Left Arm Alone Drill -- Deep into the Shot 2

In my last post, I laid out my next practice goals: a more relaxed swing, like D. J. Trahan or Ernie Els, and a more complete follow-through. This practice was a revelation. A light snow had fallen early in the morning, frosting the landscape around me, and snow flurries continued during the day. By the time I went out to practice, at around two forty-five, I saw that the temperature must have been right around thirty-two or thirty-three because the snow wasn't sticking. That meant that I could have decent footing on my flagstone walkway for hitting off the mat. And the way this practice went, the flurries were like a benediction, a sign that—like that great scene in Fellini's Amarcord when snow starts falling out of a clear blue, sunny sky—something miraculous was possible.

The revelation didn't take long. After all my practice and preparation, I was, like an acolyte, ready for the annunciation. I practiced a few swings, feeling the transition and then the lag before descending to the ball. For this practice, I had decided that I didn't care about distance. The only important improvement was that I wanted my swing to look more like D. J. Trahan or Ernie Els. I wanted it to look slow and smooth&emdash;effortless. I had confidence that I was very close because my recent videos showed some good fundamentals. I was just missing the middle part of the swing, the most crucial part, I think, where the downswing goes into the release, and the release goes into the follow-through.

At this point, a digression is in order. This moment of epiphany (how many of those do we have?), took me back to my first lessons, a couple of years ago, with a driving range pro. My swing was terrible at that time, but I can remember him telling me about the swing, "You just have to feel it." That concept made no sense to me. It sounded like an admission that he couldn't teach the swing. I tried a few other pros, with similar results. I always learned something useful from the lessons, just not the key to the swing that I was looking for. Lately, since the left arm alone drill has been teaching me about the action of the club during the swing, I've started to "feel" the swing—feel the weight of the club in my hand, feel it lag behind my hand on the downswing, and feel it release at exactly the right split-second, without any conscious action on my part.

Three years later, I now understand that the range pro was absolutely right. Learning a good swing involves numerous epistemological moments like this one. You think you know, but you really don't. Then, after a long period of practice, suddenly, a truth is revealed. As long as you are receptive and ready, you will make progress in this fashion. Hogan is right when he says that the average golfer can break 80 if he learns the fundamentals of the Five Lessons.

With fresh snow on the ground and more flurries in the air, I suddenly felt one essence of the golf swing. I glimpsed it the day before, when I began to talk to myself about "opening up" the left arm. It was the idea that Tom Bertrand gave me, months ago, in his YouTube video about "'The "Missing Link' to Ben Hogan's Secret." I knew it was important then, and I've thought, ever since, that I understood what Tom meant. But I didn't. Not really. I didn't understand the speed involved.

I thought that at some point, after impact, your left elbow would turn out towards your target. What I didn't understand, and what is crucial to this key move in the golf swing, is that the turning out of the left elbow is part of the release and that it happens in a millisecond. When you watch Tom demonstrate it, it looks very muscular and deliberate. He never talks about the duration of the turning. Never mentions milliseconds. That would have helped a lot. As a matter of fact, this is a huge problem with most of golf instruction.

When you watch Swing Vision on YouTube or listen to a pro describe the swing, you have absolutely no idea about the timing that is involved. Speaking from where I am, in my development of a good swing, this seems to me to be the single most important problem in teaching a good golf swing. That's why my range pro told me, "You have to feel it." He was talking about a part of the swing that the naked eye can't see. It's basically invisible. When you watch a tour pro swing on TV, you see the backswing and you see the follow-through. You do not see what happens in between. And that's where all the magic happens, I think (remember, I'm a beginner, not an expert). Angel Cabrera does something in that area that few other players can match. As a result, he can green drives on holes that are around 330 yards. This is the imperceptible action that weeks of assiduous practice revealed.

You're relaxed during the swing. Or you try to be. You're not a pro, and this doesn't come easily. But you start off with that swing thought. You get to the top of your swing—the transition—you're loose, your fingers are relaxed, the club is balanced, you can feel that it's resting on top of your forefinger (as Shawn Clements suggests, in one of his videos), and then you start the down swing, and you have one swing thought in mind. You want to come down in a relaxed way, and you want the clubhead to lag behind. There's no rush here. But, at a certain point (we hope and think that this point will be where your hands are somewhere near or over or just past the ball), you have to think—"Release!" And it has to be "NOW!" This thought does not mean, however, that you are controlling the release. The left arm drill teaches you that the release happens naturally at a certain point in the arc of the swing. Instead of controlling the release, you are making yourself ready to let it happen. Basically, you're getting out of the way and enabling your body to cooperate with the club. In this millisecond, the club is in control. Not you.

If you don't have a Swing Vision camera, you cannot see what happens here. Instead, you have to "feel it." And that's what happened for me. I started to feel that I had to turn my left arm, the inside of the elbow, towards the target, during the milliseconds of the release. My thought at impact was to "open up." And once I started to do that, the swing became ridiculous. It seemed easy and effortless, and all I really had to think about was the "opening up" of my left elbow. With each shot, I was catapulting the ball out there towards Route 6 and into the topmost branches of that maple tree, and I could direct the ball with this release. The last few balls I hit were those "almost golf balls," those hard rubber yellow ones, and my swing sent them up into the highest part of my favorite maple tree.

I haven't planned it yet, but I think that my next practoce will be a continuation of that "opening up" of the left arm, the way Tom Bertrand describes it, and see how accurate and consistent and long I can get it.