I do everything to save as much of my hip rotation until after impact, so I have a lot of #4 to get the club over to the 4rth parallel. Keeping my upper arms packed hard against my body, I have spent #1, #2, and #3…so 4 really has to fire hard. To do this I use the ground, by wrenching my feet together, (squeezing them together hard) firing the left knee into a straight position, and keeping the left wrist partially cocked still. I turn my torso as flat as I can so that the left shoulder is moving away from the ball as far as possible. The hands are firm and stiff. Once I am at the 4rth parallel… I then fight the direction of the true impact plane (elbow plane) and then use the rotator cuff muscles in the shoulders to raise the upper arms off the body again pulling the club and shaft off of it’s very flat plane and use the #3 pressure point, but this time it is slightly a bit more underneath and I just pull the hole thing up as hard as I can to do everything to keep the club and shaft moving and I like to feel that I am reaching maximum hand speed just past the 4rth parallel. Now this is a feel thing in my attempt or futile attempt to maintain the acceleration of my hands beyond the ball. I actually leaned this technique in a martial arts class. In other words, if you are going to chop through a pile of bricks, you must concentrate on moving your hand past and beyond the point of impact. So whether or not I can hold the flex to the ball or not, it is truly my intent to do so with every swing of the club, from driver to putter.
My sequence of accumulator release would be 1 (2+3 together) 4.
It is of course inevitable that some of 4 is being released on the way down, but after impact, what could you possibly have left? If your intent is to keep the clubhead accelerating after impact, then the feeling of your hands moving faster than the clubhead after impact must be your goal.
Again, we can argue whether or not this is actually possible, and I do believe it to be… I have some video packed away somewhere I hope to upload soon to demonstrate…
Now getting back to impact, when I am really striking the ball well, my left hip moves significantly after impact, being the core of the engine that moves the upper torso, and all this force is applied to the #4 pressure point at the left armpit. Once the club is all the way over to the 4rth parallel…. now what is left? All the accumulators are spent right? But I would argue that my intent is still to be moving the club
faster than it was moments before… I am trying to accelerate and am not ready to give up… Accelerate forever!
So after the body has slung the club and shaft over to the forth paralled on a very flat plane, (elbow plane) it is now time to lift that club back up to shoulder plane with a most violent effort…
all you aussies have a great role model for this with Peter Senior, and Greg Norman in their primes… a massive uplifting, making every effort to squeeze every last possible ounce of kinetic energy in an attempt to keep the club accelerating long past impact…
And this is my argument for this 5th accumulator…
Homer is correct that there could only be 4 accumulators prior to impact, but we also know that ball speed, is affected by not only pre impact clubhead speed, but post as well… and this is where I believe that what happens after impact is just as important as what has happened before…
There must be a lot of commitment and intent to keep things moving along after the ball has left the clubface, because the greater the speed of the clubhead after impact the more we compress the ball and that compression is what we feel coming up the shaft into our hands and the 4rth pressure point as well…
This would also be consistent with martial art training, and hitting through, not stopping at…
Remember, lag pressure and feel are the same thing…
The longer you sustain the line of compression, the more lag pressure you create, and the more feel you have.
Educated hands love lots of lag pressure, the ball loves it and so do your scores…
Now go buy some blades so you can start really feeling all this stuff…!!! lol
I think like delaying #4 as long as possible, or really saving as much of it as possible. It is of course inevitable that the torso will rotate some on the downswing, but after impact, 2 and 3 are unloaded, and if you are turning with flat shoulders to maximize the pivot rotation then you will have had to spend 1 as well to keep the hands on plane.
This is one of O Grady’s big points, straighten the right arm out quickly on the downswing as the torso rotates, as if you were dropping your hands into your right hip pocket, this keeps the hand on plane so you don’t come OTT … it is a very strange feeling, but once mastered, very powerful…
The right arm straightens to about 120 degrees at the 3rd parallel then stays frozen through the hitting area and all the way over to the 4rth parallel… only from then does it try to straighten in sequence with the 5th accumulator.
The key feeling to maximize #5 if you are hitting is to move the shaft
low, flat and around to the lefft after impact, then rip the shaft upright to a shoulder plane… with the rotator cuff muscles raising the upper arms quickly off the body… Norman, Peter Senior, and Tiger all do this very well.
Accelerate forever!
I believe the reality of power package release sequence is that there is quite a bit of overlap going on, and it is also a reality that there can be a turn on and off… then on again situation as well…
I consider #1 to go first in my swing, meaning that it is the first to be exhausted. My right arm is bent 90 degrees at the top of my backswing and it straightens 30 degrees as I arrive at the 3rd parallel,
so it is now at 120 degrees, this angle is held past impact… it certainly releases before 2 and 3…
To complicate things I would also state that I start my downswing initially with #4, just to change the direction but then it feels very quiet until right before impact, where the left knee and hip fire quickly and ferociously!
I believe #4 overlaps all the others, of course it has to… because the pivot is in fact turning some all the way down… I just don’t believe that the power package assembly release sequence is all that cut and dry.
Two and three certainly have some overlapping going on…
and they also are spent into impact… but I still have a lot of #4 left.
You must realize that #4 has a far greater span of kinetic motion…
the whole essence of #4 is very wide… I can turn it on they wait, then REALLY turn it on…!
I think the important thing is to know WHAT THE POWER ACCUMULATORS ARE! Learn to FEEL them in your swing,
and learn how to train them to work together in an effective way to maximize ACCELERATION of the clubhead. Find ways to strengthen those muscles, tone them, and make them do their job of applying power and force to the SHAFT!!! during impact and beyond!
Remember that we can use a big “sit down” position to initiate the change in direction, the legs are part of our pivot…
and in TGM that would be our 4th accumulator.
This “sit down” allows the gradual delivery of the power package to parallel #3…. soon after the left leg FIRES and #4 is put into full throttle…
It is not much different than driving a car, you can punch the gas pedal in first gear, then you hit the clutch to move into second, you could do this with a delay action before you pop the clutch and move into second gear…
This sitting action is like pushing down on the clutch pedal…
The engine of a car starts the car moving from still… then it is disengaged, for a brief time, then re engaged …. for a second big move… much like the left leg and hip firing at impact…
Use the “sit down” action as your swing clutch…
I don’t think the pivot is ever going to actually stop, the accumulators do overlap one another, but there is certainly a sequence to their release of potential energy.
I would say that the pivot might very well slow down, it certainly does for me. I think of it like shifting gears in a car… the rpms drop but don’t go to zero…
The initial change in direction might demonstrate a quick motion of the pivot, but then the pivot would slow down to deliver the passive arms down to the 3rd parallel, then the pivot would pick up the pace though the hitting area… releasing 2 and 3…if you are swinging…
A hitter would usually straighten the right arm out before 2 and 3 on the downswing… this works well if you are rotating the shoulders flat,
keeping the shaft on plane… feeling as if you are dropping your hands into your right hip pocket on the downswing as the shoulders rotate more at right angles to the spine… flat…
Lag said:
This is one of O Grady’s big points, straighten the right arm out quickly on the downswing as the torso rotates, as if you were dropping your hands into your right hip pocket, this keeps the hand on plane so you don’t come OTT … it is a very strange feeling, but once mastered, very powerful…
It might be the same result, but because I can’t really get the right hand into right pocket feeling, I go with another feeling:
I try to keep the inside of the right elbow directed towards the target line as long as I can from around P3 right through to PV5. Of course it does rotate so that it actually is pointing more skywards approaching P4.
I do know that the right arm HAS to straighten for this to work and the hands do seem to stay on-plane.
I like to feel I am always hitting hard with the body… but the better I am playing, the later that hit feels. I like to feel I am really going at it with the rotational speed of the body around 2/3’s of the way down. I like to feel the club is just gliding down from the top, then as the shaft passes the 3rd parallel it’s a very strong effort, almost violent… left knee straightens, hips really firing, torso picking up speed, all this feeling well beyond impact, over to parallel #4.
A half or 3/4 backswing will still have the same sensation of power applied at the bottom. This really creates a feel of sameness from driver to wedge with all the “in between” shots.
This topic was applied yesterday during a round with a fellow pro whom I had traveled with on the Australian Tour in 87. After catching up on things, and talking about equipment changes, we were comparing the blades from the past with some of the newer stuff bigger irons out now, and I had left my 9 iron in his garage. On the first hole I needed a nine iron shot into the first green! The shot called for a soft 9 really, so rather than try to muscle a wedge, I took and 8 iron, and just shortened the backswing, in doing so, I was able to still hit it hard, staying aggressive and setting up the rhythm of my swing for the round. The ball landed with good spin about 20 feet pin high left.
The point here is you don’t always have to swing easier… often a player will end up quiting on the shot, and or give up the acceleration and impact alignments by going “easy”
Just something to ponder here…
Ball striking doesn’t need to be any different than putting. Putting is a series of different backswing lengths, all day long. On the greens I like to feel the same acceleration, just different backswing lengths.
It’s not a bad idea to go out sometimes and play with every other club missing from your bag.
Again, this is hitting protocol, and quite different than what you might want to feel from a “swinging” sensation.
In reading through the posts in this thread, it is almost the opposite that I had in my mind of how things went when I think about the downswing. I always thought of the down swing as
1.Hips turning, pulling around the shoulder (Accumlator #4?) which…
2.Moved the left arm down and across ( never used to think of the right, only the left, a swinging thought? Acculmlator #3?) which…
3. Released the wrists (I used to think uncock not uncock and roll) and then the club released out automatically (Accumulator #2 and 3?). I had certainly pre TGM never though of the right arm as a source of power.
I am guess I was thinking of my own version of swinging?
We have a lot of exciting stuff going on here… and lots of work to do… even myself… I am always trying to better perform
and perfect the swing modules… for instance, the better I get at M#3, the more it helps me with #1. #2 helps # 1 and #3
and acts as a bridge between the two. Module #4 connect the dots for us and shows us the elusive pathway through the impact area
and gives us the tools to self analyze and really understand the intent of proper path, direction and purpose by explaining the hitter’s
superior swing plane protocol.
Good Stuff!
Lag, could you explain the ‘sit down’ move a little better? I’ve heard this term a lot, and may even incorporate it to a degree myself, but what feeling are you going for here? Is the term ‘sit down’ almost literal? As in, I want to put more pressure on my left butt cheek to change directions? Or is this initiated with the knees as opposed to the pelvic area?
As a courtesy to those who do not speak TGM lingo, it would be greatly appreciated if you can list down the Power Accumulators into simple terms so that I can go back and read these interesting posts and absorb them properly.
Thanks.
As a courtesy to those who do not speak TGM lingo, it would be greatly appreciated if you can list down the Power Accumulators into simple terms so that I can go back and read these interesting posts and absorb them properly.
#1. Right arm straightening
#2. Wrists uncocking
#3. Forearms rotating
#4. Rotation of the body (pivot)
#5. Raising of the arms off of the body post impact (hitters only)
Lag, could you explain the ‘sit down’ move a little better? I’ve heard this term a lot, and may even incorporate it to a degree myself, but what feeling are you going for here? Is the term ‘sit down’ almost literal? As in, I want to put more pressure on my left butt cheek to change directions? Or is this initiated with the knees as opposed to the pelvic area?
It is the initiation of the downswing with a strong deliberate bending of both knees… as if we are sitting in a chair. Not a lateral slide…
So as a swinger to sequence the power accumulators with proper intentions where 4,2,3 as that what you felt before changing to a hitter also that sequence 4,2,3, was automatic correct?
Yes… but as a swinger… I really think that even #2 and #3 act as hinges that don’t interfere with CF… if the hands are passive,
then the hands are really hinges.
As a hitter, my hands are motors… that is the difference… I grip the club very firm, and fire the hands actively and as powerfully as possible. Hogan was not wrong describing “I wish I had three right hands” He also talks about “hitting just as hard with the left hand…” Certainly both hands are on the club… and they both can contribute to the velocity of the clubhead actively.
Swingers hands are really passive hinges… and the right arm is very passive also… The reality of the situation is that pure CF swinging is essentially a one accumulator action… #4… because a swingers hands are not really actively motoring anything.
It takes a lot of trust to swing.
As far as hitting…
The first thing you’ll have to do is to understand that the new objective is to get the hands moving faster AFTER impact, so you have a chance to hold the flex and bring a pre stressed shaft into impact.
The big difference in your feel is that as a hitter your hands are no longer passive in the impact arena. You can glide them down to the 3rd parallel just as if you were swinging, but then as your hands are just about even with the ball, and the shaft has now fallen past 9
o clock, lets say to 8 o clock, they activate, and get violent feeling, suddenly from out of nowhere, ripping, tearing, and slashing into impact with all the conscious force that the rotation of #3 accumulator can muster.
The hands still aim at the inside quadrant of the ball on the way down, 4:30 on the ball, but when you fire the hands into impact, the clubhead will now rotate into impact and hit the back of the ball 3 o clock.
The reason people swing is that they see hitting as an impossibility…and in some ways for good reason… because as a hitter you are going to have to figure out how to keep the club accelerating through and beyond the ball, holding the flex of the shaft past impact… LIKE THIS. Notice how the torso continues to turn and rotate substantially with each frame. Notice the first photo, how little flex is on the shaft, then on the second, big flex at impact, then that flex is still maintained all the way to the forth parallel. Crystalize this image into your brain and your dreams at night, think how this will feel.
The more speed you can generate from impact to your finish the better. Why? because the faster you can turn past the ball, the more active the 5th (post impact speed accumulator) the faster you can start your downswing.
We all love to hit hard from the top, that’s easy, it’s easier to generate speed from the top to impact than from impact to the finish,
but unfortunately that’s not how to hit good repeating golf shots.
and this is why golf is so difficult, people don’t get it, they don’t understand this, and teachers don’t understand this, because the golf swing is not as important before impact as it is after.
To pass through two great post impact positions also takes care of your swing plane. I would rather see someone with a great finish than a great set up. P4 and your finish tell a lot about impact, a lot more than your set up or how you look at any point in the backswing.
That stuff is more like the paint job on a car. It has little to do with horse power.
The hitters plane feels more like this…
If your hands are down around your right hip pocket at parallel 3
then they need to be over around your left hip pocket at parallel 4 after impact.
If you let your hands free wheel out away from your body like a swinger after impact, you are really more swinging, but with stiffer wrist if your intent was to hit … how big can I make these words
DISASTER!!!
Want to do it right? watch Ben Hogan… don’t do what he says, do what he DOES!
I by no means am a physicist, I am the son of an engineer so I probably picked up the analytical mind thing from pop… but the thing about golf is that it is a game of feel, and although all the math and physics, geometry and so forth is going on, you can’t possibly think about that stuff while you are playing or hitting shots. The concepts are not as difficult to understand as they are to execute. I can talk all day about holding the flex of the shaft to the ball and beyond, but I can assure you it is no easy feat.
I have two particular concepts that I believe and apply, the first I speak with strong conviction, that being the hitters 5th accumulator. The raising of the arms off the body after the 4rth parallel. It no doubt can extend the force on the shaft once all the other accumulators have been exhausted… and although it may seem to most that the ball is already gone, I would like to see what would happen if Ben Hogan kept his arms pinned to his body after impact and never lifted them up off the body at all. I believe that if the plane of the club stayed on elbow plane right to the finish with the hands just about hip high at the finish, you would see a huge power loss.
The deceleration that would take place would be disastrous.
The second is the Hogan move again, because from everything I see, it appears that he drag loads it, then drive loads it, then uses a combination of the pivot and 5th accumulator to radially accelerate it after impact. It really looks like a swinger’s move all the way to impact, but all hitter after impact, so my question and hunch is that this is what he did, and I do everything I can to do the same thing,
but I don’t quite have the hip speed Hogan had, but at times I can get it going pretty good with the hips, and it is really a different ball game when you attack the ball with such a power onslaught.
A quicker backswing tempo sets up more centripetal force at the change in direction, the outward turns inward, then the right arm quickly straightens, then that inward force quickly bounces into an outward throw, or centrifugal force, that as it is being assaulted on the ball is then redirected through a fast hip flat torso rotation past the ball into a radial acceleration that is then ripped back up the plane with the raising of the arms up and off the body in a final attempt to keep force on the shaft. The thing that seems to set Hogan apart from the modern players is that his hands looked so soft on the downswing for a hitter.
There is that suppleness, in the float loading that goes on during the start of the downswing, and that is not the look you see typically from a hitter. I really had that look too, but not as a hitter. Now I am pretty firm coming down, and resist that compression centripetal stuff. Hogan didn’t resist it, and that is such a swinger trait.
This is all really high end application stuff, but I just can’t rule out the possibility that this is what he did, regardless whether or not Homer said you can’t do both.
I took some lessons from Tom tomasello back in the 90s. He had me swinging this way: start downswing by straightening right arm. As soon as right elbow touches my side, begin pulling left hip out of the way. His constant chant was, “Right hip, right arm, right arm, left hip.” I always thought that was a 1, 2, 3, 4 accumulator firing order and had trouble reconcilling it with the book. Now it all makes perfect sense. Thanks Lag.
The power sources by TGM terms surely overlap…
#4 start the downswing… then #1 the right arm straightens… then stops at P3
then #2 and #3 fire in unison… then #4 fires stage two… #1 then fires it’s second stage rocket…
then #5 rips it up plane into PV5.
(4 + 1 + (2+3) +4 + 1+ 5)
The good news is… as you master the modules… you don’t have to think about any of this thank goodness! 
Lag,
When I pay attention to what I do on the start down, my sitdown move essentially consists of rotating my left knee (right one too I guess) out to about 10 O’clock or WNW while leaving my weight bias over my back leg. This leaves my hips just about square with my right arm tight to the body like you have mentioned (right elbow almost right on the hip bone) with that 430 position appearance and feel.
I arrived at this after a while of experimenting as a better way to incorporate the 430 feel into a full swing (more like 3/4 really) and it seems to work for consistent, solid contact even with the miniscule head of the 1969 Dyna 2-iron. I think I could play this way exclusively but I don’t know if it would be advisable as I am only on Mod 1.