That is incredible to me. I have never heard of it…but it looks like it is even better than hockey as a golf-prep sport. That at the top position…you can see how Bruen got his look, and why crossing the line/flying elbow may not be so bad…might be preferable!! “Alignment Hurling”…if there is such a thing( as in"Alignment Golf" )…would never approve.
Eagle, it always amazes me when people have never heard of this sport having grown up with it so much, though I suppose that’s the way of the world. I’m not sure what part of the world you live in, but a lot of the major US cities have GAA(Gaelic Athletic Associations) sections that hold tournaments- not a bad way to spend an afternoon, and they tend to be free to watch. I’m kind of glad it’s unknown in a lot of ways as both of the sports are contested on an amateur level but with guys who are world class athletes and who train as such. It would be a tragedy to see professionalism enter into it. It already has in small ways with grants and stipends for players, but hopefully it will resist the big push.
The across the line position really is amazing, and does show without question that the ways to swing a club are many and varied. I’ve put a good bit of time into experimenting with this shape of golf swing, and it’s definitely got it’s advantages but it’s awfully difficult to work through the bag. I’ve honestly never hit crisper, zippier iron shots than I have doing this, but the driver was the main reason I left it alone. It’s very difficult to bring it all back together. I think the right hand on top is significant to this motion as it’s in a high and dominant position from the get go. Obviously Bruen played with the right hand low and found his way with it, but he was a bit of a genius to say the least.
The feeling doing this is that it’s all about the club, hands, and arms. There’s a similar sense of force to the orbit pull, but all the way through the swing. The club is just whipping around the place, obeying it’s own force rules, and all you can do is hold on and let whip on through impact. And it really does find it’s back surprisingly well. If you look at the freeze frame picture in that video before you hit play, you can see that the whole set up unit is bascially intact at the top- thinking in golfing terms that is. If you think about that for a second you can get a sense of why this is so powerful. There’s no lagging behind of the club on the way back, there’s essentially been no backSWING. As a result you don’t have to play catch up, you don’t have to waste any energy bringing the club back around, which is a pretty significant power leak. Think of a pitcher starting with his arm pre stretched and then trying to throw with speed. It’s pretty lame. That’s kind of how golfers swing the club, and why pivot acceleration is SO important- in order to create lag time something needs to be leading hard and fast when the club gets behind the lead in the race so early. Bruens way of swinging puts the lag, load, and release all in the forward motion, so the focus really is all on accelerating the club. The pivot doesn’t have to do as much active work- It does work but it’s reacting more than it is leading. All the speed is around impact- which is why you can really snip the irons. There’s very little waiting that has to be done because the club is doing most of it for you out of it’s own need to do it.
The thing about getting it across the line is that the club drops back in by it’s own accord, it has to get to the other side of your hands whether you like it or not. But this is a different across the line to the standard cause of it. Most people go across the line because they whip the club inside too soon cocking the right hand and losing the cup in the left wrist- they basically get into a pre-impact state way too early. They then have to leave that, go somewhere else, and hopefully make it back again on the way down.
Taking Bruen as an example, he adds cup angle to his left wrist going back, and flattens out is right wrist. It’s kind of a mirror of Hogan post impact, which is kind of why the whole thing works- there’s a ‘for every action there’s an equal but opposite reaction’ type of thing going on. But you have to have a pretty straight spine because symmetry is part of the deal.
This is similar to Byron Nelson, and also to Ricky Fowler. It’s one of the reasons why I think Nelson has that liquid drop of the club from the top. The right arm and elbow are totally dominant and high taking it away. In fact, Fowler and Bruen have almost identical takeaways, and theoretically similar golf swings, but Fowler lets the club fall back behind earlier than Bruen. Again, when you take it away like that the club wants to go back behind you, you just have to let it. The whole experience is very much felt in the hands with lots of club awareness, and the body follows suit.
The key question to ask when discussing the concept of ‘across the line’ is ‘what line are we talking about crossing?’… I’ve got some thoughts about it, but for anyone who is reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts about ‘what and where is this line that we’re not supposed to cross’… all thoughts welcome as always…
I don’t know why I’m bothering since people don’t seem to have any thoughts on these things, but I’ll go with a few more regardless…
SInce the left elbow is being discussed in Mac’s heretic thread, I’ll put a few things up here in that regard…
I have a sequence of Peter Senior that wont upload but I’ll try to figure out a way to do that…
Ultimately I see the whole body as an energy production and delivery system, and not utilizing the link of the left elbow in that chain robs us of our full ability to power the club. This is not a power/accuracy issue, imo this is a simple matter of natural motion. If you just think ‘pivot’ then you break the chain by removing the left elbow link. The pivot delivers the energy to it’s highest point, that being the left shoulder, then it needs somewhere to go. It can no longer go directly up so it has to go out in some way first before it can go up again. The first outward direction available is the slight bend in the elbow- it does it’s thing and then cycle continues. If the elbow doesn’t bend or it isn’t aware that it has a job to do then the pivot needs to do extra work that it really shouldn’t have to, and really isn’t as good at anyway. An important thing to remember is that the energy of the pivot is ultimately focused in an upward direction(it’s up and left in reality because the main axis reaches from the left foot to the top of the spine which angles up and away from the target, and then the spine is also bent forward which creates the left aspect)
Those pictures make a very good case for bending the left elbow(for right handed golfers). Your posts on another thread also support this, where you point out the many top level golfers who have bent elbows. eg…Hogan, Sergio, Westwood,Senior, Olazabal, etc.
So it begs the question…why is it bent? I think you addressed that also. Is it a vapor trail? Should the bent elbow be a preference?..an indicator that something right is happening?(proper pressures and forces are being applied in the right places and at the right time).
Good point Bom. Made me think. Are we referring to the target line?..or should be be referring to maybe Lag’s “4:30 line” when we discuss “crossing the line”?
Last spring, the best striker I have ever played with told me he was working on correcting his “line crossing”( I suspect at the suggestion of a TGM teacher)…I pointed out Jack Nicklaus to him, and i think it gave him pause.
If the reference point is the 4:30 line…then there will be far fewer, if any line crossers.
Many of the most pure strikers get a bent left arm through fighting CF-- it takes the timing element out of the shot when you line your ducks up and this becomes a result more than a desire
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John Gerring is a well known and respected teaching pro. Years ago, I was on a practice range and heard him giving a lesson to a couple of teenagers. He said something like this…“learn to cross the line like Nicklaus”…I think it was to help them hit it more solidly. He was also big on the set-up, and just firing…“hit it!”
St H,
Good case with Jai Alai about pivoting well past the release point. I spent about 14 years obsessing with how to get to impact as if that was the whole problem and giving insignificant attention to the swing beyond the ball. Whatever serious attention I gave to post impact always gave way to the stronger obsession with getting to impact from the top of the backswing. Thanks to ABS and reading posts, including those here on “Small World”, learning to assertively seek and feel the swing beyond the ball has finally come into prominance for me and plays a “pivotal” role in structuring or molding the downswing, but I would not be able to create the down swing structure without first having gained some competence in Mod 1 and 2 and having been influenced by Lag and Two’s posts and coaching and the posts and messages by other deep and practical thinkers ably posting on ABS who see the interdependent connections between post impact and everything that preceeds it. What a great ride so far.
I am looking forward to more of your posts.
Best to you.
Twomasters…
when you guys talk about fighting CF how do you see that? Are you fighting it from taking the club away out to right field or are you fighting it from wrapping the club around your body to the left? Considering the pivot thrust I’m assuming you mean fighting it from going out right, but I just want to clarify…
Eagle, regarding the line I was talking about, when you’re playing a sport like hurling or any game like that thats in motion it becomes a very basic reaction situation. The reality is that you have a ball, a target and a stick to move the ball. You want to move the ball towards the target, and you can call that distance between the ball and the target a ball target line or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t even have to be straight, there’s just a realty that the ball needs to go to the target. You then ‘align’ yourself accordingly. Your main consideration boils down to the heaviest part of the stick and the ball, and then bringing back that part of the stick to the ball with good power and a good focus of that power both into the ball and towards the target so you get yourself into position to do that. The same thing really does apply to golf but we get bogged down in alignments of our body that make sense in our intellectualized world, but don’t really make a whole lot of sense if you think of directing the energy out of your body, into the ball, and then towards the target.
So much of this game comes to life through your hands. It’s a completely different game when you have a constant sense of the weight of the club as you move. Those guys playing hurley understand that which I imagine is why they essentially keep the stick above themselves. I know when I played it that was a feeling I remember. When you blend all of the weight of the club into the body, from a sensory perspective, it’s very difficult to keep track of the club. Your body is big and strong but isn’t very sensitive to light weights like a golf club. This is why I imagine heavy clubs are so important to pivot driven hitters.
When you waggle a golf club up around your ear like a baseball hitter does, or like these hurlers do, it’s very easy to recognize the weight of it, and it ‘feels’ really good. The problem is that we’re not ‘supposed’ to have it up there, and we’re supposed to have our right elbows up in the air either. But the thing is it feels really good up there, and completely liberating. There’s obviously a balance to be drawn, but in my opinion to make a swing purely pivot driven with no arm involvement is just as bad as making it all arms and no pivot involvement. And that’s not a knock anything here, because I don’t know what’s going on here, but that’s how I feel about the swing. There’s a lot of power in a descending club as well as a driven club, so to some extent a club coming from higher up has it’s own type of advantage. One of the difficulties I’ve found when I’ve been too flat or too deep into my backswing was having a sense that the club had nowhere to fall or nowhere to ‘go’, and if it has no where to fall then it effectively has no weight. It’s a really bad feeling particularly with the irons, that’s how it feels to me.
We obsess about the club in relation to our bodies, and judge it’s alignments accordingly. But if you just think of it in terms of the clubhead and the ball then it looks a lot different. And btw, I’m not talking about Jim Flick swing the head stuff. Even the most across the line swingers still have the head of the club well inside the ball which seems like the important thing at that point. Even looking at John Daly, his clubhead is nicely inside the ball, and it almost looks optimal to my eye. Even with those hurlers, we might see that as across the line but the head of the stick is poised above and inside the ball ready to go. And kind of like with Daly, the weight of the club really does then want to fall in behind the hands and blend with the body to deliver the blow- and you get to feel that weight all the way too. It then also has the effect of flattening out the right hand and forearm. If you think about across the line, the right palm and forearm are essentially pointing at the ground. As the club falls in behind the hand it turns that relationship upside down creating a very natural palm up state at that point plus it feels and is descending which it doesn’t feel when you’re super flat or deep with that position. It’s a fun way to play the game, but requires a pretty free spirit to do. It’s not about control but it’s not not about control at the same time either.
The downswing just wants to throw the clubhead right through and beyond impact because of centrifugal force of swinging something with some weight to it- the best strikers fight that urge thru proper swing dynamics
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My thinking in that situation would be that the more you try to fight CF the more you inadvertently increase it. In that the more you try to pull something out of it’s orbit while rotating it, the more it will actually pull away from you- like the water in the bucket idea. This being a good thing in my eyes because you’re actually increasing clubhead speed. It seems a matter of perception at that point, or how you would prefer to look at it. What do you guys think about that? Is that the idea as you see it anyway? I see it as relevant to the discussion of the left elbow in terms of whether it’s role is consciously active in the production of CF or whether it’s merely holding on to the thing that’s trying to get away through the rotation of the pivot…
I’m out for a while guys…I enjoy discussion but it’s not happening around here anymore… all the best, I’ll drop in from time to time but I’ve got my own searching to do…
Cheers for now…
BOM
I know a lady who played on the LPGA who could not keep her left elbow straight. It was like “this is your only fault”. I think she had been to Penick, Butch Harmon, Phil and Rena Ritson, and others. She showed me her swing, and then we looked at it in slow motion. As hard as she tried she could not keep it straight. So at least in her case, she was trying to keep it straight…she was not consciously bending it to use it for a reason.
So this to me is case for the argument that at least some people who bend the left arm have such powerful pivots that they have exceeded their ability to maintain the straight arm. They would maintain it if they could.
Bom,
would a circle move faster around a cog or would a oval shape move faster around a cog ?
There’s your fight against gravity…smaller moves faster so why would we want to throw out and increase the radius? and in the process slow things down
If the water from the bucket went right it’s an arm/hand swing release
If the water from the bucket went down the line then left that says the pivot is working
That was a quick break for Bom 
I can’t resist a good discussion…
Who’s talking about throwing out? I’m talking about contracting, or a pulling inward. Pulling the elbows inward(bending them) as the pivot accelerates is the opposite of throwing out yet it has the effect of making the clubhead pull away, increasing it’s speed. Bending the left elbow will always shorten the radius- that seems clear, right?. And it also seems that that’s exactly what Hogan and particularly Senior was doing. What I was getting at was about how you see that action- a fight or a creation, either way they feed eachother because you increase it by fighting it.
The concept of the cog in the golfswing is ultimately inaccurate because the feet are on the ground, it’s much more of a sequential acceleration. The pivot thrust has the effect of momentarily turning the swing into a wheel by attempting to remove(in a way) the static base.
The cog and the wheel always make the same amount of revolutions and the same point on the cog always faces the same part of the rim, these things can’t be said about the golf swing. There is lag in the spokes of a wheel because it’s driven from the centre, but it’s minute, almost nonexistent. The lag between the ‘cog’ of the swing and the clubhead(rim) is massive by comparison and that reality spreads back or out through the parts and can’t really be ignored. The best hitters tend to bring the revolutions closer together, particularly through the impact area, but there is still a significant lagging of the parts. IMO if you remove one of the key links in that sequential path, the left elbow, then something has to compensate. It either has to be extra pivot or the hands doing crazy stuff. Contracting the radius is important in the golf swing because of the lack of a true cog. Because you can’t ultimately stay ahead of the clubhead, you have to take advantage of staying ‘ahead’ of it by staying inside of it, or running away from it towards the centre.
I think we’re in agreement here, the only question being how it’s perceived and then as a result do you feel an active force working through the left elbow in the creation/fight of CF, or as a way to stay ‘ahead’ of it internally.
Bom hope you don’t disappear too quickly because your thoughts are intriguing. Regarding the left elbow you may want to check out this video from professional Denny Alberts–a Morad Man. I believe it could be more or less the same thing you are explaining.
Cheers, Nick, thanks for the thoughts and for the video. I let frustration get the better of me yesterday in trying to get my thoughts on some of this across. To be honest, it really doesn’t matter if there’s no discussion about this stuff- though it helps if there is. For me I tend to clarify my thinking by getting it down and then out there. For some reason I can see things clearer that way- sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I’ve found in my own searching that a lot of times you really have to believe something in order to see if it’s right or not. It may or may not be, and if it’s not then you have to be willing to let it go. I’ve followed a ton of ideas that I was sure were right only to find out that they weren’t. It kind of sucks but I guess the more you get wrong the easier it gets to get it right. Right? Process of elimination and all that…
Interesting video alright. His overall ‘method’ seems a little contrived at first glance, but he’s got some pretty solid principles in play. I like that he’s talking about the left elbow powering the pull but his use of it seems more of a cut across than an internal power source. I’m not a huge fan of the flat left wrist in the backswing either, but again, that’s a first glance impression. I really like his emphasis of the unit being from the left elbow to the clubhead- some real food for thought in that idea, though I do prefer to see everything working together with no concrete bits. It’s hard to move and not move at the same time.
I also like is his approach to the backswing. A real difficulty in the golf swing, and I touched on it up there a bit, is the pre lagged condition that the standard backswing puts us into. It makes life very difficult because the downswing basically has to be in two parts both of which contradict eachother. Basically you have to un-lag and then lag. It’s why holding the pivot for the arms to come back to it before you go is so important, and difficult. I don’t think there’s an absolute solution to this barring starting with the club over your shoulder at set up- which is kind of fun actually, but not great for touch shots!
To accelerate something athletically, you basically lag it behind the power source while building up the acceleration through the body, the thing passes by the accelerating and decelerating power source sending the energy out through to the object. This has to happen to produce power. You can tighten up the gears and get super rotational, you can even have your mental picture of a wheel to give you a strong picture of intent, but the same thing has to happen. If it didn’t then the speed of the club head would only be marginally higher than your pivot speed and your arms would never fold on either side of the swing- they’d be like spokes. It’s doable, but I wouldn’t recommend it. IMO Moe does a version of this but he still has a ton of lag between his feet/hips and clubhead. And he was short with super strong canadian legs- man I wish I grew up playing ice hockey!
I like what this guy Alberts does with his backswing because he contains the arms and club inside the power source to a decent extent. At least the concept of his backswing does. The arms and club basically ride up inside the line of the right shoulder- the thing you want to accelerate is still contained inside the motor if you know what I mean. From there you’re more able to lag, load, and release in one motion. In a similar way to those hurlers, or Jimmy Bruen. It takes a lot of strength to do fully with a golf club, and Bruen ultimately had a lot of wrist problems which I reckon can be attributed to how much load they took in his swing. A fun picture to play around with and something that produces great iron strikes is trying to match the shaft angle with your spine angle in the backswing when the club is perpendicular to the ground. It feels kind of crazy and requires a lot of hand and forearm strength(hands go super deep and you pivot the hell out of it) but if you get it there and then let it fall behind you as you go hard through the ball it’s pretty crazy what it does. It makes you basically move all the set up relationships deep into the backswing with changing them, similar to how you would throw a ball. It does a great job of creating a natural right palm/forearm facing up on the way down- the weight of the club is doing it for you as it falls behind- again, similar to how you throw a ball…
Man, I’ve got no short answers, and I didn’t even get to the left elbow. I’ll get back to some of these thoughts later on…
An aside…
I love playing around with ideas and that’s the value I see in a forum like this. If that’s not part of the deal here then I’d just like to know(seriously) because whether what I say is agreed with or not doesn’t bother me, but I don’t want to feel like I’m offending anyone by thinking- it’s a useless state to be in, and is kind of how I feel sometimes here or when I used to post at ISG- which is what spurred my ‘maybe I should just get out of here’ post. I’m not interested in undermining anyone, and I’m even less interested in dogma. My search in golf is about finding a way to react as athletically and as instinctively as possible when I stand over a golf ball. That’s my only interest.