Manuel De La Torre swing

Was watching a an old video on MDLT speaking to a few youngsters. He said, you use your (upper) arms to power the swing. What was really interesting, he said, you swing the entire club to the target. The alternative is to use your wrists or forearms. As I high capper, I am guilty of steering the club head to the ball. I guess it stems from an early age of just wanting to make good contact. Today, it was a light bulb moment. If you use your hands and forearm to swing just the clubhead, you would create a flipping motion. The opposite is true, if you swing the entire club.

I was watching one where he's talking about just swinging the club. It's a very relaxed process. You can't tell anyone how to swing a club. You can tell them what to do to when they swing a club, but not how to swing a club. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXJQGLHRXIE

Just swing the club. The ball is in the way.

Nothing really has changed. The modern golf swing is not for most of us. We just can't do it. We don't hit 1000 balls a day. Most of us are lucky to hit 150 balls a week plus play one round and we expect to break 80? All the numbers, angles, and all the other crap they fill our heads with gets in the way of playing the game. What we need is a low maintenance swing.

I agree with MDLT that it's impossible to 100% confirm 'how' to swing a golf club or do any human movement . The only way to do that would be to monitor the firing (and degree of firing) of every interconnected muscle/tissue/tendon in each individuals body to see how it makes each joint and bone move in space. Each of us will have different bodies and our subconscious controls our movements to keep us safe and provide a path of least resistance (if we let it).

But when looking at his video link posted above by 'InTheRough' , MDLT then starts instructing on 'WHAT' he thinks the body does and that is subjective and open to different opinions.

Example:

"Use your hands to swing the clubhead around you over your shoulder"

"When you get the club to the top, a shift of responsibility take place and the whole thing transfers 100% to the arms. From that point on, the hands are used to simply transmit what the arms are doing and to control your club."

Why not also use the arms in the backswing? Why does he stress the hands?

Imho, I think he could be going wrong by mentioning body parts like the arms/hands because if you consciously think about a body part it will short-circuit your subconscious kinetic chain of movements. It has already been proved by scientific research that internal focus (ie. on body parts) is inferior to external focus (ie. intent thinking to achieve an outcome outside the body).

It's your brain that moves your body parts correctly , so get your focus sorted and that will automatically put you in the correct positions to deploy optimal movements (specifically unique to your own body). But you also need a bit of background knowledge to stop your brain making incorrect assumptions about what creates clubhead speed. All our lives we've been throwing things and it comes quite natural how to create speed through our hands. If you look at the human body , it is formed in such a way that we end up using the most distal shortest segment joint of our body (wrist/hand) to accelerate a ball or a spear. But a golf club throws a 'spanner in the works' because it becomes an unnatural extended 'longer segment ' of our body and we aren't allowed to let go of it (like a ball/spear). It's not something we've been used to doing and we need to reprogram our brains to understand how to optimise clubhead speed using hand speed and 'hand path' . Imho, once we've reprogrammed our brains to accept the counterintuitive nature of how to create clubhead speed then we can progress on learning how to do it automatically.

Carolina Golfer said:

Was watching a an old video on MDLT speaking to a few youngsters. He said, you use your (upper) arms to power the swing. What was really interesting, he said, you swing the entire club to the target. The alternative is to use your wrists or forearms. As I high capper, I am guilty of steering the club head to the ball. I guess it stems from an early age of just wanting to make good contact. Today, it was a light bulb moment. If you use your hands and forearm to swing just the clubhead, you would create a flipping motion. The opposite is true, if you swing the entire club.

Click to expand...

If you don't want to flip or roll through impact , you can try and use a drive-hold hand release action as shown in the slow motion images below . Basically the 'arms/club' unit is being swung together through impact for a few inches.








Notes explaining the above:

"Image 4 is a composite image of images 1, 2 and 3 and it shows how Kelli Oride keeps her clubface square to the clubhead arc all the way between P7 and P7.4. The accompanying diagram shows her left shoulder socket in black, her left arm in red, her clubshaft in green, her left hand in blue and her clubhead in orange. Note that the angular velocity of her left hand's forward motion is perfectly matched from an angular velocity perspective to the angular velocity of her clubhead's forward motion (even though the linear velocity of her clubhead is much greater than the linear velocity of her left hand), and that characteristic defines a DH-hand release action, which ensures a stable clubface as the clubhead travels through the immediate impact zone from P7 to P7.2+."

PS. You don't try and steer the clubface along the ball-target line , you swing the arm/club unit together limiting clubface roll relative to clubhead path (ie. keep the clubface square to clubhead curved path through impact)