My mind has shifted into a different mode now that I’ve solved my setup issues with regards to stance and foot line, and something dropped out of the sky this morning while I went over the down swing transition.

What I was working on last evening was the syncing together of the leading and trailing arms, because even in a right-dominant or left-dominant swing action, you’re still using both arms, just with a different feel of which one is dominant.

You all know that I am always digging up past swing principles and either re-implementing them or discarding them, and this morning was explosive.

I didn’t even dig it up – I was revisiting the “pull down” action of the leading arm from the top to add it to the pushing down action of the trailing arm, and lightning struck.

I had made a swing back to the top without shifting my head because I just wanted to go over the leading arm action from the top, and I shifted and leveraged the club back down into the impact zone, nodding my head – that’s how it goes.

Because I drill things relentlessly, I repeated the action and that’s when it struck me – I wasn’t shifting my head, but I was leveraging the club down with the exact action and flat-footed impact move that was Dunaway’s signature.

I’ve also talked about drilling things in sports until they become unconscious, and that’s what was going on – I glanced down while making another pivot and down swing, then the lightning struck.

Without even knowing it, I was performing a rotary back pivot (Hogan’s “Perfect Pivot” action) and performing the Trebuchet Drop from the top to impact.

That’s when the clouds parted, as I feverishly went over and over and over everything, including the grip at address and impact (you’ll remember that I was experiencing an issue of the club face turning down at impact with the right dominant swing model), and then I knew what I’d found.

Here are some stumbling blocks I’ve encountered with modeling golf swings when using athletic intuition:

• I didn’t like the left-loaded setup of the standard Classic Golf Swing because I wouldn’t set up like that intuitively,
• I absolutely loathed the shifting head premise of the Dunaway/Austin pivot action, even if I understand it now (I still don’t like it),
• The “Trebuchet Drop” is something I was doing early in my research, because I was hewing to the principle of the left-loaded setup, but I instinctively moved my head down and back into impact.

Here is a swing showing a stable head position on the back pivot and the “Trebuchet Drop” on the down swing through impact:

---

I believe that particular swing was from 2012, so it’s more than a decade ago and when I was trying to emulate the Mike Austin swing, but as you can see, I wasn’t shifting on the back pivot into a spot where I could swing down with a stable head.

It wasn’t because I refused to – I simply couldn’t make myself pivot with a shifting head even when I thought I was doing so, but the video doesn’t lie.

Instead, I kept the head stable on the back pivot and performed the Trebuchet Drop so that my spine angle head position were optimal at impact.

All of this (stable head pivot, drop on the transition) was unconscious – I was doing it without even thinking about it and actually believing I was doing something completely the opposite.

That above swing however is not the action I had this morning, because the setup was different which allowed me to swing down into a flat-footed impact or a barely raising rear heel at impact, and no short-stop slide release.

Of course, in the above swing clip, I was swinging left-dominant and without my optimal foot line stance, even if it was angled.

This morning, I was set up right-dominant and with the optimal foot line that I’ve worked out, and that was what I got – a rotary pivot swing that gave me the same impact position as Mike Dunaway’s more or less.

You’ll remember my mantra that the setup is 90% of the swing and that the swing is the swing?

Well, I wasn’t incorrect when I said I have my model, and that I’m just now polishing it.

That’s because I am still in the setup that I built over the last couple of weeks, still getting the same impact position that I theorize should be, given that setup and swing – all I did was accidently transition from a shift-and-post pivot to the rotary action one.

In doing so, the shifting head also transitioned from the back pivot to the down swing.

Not only that – if you look at this action, it’s flowing and athletic, perfectly balanced, just not optimal because of my dominance and setup issues:

---

This, my friends, with a little tweak or two, is the left-dominant version of the same swing model I’m building, but with the left-dominance, you’ll get the sliding rear foot release instead of the delayed step-around finish.

In having decided to go it alone with my athletic intuition and acquired technical knowledge, I discovered one thing about the Dunaway/Austin swing models – the setup is the one you wish to use for an optimal swing action, and it works with both the rotary pivot and shift and post pivot actions.

“Six of one or half a dozen of the other, please…”

How’s that for a Friday morning revelation?

I’ll be back at it next week, and I can’t wait to report what comes of my next session.

More to come!