Athletic Intuition Isn’t Everything… But It Is Vital

I would almost say that it’s the only thing, but athletic intuition combined with technical knowledge would of course bring results much more quickly than intuition alone.

For the late arrivals, I decided a few weeks ago to stop trying to build XYZ model or models and just go back to my roots, using athletic intuition and what I’ve learned technically over the years, and nothing else, to build what I would call the Athletic MCS Golf Swing model.

Now, I would break my golf swing research into 3 separate eras:

  1. 2005 – The Beginning, where I knew practically nothing technical about swing mechanics,
  2. 2008-20012 – The Middle Period, when I began to share my research on my blogs, and made my first videos on the swing and
  3. 2013 – 2019 – Wherein I was more focused on other peoples’ swings than my own with personal consultations.

The funny thing is, that 2nd Middle era is my favorite for some reason – I learned a good deal about swing mechanics through experimenting and using athletic intuition, and when I took a look back at some of my swing archive, I found something shocking in my late 2012 swing clips.

You’ll recall that I didn’t even remember that I had been born with scoliosis, so little did it impact me in my daily life and including playing several sports at a proficient level, and that I didn’t have the revelation about it until the winter of 2013-14, over a year after the swing I’m about to show you.

In the 2012 season, I had produced 2 videos on the golf swing using the Mikes Austin and Dunaway’s models to guide others to more mechanically-sound swing mechanics than the Modern Golf Swing.

At the time, I didn’t have any concept about cross-dominance or swinging with a dominant leading arm as opposed to a dual armed or right-dominant swing, and the only sin I committed in the below swing was that of swinging left-dominant.

In recent weeks, I’ve discussed how making adjustments to the standard setup of my models would allow me to address the ball in a manner that I could pivot back and swing through with square shoulders at impact.

Now, look at this setup procedure of mine:

This is nearly perfect for my requirements to swing square to the target line, and I was doing it completely with athletic intuition (by feel) on how to place my feet to ensure the desired “squareness” at impact.

Note the angled stance foot line as well as the slightly closed shoulders, which are both required for me to swing naturally and square the shoulders at impact:

There are only two errors here – the first is having the left dominance, as you can see that with the second flaw, a slightly bent right arm, I’m controlling the swing with my left arm.

Had I had my right foot back even a smidgen farther away from the target line (and even here, if you look at the toes of my spikes, my foot line is close to 45 degrees angled to the target line), I would have been able to straighten my right arm and keep the shoulders in their position.

Now, I’m not going to show the pivot and down swing because I am not a sadistic nor masochistic person (let’s say it’s not a perfect pivot action and a very steep down swing plane), but take a look at that ball flight from impact:

A perfect drive, results-wise, but while I got the requisite square shoulders impact, my left-dominance would have shown up on the launch monitor (and I had not even used one at this time) with a negative attack angle and negative swing path (sharply outside-in).

Now, I could be tempted to lament the 3rd Era from a personal viewpoint, because I spent those six years improving the swings of others at the expense of my own once I had devised the principles of the MCS Golf Swing model of 2014 and going forward…

… except for the fact that those roughly six years spent making videos of that model and assisting others adopting it advanced my technical knowledge far beyond what it was back in 2012.

Not only that, every time I worked with a swinger and got them swinging MCS-style, I was confirming the efficacy of the model and theory.

So, I needed the last ten years to learn what I knew and didn’t know, and it’s not coincidence that the personal breakthroughs in my own swing have come in the years following 2019, which was the last time I worked personally with anyone.

During the pandemic lockdown and subsequent disruption in the industry, I returned to working on the swing for myself, and there came the realizations:

  1. Holy Moly, the mother of all realizations when I figured out the nature of cross-dominance and was forever cured of setting up and swinging left-dominant and,
  2. That my spinal deformity will never allow me to swing properly standing square to the target line, whatever I do in my setup, and that I have to make the adjustments on which I’ve been working of late.

Now that I’ve returned to the basics of using athletic intuition which I can now combine with the technical knowledge accumulated over the last decade, I don’t think it’s coincidence either than I now get the mechanics of Mike Dunaway’s swing model which, you’ll remember, took him years to attain himself.

I’m looking forward to the next session, you can be assured, as I was so close to it the last time out.

More to come.