – I need more input to figure out which bucket to put this golfer in:

Search for more input:
Physical: The right shoulder is tight.  The thoracic spine is tight.  Both hips are tight and the glutes are inhibited (the light switch is broken, not just the bulb).  This is easy.  I can test for each of these capabilities and any one of these COULD cause the swing fault and shot patter that I discussed.  But what else?

Conceptual: The golfer may think that the clubface should stay facing the target for as long as possible instead of rotating around the curve that the club is swinging on.
Or, the golfer may think that his or her best way of creating speed is to chop the arms down like chopping wood.

There could be an infinite list of places where the concept could go wrong so lets jump ahead and just say, this golfer doesn’t know what the hands or body is supposed to do to hit a draw correctly.   So now I apart from the physical fitness, I have to teach him what to do.

The art of teaching is picking which is the important input.  But if you get the right input then the solution is easy.  Ask what sports the played growing up and see how I use that new input a lot now and here’s how I do it.

If a golfer has some success with his stroke then the swing can’t be completely broken.   But in order to fix a semi-broken swing you are going to have to change everything.  A fully broken swing can be caused by either nothing working or two things working in the opposite directions.  If a swing is semi-broken then everything is only partially doing the right things and all parts will need some level of adjustment.

That is the great cause and effect relationship in golf.  If I tell your hands to do something different, chances are the chest is going to have to adjust as well.  To adjust my chest, the pelvis is going to have to do something different, which means the legs and feet are doing something different.  Woah.  Before you run home and throw out your golf clubs in desperation let me clarify my last post.

We, as golf coaches and body coaches, could start to change your biomechanics from either end: the feet (body) or the hands.  Either way, we are going to have to trust that your brain makes minor little tweaks and changes to make it all work again.  So which end to start from has always been a debate among teaching professionals for some time.  Do I get the body in the right place and then just say, “try and hook it with your hands” or do I teach the hands what to do with smaller swings like pitches and chips and then tell the golfer that the full swing is just like that only bigger?  In the first example: the hands are adjusting to a “fixed concept” of the body, in the second example; the body is adjusting to a “fixed concept” of the hands.

Let me bold this statement.  If you want to change a swing, get one part correct and then work on fine-tuning with the other.  If you want to struggle with golf, bounce back and forth making random changes to the grip, set up, downswing, impact etc.

Back to the original post.  I am now deciding which one to fix and which one to leave a variable based on what sports or activities each golfer played before the age of 15 (I just picked a number, test this variable if you want).  If they played a lot of body sports then that is going to be the VARIABLE.  If they played a lot of hand sports then that is going to be the VARIABLE.

An example of this is a good body athlete.  I could spend 5 lessons getting the hands perfect and just give a simple idea for the body to make this new hand movement work.  “Don’t change your hands, try and find a body position that works with what we are now doing.” Then I give my best guess at feelings for the body until we get something that matches.  I am telling you, this works wonders on the learning curve.

Pick the right problem bucket and the solution is easy.  This is just a new way to get into one of a few buckets.

Hope that helps.

Otherwise send me more questions and I’ll clarify on Thursday.