Don't Put On The Brakes

Hi Peter,

Do you have some injury or problem that gives you trouble tossing things over your left shoulder? Do you have video of your swing that you might be able to upload to YouTube as some of us have so we can see if we can offer any help?

You might want to practice with the towel drill Surge offered up last year (video currently unavailable, but you may remember it). Toss a towel over your left shoulder so it drapes down your back. Do this from setup position. Swing the towel back a little and then try to throw it up over your left shoulder in a finish position.

Lynn42--I was another classic example of not following through completely, but I came up with an inadvertent fix, one that was completely untented. I play at a course where it is inconvenient to warm up at the driving range. Most of the golfers putt a little and then head strait for the first tee. Recently, to protect my back, I have taken to swinging clubs using baseball (level) swings in the grassy area by the parking lot just to warm up, starting with easy swings and finishing with full swings with the club wrapped around my back. I began hearing the swooshing sound and feeling the extension in the upper body muscles, and it carried over onto the first tee. Until that time, I think I was hindered by two things. One was a mental feeling that I needed to control my finish to not get out of control and some need for symmetry in my swings, making equal length backswing and follow through. So, I got more out of the baseball warm up swings than just loosening up.

Aches and pains for us 54 year olds is not so much fun but play on you are!! My hands your shoulder. Oh boy!

Steve, Disregard the previous reply. I just realized what is going on. Since the comments are replies to other comments not on the first/current page of that particular blog. Any quick link will take you and it, to the top of the current page, out of the normal sequence without the to name being displayed. I knew all of this crap from before, I just needed to be reminded about it again.

Was there a particular club you saw this with, because I just rewatched the video and he looks perfectly square on every shot. Maybe you're being tricked by the perspective? The down the line camera is set very low back on the aiming line.

BoogmFitted irons made all the difference for me picked them up Thursday hit at the range Thursday night and played them yesterday and today. I am waiting on the driver head to come in its on back order he is trying to get me a 11 degree with a square face. I think what they doing is looking for a 9 degree head that spec's out to 11 degrees of loft. It might be a couple of weeks. Enjoy your new sticks when you get them. Roger

Thank's Don I wonder about stoping the shot or being noodely
with the arms as some thing to do with confidence with the
shot as mooving our head its much easier to do things
right when we start our Day out strait and long .
Same thing with back problems making the swing thinking
you might hurt yourself will in some way tighten up and
even if hit strait there is no distance
What stays  with me the most is still swing the feel
the hard part is that little white ball that we had to the mix
they say the size of a golf course (all golf courses)
is 6 inches long that"s 6 inches between our ears
CONFIDENCE OF A SOUND SWING IS GAME
and good swing is gainned by PRACTICE PRACTICE
AND PRACTICE how many of us want to dedicate
the time how many of us have a practice system
we folow ,keep notes and grade ourself.
Our reslts are probely what we put in it I ear Don say often
that the swing is part of is D.N.A I'm guessing for many years
he as done the drills.
Heck he as invented some of them.
thank''s Don take care of yourself appreciate all you do
Ron... from Qc, Canada.

Hi, Lynn42--I caught the Harrington imitation of Happy Gilmore with his running start.  It showed me how much eye-hand coordination he has to be moving and still hit that small ball.   The baseball swing warm up got me 15 yards more on my driver and fairway woods the last two days.

Since you brought up "dots" learning again, and I know that possibly 70% of the general public are dots learners, I thought I would say that if you ever want to find out if you are a dots learner cognnitively or behaviorly, I can help you.  Some of us are dots learner because we are wired that way.  Some of us are dots learners because we somehow developed those habits even if we are not wired that way.  Usually, our instincts are correct, so if you feel you are a dots learner, you probably are one.  What I can find out, though, is if you are so strongly a dots learner that it becomes difficult to make the transition after learning all the dots to cross over and overlay a holistic swing over the dots.  We would have to find a way to do this off line.  I don't have data from golfers, but I studied over 100 adult tennis tournament players, and the percentage of dots learners was higher (greater than 70%), so there's hope.

CharlieY

In my observations of golfers that do not follow through, sliding on the FUS is the biggest culprit. Do a proper bump and weight shift and the follow through is almost a natural finish. It is all but imposible to follow through with a slid. Adn forcing a follow through with a slide will really do a number on your back

Dick H

I found that if you increase speed at impact then the finish has to happen naturally due to the force created.
 So if the T finish is not happening could the problem be more of a case of a swing that is too casual?
My father in law cannot do a finish at all and I can see that it is his swing.It looks like he is hitting the ball by stunning it and not just swinging through the ball as if it wasn't there. He knows he cannot finish as he always mentions that my 8 year old son does two things that he has never mastered and the finish being one of them. But he is unwilling to change and when trying something different will quickly revert as it feels diiferent!    

Charlie,

I have no clue as to whether I'm a "dots" learner or not.  I do know I can easily get bogged down with too many swing thoughts and I do tend to overthink things.  I do like to try different things, although I'm not as bad as Steve...lol.  I'm not from Mo, but you do have to show me.  The written word can often be ynderstood differently by different people as we have seen here recently.  l prefer visual learning for most things.

I can play golf with someone and watch their swing and if they are having a particular problem and ask I can normally see what the correction might be.  Many times we are not doing things the way we think.

Interesting subject though,

Lynn42

Steve, maybe he  is an exception to the 2.5 rule  :)

Some crazy weather for us this early in July. It's like the monsoons are blowing up early this year. We may have some sub-100 degree days later this week even. There was some really gorgeous lightning last night, but I'm hoping it's all passed now.

Your mental error starting that was the idea of an equal follow through to the back swing. Just like with putting you want to follow through more than you went back in order to ensure proper acceleration. :)

Surge your points about following through just make sense. It is all part of accelerating through the hitting area and at our target. I always appreciate your reminder that we hit the ball with our follow through not our backswing.

Thanks Steve, its funny how nerves can wreak havoc with your game.   I know some tour players welcome the nerves because they know that their in the hunt and they tell themselves "I can play good golf with the nerves".  

For me the flubbed chips were caused by a nervous quick and jerky swing combined with a lift of the head before impact to watch where the ball was "supposed" to go.   I then told myself to swing with a smooth tempo and try to watch for the clubhead striking the ball.   The next chip is then almost always a perfect strike and I say to myself "see you can play good shots when your nervous".

After the first round, we played two rounds of 27 holes over consecutive weekends, I went out for a practice hit and at every spot where I played a flubbed (or the one sculled) chip I pulled out about ten balls and replayed the chip.   The worst chip was generally about six to eight feet, still a makeable putt, but most were around the three to four foot range.  I improved my score in the next round by five shots with only one flubbed chip but quite a few scrambled pars!

Have you told him that if he wishes to continue to get the same result, he should continue to do the same thing? ;-)

Believe me we all try to better our game and try a lot of things
I have so much to learn that I  should not be giving advice
this said I wish you well on what you are working in your game
I always scored bad when trying knew things. If it can help, this is what
I do first for the time I am practicing and till I feel good in the knew
position I forget the score I even ask the players with me to not right down my
score after all I know when I'm playing good and I pay more attention
on what I am trying to do and less on the score card .
As for balance I find that when I take my arms out of play it
helps me some times we try to hard
I hope this can help if not I sugest the delite button LOL

Steve I hear what your are saying. I have a finish similar to yours some what I have a screwed up left ankle my foot doctor says I fractured it at some point but I don't ever remember having a cast on it I did sprain it pretty bad and do have arthritis in it. I can get to some what of a finish with the weight on the left side but just do not stand there and pose.
i continue to work on this and will see were it ends up. I am not disputing what Don is saying  in any way. I watch the senior tour and a bunch of these guys are not staying in a pose very long at all. I watch your videos you definitely are getting to your left side and through the ball . 
  

Roger, it's like I told Doc, I have a 3 year plan.The plan is to get as good as I can get by 3 years time so I can enjoy my retirement, Lord Willing. Doc told me that I shouldn't have any trouble obtaining my goal and sooner with practice. After studying Doc's site along with references on there from Tom Wishon and from other sources on the net, I want my game to be or get as mental as possible. I'm with you, fitted clubs will be a major stride in getting my game there. I believe in this swing and with properly fitted equipment I'm looking for my uh-ohs to be because I did something really stupid in that fairway that is only 6" wide.

Edit :For those wondering what I'm babbling about, I was referring to "The Absolute Golf Truths" page found on Doc's site. :)

Steve--your post reads like a reply to someone's post, but it is at the top of the blog.  I scrolled down to see if I could find a post that it could be a reply to but couldn't find a possible candidate.  Was it a reply?

Thanks for the suggestion to use the "Context" link. Would not have thought of it.

Steve, even though the golfers on this blog don't seem to buy the importance of eye-hand coordination, I think the Happy Gilmore swing shows what it can do. I think tht the Tiger Woods trick of bouncing the ball several times on the blade and then hitting it like a baseball on the last bounce is another example. The third example, and one that is targeted to golf, is the drill on the Golf Channel where the pro of the day in the 12 Nights of the Academy showed a drill where he put balls on tees of different heights from a normal tee to a one-foot high tee and swung consecutively. While he didn't say so, it is my feeling that it was an eye-hand coordination drill. Even though a golfer friend says that he doesn't need eye-hand coordination to hit a ball in an unusual lie that he has never seen before because he can just take a good practice ,and then swing the same swing, I have a strong suspicion that he can do this because he has good eye-hand coordination. I haven't seen any research on this yet, but I haven't looked too deeply.

Steve/Charlie,

I, like a lot of us are self taught.  Never took a lesson.  The guy that got me started and built my first set of clubs showed me some basics and I learned by trial and error.  It was about 2 months of hitting balls with a Lynx 9 iron in a field for a couple of hours a night, six days a week  and finding out what worked for me.  So I learned by trial and error (more by error...lol)

If I  try things step by step I tend to get bogged down and overthink.  My best results seem to be less thinking and just going by feel.  Case in point is the "bump".  That made me nuts til Doc said don't worry about it just let it happen.  He was right.  Like most of us I have some range of motion issues so I doubt I will ever have the correct Surge swing, but his swing comes closer to giving me results I've never had before.

I'm a work in progress hacker.

Lynn42

Don great lesson

Sunday round report.

Hit 10 greens 3 fairways and 30 puts and 2 birds shot 76 today one better than 77 yesterday. Its been a long time since I had back to back rounds this low. Not sure if I am playing tomorrow are not would be interesting to see if I could validate these two scores though.

Roger

I have run into guys that could hit it really far without a lot of apparent effort and not being physically large and they all had one thing in common. They could trap the ball and still create a spin rate that let the ball carry a long way.

On the down side these trappers tend to not have a great wedge game. Phil is the only exception seen. Could be his hinge and hold action along with 4 wedges and a great imagination.

Great lesson, I am having a real problem in swinging on, on and on.

Chares

I have an interesting question. Could you swing better left handed? People tell me I have a better left handed swing than right handed, but I only dabbled in hitting balls left handed.

Charlie, I've found the context link helpful many times in following threads, on other than the first page of the blog. It becomes like throwing darts with the 2nd and after page comments being placed at the top of page one when using the quick link tabs. Also, once the partial comment is found with the context tab, you can click on their name and it links to their activity page of DISQUS, where you can see it in full, along with all their past comments. There are a number of other benefits available on the dashboard as well. One, being able to still reply, to any one replying to you, whether or not the blog page has any reply tabs left.

Maybe you are too aggressive ;-) I think both ends of the scale can cause problems, a inability to get the T finish and over doing the power/speed with balance issues. 

Not yet,Robert, I expect to hear from Doc about mid-week.I am anxiously awaiting the new clubs, much like a kid at Christmas.

Lynn42--not sure how to reply to your post.   Maybe no reply is the best reply, but here's one anyway. I have a lot of experience in how people learn, whether through dots, holistic motion, thinking or feeling, so if I can help, ask away.  I may be able to provide some answers or suggestions.

Robert F--No argument from this corner of the need to swing up to the T. But, I wouldn't say that I had a mental error related to thinking; it was a mental error related to the body not doing what the brain wanted to do. Don't forget, I was the one who posted the biomechanics reason for finishing the swing long that T Medley has reposted several times. That's all in the past now. Warming up with baseball swings around my body has changed my swing. Over the past week, the two correction tweaks, correcting the problem of hitting 1" to the heel on the driver and fairway woods (that you helped me correct when you posted that I was probably swinging out more than I thought) and not swinging up to the T has given me 30 more yards with both clubs. For some reason, I feel that there is more yardage coming as I get better at both tweaks.

Charlie, If you go to the dashboard and find the comment, then click on the context tab, this is the sequence of comments. Which leads me to believe his comment was to Lynn42.

13 hours ago

CharlieY posted:
Hi, Lynn42--I caught the Harrington imitation of Happy Gilmore with his
running start.  It showed me how much eye-hand coordi...

10 hours ago

Lynn42 posted: Steve/Charlie,

I, like a lot of us are self taught.  Never took a lesson.  The guy that got me started and built my first se...

5 hours ago

Steve Smith posted:
Sounds like you have learned that although you are probably a dots
learner you have learned that you must incorporate feel in...

26 minutes ago

CharlieY posted:
Steve--your post reads like a reply to someone's post, but it is at the
top of the blog.  I scrolled down to see if I could f...

What kind of problem? What's happening? What does it feel like? What happens to the ball?

Steve's aggression is within his control. The problem is his left leg can't support his weight properly without him likely ending up on the ground. Not exactly a dignified finish to a swing.

Steve

I use to play in a skins game at my home course and help run it have not played in it for about 5 years and got away from it we would have 16 foursomes every Saturday and Sunday  there started to be to much fighting and arguing going on but it has thinned out some they are only getting 8 - 10 groups now all the complainers are gone . They were bugging me today to come back and play with them. I am going to play with them tomorrow and see how it goes. It's a 20.00 a head game they split it 8.00 person goes to skins 8.00 to team game and 4.00 a person to the par 3 game they split the par 3 pot and have AB game and CD game. The team game they pay front back and total. They had 1 skin out today it paid 320.00 somebody got a nice payday the rest of the holes were all tied. The A players in this game are all scratch players the A's and B's generally win the skins the rest are playing for team money and par 3 money. I am not sure I want to be a donator again. LOL

Hello fellow Surgites I have some good personal news to share, I have just returned from a trip to my home town of Warren in central western NSW, Australia where I played in my home Golf Club's championship.    I have been a Surge Swinger for nearly 2 years and before then I struggled to play to a 17 handicap.   Finally after many years of trying I have won the B grade championship, came third in the overall scratch (only three shots behind the Club Champion) and second in the overall handicap (won by a burgling C grader).    

The guys at home teased me about being a burglar myself because I play mostly with my social golf club at my local pub in Sydney on a handicap of 6.   I WAS on an AGU handicap of 13 which will be busted down to at least 12 putting me in A grade for the first time.    The guys are impressed with my straight and powerful ball striking and remarked that I left a lot of shots on the course during the championships with mostly flubbed chip shots and some poor putts.

With the constant improvement I am getting with the Surge Swing I am eyeing off the club championship over the next few years.   Regards, Craig

P.S. In regards to todays blog topic I definitely need to get to a proper T finish on the follow through to avoid hurting my dicky lower back.   I find that after impact if I turn my torso quickly (hips and shoulders together) to face the target while throwing my arms (buffed) over my leading shoulder that this sets me up for a powerful shot prior to impact.  This is especially so when I hold my arms, set at the top of the BUS, and let them drop into the slot while bumping before accelerating them through impact.   The swing thought is a bit like a Tarantino movie where the focus is on an after event and then you go through the reverse chronology of prior events to get to the after, i.e. you know where the swing needs to get to and then you go through the prior actions to get there.

The way I see it is your being on the course
playing this wonderful game well that spells
winner to me .
By the way like your comments they are fun
to read keep up the good work.

Ron from Qc, Canada...

I am not sure how the trapping effect would apply to the Driver though, since it is hit with a level or sweeping contact strike.

Watched Don on his hitting all the clubs video and noticed that in his set up routine just before he starts the backswing he seems to pre set his hips slight open.Only saw it the other day and wondered if anyone else noticed and used it in their swing and how it works.Cheers

Very good video today,Surge. Definitely need to finish the swing as you say. I,for one, can attest to the ills that await you should you slam on the brakes or make a sudden deviation in the swing path.Luckily it only took 2 weeks get my disc realigned and timely as well, just in time for my fitting appointment with Doc last week.