I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how I’d been looking at Jack Nicklaus’ very vigorous and aggressive leg action and that I think it’s the way one must perform one’s leg and hip action for maximum efficiency.
In the intervening two months, I’ve been looking at the setup and the pivot itself (not the leg action, but the back swing pivot angle with regards to arms and hands going back), and while doing that, I re-affirmed the overwhelming importance of that leg and hip action.
How important is it?
Well, there’s this – I jury-rigged my swing aid device with a stiffer spring from an older model and where I had to swing pretty hard to get it to click at around the should-be-easy 9 setting, I recently increased the difficulty to7 and it is virtually impossible for me to get a click on it unless I absolutely nail the setup, pivot angle and hip/leg action.
Without that vigorous leg action, I can’t click that thing to save my life even as I feel the momentum of the swing aid in my right elbow and shoulder.
When I get the leg action right, the click feels ridiculous easy, but that’s because I’m doing the work with my legs instead of upper body, and the legs are far stronger.
Back to the leg action – in 2015, I registered my highest confirmed ball speed at 194 mph with the SSR:
Note: I will clarify again that club speed with the SSR can be unreliable because the machine will read the toe speed so if the club face is closing at impact, the toe speed will be higher than that of the middle of the club face where the ball is struck – a golf or baseball however is a sphere and therefore the Doppler radar in the SSR will read ball speed very accurately.
Today, after working on my swing for a bit, I went back and looked at that 194 mph ball speed swing and two things immediately jumped out at me.
The first was the leg action, which you can see above is very vigorous, and the second was the setup, which was absolutely on point with regards to stance and weighting:
There are only two flaws in this setup viewed face-on – the first is the right hand grip, which is far too strong, and the second is that I was swinging with a left-dominant action, which you can’t really see in the setup but I’ve put that in there.
2015 was the last year I really worked on my swing, form-wise, and it shows.
Look at the top position of one of my & 7 iron swings from that year, if you wonder how I could get the distances I did back then:
That club shaft at the top is virtually parallel to the ground, but look at the leading leg position – that was a massive hip turn with the shoulders at 90 degrees, and the leverage this top position created made my swing look effortless even as I was hitting towering shots:
The only flaws I had at the time with this swing were the right hand grip and the left-dominant action, but I could knock down flags at any rate from prodigious distances.
The leg action could have been even better had I achieved a straighter right leg at the top, but that’s not really a flaw, just a lack of optimal hip & leg action.
After that year, I was either focused on working with other swingers or producing the “E = MCS” video trilogy, after which time the Covid pandemic hit and threw a spanner into the work for a couple of summers.
I’m only now getting back to that optimal setup and leg action, and I’ve of course fixed the left-dominant action and right grip issues, so I can’t wait to get on a proper launch monitor to see if I can approach, match or exceed my club and ball speeds from 2015.
WAX Golf 