I've added distance to my shots this year. A lot.

[BuckeyeMark]

Just work on the range. The biggest hurdle to climb is body awareness and discipline. You have to teach yourself to feel when you're doing it, and then isolate those feelings into motion or limitation of motion.

Strangely enough, I find that strain lessens that body awareness. The harder I strain, the less I can feel what I'm doing. So as I really slow down and cut the strain out, I tend to be able to feel what I'm doing more acutely.

It's not a drill, but the sway and head were a big problem for me so I started by trying to make sure they don't move AT ALL. In my mind, I don't want my knees or my head to move even 1mm. In practice, they will. But in terms of FEEL, in my head, it had to be zero. Practicing that developed that sense for when I was moving and what the effects were. I still screw it up all the time, but I can FEEL when I do it now without anyone ever having to tell me.

This is where film can be useful, to sync up what you feel to what is actually happening. I don't like using video to build a swing because that's too aesthetic. It's 100% about impact on the ball, not being pretty. And no video teacher would have given Hogan or Palmer or Trevino their swings. But as a way to understand how something FEELS as opposed to how it plays out in the swing, I think video can be really helpful. But the goal isn't to "pretty up" the swing, the point of video is to help it inform your ability to have body control and awareness.

Then, once I have that body awareness, that's when the efficiency work comes in. Instead of trying out 30 different things at 30% margin of error, I tried to pick out the 5 or so things that were most pivotal for me and doing them at 1% error.

I don't like drills too much, as a rule, because they tend to cause you to focus on the drill itself and not on that body awareness and discipline. Not for everyone, and some drills are brilliant, but more often than many realize they get caught up makeing the drill "work" rather than using the drill to inform their awareness of themselves. It's like putting drills--it's easy to cut out that .25 inch club face bleed on your 10th putt from the same spot. But that's a whole world away from stepping up to a putt that matters and being able to make it go where it should when you only get one shot.

I tried this out in a friendly bet yesterday with a friend. His wife had never hit a golf ball in her life. He bet me that I couldn't get her to hit a ball more than 40 yards in five tries. She took a shot and it was just brutal--terrible swing that evolution gave her and the ball barely went 5 yards at contact.

I asked her some questions, found out she was a dancer, and used the language of body control with her. I set her up, showed her the basic swing motion, and said this, "Okay, now, keep your forearms together, and don't move your head or knees even 1 mm. Keep them frozen".

Then I put my hand on her head, gently, so she wouldn't dip it. She swung with my 7 iron and sent it 90 yards and within 20 yards of her swing line. She squealed. Then she did it again without my hand on her head and only the admonition of "forearms together, and keep your knees and head completely frozen." Her next shot was about 60 yards but dead straight.

Now this woman is a long way from being a golfer. But the point was that I approached it very differently with this new point of view than I did when I viewed the swing as a bucket of parts you have to put together correctly as opposed to being agnostic about all of the parts on some level, just channeling them toward impact on the ball with very little error when it comes to sway, compression, and spine angle.

This is good stuff but how do I work on this on the range? I can't tell if my head moves - I think I'm being still but lots of time I'm sure I am not. When I work on it at home and the wife observes she says I'm swaying. GRRR!

 

[Good.Shepherd]

This is good stuff but how do I work on this on the range? I can't tell if my head moves - I think I'm being still but lots of time I'm sure I am not. When I work on it at home and the wife observes she says I'm swaying. GRRR!

This is where a camera can be a big help. Set up your iphone (or whatever) on the bag behind you or beside you. Take two or three swings--one where you don't worry about it, one where you sway a little, and one where you lock it down.

Then compare them and how it plays out in your body.

I'll usually record a few swings at the end of a long range session where I'm hitting well. I delete them after I study them (because I don't want to obsess over them).

Also, look around at the range and try to diagnose the people around you. It's a good way to see the swaying and head movement and then to play around with it on your own.

Also you can try to "coil" more in your swing, instead of to "move" into it. The best guy I've found to describe this is Shawn Clement and here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDo1Lg-O4H8 . I don't know if he'll communicate in a way that helps you at all, but here it is nonetheless just in case you want a starting point.

The only other thing I can say is--this is exactly what is worth your time struggling with. How to gain body awareness? It's the biggest struggle and most of us only wrestle with it as a consequence of other actions. The way I learned it probably won't work for you, but for me it was just time on the range, the occasional swing video, and a Shawn Clement type of "coil" as the goal--and watching impact on the ball as the final measure, not swing beauty.