Thoughts on Hitting vs Swinging

Essential Reading
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We’ll, I must say that swinging and the use of longitudinal acceleration
I believe to be the superior method of all things feel. Dumping the power package on the ball with soft hands is just a beautiful thing around the greens for all the chips, flops and around the green wedges.

I would argue that swinging makes a huge assumption that our hinges are always well oiled, free and flexible. The steady even acceleration to the moment of truth depends on exactly these things… steady, even,
and well oiled firm, but flexible hinges.

We of course can debate the pressure gauge software inside the computer. Everyone seems to have a different setting. I am not likely to go into the red on a weekend game with guys at the club, but coming down the final three holes to win the South Australian Open might put me well into the red! lol

It’s natural when we feel pressure to tighten up, and these states of muscle constraint do not do well for the free flexible hinges.

Now if you have the mind of a Nicklaus, and pressure does not bother you, then your computer will keep pumping oil to those hinges right to the award platform on the 72nd green. For me that was not usually the case!

Once I learned how to hit, with a tight grip pressure, and radial acceleration with an angled hinge, I found that to be much better under the gun, and as my computer would cut off the oil and my muscles would tighten, I would typically just rotate a bit faster and I would just have to remember to pull one LESS club down the stretch
and since I would practice with a very tight cohesive body tension,
those moments would really just seem all too familiar…. I found I was able to perform much better under pressure with pure hitting techniques.

Greg McHatton once asked me why I would want to pull the club out of orbit with the angled hinge, and the answer was really quite simple. So I could hit it straight consistently!

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In simple terms…

Swingers typically but not necessarily always are the guys with the long flowing swings, smooth and effortless looking (don’t be fooled though)

Hitters look more like short backswing, quick swing, that kind of thing.

The heart of what I was saying is that I think pure swingers have a harder time under pressure, and in my years on the tour, I saw the games best using hitting methods. Clampett and I had a long talk about it one year at Q school. He agreed.

The best hitting striker I ever saw was Peter Senior from Australia. I was there when he we waxing everyone from Norman in his prime, Faldo, no one could touch him. No swinging going on with that fine move.

For pure CF swingers… Moe Norman who I spent a lot of time with picking his brain while I was on the Canadian Tour in the
late 80’s early 90’s
With hitting, I didn’t have to practice at all to keep the ball on the course, and there have been times since my retirement where I went over a year without touching a club. One year I went out with my father, having not played in over a year, and I shot 68 at Oak Creek CC in Sedona which is a decent test RT Jones track. Now I am not saying this to toot my horn here, but to make a point… there is absolutely no way I could have done that swinging with rusty hinges!

Since coming back to golf last year, I still don’t practice, only play… and hitting makes it possible to not have to grind thousands of golf balls to strike the golf ball properly.

Swingers pull, hitters push. I believe there are purists on each end of the spectrum, most players do some of both, often not all that effectively.

From a purely ideological standpoint swinging is superior I believe.
But for me hitting proved the better method to win money and tournaments on the world stage.

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Swinging might feel like this…

If you were to let go of the club at impact the club would of course bounce off the ground move away from you… say towards 10 or 11 o clock. using the ball as a reference to a clock… Aiming the hands at the inside quadrant of the ball.

Now if you go with that momentum you can use a full roll of the wrists and let the arms move away from the body after dumping all the force on the ball and then into the ground. This is the Doyle, McHatton approach I was taught early on, and it works well. I know. I can swing that way and have won tournaments with that kind of swing.

Hitting,

Now if you fight that expanding circle action, you have to use an angle hinge, no wrist roll and the club is released by the rotation of the body. If you stand behind a golfer with this motion, the hands will quickly disappear around the body after impact… kind of like cutting it left… by pulling the club out of it’s natural longitudinal orbit,
you create a massive amount of pressure in your hands, on all three pressure points. This pressure in your hands is FEEL! and this is the feel that you can learn to utilize to control the ball exactly how you want to…. a three yard draw, a five yard fade, low, high, it’s all yours if you can learn to do it. Warning! You have to have strong arms and hands if you are planning on rotating fast and hitting it far!

On top of that, you have to learn what I believe to be the most difficult swing move in all of golf. Straightening the right arm out quickly on the downswing…while the torso turns flat or at right angles to the spine or axis. It’s a great move to master though, because if you can do it, you can’t ever get over the top of the shot and pull it.
For those who are still confused, it feels like you are coming right over the top to hit a big pull shot, but instead, that hands move straight down, as if they are going to land in your right hip pocket, but your shoulders are turning as flat a a 15th century spanish globe.

I have seen that move win a lot of money and tournaments.

Swinging for me took a lot of practice, stretching, and all in all my body just had to feel really loose free and oily…
I couldn’t just step off the plane after a long flight, bad food, and go to the course and start flushing shots right away. Each week was like having to re lube the machine and get it all oiled up for Thursday. It really wore me out over time… the road is a whole other thing. I saw a lot of compact short swing hitters just step off the plane at shoot 65 in a Tuesday round… I was always quite envious of that until I learned how to do it myself.

I would strive for maximum swing radius so I would float load or drag load the club back to the top, so that my wrist would not cock until the very end of my backswing, then I would flex my knees into a big “sitdown” bowlegged thing, this would start the change in direction, and I would hold 90 degree club shaft angle to the third parallel with a big gutty upper body rotation into this sit down leg squat.
Once there the left leg would straighten violently and the hips would clear fast and you just dump all that inertia onto the ball and into the ground with loosey goosey free flexible wrist and arms. The thing that was amazing about this, and so different is that after impact the upper arms would NOT stay packed and in tight to the body but would just move out away from the body with a full roll of the wrists, so free and spent feeling. You just have to trust that the forces that be will release the club into perfect alignment, and amazingly they do! … but with this one disclosure … FREE FLEXIBLE HINGES WITH
A STEADY AND EVEN ACCELERATION on the way down.

So my argument as a practical player and tester of this is that yes it does work, as long as the brain sends oil to the joints! … meaning you don’t tighten up, get nervous or feel any pressure out on the course.

swinging in general makes several big assumptions…

  1. That the human body will create a steady even acceleration for all the laws of physics and geometry to do what they need to do…

  2. That the hinges are properly lubed at all times when playing golf shots… meaning free flexible wrists, heavy noodle like arms, and the “gutty” inner motion of the body is really driving the swing…(loading and delivering the power package)

I will say that the hitter must also feel that “gutty” body rotation (for fuller shots)… but accepting that we all have “off days” I like being off as a hitter much more than being “off” as a swinger.

I played today, and really felt “off’, but still managed 7 birdie putts inside 20 feet. I only hit one shot that I would say was “really” bad… That would not have been the case back when I was for the most part a swinger…

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The right arm and elbow have different roles for swingers and hitters…

Remember, Mac O’Grady is a hitter all the way, so his right arm straightens quickly on the downswing to the 3rd parallel. He rotates
his shoulders very flat, and our swings (Mac and mine) would have a lot more similarities than differences. I say this because I really believe
that I know what Mac is feeling in the swing. I don’t position my hands as low as Mac does at address… but I know why he does that…

Now with swinging, the right arm is passive all the way down, and the feeling of the right hand moving out to the right forever, seems appropriate in it’s description.

Swinging, you are feeling that you are throwing the club into the ground in an on plane way…everything is dumping into the ball.
When the clubhead hits the ground it kinda bounces off the ground,
and the arms make no attempt to stop this action, therefore the free flexible way is to have the upper arms detach from the body and the wrists make a full roll after impact… this is all a result of the club bouncing off the ground. If there was no ground you would likely feel that your arms were being pulled from their sockets!

Now in Mac’s style of hitting, and myself as well, we do everything we can to stop the club from doing everything I described above!

By pulling the clubhead out of it’s natural straight line descent into the earth, we muscle it around our body in a tight way, keeping the upper arms glued to the body, and rotating flat. But the key to this working is what the right arm does on the downswing. If you were to keep the right arm bent with this kind of motion, you would come OTT and pull everyshot dead left. You HAVE to straighten the right arm on the way down or it’s OB left…

The plane is the same but it feels totally different because as Guru said, you can’t do both!

Now swinging does work, and it is of golf’s highest ideals…
but from my experience of doing both fairly well in my career,
I would say that swinging I might hit it like a (10) somedays, and like a (3) others… but as a hitter I am like a (6) to an (8) all the time.
I never hit the ball bad… and I say that in comparison to when I hit the ball bad as a swinger… I could really spray it on an off day, but I never spray it now… never…

As far as the body, as a swinger I would like my body to feel like a yoga instructor, where as a hitter, I really need to feel like an athlete…

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On tour…I would keep my swinging activities to around the greens… I believe the softness, sensitivity of the hands gives the great touch around the greens, and putting too… so I might say I swing inside 30 yards… hit everything outside that…

Now that being said, I would say that with swinging… I like the hands and arms to feel heavy and deliberate. With hitting, I like the arms and hands to feel light and tight… so I would say at a high level of the game, this might explain why a lot of great short game players hit the ball poorly in comparison, and a lot of great ball strikers have trouble with touch around the greens… I think this is a real reality for a lot of players, and this might give a very real insight into why this happens.

The players that figure out how to move from one feel to the other are the ones that really set themselves apart from the others…

Nowadays, since I don’t play serious competitive golf, I’m hitting everything, even chips and pitches…
This way I can keep a decent short game with zero practice… and that is what I am after now…
I’m even hitting putts now… zero practice… very simple action.

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At transition, It’s not a bad idea to have the arms feeling ahead at first, then as the torso starts turning it would feel behind, because of the lagging effect, or should I say, as the body rotates, the arms would feel that they lag behind… as they compress into the body while the torso is rotating…

The hands need to be in the same relative position “on plane” from the third to fourth parallel, so if your hands are down low, right hip pocket on the downswing, make sure that when the hips have fully cleared, that the hands are now 4 or 5 inches from your belt buckle at the fourth parallel, on the same relative plane as they were on the downswing.
This again is angle hinge stuff, that of hitters…

Now with swingers, you would NOT want to do this, because when the club hits the ground as a swinger, it essentially “bounces” of the ground away from the body , and would appear to be off plane, but the intent is for the club to go down into the earth and stay on plane… (radial vs longitudinal acceleration)

If anyone doesn’t understand the difference here please let me know and don’t be afraid to ask questions, maybe I can learn a better way to explain all this without having to show someone in person… which I am quite sure I could communicate these concepts much more easily…

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Hi LP…

How about a discussion of the different components between what you understand about swinging and hitting.
If possible in TGM terms?

Thanks!

I have a video shot, just need to finish the voice overs, and maybe it will clean up the issue once and for all…
Keep bugging me about it is the best way to see it! :unamused:

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Rhythm is equally important in both hitting and swinging. The key is to have it…. and to really understand the difference between radial (hitting) and longitudinal acceleration. The intent is totally different, yet they both need an application of rhythm.

In a sense the third and fourth parallel should be mirror images, particularly if you are hitting, you could think of teeth on a saw blade.
But the feel is a bit different in hitting because as a hitter… you are in a way, pulling the club out of orbit… in other words, if you were to let go of the club at impact it would hit the ground and bounce off to the right,
into right field… so the hitter does everything he or she can to resist this throw out action. The swinger would argue the opposite, allow as little interference as possible, loose free arms, wrists,
let the clubhead roll over and so forth. The shaft of the swinger would appear to be OFF plane to the hitter, moving out and away from the body after impact. All this stems from the difference of intent from Longitudinal or radial acceleration… two very different objectives.

“The hitter attempts to bring a pre stressed shaft into impact through
radial acceleration. The swinger sees this as futile, and not realistic
choosing to dump the force, lengthwise down the shaft telescopically…. and uses the virtue of a rhythmic, steady even acceleration to take full advantages of the physics of centrifugal force to activate the release motion of the club automatically through a straightening and inline throw that is guided by smooth, steady, even power supply.

I knew the difference here intellectually as a young TGM student, but it really didn’t crystalize for me until years later until I could really feel the difference. I spent half my career as a swinger, the other half as a hitter. I really know what these styles feel like in the body, and since golf is a game of feel, I became aware of the pros and cons as a real life test subject.

As a hitter, the mirror image “look” is interesting, because at parallel 3 the hitter would feel non manipulated, but to get the same look over at parallel 4, you would be under a sensation of heavy manipulation…. both with the plane of the shaft and with the attempt to hold off the closing of the clubface. The “word” manipulation sounds “bad” to most, but that “pulling it out of orbit”, and resisting the closing of the clubface, actually puts feel in your hands, and gives you an awareness of the clubhead, shaft and clubface a swinger could only dream about.

Distance from the ball is a great topic, it could start a new thread of it’s own.

Again you might have two different protocols here between hitters and swingers. The swinger might have greater success with the ball being farther away at address to take advantage of the maximum swing radius principle. The bigger the arc the faster the clubhead will travel given the same pivot speed… but of course longer means heavier too… but now with the modern gear, you can have longer and lighter, so that is the main reason the ball is going farther.

The hitter would be more along the lines of a figure skater pulling everything inward to speed up the rotation when they go into one of those routine closing spins. The closer the hands are to the body
the faster the hitter can rotate, which is the core of the hitters quest for developing radial speed… The hitter would argue that the swinger has little chance of repeating their swing on a day in day out basis due to the nature of the human body NOT being able to always accelerate steady and even, and that the wrist and arms could feel tight from time to time, and interfere with the freeness of the hinges that are so paramount to the swingers success…

So, back to the question… how far to stand? Well first, are you hitting or swinging? This of course leads right into how to set up your irons flat or upright?

Personally I like flat irons for hitters, more upright for swingers.
Either way, you must set your irons to proper impact alignments, not
“address” alignment… and not the markings on your club swinging the way you do on a black rubber mat. Fitting your clubs to your swing in the NOW state, with guarantee you stay with what you have good or bad… nothing will foster poor impact alignments faster than poor club fitting… It happens ALL THE TIME!

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Many would have seen this photo lag took on his deck. Swinging v Hitting.
I think this is my favorite photo. The mist, the 2 different releases and the ball flying up identical paths with those 2 different releases. Great stuff. Look forward to the video of it Lag
hit_swing.jpg

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I’ll be getting the long awaited Hitting vs Swinging Video up soon…

Thanks for the motivation!

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I am also looking forward to studying this video, a great learning tool!

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Lag,
Your one of many golfers who went from swinging to hitting and was succesful with that change,. The change helped your career. My qestion is how long did that change take, how long before the change became comfortable, if someone has been playing golf for 37yrs and is a swinger and wanted to play competively would a change to hitting help or is it too hard to change at that stage im talking about a scratch golfer.

                                                                                                                                Thank You
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Your one of many golfers who went from swinging to hitting and was succesful with that change,. The change helped your career. My qestion is how long did that change take, how long before the change became comfortable, if someone has been playing golf for 37yrs and is a swinger and wanted to play competively would a change to hitting help or is it too hard to change at that stage im talking about a scratch golfer.

Have you experimented with Moe Norman’s approach? The high hands and swing off a shoulder based plane rather than what
I call a chi plane or most would call an elbow plane?
If you are hell bent on swinging… Moe is the Model… end of story…

I really believe I teach hitting the correct way… not the silly right arm thrusting thing without emphasis on the pivot as
I see most TGM instructors teaching…

Great hitters like Hogan, Knudson, Peter Senior, go through impact with a frozen right arm, arms pinned on the body with
great pivot rotation that does anything but stop at impact… there is no unnecessary rolling of the wrists or club face post impact… however, there is a lot of clubface rotation coming into impact…

It took me about a year to switch over… but knowing what I know now… I wouldn’t hesitate to change at anytime…
I didn’t have a coach when I did it… and I did waste some time having to figure a few things out… but that is what I
am here for… so others can make the transition much more smoothly.

We all have the hit impulse… so I finally embraced it…so then golf wasn’t a fight, it’s a much more natural human action
that embraces our basic instinct to strike with athleticism.

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Lag,
Not completely sold on swinging although will look at Moe Norman model just looking at a model like you said where you can jump out of the car and be able to play competitive without 1 to 3 hrs of warmup.
Your absolutely correct most TGM instructors when teaching hitting just focus rt arm thrust without any focus on pivot or the 5th accumulator.
What did you feel was the hardest challenge in the makever?

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The hardest thing was realizing the golf swing wasn’t over at impact… It took me a lot of time, and contemplation to realize that…and in many ways, the hitters swing really starts post impact… because if you are really going to hold shaft flex, you better get really busy at P4… 10 times more than you ever would imagine… it’s a tough pill to swallow, and a really tough one for the typical TGM guys who are so preoccupied with impact, and power package delivery…

There is some kind of debate over on Lynn Blake’s site, and some expert over there thinks I am out of my mind, and that I am the new TGM antagonist… which of course is anything but the truth! :unamused:

I just can’t be bothered by armchair TGM experts who think they know what I am doing or teaching for that matter.

A lot of these guys are book smart but have no real life experience… it’s like taking a kid out of college and putting him
in the CEO chair because he graduated with high marks… I was a bit green in TGM when I was younger but not now…

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At the highest levels of the game, under the most pressure situations, I needed rock solid dependability. Swinging does work,
but makes two big assumptions. Free flexible (oily) wrists, free of tension and anxiety, and second, the ability to accelerate the club on the downswing with a perfectly steady and even acceleration. Can you do this? Swing away my friend. But if you are like me, and have a tendency to tighten up even slightly, or accelerate a bit too quick with the body on the downswing, you can be left with a swing that is completely out of control, a feeling of total helplessness and be spraying the ball all over the course with no one to help bail you out until you roll in your last putt on the 18th. Why does this happen?
Because you cannot tighten the hinges on the way down, they need to be free and flexible so that geometry and centrifugal force can work as it needs to, and that the acceleration be steady and even so
again, physics can do what it needs to…But if you tighten or over accelerate, it’s like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel. Scary stuff.

Myself coming from the Ben Doyle camp of extreme swinging protocol, I can attest that swinging does work… and as Bobby Clampett of the late 70’s, early 80’s demonstrated to the golfing world, advanced swinging can be geometrically correct and win golf tournaments of substantial magnitude. It was an exciting time for that side of TGM and I remember how heart broken Ben was when Bobby left that side of Homers findings to pursue something that was unknown to him at the time.

I don’t think anyone has come along and swung a golf club like that since. It was very unorthodox at the time, yet mesmerizing and beautiful all the same. Bobby’s horrific (at least it must have been to him) collapse at the British Open certainly put a big question mark in the head of not just Bobby, but was felt right down the line with all of us TGM’ers at that time. Ben really pushed us all very hard.
We all felt a sense of deeper purpose to PROVE this was the new way to swing a club, that science would win over guts and nerves,
and the slew of incorrect golf swings that could only win by a mighty act of sheer determination!

The thing is, I can’t denounce swinging as much as I might like to, because it is still based upon good sound science. There is no fault in the machine itself as a swinging device… I can only question the machine meets flesh aspect, and our own organic limitations and in perfections in delivery Homer’s grand promise of better golf.

I was a true swinger, with a full roll duel horizontal hinge, extreme snap loader, and very noodle like arms dumping it down and out.
I had some fair success, was one of the top collegiate players in the US and won a lot of golf tournaments at that level. I was better than scratch I can assure you.

Where I differed most with Ben is that he made us feel as if hitting was wrong, and I was a bit naive to think such things really. Ben was very “one way” and I would assume he is still teaching the same thing with all his conviction and passion. He is an amazing man… his love and dedication for the game is unmatched as an instructor. The fact he taught one of the finest Amateur players of the last century cannot be denied.

Regardless of whether you hit or swing, there is a lot of TGM that is applicable to both methods.

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What I am currently enjoying about golf is having a fantastic shot makers course to play “Mare Island” built in 1892. I play in the afternoon usually with a stiff wind
coming off the San Francisco Bay. It’s absolute magic every time I tee off. Al Barkow who is one of the games legendary golf writers and has traveled the world of golf plays with me now every Tuesday, he is a good player, loves the game, and we just have a great time. He gets to see old school golf with persimmon which no one gets to see anymore, and I get to hear all his amazing stories from one of golfs storied journeys. Ken Harrington who is the course record holder (60) where Johnny Miller grew up playing (Lincoln Park) comes out to Mare to play with me on occasion and has one of the finest persimmon collections I have seen. He is a wonderful persimmon player. I love the crack of wood, and the feel of classic blades. I now have an amazing collection of incredible blades, thanks to the modern era, no one wants anymore, so I have been having a blast picking up some legendary stuff to add to my collection of playable sets… I love hitting different sets every round… which wasn’t something I could really do on tour. I’m able to play completely on my own terms now… as compared with touring I had a schedule, sponsors to please, contracts to honor, and so forth… same with college golf, and the junior circuit. So I am really enjoying golf more now than ever… I play once a week, never more than twice… and that seems to be a good pace for me.

On tour, you play 6 days a week… and for me, that’s too much golf… always has been. It starts to feel robotic, and I have really suffered from burn out in the past.
That is a terrible feeling to have on the course.

I really do like competition, but I don’t like flat wide open modern courses with too many humps and bumps around the greens. I don’t like the modern gear, particularly the drivers… I don’t like the sound, the flight, the feel and they look ridiculous. Just my opinion.

Teaching has been fun because it is needed. With all the technology out there, I realized that instruction has become worse. All the energy has been on trying to
make clubs to fit these horrible golf swings. The instructional world is still in the dark ages. Even TGM is far from perfect… so I really believe that I can make
a very significant contribution to the game as a visionary instructor. Not that my visions are in anyway ground breaking, what I teach is nothing new at all, guys like
Mehlhorn knew a lot of this stuff back in the 1930’s. But I do feel based upon my knowledge of TGM, and having real life touring experience, and being a disciplined student of the swing myself, I have a unique vantage point or platform to work off, to get people much closer to the correct sensations, feelings, and truth, than what is typically available out in the general golfing community. You can’t teach what you don’t know… and I believe that to know, you must also be able to demonstrate. I love the artistry of the swing, and the quest for perfection… and I am a student in that regard… always will be… just farther down that road than most. I strike the golf ball well because I have very sound mechanics. The ball doesn’t lie. The best way to make a believer of a student is to watch the ball, not just listen to verbal rhetoric. A few of the guys from iseek, Paul Smith “Guru”… Scotty, “Bio” and Justin have been here to see me… and I think they have all left
with a good feeling… in that what I am teaching is sound stuff that is fundamentally correct, was logically demonstrated, and actually quite achievable… A lot of
what I teach is TGM, but TGM is not complete the way it should be. I am more interested in teaching what history has showed us with the legacy left behind by the great strikers. I rarely discount the descriptions of great players or strikers… I really try hard to understand and feel what they are saying… and usually they are right. The photos, the films, their words, it’s all there… and it’s my job to take all that, and extrapolate it all into something I can pass on to my students and deliver it in a way that is both understandable, but also dynamically advantageous… and realistically executable. THAT is the challenge, which of course leads to
the modules…

Shooting the modules has been fun… and very challenging. The first module I think has been a wonderful success, but still I had to shoot a supplementary video to it
because I realized that most students, didn’t quite “get” the very precise parameters that were meant to be communicated, so with the two videos, we are not really getting the results… and it’s saving everyone a lot of time… I’m learning a lot too.

Basically, my life is pretty full with golf between, playing, the forum and posts, teaching, viewing student vids, e mails, reading books, putting together
vintage sets to play, and tweaking my own gear… So my plate is pretty full! We are really enjoying living in the San Francisco Bay Area… this is truly one of
the great cities of the world with a lot of progressive thinking going on…

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I just wanted to chime in on trying hitting. I have always noticed that my full swing short irons were most repeatable with what I found out to be a “no roll” hand action. However, I did this by accident without knowing what I was doing until someone told me it looked funny. I was only vauguely aware of TGM concepts but the person who remarked on it said it reminded him of Craig Stadler. Long story short, i found out I was hitting but with swinging components mixed in sometimes(still using some CF delivery because I didn’t ‘know’ what I was doing).
Well, after finding this site through the Sevam1 sites, I decided that I probably should be a hitter. Interestingly enough (because you mention it here), I had been using the Moe Norman style of swinging to the best of my ability with mixed results in reproducibility. However, yesterday I tried hitting again with pitching wedge thru Driver and I would have to say I lost zero distance. Actually, if I catch it flush I gain distance and if I am off center a bit I am about the same as my swinging distances. The big thing is with a 9-iron, 5-iron, 3-wood and Driver my reproducibility is WAY BETTER than swinging. Out of 20 swings with each club, I had zero off line with the 9-iron, 2 off line with the 5-iron, zero off line with the 3-wood and 3 off line with the driver. Not all were perfectly flush so the distance wasn’t perfect every time but even the less than flush hits were straight or baby draws and within probably 10% of my flush hits. And 2 of the 3 off line with the driver went curving about 20 yards LEFT instead of the 30 yards right with swinging. The third off line with the driver was a low 30 yard pull. I need more guidance but the results are encouraging in my mind.

BTW, I am a left-hander golfing right-handed.

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Would love to see your Moe Norman type swinging … I believe that to be the best way to go for true fly it out CF swinging…

Either way… having a great pivot will be nothing but beneficial…

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Lag,
The tendency that I fight the most is tension in my hands. Or, more correctly, I have trouble with CONSISTENT APPLICATION of the concept of passive hands even though I understand it. I think this is all too common. And as you say, if you are going to Swing, then the hands should really act as hinges…they HAVE to be passive to be compatible with CF motivated Swinging. So instead of fighting that tendency constantly and blowing the passive hands needed for a fully functional swing, I found it is easier to embrace the hand tension and build a golf shot around it. Hence, Hitting. So even though I could make good contact using both techniques, I never know when my hand tension would creep above a certain threshold and blow up my Swing. However, I still like the IDEA and look of Swinging over Hitting. If, however, I could perform Hitting the way you pull it off, then I may rethink my preference.

From another point of view, you could say that the tension anyone has in their swing is based psychologically on a lack of trust in what they are trying to do. But if you in fact have an appreciable level of trust in what you are doing and then go out on the course where tension can rise naturally, as it does for a lot of us (and Ego plays a large part in this), then you have yourself a swing wrecker as you have pointed out in this thread. That’s not even mentioning competition.

It should be noted that I am not that good overall to begin with (average athlete) so I am just trying to find the most successful/ low maintenance way of wielding a golf club. That’s the angle I am coming from. If I am my own worst enemy in a golf swing, then why not turn my natural level of tension (I am high strung, ADHD, etc.) into a swing motivator instead of a swing wrecker?

BTW, I am currently using 1983 Hogan Director irons. They were my grandfather’s. He grew up caddying as a kid here in NJ at the excellent and renowned Pine Valley CC. He was a scratch golfer though and I am NOT…yet.

You really do need to both commit to one protocol or the other. A lot of golfers run into trouble when they confuse hitting with swinging. Most golf instruction, even great books are geared to one or the other… so getting an understanding of the two methods can be helpful… I do plan on releasing a video that I think will clear up a lot confusion for people and help them make the right decision as to their direction. It’s really hard to properly master both methods.