I had a hunch, I wrote a couple of weeks back, about something I had been looking at 12 years back with regards to the relationship between the back pivot and the down swing involving the concepts of “push” and “pull.”
Seems I was right on the money back then, and it took looking at Mike Dunaway’s “Peace River” video demonstration of his own back pivot concept to spur me to check it out once more.
If you want to know why Rory McIlroy has so much power for a man standing 5’9″ and weighing all of 160 lbs, you only have to look at his down swing and impact/release to see why.
Forget all the nonsense you hear on television, the true secret of Rory’s power is the leveraging he creates both with his semi-classic pivot (heel comes up a little, but even that little gives him more hip turn than a fully planted pivot) and his down swing from the top.
If you were watching the CBS coverage from the Canadian Open today, you’ll have seen a swing breakdown on Rory McIlroy with Driver and how he gets positive (upward attack angle).
There was nothing technically wrong with saying to swing like Rory, but it was the whole thing once again on someone just telling you what they’re seeing, which you can see for yourself, and not a thing on how actually to swing like Rory.
If you are looking for a great example of how someone can generate power with a short back swing and proper leverage evidenced by a low trailing heel impact, then look no further than one Tony Finau.
Yes, he’s a very tall player with long limbs (levers), but when you look at how ridiculously short his back swing is and how effortlessly he’s leveraging the club, you will realize that Finau could be monstrous-long, a good deal longer than he already is, with an adjustment or two.
I had a pleasant surprise gift from The Welshman a couple of weeks back on my last session at the range, when we got together to hit some balls together after the long winter.
He had found a nice vintage set of Mizuno MP-14 forged blades (he likes to pore through sell sites like Kijiji exactly to find gems like this), and got them for me.
