Plastic and Progress

In my last post, I showed a video of the state of my swing and ten comments about what I saw. Since then, over the past week, I've worked on some of the flaws by hitting plastic balls in the backyard, the kind with the big holes and soft plastic so they don't go very far. I videotaped often, and after three of four days, I was happy with the way the swing was beginning to look. See it below. Here are comments from last week.

• Steeper backswing
• Keep right leg flexed and reduce hip turn
• Drop right arm at top -- straight down
• Keep spine angle (I stand up)
• Lower body -- legs -- rotate first and let arms follow
• Hands stay back (my arms start moving too fast and too early)
• Arm angle is pretty good on way down
• Keep working on opening hips and holding lag
• Keep right toes grounded
• Do something with the follow-through so that the clubhead is on the swing plane

In the swing now, there are some notable improvements.

• the swing plane is much better. I worked often on swinging the driver back and forth, without a ball, in order to get the feel of staying on plane.
• I'm using my big muscles better and keeping the arms more passive. This involved learning to speed up the leverage that Max taught me with my left arm against my left upper ribcage.
• That late speed with the left arm gives me that complete follow-through, something I've always lacked, mainly because by impact, I had always expended whatever clubhead speed I was able to generate.
• Right knee is more flexed.

Now I'm going to work more on keeping the hips from turning so much, keeping the right knee flexed, and really relaxing my arms. One other thing I noticed is that on the backswing, my head moves away from the ball considerably. This is something Wayne DeFrancesco sees in his own swing and works on correcting.