Peter Thompson on Hip Turn (Video)

The record for winning Open Championships is six, held by Harry Vardon. But four players are tied with five, one of whom is the late Peter Thompson. So it's appropriate to share some of his swing tips this week.



Since he made this his #1 tip, Thompson clearly felt that hip turn was a crucial part of the golf swing. It was a forgotten fundamental for a while. Players tried to keep their lower bodies almost locked in place, attempting to create more power in their swing. That back-wrecking maneuver is finally being replaced by common sense, but some teachers like Thompson never forgot it.

The keys to note here are that when Thompson's hips turn, the trailing hip actually moves toward the target, not straight back. This causes the trailing knee to straighten during the backswing and then stay pretty straight during the downswing. You often see it in the swings of legends like Arnold Palmer.

This move isn't for everybody -- not all players are comfortable straightening that trailing knee -- but why might you want to try it?

If you have a problem with a sway in your backswing, or if you tend to reverse pivot during your downswing, this more extreme hip turn might help you. Both of those faults happen because you move away from the target and shift too much weight onto your trailing leg during your swing. Thompson's turn forces you to brace that trailing leg, stopping any movement away from the target.

You might think that straightening your trailing knee would steal some power from your swing, but power players like Palmer prove that's not the case. So this is something you might want to try it you're fighting a sway or a reverse pivot. If you'll pardon the pun, winning five Opens certainly gives this tip some legs!

[UPDATE: Well, I guess the joke's on me. I got a note from SJ letting me know that this isn't the Peter Thompson I thought it was, but that it was a good tip nevertheless. I didn't realize I pulled up videos from BOTH Thompsons when I did my YouTube search.

At least it was a good tip. ;-)]

Bernhard Langer on Shaping Shots (Videos)

Why wouldn't you want to copy Bernhard Langer's swing? This clip is from early 2015, and Bernhard is explaining how he hits draws and fades.



I hope you paid attention to his lower body movement. While instructors focus on how he opens his hips on the way down, Bernhard doesn't lunge forward the way you might expect. In this next video from late 2015, Bernhard talks about how he focuses on NOT sliding forward.



And in this down-the-line shot from earlier this year, you can see how effective he has become at keeping his lower body quiet.



In fact, I've been amazed at how many similarities there are between Bernhard's swing and Shanshan Feng's swing. You might want to go back to my Feng post earlier this week and compare the two.

As for Bernhard's swing, you'll get plenty of chances to watch it this weekend. The Charles Schwab Cup Championship coverage starts today on GC at 4pm ET.

"Feel" Fred Couples's Swing for 38 Seconds (Video)

The Champions Tour posted this video of EVERY full swing Fred hit on the back 9 at the Chubb Classic on Sunday. If you want to get a good sense of how smooth his swing is, this will definitely help.

Every full swing from Fred Couples' Sunday back nine at the @ChubbClassic. pic.twitter.com/4WrmQeLxMq

— PGA TOUR Champions (@ChampionsTour) February 23, 2017

Bear in mind that Fred hits the ball a long way WITHOUT shoving his hips way out ahead of his upper body. His spine doesn't bend backwards at impact. And he never looks to be straining.

Want to hit the ball better? Copying the rhythm and tempo of Fred's swing is a good place to start.

In Case the Hands Drill Confused You...

After posting yesterday's post with the hands drill late on Friday night, I was laying in bed and suddenly realized that some of you might be confused by something in the one-piece takeaway drill that the hands drill was piggybacked on. Hopefully, today's post will eliminate that misunderstanding and you'll get the full value from both the OPT drill AND the hands drill.

When I design a drill with a specific purpose, sometimes I forget that the players using them may not recognize the why behind it. And while players learning an OPT may have understood the why (I mentioned it briefly in the original post), those of you who just focused the hand drill may not. So here's the explanation.

The OPT drill was designed to teach weekend players the correct feel for this position, as illustrated by the photo of Paula Creamer in the OPT drill post:



Many players have trouble getting into this position because they slide their hips away from the target. Many instructors call that a sway, and it's a bad thing. It  happens when players don't brace against their trailing leg properly. Among other things, it prevents you from creating a good shoulder coil, which hurts your distance.

In addition, some players move their shoulders away from the target also, which makes them lean backwards and contributes to problems like slicing.

And both of these problems cause a faulty weight shift, which magnifies the other problems.

In order to teach a proper OPT, I needed to teach players how to maintain correct posture as they turned away from the ball. The way I did that was to have players straighten up during the OPT drill. The reason is that we turn and coil and shift weight properly every day, because we're used to doing it when standing erect.

So I had players straighten up to make their turns and then bend over again so they were in the correct takeaway position at the point Paula is demonstrating in the photo. Then, after they were used to the correct feel, they could just make a normal takeaway.

You may be wondering why I used that drill to set up the hands drill, since most of you using the hands drill weren't worried about making a correct OPT. That's a good question!

And here's your good answer:

If you make an incorrect weight shift during your takeaway, the hands drill becomes unbelievably difficult. If you want to see what I mean, forget the turn for a minute and just try to lift the club up from your address position -- as in the Bann video in the last post -- but try to lift it while bending even lower as you do. You'll have to really exaggerate the lift just to get the clubhead off the ground!

Swaying with your hips or moving your shoulders too far sideways during your takeaway creates the same sort of problem. Doing the OPT drill will prevent that.

You've been told to make a wide takeaway to keep the clubhead low to the ground and to create width in your swing. But most of you will do that by making a faulty weight shift, then you'll lose your width at the top of your swing. Width at the top of your swing is much more important than width at the start of your swing, simply because you don't hit the ball with your backswing. If you have width at the top of your backswing, you'll create width during your downswing. Stretching your arms during your takeaway doesn't create width; coiling your shoulders properly does.

Let me repeat that: If you have width at the top of your backswing, you'll create width during your downswing. Stretching your arms during your takeaway doesn't create width; coiling your shoulders properly does.

Use the OPT drill to learn the waist-high position of a correct takeaway -- which will create a proper weight shift to your trailing side -- as demonstrated by Paula in the photo. Then practice doing the hands drill from your address position to Paula's position. That will give you the most success with the least effort.

I hope that clears up any potential confusion I may have created with yesterday's post. Golf is really pretty simple; it's when you try to explain it that it gets complicated. ;-)

Using Your Hands in the Takeaway, Part 2

In yesterday's post we looked at the theory behind adding some hand power during your takeaway. Today I'll give you a drill that will help you apply that theory.

I hope you spent some time using your hands to position the club over your trailing shoulder WITHOUT turning your shoulders, as Manuel de la Torre explained in the book quote and Steven Bann demonstrated in the video. We'll start with that, then we'll add the rotation.

If you take your address position and just raise the club until your hands are roughly waist high and the shaft is parallel to the floor, that's a very simple move to do. If you avoid excess tension in your hands and forearms, you'll probably find that your upper arms stay pretty close to your chest and your forearms move upward and outward a little.

While de la Torre says that your wrists don't move when doing this, that's not entirely true. The reason is that your wrists actually flex downward a little at address, because of the weight of the clubhead. When you lift the club, your wrists return to more of a neutral position -- which means that, if you straightened out your fingers, you'd see them move upward so they form a straight line with your forearms. That's the natural position for your wrists when your arms and hands are relaxed.

Now, if you click on the Some Useful Post Series button up under the blog header, you'll find that one of the listings is Dexter's Coming Over-the-Top and the third post in that series is labeled as the one-piece takeaway post. (I'm just going to abbreviate one-piece takeaway as OPT from here on out.) While that post has a picture of Paula Creamer after an OPT, there is no diagram showing the drill itself.

Here are copies of the drill diagrams from my Stop Coming Over-the-Top Quick Guide, one for righties and one for lefties. This drill is intended to help you learn what the correct position feels like. But you'll notice that the first thing you do is lift the club, the way you just did when you copied Steven Bann.





You should also notice that the toe of the club still points up at the waist high position in this drill. That's intentional. Believe it or not, this position has actually rotated the clubface open just a little. You don't want much clubface rotation during your swing because the natural bending of your elbows creates more rotation than you realize.

This position matches the "lifted" position you created when you imitated Bann's video. If you use the instructions from the Dexter's Coming Over-the-Top #3 post to get used to this halfway back position, AND THEN you start swinging the club back while imitating Bann's "lift" as you turn, you'll start creating a lot of motion with your hands.

Here's an important thing to note: When you add the rotation during the drill, it should still feel as if you're lifting the club straight up, toward your head. It will probably feel weird at first, but this is how your hands SHOULD feel if you're turning and lifting correctly. (Remember, your trailing elbow bends to create the necessary rotation during a full swing. It will feel as if your forearms aren't twisting at all.) Many players rotate their forearms during the takeaway, which messes up your swing plane. The technical term is that the club gets "laid off."

You may wonder how you'll know that you're doing it correctly. It's very simple, actually. When you lifted the club without turning, the club probably started to feel heavy as the shaft became more parallel to the ground. BUT when you do this OPT drill with the hand lift, if you try to stop at the position shown in the diagrams, YOU'LL PROBABLY HAVE A LITTLE TROUBLE DOING SO. Your hands will stop but the shaft may swing on up to a 10:30 or even an 11 o'clock position. That's from the extra momentum your hands are creating.

Why is this important? There are several reasons I could give, but this one should suffice for now. Many of you have trouble keeping your club on plane during your backswing. That's because your takeaway is too slow... but the trick is that you don't increase the speed by turning faster. You create the extra speed with your hands. Practicing this drill will help you learn to do that.

It will also make the club feel lighter as you reach the top of your swing, which makes it easier to change direction at the top, which helps increase your downswing speed, which can increase your distance. But that's a whole 'nother topic, which the old-time players called "feeling the clubhead."

So there you go, Dana. That's the way you learn to use your hands properly in your takeaway. If you have more questions, just leave a comment and I'll try to give you a usable answer. ;-)

Using Your Hands in the Takeaway (Video)

A couple days back Dana left a comment on an old blog post from 2010 called Manuel de la Torre on Arm Swing. In the comments I had mentioned how the old hickory players used their hands to start their backswings and that I could post a drill if the commenter was interested. As it turns out, the commenter from 2010 wasn't... but Dana is. So let's take a look at it.

This post will actually spread over a couple of posts, since I have a lot more material on my blog to refer to now, material that may make the drill I mentioned easier to understand. You need to understand the basic principle at work here (today's post) before I can teach you to use the drill properly (the next post). Okay?

The original post started with the late Manuel de la Torre, who taught a swing based in some of Ernest Jones's teachings (his book was published in 1935), who in turn adapted his method to steel shafts from the old hickory shaft techniques. So let's start with what de la Torre said about the hands in his book, Understanding the Golf Swing. Let me pull something from the old post's comments that I copied from that book, simply because you need to know what he means by "hands" and "arms" to understand what he's saying.

Earlier in the text (on page 51) he specifically defines the arm as "...that portion of the extremity from the shoulder to the elbow, the rest of it to the wrist is the forearm."

Are you clear on that? de la Torre separates your arm into arm, forearm, wrist and hand in his teaching. So when you see ARM in this quote from his book, he's talking about your arm above the elbow. And when you see HAND he means your hand separate from your wrist. Got it?

Okay. Here's the quote from his book. Bear in mind that he's writing for right-handed players, so you lefties will need to substitute "left shoulder" for "right shoulder" in the first paragraph:

To produce the backswing, the player must swing the clubhead back with the hands (both hands) toward the right shoulder so that when the backswing is completed, the club is over the shoulder. The hands must be used because a coil has to be created in order to be able to generate the desired speed. The hands must be used exclusively to swing the clubhead from the ball to the end of the backswing, where the arms take over and swing the entire club to the end of the swing.

When your hands swing the clubhead in the backswing, be sure that as soon as the clubhead starts to move, everything moves with it. Clubhead and shoulders start together, stay together, and reach the end of the backswing together. The rest of the body will respond automatically if it is relaxed.

Notice that when referring to hands and arms, the plural is used. Both hands are used in the backswing and both arms are used in the forward swing.

If a player would take the address position and lift the club vertically to place it on the shoulder, the hands would be used to make this movement. No other part of the body would be considered.

You should make no effort to cock your wrists in the backswing. When a player attempts to cock the wrists, they must be cocked in the plane that corresponds to the club being swung. This would be just another "moving part" making the golf swing difficult to produce.

The wrists are cocked by the club being swung over the shoulder. It is a natural reaction to that motion. It just happens. (p50-51)

There's more, but it gets into the downswing and such, which is more than we need for this discussion.

He's got some interesting stuff in here. Let's take it piece by piece.

• According to him, your hands make the backswing and your upper arms make the downswing. This isn't a distinction that most instructors would make, and it's probably just how he understands the motion -- you know, the way he feels it when he does it.
• He says the hands must be used in order to create a coil -- that is, a shoulder coil. He says the shoulders turn because the hands move the club. That might be a bit confusing, so it deserves a closer look.

Imagine for a moment that you took your address position but, instead of holding a club, you just put your hands together. If someone took hold of your hands and just pulled, they could pull your shoulders around into the coiled position you had at the top of your backswing. And since your arms would be pretty relaxed -- after all, the "puller" is doing all the work -- both of your elbows would stay pretty straight as they did it. This is the idea that de la Torre is describing; that's why he emphasizes that both hands and both arms have to work together.

Many instructors actually teach a version of this, although you probably didn't realize it. Have you heard teachers talk about trying to keep your trailing hand as far from your shoulder as you can at the top of your backswing? That's the same idea, except they're talking about pushing your hands away from you with your arms while de la Torre has your hands pulling your arms and shoulders around.

Likewise, when he says that everything moves together, this is what most instructors call "keeping the club in front of you" during your swing. But again, they're trying to push the club back while de la Torre has your hands pulling you around.

And that's where most of you will get tripped up as you try to wrap your mind around this. How can your hands pull your shoulders around? You can understand if another person grabs your hands and pulls them, but how can your hands pull you around when they're only attached to your arms? Hands don't just move on their own!

Here's the trick: During your swing, your hands are holding your club. Your club has weight and, if you start it swinging, the club's momentum can pull you around. And that's what he's describing in the last three paragraphs I quoted.

Here's a video I've posted more than once. Steven Bann is K.J. Choi's coach, and in the first minute or so of this video he demonstrates almost exactly what de la Torre is describing. Take a look, then I'll explain a bit more below the video:



Now this may just be the way I feel this movement, but I'd say the lifting motion Bann is making (and de la Torre is describing) is actually caused by bending the elbows ever so slightly. Some of you may feel it mostly at your shoulder joints, some may feel it at the wrists and some may even feel that the fingers are causing the lift. Technically, it's probably started by the fingers since the clubhead has to move first and your fingers are the closest part of your body to the clubhead.

At any rate, it's a very slight movement that starts the club moving upward, and then the club's momentum starts helping your arms move upward, so you feel as if you're just trying to move along with the club. That's what happens until the club shaft points straight up in the air.

de la Torre says you don't consciously cock the wrists. The wrists don't cock until you get to the top and the club starts to move from that vertical position and literally falls toward your shoulder. Gravity makes your wrists cock as your arms slow down. (They HAVE to slow down or you'd smack your shoulder with the shaft. That can be painful!)

You make the same sort of movement when you pick up a glass of water or just about anything, really. (Hopefully you aren't swinging it up over your shoulder and throwing water everywhere, but the motion is the same.)

Now, when Bann separates your backswing into an upward move and a rotational move, that's the key to letting your hands start your backswing. Tomorrow I'll teach you how to combine the two into a smooth backswing. Today, just get used to that upward move that Bann shows you, and then coil your shoulders so you can feel the position at the top of your backswing.

Yeah, you heard me. Practice taking your address position and lifting your club up over your trailing shoulder, then turn to the side. You've probably practiced stranger things before!

UPDATE: The next post in this series is here: Using Your Hands in the Takeaway, Part 2

T.J. Tomasi on Muscle Memory

I have a copy of an (I believe) out-of-print book called The 30-Second Golf Swing, by T.J. Tomasi. It was published around 15 years ago, so it's not unusual for a book that old to be out-of-print. (Everybody's always looking for the next magic technique, right?)

To be honest, I can understand why this one went OP. The technique seems overly complicated to me, a complex procedure that you go through before, during and after each shot that will hopefully eliminate thinking about the wrong thing at the wrong time. Don't get me wrong -- the concept makes sense to me. This particular implementation just seems overthought.

However, Tomasi says something in the first chapter that I think most weekend players -- and perhaps a few pros -- need to realize:

Once you learn your swing, it's in your brain for good. Unless there is a brain injury, it's in there and you won't lose it, as in, An hour ago I had my wallet and now it's gone forever 'cause I left it on the airplane.

Studies in motor learning show that once a skill is learned it is never forgotten. Furthermore, after a year without practice, the performance level returns to 80 percent after ten days of retraining. So your swing is in there all right, just like other motor skills such as shoe tying, bike riding, running, and swimming. You cannot forget them because they're captured in neural networks. Rather than thinking in terms of forgetting how to swing, I suggest that there are circumstances that deny you full access to the motor program called your golf swing. Your "A Swing" -- the one that fires on all cylinders when your game is under control -- is temporarily unavailable. (p7)

Obviously his "30-Second Golf Swing" technique is about maintaining full access to that motor program, which is what a pre-shot routine is supposed to do. (Tomasi's routine is more than just pre-shot, of course, or it wouldn't need an entire book!)

But what I want you to remember is that your golf swing is in your brain for good. That's why, after a particularly tough stretch on the course, you can simply put those misbehaving clubs away for a week or a month and the problem miraculously fixes itself. According to Tomasi, even a year away won't wipe the imprint from your muscle memory -- you'll just need some time to get used to the feelings again.

As the weather gets worse and you have fewer chances to get out and play or even practice, this is something you need to remember. A few moments spent swinging a club in the garage or backyard every few days may be all you need to keep your swing "fresh" in your mind until better weather returns. A few moments spent mentally practicing your swing -- that is, just imagining how it feels to swing a club -- may do the same job. And once you can play again, it won't take all that long to get it back in shape.

Because your swing doesn't leave you. Lydia Ko may have spoken more truth than she realized when she said her clubs simply "got tired of her" and needed some time away during the off-season.

Don't beat yourself up this off-season, during the bad weather. Your swing isn't going anywhere.