Quasimodo's Swing

In my last post, I mentioned Jeff Mann's valuable Website. On this page, where he talks about "the kinetic sequence." Since then, I've come to realize how much his paragraph on "the rope handle technique" has helped me in the last few days.

When the left arm freewheels towards impact, it pulls the lagging club via the left hand, and this type of swing action is called the rope handle technique. In other words, the club is passively pulled along by the left hand - as if the golfer was simply pulling a piece of rope (like church bell ringers in the medieval era who pulled the bell rope in a groundwards direction in order to get the church bells to ring). At the end-backswing position, a modern, total body golfer usually has a 90 degree angle between the clubshaft and the left arm, and when the left hand pulls the grip end of the club during the downswing, the grip end of the club must obviously move as fast as the left hand. By contrast, the clubhead end of the club has inherent inertia and it lags behind the grip end of the club during the downswing.

This is a fantastic analogy, a key to my growing understanding of lag. When I emailed Jeff about something he wrote about the left arm "catapulting" into impact and follow-through, he promptly wrote me back with a revision. I haven't gone through this paper, but I'm looking forward to it.

In my practice, when I can remember to think of the grip as a rope, the results are invariably good. Swing like Quasimodo. The trouble is that I don't always think of the rope because I'm also thinking about other things, like shifting my weight over my left ankle on the downswing, on keeping my weight back and off my toes throughout the swing, and on turning my hips and upper torso until I can't turn them any more. That's a tip I got from a recent Golf Digest article about Alvaro Quiros.

The video shows the state of my swing. From behind and from the side. There's also a side-by-side of the most recent swing and one that's just a few days older. You'll see quite a difference. The swing is different now, since I've been working on improvements since I took this video. I'll try to show the latest changes in a video in the next blog.