I will discuss other parts of today’s Tracer Golf session in the next posting, but this is huge.

I’ve said before at stages of my swing research that up to that point, I hadn’t ever put a decent swing on a golf ball due to impediments I put in my own path, but this really takes the cake, friends.

It turns out that I still haven’t put a decent swing on a golf ball because today, while going over my setup in order to work on the Post-Modern swing model, I discovered that I’ve never had my shoulders square to the target line.

I can say that because when my shoulders were squared, I again had that sensation that my shoulders were angled to point extremely right of my target line instead of parallel.

I’ve possibly felt that they were square to the line in years past, but I know for a fact that I’ve never had the visual frame and physical sensation of what I felt and saw today looking down at the ball, when I made absolutely sure that my shoulders were squared.

It wasn’t even a matter of a few degrees that I was off when I thought I was square before – we’re talking maybe 10 or more degrees of difference between what I felt and thought was square and what actually was.

The Old Spinal Deformity Again

You see, with this spinal twist of my scoliosis, I feel natural and aligned when I stand normally, but my shoulders are at least ten degrees open.

They don’t feel open, because that is the natural position, but they are.

For me to square them, I did the old club across the chest drill standing upright, turned my shoulders to the right until they were square, then tilted into the address setup position making sure my shoulders tilted (left goes up, right goes down) without changing angle.

Different Feel, Way Different Look

I’ve done this before as a drill but it’s likely been years (or never) since I actually meticulously performed this exercise while keeping a very tight eye on my shoulders angle…

… and what I saw looking down was so alien to any other visual I’ve ever had looking down at the ball, as well as the sensation that my right shoulder felt at least ten degrees behind the left, as if I were standing to hit a wicked hook shot – but they were square.  That’s how much the difference was between feeling squared and actually being squared.

Probably for the first time in my life while holding a golf club.

So, I’ve been doing this for years and years and when I was standing with shoulders square to the target line, my feet were likely angled closed to the target line, so the visual was the same as standing with feet squared and shoulders open, in the looking down aspect.

Like this picture below, I would say my shoulders were square to the target line, but then my feet couldn’t have been, because they’re on a different angle from the shoulders:

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And that is better than swinging with open shoulders, but I was never going to nail the model if I was missing somewhere, like squaring the shoulders and feet.  This mismatch disrupts everything in the kinetic chain.

Come to think of it, if I were to get quantum on the above pic, I’d say I still didn’t have it – more a touch of open shoulders and a touch of closed foot stance, making me feel squared, and that’s probably the closest I’ve come.

So, What Happened Next?

When I was standing completely square with both foot-line and shoulders today and looking down… well, let me tell you that I’ve never seen this before in my own stance looking down.

Nor felt.  I couldn’t believe this was the feeling of being setup square to the line, it just couldn’t be!

But it was.

I was running out of time because I’d wasted the first half of my session working on the Post-Modern model and thinking my shoulders were square simply by feeling them a little more right than usual, but again my misses were left way more than right, so that’s when I decided to really get into my setup.

So when I actually did what I described above, I’d lost a lot of time.

I therefore switched immediately from the Post-Modern to the standard MCS Classic Swing setup and action ( back to basics and the model I should know inside out) and let me tell you what happened – in the next posting…