Untruth Serum

I was thinking that it would be a cool thread to lay out the things that are meant to do the thing that they don’t actually do. In my own time with the game, these things are many and varied… I’ll start with one…

Hands ahead are for hitting down on it.
While this may actually be true on some level, the goal of hands ahead is actually to enable a SHALLOW strike that then ends up being somewhat downward BECAUSE it was a shallow approach to begin with. A downward strike is actually very easy, and every hacker and/or his or her mother/father is quite gifted at it. But bringing the hands in low and deep and then ahead, is the big key to allowing the clubhead to arrive late and SHALLOW, and to then clip the ball crisply. I bring this one up because it’s a huge enabler, once you grasp the image, of a clean and convincing strike.

“TO ME”, this is huge…Just today, I had some new feels as to the difference…seeing it in print just helps that much more!

The untruths I suffered most from relate to how things move forward and back. For me the scariest outcome of a golf stroke is the fat shot. In fear of the fat shot I developed a tendency to drive the arms forward (directly targetward) from the halfway down position. I thought this would get the lowpoint forward and make fat impossible. What actually happens is that the forward thrusting of the arms actually pushes the torso back in an action/reaction pair. This stalls the pivot and your lowpoint move back anyways. I now feel like I’m almost moving my arms backwards, away from the target at halfway down and wait for the pivot to bring them around. So, lesson learned: thrusting the arms linearly forward doesn’t move lowpoint forward!
I also had a similar untruth with the hip movement. First move down from top was nasty hip slide with the extension. Again I thought this was key to moving weight and therefore lowpoint forward. Problem is this can cause the upper torso to fall back and with your rotation wasted early you are toast. Underplane and lowpoint behind ball with no way to turn the corner. Now I try to keep the weigtht on the right foot as long as possible, save rotation as long as possible, and amazingly, the lowpoint moves forward! Stupid game.

This made me laugh… good one. Though half the time I think it’s because we’re stupid… maybe more than half the time :blush:
Those are some quality untruths alright. I was actually going to post about the shifting the weight to the left side starting down idea, and how wrong it is. You described it perfectly.

Could you elaborate on this more. I find it interestingly counterintuitive in feel, like you say “stupid game”. How is one progressing his swing from the top if staying on right foot AND saving rotation long as possible? What is moving from top before you have to succumb to rotating torso and shifting weight of right foot? About where in DS do you feel like you have started to shift weight to left and started rotation?

Reason I ask is because my misses currently are predominately fat. I seemed to find that shifting weigh sooner moves low point, but then I start to overcompensate and then suffer from thin shots.

Just my two cents:
For me if I find I’m hitting a fat shot most of the time the culprit is a steep shoulder rotation.
If I feel that my left shoulder moves upwards in the downswing I’m moving lowpoint way behind (and below) the ball.
I need to feel I’m turning my shoulders very level, or turn my left shoulder down into the ground even. This can feel unnatural at first in combination with a tilted spine.

That’s exactly my finding IoZ. It’s been a real eye opener. Also to answer Budman, as I progress through ABS I don’t have any intentional transfer of weight to the left side. If we are bowing to the 4:30 line in the backswing, this creates axis tilt such that when we drop down to the inside of the right heel in transition, the result is that we compress into the ground with both feet and on video it looks like we are moving to our left side - but this is not what we are feeling or doing. The weight only moves to the left side when the momentum of our rotating torso takes us there.

Excellent

Teddy, you may have snatched the pebble from Master Po’s hand! :wink:

That was an excellent description and staying on the right side is something I wish I understood better prior to module 7. You have more time, you can hit harder and hit later. All great stuff.

Captain Chaos

Well take this with a grain of salt because my swing issues are uniquely my own but basically I try to take a “traditional” backswing in which my weight is primarily right enough that I can lift my left foot up but it falls back down (can’t balance solely on the right foot), BManz calls this “counterfall”. In my pre-ABS swing I would take my hips and move them linearly at the target trying to get weight left. But since my feel weren’t moving my upper torso and head had to fall backwards a bit to stay in balance.

Now I try to take that weight down deeper into the right ankle and let my left cheek go deeper (to the same depth behind me as my right cheek) instead of forward towards the target. For me this fixed the hip slide which also came with early extension i.e. slight pelvic thrust towards the ball. Since it’s easier to turn the hips when you go into extension I would use a lot of my rotational capabilities with that slide. There was no “resistance” to this move because my feet were so passive. ABS truly showed me a roadmap out of this disaster and you would need to do the module work understand better but I just had a whole lot of loose and fast lower body movement that sorted itself out by learning how to provide resistance “on the other end of the towel”.