Making huge swing changes

The only reason you should change your swing is to fix a fault.
Duff, top, thin, slice, hook etc.
Film your swing and identify the cause of the fault.........sway, wrong grip, reverse pivot etc.
Find a drill to practice and film the swing again. Has the swing really changed? (real and feel).
If it improves the fault, the ball flight will improve.
Keep practising the cure until it is ingrained and film every now and then to monitor your progress.

DO NOT CHANGE YOUR SWING BECAUSE IT LOOKS WRONG.

And remember, better players than you have screwed up their game searching for the perfect swing.
 
chrisd said:
T

I guess at your level Karen, that your "just awful" is someone else's "I'm really happy with that" though. To get that low I'm assuming your short game is, at the worst, very competent and therefore working say, on long irons may give better returns
Click to expand...

It's all relative really. My short game isn't the best, to be honest, and has been a bit neglected this year as I try to sort the long game.
 
Changing a swing is dangerous I think, there's untold issues down the line, a slight revamp may be OK. I think there's probably better ways to shave off a shot or 3 off your score .
 
I totally backed off from lessons early in the year as it was doing my head in, too many swing thoughts and I wasn't enjoying playing tbh.
My swing is naff but it's now somewhere near repeatable and I've managed to knock 4 shots off my handicap in the process. I know my natural flaws but I can accept them if it means I get the ball around in a semi decent score and I enjoy the round. There's no way in this world I'll ever be a single figure player and have a "classic" swing so I'm not even going to bother going down that route.
I've also discovered short game is where it's all at, a good chip and putt can save that pulled iron shot to the edge of the green.
 
For me, if lessons aren't improving your ball strike they are not worth having, looking good is nice, but Adam Scott doesn't win that often...... Also, now I wouldn't consider a lesson without a Trackman etc. Informed guesswork on what's happening at impact just isn't necessary anymore. You can look at the data in seconds of hitting the ball and know what occurred. I know this isn't everyone's opinion, but a friend of my son's who has become a teaching pro, summed it up. "Why spend 30 minutes figuring out what's wrong, when I can spend 30 seconds to figure it out and the rest of the lesson helping the customer to fix it".
 
bobmac said:
The only reason you should change your swing is to fix a fault.
Duff, top, thin, slice, hook etc.
Film your swing and identify the cause of the fault.........sway, wrong grip, reverse pivot etc.
Find a drill to practice and film the swing again. Has the swing really changed? (real and feel).
If it improves the fault, the ball flight will improve.
Keep practising the cure until it is ingrained and film every now and then to monitor your progress.

DO NOT CHANGE YOUR SWING BECAUSE IT LOOKS WRONG.

And remember, better players than you have screwed up their game searching for the perfect swing.
Click to expand...

A lot of people told me I had an aesthetically pleasing swing before, but I new it wasn't technically sound.
As a youngster I had a very flat swing, which was very much in to out, and needed to time a flip of my hands through the ball otherwise it would lead to a massive block/slice.
When I timed it well I was very good, when I didn't I was very poor as it lead to blocks or snap hooks.

As my swing got more upright my game improved (from 10-4 at one point with previous Pro) but I still relied too heavily on timing rather than solid basics.

I have now had lessons with my club pro, who has helped me to a more authentic/conventional swing path, a change in grip (to an overlap) which seems to have helped stop my old habit of flipping my wrists around impact and the short pause at the top of the backswing which means I'm not starting my downswing before properly completing my backswing, giving better co-ordination between my body and arms.

I just need to get used to it all and do it on the course more often. Level par through 9 this weekend suggests some improvement (shame about the back 9, but I blame the beers on the 11th tee - it was the Pro's Charity Am-Am Day).
 
bobmac said:
You wait till your off 6.........you'll want to be off 5 ..........Cat I
Then you'll want be off 4, then 3 etc
Click to expand...

Exactly - the thing about golf is you never win, and you can always get better.
 
I have worked with my pro over that last year on a swing change. Although my swing was relatively strong it was not repeatable enough to get me to the strong single figures I wanted to get to.
I already have a strong short game (chipping was an addiction in my youth) but I needed to get the ball into a position where I could better utilise it.
I have worked on a draw which has gained my length and consistency where I am now in a better scoring position. Also, in learning a draw, I now understand the mechanics of shot shaping and can better avoid danger (or at least improve my misses) by moving the ball.
All of the above may sound great, however Feb-June this year was mental torture as I had so many swing thoughts in my head that scoring was near impossible. I played with our club champ one eve who advised on ditching the scorecard until I had grooved my swing.

Now that I have got the changes in place, I am playing better more consistent golf. The measuring stick is that it is more solid under pressure, and the misses don't hurt my card half as much as they did previously.
 
I'm making (or at least trying to make) massive changes on the advice of my pro. When I went for lessons it was because I wasn't hitting my irons as well as I wanted and wasn't hitting enough greens compared to how many fairways I was hitting off the tee. I wasn't expecting my swing to need such a huge overhaul but it had gotten into a pretty bad state. it has always been my intention to post a before and after on here once I have actually gottn somewhere near where my pro wants me to be.

You could argue that I could spend time working on my short game and make as much improvement but for me, I want to hit better golf shots, scrambling a par is a great feeling and a necessary element of golf but I don't want to be scrambling a score every week.

Of course, golf is about scoring as low as you can and it doesn't matter how you do it, but I'd sooner be on the green than off it.
 
I have a quirky and far from textbook swing. It will never be 100% technically correct but I've worked hard to reduce the number of moving parts and make it slower and shorter. It is so much better than this time two years ago and has come on this year. It lacks consistency and I keep chucking a road crash hole in to undo any good work I've had in a round. I need to change that and perhaps stop tinkering on the swing aspects and just focus on the tempo now. Too quick (and too handsy taking it away) and that's the focus for the winter. When I am slower, the swing has more time to work and I hit it better. Hardly rocket science. I am working on the short game (and another winter focus). Putting I'm always working on

The bottom line is I enjoy working on my game and trying to be the best I can be and it annoys the crap out of me that the handicap is going up when I am feeling I'm playing better and goes back to these horror holes blowing any cut or buffer zone. That's the problem. Might be in my head more than in the swing
 
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