Golf Digest Article: The New Swing

[WichitaDM]

Well i was flying home from New Orleans today and i picked up a golf digest. There was an article in this months edition (the one with vijay on the front) that discusses a new approach to the swing. It appears the main differences are a shorter backswing, a noticeable left spine tilt shortly after take away, and a focus on keeping the weight more on the front foot than the traditional golf swing. It helped three new pros win their first times last year and i was looking to get some input from better golfers. I am a 5 handicap and can only describe myself as a "scrambler" My ball striking while generally pretty straight tends to be the weakest part of my game. After taking lessons from three different instructors i havent found anything over the years that has worked for an extended period of time.

This includes my first teacher who taught me thru high school and had me down to like a .5 handicap before i blew up my senior year with a horrible putting problem as well as everything else. It inevitably seems after playing this game for 20 years that the cycle with my golf game is something like this.

Struggle
Take series of lessons
Drop down to about a 1-3 handicap
keep practicing
wheels fall off of golf swing after 6 months - 2 years and im back to the drawing board
back to 5-6 handicap
Switch pros

Its frustrating and while there arent any teachers near me that could work with me on this im tempted for the first to actually make swing changes based on a golf digest article lol. The points made in the article about weight shift having to be exact in the traditional swing seems to be exactly my problem. When my tempo is good and my confidence is good, i can hit it as well as any one, and when its not my game just goes into the dumpster.

Any comments/suggestions from good golfers who read this article?

[scorer]

They are getting alot of buzz in the press these 2 teachers. I'm not sure this is something that will be the new so called method. Phil won the players with a reg swing coach in harmon..i think its jst a different method used. If you want to get closer to a scrtach golfer you need 3 things... greens in regulation, short game chipping and pitching and putting. I'd concentrate on the short game and it will help you alot.

[dzh90]

This swing takes rotational hitting to its full extent. It is a total coil around the spine, without any lateral movement away from the target.

I swing pretty similar to what they teach, but not as drastic. I have a slight shift away from the target.

For the most part, going from 5--> scratch is short game.

Edit: see you're a scrambler. 150 yards and in is key as long as you can put the ball in play off the tee

[WichitaDM]

Ya my short game is pretty good. Putting and chipping is and always has been my bread and butter. (Except for a one year period my last year of high school where i developed a nasty case of the yips, i have since switched to left handing putting and all is right in the world) However i have always been relatively short off the tee 240-250, not incredibly accurate either, and probably averaged 6-7/18 greens in regulation. My biggest problem has always been getting "stuck" on my right side and hitting that weak right push we all hate. This article interested me mainly because ive always struggled with tempo/weight shift and this approach seems to take that out of the equation more than the standard golf swing.

[dzh90]

Try hitting some balls with it. I tried it and it felt pretty cool. I made sure to get a tight coil around my spine (feel all my muscles stretch) and then snap my left leg/hips through to start the downswing. perhaps easier said than done...

[SlyGuy]

Anywhere else I can read about this fancy new swing online?

[esad]

I tried this a bit at the range this morning. It was hard to do the lean forward because I'm so used to keeping my head behind the ball and it felt weird.

It was much easier to do the "straighten up at impact" part of it. One thing that it did was to really help you get your hands closer to your body at impact. I've been having problems lately keeping my hands closer to my body and that really helped. I'll have to mess around with it some more. Leaning foward still felt really strange though.

[alebron]

This isn't all that revolutionary. It's pretty similar to:

1. Jim Hardy's one-plane swing. Differences here are minor: Hardy focuses on arm-travel on the through-swing whereas P&B focus on body rotation, but they pretty much accomplish the same thing. Both feature an "odd" weight-distribution at the top of the backswing.

2. Hank Haney's arm-plane swing, aka TW's post-2004 swing. Haney focuses more on the position of the arms throughout the backswing, but the position at the top ends up being very similar: lots of rotation, very little right-side loading, straightish right leg. Emphasis on body rotation on the throught swing is exactly the same as P&B's emphasis.

3. Sam Snead's swing. Carbon-copy backswing, very similar through swing.

All four result in the same sort of ballstriking results: flat high-spin trajectory, accurate short-irons, but some loss of distance on longer irons, woods and driver.

To further emphasize that Stack And Tilt is not all that revolutionary, the following are tour pros that, to my knowledge, aren't working with P&B but have pretty much that exact swing type (off the top of my head):

Arron Oberholser, Zach Johnson, Ken Duke, Mark Wilson, John Rollins, Heath Slocum, Ted Purdy.

[Butcho22]

David Duval sort of had this move going as well.

[Goldstone]

Pretty funny, that is almost exactly how I swing (which I'd always been told was completely wrong).

Plus points (for me) are that I strike the ball very well and hit all my irons straight on a nice trajectory.

Downside is that I don't have the same reliability with the driver for some reason. Also I lose about 5%-10% yardage vs. a more traditional swing.