Here is a video of Scott McCarron cutting it low and left after impact. He is promoting a training aid, but he talks about the arms staying pinned to his body, rotating hard left, and cutting the club low and left after impact. Looks like a very solid swing.
McCarron is a Jim Hardy guy and is a poster boy for the One Plane swing.
The pure contact he is using is used by some guys teaching at where I practice, not a bad gadget, but its just paintwork without the information that we have on this site.
McCarron doesn’t get close to 4.30 line however… he is a big down the line player who holds and cuts just about every shot- no matter what that stick on the ground says about swing path he doesn’t really achieve the objective. He comes squarely down the line and cuts it left with arms, not so much the body motion
He has been a good player- but what you feel and what you say is sometimes very different to what you do
Twomasters, how do you verify if someone is coming down on the 4:30 line? To my untrained eye he seemed to be at 4:30 just before p3.
I just know from playing with McCarron quite a bit that he is a very much ‘down the line’ player along the target line into impact- which is why he has always played a very similar shot pattern of left to right on every shot.
He may begin somewhere from 4.30 but he releases differently than what ABS is about. The cutting left is arm orientated in his sense- Hardy students do a lot of this if you watch their practice swings. The feeling of cutting left for them is more of an over the top arm pull through impact. This makes the club want to travel the straight lines of golf into impact that everyone talks about, but really aren’t there- these players are good enough players to get away with it and are feel orientated to know what they need to do to offset it- however that involves a lot of timing and as U2 say- ‘some days are better than others’
Here’s another view of McCarron below. You will his club comes into impact pretty much down the line and not so much from the 4.30 line
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mapq1QEraBM[/youtube]
IMO- Pernice Jnr (another Hardy student) has more ideals along what we are after in the ABS program (turn sound down and don’t listen to Kostis explanation)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kczIGo3gMEw[/youtube]
Those two videos, I watched over and over, and towards the end, the only significant difference I can see is Tom’s hands are finishing a bit lower, his shoulders are definitely less steep.
This leads into an interesting topic. I’ve been studying this specific part of the swing for a long time. I’m starting to think this is where the finish is completely dependent on what you want to do with the ball.
Well before I knew Lag, I bought into the one plane/two plane thing. I bought all of J. Hardy’s stuff a few years ago and he always described the one plane player’s hands as being like ‘baby alligator’ arms through the swing… that device shown in the first video is a replica of the hand path Hardy wants. There’s an inner circle (hands) and an outer circle (club head).
The reason I think this is a weird area to examine is I have tried very hard to understand what Lag wants here, and I have to confess if I do it with 100 percent intent, I dramatically make every shot go left… .maybe driver is a little straighter, but mostly left. Just too much. Why I think this happens is I have a very dominant body move. Even coming at 4:30 deeply, I have a bad habit of getting too dominant with my body turn. I think this part of Lag’s stuff does well for other people who don’t use their body at all, or very little. A very armsy swinger for instance probably feels a very strange thing going on here.
Scott might be a cutter of the ball, but I find that the easy shot to make here because you can still come deep into 4:30, and even rotate your body HARD through impact, but as long as you hold off the face… you get an easy repeatable shot. I’m not convinced that this is a bad thing. Frankly it saved the end of my season, and started to develop into my ‘goto shot’.
A year ago I was a typical over the top sliced. By the time I got to module 3 everything was dead left. With module 3 it was amplifying my dead lefts. It took a lot of work for me to learn to be able to hit the ball hard, and not worry about left so much.
For those who don’t know what cutting it left means- it isn’t pulling the club left. It isn’t pulling the hands left.
These photos below show it nicely. I know Lag has some other photos also.
It is body rotation with knitted arms that keep the grip left whilst the head still travels pathward along the line of its centrifugal force pull that is trying to propel it right of target.
these photos show the difference. Most people will just pull their hands or the head left and think they have it- but it isn’t the same. ABS will sort you out as the modules advance.
Hope that fixes up some ideas about it- because you can cut it left OR you can cut it left-but in very different manners. One is correct, one is not and one helps you flush the ball- one will have you looking for balls
Terrific posts, TM. This picture has none of Lag’s artistry or skill (it’s hard for me to pull the exact same frames from youtube, for one), but I think they show that Pernice is flatter coming into P3 (shaft is closer to covering the right forearm) and MccArron’s arms have flown off the body post impact (Pernice’s are closer to Lag’s ideal of packed arms with more of what looks like an angled hinge).
Correct Cheese- that’s the difference- well spotted…that’s exactly why using Hardy pupils for eg in this one that I said Pernice was closer than McCarron to what should be really happening
Twomasters,
Brilliant post!
To take the analogy further, does one have the sensation that from p3 to impact that the club is being thrown outwards to right field like a swinger but that in a hitter’s case, the club is rerouted by the pivot rather than released?