Taking things slowly when making swing changes is crucial.
Stephen Denton
If you’ve taken enough lessons that didn’t stick, you might think that you’re mostly stuck with the swing motion you have. And I bet you can close your eyes and picture a golf buddy’s crazy looking swing that hasn’t changed in all the years you’ve played together.
But I promise you really can learn a new movement pattern. You just need to approach it in a way that might surprise you.
Trying to copy a complicated motion like a golf swing at full speed means you never really move from performance mode to learning mode. That’s why I like to do a lot of very slow speed movement work where there isn’t even a ball involved.
You can see what I mean in the video below. Lisa came to us determined to find the speed she lost. She wasn’t very good through impact, mostly because of a hip slide off the ball in her backswing. That made her chest tilt back toward the target, and she ended up in the classic reverse pivot-chicken wing combination that a lot of weekend players have.
We slowed things down and did two drills that really emphasize the new moves — and, just as importantly, the new feels.
In the first drill, Lisa made a more stable turn away from the ball by coiling into her right hip, then stretching an excercise band away from her torso by extending her arms. This slow movement and the load provided by the band completely changed her feel for the move we wanted her to make.
We moved right into another drill to really get the feel for that backswing turn. She crossed her arms over her chest with her hands on her shoulders, pulled her lead foot back and made some slow backswings. The split stance pretty much forced her to make the pivot into her hip instead of sliding back.
Even if you find a couple of drills like this that really help, the impulse might be to do them a few times and consider yourself fixed. But these pattern changes take time. Over the course of the next three months, we stayed just on these two drills, and just on the backswing. It’s so important to be willing to stay focused on one key thing over time, and to do it even if you see uneven results in the short term.
Lisa developed a much better backswing, which led to a better top of the backswing and transition. During our most recent lesson, with the help of Morgan Hale, we added some exercises and drills which helped change her sequence out of the top of her backswing and improve rotation through the ball. From there, she was able to unwind and clear her hips and rotate her chest through, which produced a much stronger and more consistent strike. Amazing when you see the changes and the results from these drills and work. The dreaded chicken wing began to disappear, Lisa got more compression, and more distance and speed each week.
Beyond the swing work, we set up a training plan at the gym so that the time Lisa was already spending there would multiply those results instead of work against them. That’s a key part of what we do with every player from the professional tours to weekend golf. Integrating that training makes the gains come more quickly, and also helps players avoid injury or even just basic soreness that keeps you from playing or practicing as much as you want.
