The Slice Cure - Part 2
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In Part 2 of my Guaranteed Slice Cure, we take a deeper dive into the mechanics of the AXIOM, how to use it to swing at your maximum potential speed without losing control and how it even helps you with short game shots, especially off tight or soggy lies.
Do you have a proper grip? Here's how to grip the club: The Golf Grip
5 Minutes to the Perfect Backswing: The Perfect Backswing
Squaring the Face Early: Square the Face Early
AXIOM for Short Game & Distance Control: Short Game and Distance Control
Unleash Your Swing Speed Potential: Learn How to Throw Like a Pro
The axiom is pretty wild, right?
The truth is it was staring us in the face the whole time.
Once we understood this clockwise movement, it was easy to get the whole body to move in perfect rhythm and tempo and sync.
Now I want to talk about some of the nuts and bolts of what you see in the best players in the world.
And help you understand for yourself what's going on in their swing.
So that when you understand what you're doing in your swing.
And you look at a Tour Pro or some other example as a good model swing, you know what's happening.
The first thing I want to talk about is that.
Something that's been around for a long time is that most tour pros look like when they start their downswing, their hands look like they just go straight down.
Now most amateurs look like the exact opposite.
If you look at your swing on video, you probably don't see your hands going straight down to start the downswing.
You see them going straight out toward the ball and this is that dreaded over-the-top movement.
It's because you're moving counterclockwise.
But why do the pros look like their hands are moving vertically straight down and I'm telling you to move in this clockwise circle?
Well, they are moving in a clockwise circle, but the trick is they're rotating their bodies in the downswing, which makes your hands naturally want to go toward the target.
So if I just put my hands at the top of the swing and I just start turning my shoulders, look where my hands would go.
If I don't do anything active with my hands, it's going to look like I'm swinging straight out over the top, right?
So I grab a club, I put my hands here, and now I just start rotating my body.
Well, that's not going to work.
So the reason that it looks like they're going straight down is because they're actually going clockwise.
If they didn't go clockwise and they just went straight, truly went straight down, that's my hands doing this while I add rotation.
It looks like I'm coming over the top.
So it's an illusion.
The reality is the movement is this clockwise circle, but because you're rotating your body, it creates the illusion that they're actually falling straight down.
So that's one of the things that you'll see in Tour of Pros that's very consistent and the exact opposite of what you're probably doing.
So if you go to the top of your swing and you see your hands immediately start going out toward the ball, that's a death move and you need to really exaggerate this clockwise movement.
Now, speaking of exaggerations, Matthew Wolfe.
Now, when Matthew Wolfe came out on tour with his very homegrown, homemade golf swing, everybody thought, what the heck, this thing looks crazy.
But I bet you look at it differently now.
Not that I'm advocating you swing like Matthew Wolfe.
It's way too complicated for the average guy to try to learn.
There's no need for it.
But the same exaggeration that I showed you of this big clockwise loop as you're making the swing makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it?
It doesn't matter so much how you take the club back.
It matters how it comes down more than anything.
And so you can see why Matthew can now make this big clockwise loop.
And every time he does this, the club just sets on plane perfectly.
That clockwise rotation of your wrist is what does that.
See that?
All I'm doing is this.
Clockwise rotation of my arm, clockwise rotation of my wrist.
I can take the club stupidly outside.
It doesn't matter.
All that matters is I get here.
And as long as I make that clockwise movement, I'm going to be on plane and be able to release the club.
So now, what happens if you're still slicing and you're certain you're making a clockwise movement?
First of all, you're probably not making the clockwise movement.
Most golfers who swing over the top, this movement is so ingrained because you've done this literally thousands and thousands of times.
So it's okay to make that Matthew Wolfe-esque exaggerated movement, but you want to tone that down over time.
We don't need any extra moving parts in the swing.
It just complicates things.
So we want to make this very small, subtle clockwise movement with our hands so that as we go up, it's almost imperceptible.
And again, why it looks like the Tour Pro's hands are going straight down.
So what you're going to start to feel at first is you've got to maybe exaggerate it.
And then over time, it becomes less of an exaggeration.
And then it becomes a feeling, just a very, very subtle feeling.
So if you're still slicing and you're certain your hands are moving clockwise, it's a couple simple things to check.
The first is your grip.
Most over the top slicers have a very weak grip where their left hand and right hand is twisted over on the club like this.
And the V's on their hands are kind of pointing towards their left shoulder.
That's a death move, but it's a common mistake that slicers make because you feel like it's easier to square the face, but the opposite is true.
So the first thing is you have to have a proper grip.
If you don't know what that is, I put a link down in the description.
I've got a video that walks you through it in detail of how to get your hands perfectly on the club.
The second thing is, let's say that you've got a proper grip, but as you get to the top of your swing, your lead wrist is cupped like this.
This opens the club face.
And so now you've got to try and time it at the bottom to save the shot.
Obviously the simplest swing is the one that's going to win.
We want the fewest moving parts possible.
And that means at the top of your swing, your lead wrist needs to be flat.
Now I have a simple way of thinking about this.
All the arms have to do in the golf swing is elevate and your right elbow folds.
And if you do this as that right wrist is moving clockwise, remember during the clockwise loop in the swing, what's that going to do to your wrist?
It's going to flatten it.
If you have a tendency to want to move counterclockwise, guess what would happen to my wrist?
It would get cupped.
So as you understand this clockwise movement, know that it pulls you into position.
So as you make this clockwise movement, it flattens your left wrist.
That is the key.
So I've got a video on this as well called five minutes, the perfect backswing that just teaches you how to do this movement because that is the entire swing.
If I can get here, guess what this does at the top of my backswing?
Elevation, flexion.
I'm just going to hinge forward, get in my posture and rotate to the top.
You see that?
Pretty good spot at the top, right?
You can play great golf from there.
So take a look at that video.
It's a link down in the description.
If you're not certain how to get your arms into that position at the top.
The last thing that's probably going to happen if you're still slicing after.
You've started to get a feel for this clockwise movement is that you don't realize that you want to start squaring the face early in the downswing.
And what I mean by that is, again, especially if you're used to cupping your wrist at the top and you've got the face wide open and you start hacking down, that club face is never going to square up because it's like chopping wood.
There's no inherent rotation in the face.
So what you want to feel as you start down, this clockwise movement in your wrist starts to square the face early.
Watch what happens to my club face.
So I'll go to the top and I keep this clockwise movement.
As I continue this clockwise rotation of my wrist, look what it does to my left hand.
I call this rolling the knuckles under.
And this not only gets the club back out on top of the plane if you're underneath, but it starts to square the face early.
So now as I'm coming into impact, I'm not coming in like this and trying to save it.
The club face is already squared up early and I barely have to do anything to square the face at impact.
And I've got a video on that as well called squaring the face early that I'll put in the description down below.
One of the last things you may be wondering is how on earth did you come up with this?
Well, it's simple.
This discovery was made the way that all great golf swing discoveries are made.
I was in the bathroom, sitting in my boxers, standing in front of a mirror, making practice swings because I have had this vision since I first started teaching golf almost 30 years ago, that there should be one overarching movement pattern, one thing moving in one direction that makes the golf swing work.
And if I can get you to do this one thing, then anybody can learn to swing like a tour pro in 10 minutes.
And so that one thing was understanding how to make the golf swing move in one direction.
You think about other sports, it's pretty natural.
If I'm shooting a free throw, sure there's a little bit of a squat here, but in general, everything's moving in one direction up and toward the basket.
Even in baseball, when you're standing there getting ready to hit a pitch, you don't make this long backswing and then hit the baseball.
Everything starts here and then moves in one direction, rotating this way out toward the pitcher.
Golf has been taught as two directions.
You rotate this direction going back, you stop, you magically change directions in a 10th of a second, and then you change direction somehow.
It's never made sense to me.
And as an athlete myself, who's done a lot of other things from racing mountain bikes to riding dirt bikes and snowboarding and ice climbing and all these things, to me, I want to be able to feel natural and free and athletic.
And I don't want to think that I'm having to try to coordinate all these discombobulated moving parts.
And for my students, I wanted to give them a feel rather than a bunch of mechanics.
And as you've noticed, this is all feel based.
For instance, what do you want to do?
What do you need to do when you want to hit it harder?
When you need to swing faster?
All you do, speed up that pressure shift on your foot.
That butterfly effect that's happening as you're moving pressure around your foot, starts moving your whole body, everything's in sync.
The faster you can do this, the faster you can swing.
And more importantly, you probably feel now, the harder you swing, the more you come over the top, the worse you slice it, the more disjointed you feel.
Now you can feel, as you get everything moving clockwise, it's a simple throwing motion, all moving in one direction.
And that you can do as fast as you can possibly want.
This doesn't take all this crazy coordination to change directions and stop midway through the swing.
Because you're moving in one direction, you're in control of your speed again.
You can swing fast by simply shifting your pressure faster.
You can use this for short game.
Making tiny little pressure shifts in your short game is the same way that you control distance and feel.
Everything starts coming from your right foot as you get a feel for this.
And guess what?
You've been training your whole life for this.
For the first moment you got your driver's license, you have been training your brain to coordinate this right foot, which is why I love the feeling of the axiom because it's something that we're all familiar with.
If you've ever driven a car, you have tremendous sensitivity and pushing the throttle.
You don't romp on it every time.
You're squeezing the brakes, letting off the brakes.
You've been training this right foot for your golf swing your whole life.
And you didn't even realize it because now all you have to do is feel and put your brain in your right foot.
Once you've got this feeling of your arms and your hands moving together in one direction and sink.
Now, all of a sudden, the only thing you think about on the golf course is feeling your right foot.
You don't have to think anything mechanical at all.
You feel your right foot.
You feel that pressure shift moving in a clockwise direction.
Like I show in some of the other videos with Justin Rose, for example, who I use in the force plate study to show how this pressure shift moves clockwise in all these tour pros.
And again, it's so subtle, but it's been in front of our face this whole time.
So now you understand how to move everything in sync, how to feel powerful and coordinated and have great rhythm and tempo.
And all of a sudden it's incredibly simple.
Feel this clockwise pressure shift, feel this clockwise movement in your arms, and you'll never slice again.
You'll have more speed than you ever thought possible, and you'll feel athletic and fluid again.
Ron
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Asle
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)