Articles and Help

Rebuilding a swing

Every day coaches are asked to help players for a variety of different reason, it could be a simple request to help cure a topped shot, or someone who wants to put the work in to get their handicap down. However, it is not every day you get asked to recover the swing of Britain’s number 1 amateur player, which is what I was asked to do in September 2020.

Lily May Humphreys and I worked tirelessly together for 9 month. Due to the COVID pandemic, and Lily’s status as an elite golfer, Lily and I could work together pretty much 6 days a week, and spend hundreds of hours going over and over the principles she needed to recover her swing.
By May 2021, Lily had gained her confidence to such a degree, that she was ready to turn Professional. It took her just 3 events to win her first professional tournament, the Golf Flanders LETAS trophy in Belgium with a total score of 10 under par. Since then Lily has gone on to secure her full ladies European tour card for the 2022 season.

Since Lily’s return to form, I have had quite a people ask me what we did in order to get her game back, so I decided to write this article to give people an insight into some of the things we worked on and changed. No player is immune to the pitfalls of getting lost in this game. My job was to give Lily a methodology that was simple and natural, and most importantly she understood and which felt good. Once a player has their methodology, it’s a simple case of maintaining and tuning it. This, in my opinion is key to being consistent from a technical point of view.

The pictures on the left are from September 2020, and the pictures on the right are ones I took in June 2021 at the mixed Scandinavian Masters in Sweden.
I hope you find it interesting, and maybe you will see something you can relate to in your own game.

Ball flight - Big loss of power and strike. Iron shots often hit heavy (ground first) and ball would over draw left of the target line.

Set up.

Grip - The first change was that Lily had an incredibly strong right hand grip causing a closed club face. Lily loves drawing the ball, and I told her to embrace her draw, but we don’t want a two way miss (left and right) so by weakening the face it will help us not have a miss that crosses left of the target line.
Spine - You will see on Lily’s old set up, she is leaning onto her left foot. If a player is struggling with the strike, it’s not unheard of for the player to do something like this in order to try and hit the ball before the ground. However this is not what we want as it can cause issues with the backswing as you’ll see on the next image. To get Lily’s spine in the correct position, I simply got her to stand upright, and lean forward keeping her spine in a neutral position, the “tilt” in the shoulders would only then appear as her right hand is lower on the club than her left hand.

Backswing

Spine - Having set up correctly, I wanted Lily to move more naturally in her takeaway. Lily had a lot of coaching previously on club positions, and I wanted her to have a better understanding of how the body “creates” the club positions.
So I didn’t want her to be too still in her first move, instead, let her spine gently move an inch or so to the right as she starts her takeaway. This is important to set her up for her downswing.
Arms - As I mentioned earlier, Lily had done a lot of work on club positions, and I felt this could be why her arms were becoming so dominant in her swing. In lily’s new swing we greatly reduced the amount of arm swing on the way back, which then kept her arms far more in time with her body turn.
Many amateur golfers struggle with this idea. For a right handed golfer it may help to think of the backswing as more of a turn and a fold of the right arm than a big arm “swing”. At the top of Lily’s new swing we created the “stretch” which would help her sequence her downswing much better.

Change of direction

This was one of the biggest differences in understanding for Lily. In Lily’s old swing, she was getting to the top of her swing and trying to turn left pretty much as quickly as she could. It’s an area of the swing that’s been spoken about in many books etc. We may have heard “turn left” or “unwind your hips”. Whilst this may have some truth in it, when misunderstood, it can ruin a swing as it had done here in the left picture.
As Lily approached the top of her backswing, we worked on feeling her left side/shoulder/arm would pull back down and towards the target as her spine also moved towards the target, this “pulling” would in turn “load” the left wrist into the more lagged position. So in Lily’s mind the “turn” came a bit later in the downswing. We also used a weighted training aid with a flexible shaft to help teach lily the correct sequence and feeling in the transition from backswing to downswing.
We also changed lily’s irons to lighter, and slightly more flexible shafts to help her feel this movement much better.

Release

This next position is largely a consequence of what went before. To encourage the correct release, and angle of attack, I would get Lily to practice off bare mud, or even out of fairway bunkers. When she practiced at home with her wedges, her Dad would put sand on the lawn to mimic a fairway bunker shot. Initially this was very difficult for Lily, but as her swing improved along with her understanding, she became brilliant at striking it off any lie.

Follow Through

Lily had previously injured her left wrist a few times due to this movement. She had tried exceedingly hard to stop her hands “flipping” through Impact. I wanted Lily to understand that what happens at impact is mainly a consequence of what’s happened before. A “flip” with the hands is often a sign of someone saving the shot. There is a huge amount of intuition with regards to the club face control in the downswing, and I don’t believe it’s as simple as simply stopping your wrists flipping, as at the end of the day, the arms and club do rotate through impact. So Lily’s new way of looking at her downswing was to deliver the club well, then release it, rather than deliver the club poorly and try and hold the face square in an attempt to save the shot.

I am very proud of the work Lily and I have done together in such a short amount of time to rebuild her swing. The week before the right video was taken she told me “this is the best I have ever hit it”. And she went on to win two weeks later. I look forward to watching her career progress.

Online Instruction & Self-Coaching

I’d like to look at something many of you will be familiar with - trying to improve your game using online tutorials from YouTube, etc.

A situation that many coaches, including me, often come across when first meeting a new player is that prior to seeking help from a Pro, they had been trying to fix their game from a book, magazine or by watching instruction videos online. Regularly the player will say that they ended up more confused than when they started and also that one set of instructions would seem to completely contradict another!

The first and possibly most important point I would like to make is that the information given is neither wrong nor right; it is simply one coach’s thoughts on a specific aspect of the game. There is some excellent information out there and certainly some great instruction videos, and in most situations the coach is giving information that, for the right player at the right time, could be very useful so let me expand on this point with a couple of examples.

Let’s say David has a slice, decides to Google "cures for slicing" and comes across a video by a Professional which talks about how important the correct lower half movement is in preventing a slice. David tries this out at the driving range but it feels awkward and is, in fact, making matters worse so on his return home he moves on to the next video! The next video talks more about the feeling he would need to develop to encourage more of a draw. This all makes perfect sense to David so off he goes again. Ten minutes in and David just can't get the feeling of the swing the second Professional described. Frustration kicks in and the range session is non-productive.

At this point David decides enough is enough and so seeks help from a PGA Professional. Lesson day arrives and, following a short conversation about his game, the Professional watches David hit some shots and points out the following . . . “At address your shoulders are a long way in front of your toe line so your centre of gravity is towards your toes. This makes it very difficult to use your legs in your swing and causes the swing to be dominated by the upper half; this is the root cause of the slicing motion.”

Together they get David into a balanced posture and David looks up at the TV screen where the Professional has the his original posture set up next to the new one and he can't believe how much better it looks - he even starts to think it resembles the Professionals he watches on TV!! As he starts to make a few practice swings he immediately feels a different movement, his legs are now moving differently and he no longer feels he has the out-in swing path that has plagued him for months! He begins to hit a few short irons and something miraculous happens . . . it all starts to make sense.

My second example is actually factual describes a lesson I taught a few years ago with a very nice gentleman then in his early sixties. He was, at that point, playing off a six handicap having recently gone up from five. This lesson has stayed with me for a couple of reasons, the main one however being that this gentleman had the worst case of the shanks that, even to this day, I have ever come across! He hit a few shots and displayed one of the best ball groupings I've seen but unfortunately they were about 60 yards right of his target – he was at his wits’ end but a very nice lady I coach suggested that he come and see me.

I could immediately see that whilst he was struggling hugely, he had a lot of good things going on in his swing. He stood to the ball like a good golfer and had a very nice backswing. Unfortunately, however, you don't hit the ball at address or in the backswing! Coming into that ball, his club face was wide open and the club also got outside the target line just before impact – the inevitable end result of this combination was a shank. As the gentleman had such a good set-up and an excellent grip, the club face position at impact was not what I had expected. I talked to him about what was happening and what we wanted to happen to see how this fitted in with his thinking and this was when we struck gold. It turned out that in his younger days he had been a very good badminton player, and someone had told him a few months earlier that his badminton experience meant that he used his hands too much in his golf swing. This made complete sense to me so I went on to explain the importance of the hands, and the role that they play, in the golf swing. He had literally kept his hand completely "dead" into his downswing which caused him to lose all control of the club face – this explained the wide open club face position and poor club path. Prior to this lesson the gentleman had spent some time trying to fix his swing himself using the different information available on how to fix a shank but no video was really going to get to the root of this fault.

You see, it isn't that the coaches on the YouTube videos were wrong – I am, in fact, certain they’re all excellent coaches. It is simply the case that the video can only ever offer a "tip" and cannot possibly take into account all the other factors in a player’s swing and thought process.

It doesn't matter who you are or what level you play at; if you can develop an understanding of your own individual method then you are on the path to better golf. This is where the problem will always lie in trying to improve through books and videos - there is a huge amount of brilliant information available, all written by some of the best coaches and players of the last 100 years; the difficulty lies in identifying which bit is for you . . .

The Natural Golfer Inside Everyone

Most of us can imagine both sides of the coin when it comes to the difference between a first class golfer whose swing is a thing of beauty - a fluid movement that’s the envy of thousands of aspiring golfers - and the weekend golfer whose rigid set up and jerky, snatchy swing looks more like hard work and an injury waiting to happen than anything close to natural.

Now, here’s an interesting point - have you ever wondered why, when kids take up golf they often seem to get the "knack" of it quite quickly, and in many cases quickly develop a swing that adults observe with envy? Adults, however, often find it all a bit of a struggle to start with and their swings don't seem to be anywhere near as natural . . . even after a few lessons.

Now I appreciate that in many cases adults don't, over the years, work on maintaining the flexibility we’re blessed with at birth. Instead we spend years sitting at a desk or doing the same things day in day out and, before we know it, a simple task such as sitting cross legged on the floor or touching our toes is beyond us. Whilst this is obviously going to have a big influence on the swing and what’s possible for us, in this article I want to talk about another area where we sometimes go wrong.

Let’s say we have an 8 year old called David and a 40 year old called Frank. Both have been playing for 4 weeks and come along for a lesson. The Pro sees that both would be more successful if they adopted a better finish position which could encourage them, in their downswings, to move everything (not just their arms) in a more co-ordinated fashion. So, the Pro gives a quick demonstration of the swing and finish position and asks them to copy it. David enthusiastically gets his club and, after a few swings, is developing a really nice finish whereas Frank is looking a bit awkward and stiff, and doesn't seem to be making the same progress as David. Why is this? Because Frank is using the power of thought to try to figure it out and David simply watched the Pro and gave it a go. Frank watched the Pro and had a flurry of thinking along the lines of . . .

"How do I do that?"
"This doesn't feel right"
"I must look like an idiot"
"Am I ever going to get this?"
"Maybe this Pro doesn't know what he's talking about!"
"Is my head supposed to move?" . . .

The list could go on and on!!

Our ability to think is like the rudder of a ship that guides us through life, it’s a gift that everyone is given and one that serves us in so many ways. However, there are many times in our lives when our thoughts get in the way of us achieving what we want. You may be reading this and saying "but how on earth can I switch off my thinking?!" The answer is that you can't switch it off, but you can begin to understand what’s happening without revving it up still further.

We could give hundreds of examples of the role our thoughts play in causing problems for us. If you were to put a 50 foot long but only 1 foot wide plank of wood on the floor and walk across it, my money would be on you being able to do it pretty easily. Now let’s put that same plank of wood 100 feet in the air suspended between two buildings - how easy would it be now? It should, physically speaking, be just as easy as it was when it was on the ground . . . but your thoughts impact and make the task far more difficult.

I want to make a very important point here - you may say "but the plank is 100 feet in the air so it has to be harder!" I'm sure that if we tested this with a large group of people (hopefully this experiment doesn’t ever take place!) the final results would indicate that it is indeed more difficult with the plank in the air. However, you are experiencing that walk across the plank 100% in and with your thought. When those incredible wire walkers are in the air, do you suppose they’re thinking "don't fall off!" or "my life, that’s a long way down!"? Of course they’re not – their minds are quiet and calm and they are just doing it.

Sometimes when we want to learn something new, we really need to just do it or go back to being a kid again.

If you’ve been struggling with your golf and feel that maybe you’ve been over thinking your swing, try having a few sessions down the range or on the course where you “just do it”. Do whatever you feel like but don't try and figure it out. Accept your bad shots alongside the good and just keep doing it; you may well end up finding a more natural golfer inside.