I guess you shouldn’t call it a “stick,” even though that’s exactly what it is – you must call it the “Pivot Pro,” but bless me if I couldn’t just get a 7 iron shaft (or any shaft or wooden or metal rod from a hardware store) and stick it into the ground.

It’s all about the grift with these guys, but that’s not even the problem (although it’s laughable in my eyes to be hawking a stick as anything “pro”), here are two of them in the following video clip:

The 1st Problem

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Here at the 1:00 mark, McLean is talking about if one shifts too far laterally, you need to turn, and he proceeds to make a very mechanically-unsound move where he hyperextends his left leg to get the turn in before he touches the stick:

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Awful, just terrible mechanics, and this is what they’re doing today, because when you shift laterally without just shifting the weight so that the hips move and turn, you will get stuck:

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… and then have to perform the jumping Flying Foot/Knee Hyperextension to get out of it.

And guess what? If you don’t turn the hips on the back pivot (or you do, but you restrict the turn), then you have to do what everyone is doing – you have to slide the hips laterally, get stuck because they aren’t turning naturally, and then jump and hyperextend to get out.

McLean is simply teaching people how to slide and get stuck – this is the problem, and it irritates me no end to see these people who don’t know proper mechanics making a hash out of a simple principle – you don’t have to slide laterally at all, and Hogan certainly didn’t.

His head has a tiny lateral move as he shifts his balance (even the great Hogan wasn’t perfect, although his back pivot was), but watch McLean’s head sliding to the left because he is laterally shifting, which Hogan didn’t do.

It’s not a slide – when you have finished your pivot action your hips have turned enough to lift the leading heel and swing the leading thigh to parallel or past (I call it “swinging the gate”):

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… there is a slight move in the transition that looks like Hogan is making a lateral shift, but it’s merely the returning of the weight to the leading foot will naturally move your weight and the hips toward the target:

Watch The Hips Turn Right Away, No Slide

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Do you see that?  Hogan was simply returning his weight to the leading foot so that he could plant it and stand on it through impact and the follow-through.  The hips move and turn.

There was no shift, when you separate the back pivot and down swing.

It is not, and has never been a lateral shift – it is a returning of the body’s weight into the leading side.

Watch an entire swing of Hogan’s in slow-motion and tell me where the lateral shift occurs:

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… because all he did was return the weight to the leading leg to be able to stand on it.

That’s just the first problem – here’s the second, where McLean gets the handy-dandy “pivot pro” and demonstrates that he doesn’t know the first thing about Hogan’s back pivot:

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Notice he says, “and now I’ve got that same Hogan idea…”

No, Jim, you don’t.  Nowhere in your demonstration of the back pivot against the stick do you turn your hips naturally, because you’ve nailed your leading foot down, and nowhere do you even mention the turning of the hips.

Because you’re obsessed with the idea of “bracing” the right leg instead of what Hogan actually meant – using the right leg to ensure there isn’t a lateral slide but never interfering with the hip turn itself.

This, I’m telling you, WAX Nation, is the legacy of that 60’s video that everyone watched, where the narrator says that Hogan “braced” his right knee on the pivot.

Hogan’s hips turned fully on the back swing without shifting to the right or back towards the target:

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That is a perfect pivot – the turning of the hips without them moving laterally.  But they.still.turned.

Watch me pivot with a full hip turn and no lateral action whilst doing so:

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… and then watch an entire pivot and down swing, where my hips move laterally whilst also turning on the down swing:

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I had a slight shift to the target with my head as well due to my swinging left-dominant (pulling with the leading arm), but you will see that my hips begin to turn the second they begin their lateral shift to the target – it is a returning of the weight to the leading foot in order to stand on it.

The day will come when people look back on the golf swing era beginning in the 90’s (and who knows when it will end), and the prevailing sentiment will be, “These people had no clue what they were doing when it comes to biomechanics!”

I, for one, am already saying it.