I posted a response to Chuck’s video on Tiger yesterday but my reply was a bit.
I posted a response to Chuck’s video on Tiger yesterday but my reply was a bit lengthy so I thought I’d condense it. In short...
Want to increase speed? Want to move on from the chunk movements of the DEAD Drill? Try this: stop using the position of the club and your upper body as your swing thought. Instead, use your lower body. Move it correctly in the backswing and when it’s done it’s thing...you guessed it, move it correctly in the downswing. It’s as simple as that!
Of course, I can’t resist some further explanation so you can stop reading if you’ve already decided I’m nuts. But, if you’ve read and watched everything on the site you already know there are reasons our swings get long. You’ve done the DEAD Drill and have moderate to good proficiency at the movements but everything seems to break down when you try to become dynamic or add speed. You might be like me in that we could be thinking about the wrong swing key: the movement of the upper body and club. For example, do you think it’s time to start the weight shift when the lead arm is parallel to the ground on the backswing? I did. But as we’ve seen in countless member videos submitted it can be a tremendous hurdle to make that transition soon enough when we add dynamicism and speed. The hypothesis that I’ve been working on for the last month is that the timing of my lower body is off. We’ve seen plenty of upper bodies stall out rotation in the backswing but is it possible the lower body can also stall out and get “stuck” when it’s done it’s job in the backswing? I suspect it can and might into the general category of a timing issue. To fix this it occurred to me that my swing thought might be to solely focus on the movement of the lower body: load up the lower body in the backswing, weight shift, and post up. Try focusing on that alone while keeping up with Tiger in the video he posted to Eric T. I couldn’t do it because my lower body was not moving quickly enough. My tendency was to load up, wait, and then weight shift and post up. I had to remove the “wait.” To do so, I altered the DEAD Drill so that I was solely focused on my lower body. In fact, I put my hands on my hips instead of across my chest to help encourage my hips to move with speed. And yes, I paid zero attention to my upper body for about two weeks while doing this because I had to find way to remove the “wait.” Once I felt I had it down at what felt about 50% speed without any chunk movements I decided to add back in the upper body to see what happened. I fact, I even hit a ball on the range on this first swing with the club in two weeks but utilized my new swing thought of focusing solely on moving my lower body correctly and at 50% speed...without the “wait.” You know what happened? The upper body retained the proper movements, the lower body worked at speed and the result was spectacular...a strong, piercing ball flight that flew the green I previously hit the middle with the same club! And, no longer was my swing too long. Yup, I finally solved a riddle that I’ve been working on for 20 years!! Maybe. Please don’t come after me golf karma just for typing that ;-)
So here’s the thing for all of you: if you are struggling to add speed, stop overswinging, etc., try making the proper lower body movement at speed your swing thought instead of relying on upper body positions. Make the lower body your tempo governor instead of the upper body. This seems to jive with many of the things Chuck has been telling us lately about becoming more dynamic and/or adding speed. As someone who used to freeze at the top because I had no idea what happened biomechanically and had his upper body as the sole power source, this is something that is working for me. It might help others, too, so I wanted to share. Make the lower body govern your tempo and timing instead of the upper body.
