Hanks
On the Fringe
I'm trying to catch up on this thread best I can but this post could be one of the best posts ever on THP. I'm actually going to take a screen capture of this post, print it out, and take this with me to the range next time to try and incorporate some if these tips. Wonderful post Doc!!
I just landed and I wanted to post this.
I am sitting on the plane thinking about the different aspects of this weekend and I wanted to take few minutes talking about the lesson that Jim Flick gave to the whole group (the one where he was hitting 175 shots with his driver, while sitting on a chair). The reason I wanted to cover this is twofold. #1 it was flat out AWESOME and he covered so many things that I know the majority of us struggle with. And #2 it was during this lesson that our video camera batteries ran out (I am hoping that between the three of us we got it all).
One aspect I wanted to cover was the aspect of grip pressure. He went around and shook all of our hands, but he did so in order to get us to get a feeling of how we should be holding our club. This is going to be a hard thing to describe in words bit I know that I have this on camera so I will post it later. But it was so much looser than any of us expected. He was making all of us loosen up our grips and relax our wrists. He then told us to go and grab our drivers and 6 irons. He asked which one is heavier (the answer is the 6 iron). He had each of us hold up our 6 irons straight in front of us half way between vertical and horizontal. He then said that he wanted us to relax our grip and wrist to just before the point were the club would drop from this point. He said this is the grip and wrist pressure we should be holding this club. He had us repeat the same exercise with the driver. I urge you all to try this (it works for every club, except maybe the putter). Which do you think required more pressure to hold up? The 6 iron, so his point was that we should be holding our drivers with less pressure than all of our other clubs. But I don't know about you guys but I have a tendency to fall into the grip it 'n' rip it category when it comes to my driver. It is amazing how much we shoot ourselves in the foot in this game.
The next aspect of his lesson I wanted to talk about is weight distribution. I posted earlier a out Jim Flick telling me that I was throwing my hips like a stripper. Well this brought up the question of weight transfer. First off he asked me which was more important to shift my weight or to have the clubhead square at impact? I answered the latter, which resulted in the stripper commentHe then asked if our weight should be more on our front foot after hitting a driver or a 6 iron? I think someone answered that the weight should be transferred the same no matter the club, which Jim emphatically disagreed with. He said that when we hit a driver at finish our weight should be more evenly distributed with the driver than with 6 iron. So with a 6 iron our weight should be much more on our front foot at finish than a driver at finish. In fact to give a bit of insight into Jim and my personal lesson. He saw that I was shifting my weight too much with my driver (which is legitimately what I thought I was supposed to do), so be had me hitting drives while keeping my back foot on the ground. Try it! It is super difficult, but I'll tell you what it totally works! Now for the reasoning of this. With the driver we tee it up, so we do not want to hit down on it, we want to hit up. In order to do this we must leave more weight on our back foot.
Lastly we came to the tip which had him hitting balls while sitting in a chair. He was demonstrating the idea that if you want to bit the ball further you don't grip the club tighter and you don't swing you hips through faster. He said that for the golf swing 80% of our distance comes from our upper body (which blew my mind because I was always told the opposite). So the way to hit the ball further are to change your club (club up) or bring the club back further (although he is not a fan of reaching way back just to gain a few more yards, he told me that from his experience this only negatively affects a players outcomes). So he sat in the chair and hit a ball 75 yards. He actually directed one of the fitters to grab him a 75 yard ball, which be hit 75 yards. Then he asked for a 100 yard ball and hit that 100 yards. This proceeded to a 125 yard ball, a 150 yard ball, and finally a 175 yard ball. Each ball was hit perfectly at his target although he got mad at the fitter because he gave him a 178 yard ball instead of the 175 yard ball
PS sorry if I have a ton of typing errors I have been posting everything for the last few days from my phone.
