I am working diligently on my shoulder rehabbing, because I am behind you – those of you who have downloaded the “Basics Of The MCS Golf Swing” video are ahead of me.
Ahead in what?
In creating that perfect combination of a Jack Nicklaus-type grip with the MCS setup and Ben Hogan’s last silky pivot action that mesmerized the world when he won 3 majors in 1953.
Let’s go over the history of this evolution in the MCS Golf Swing.
My possible greatest breakthrough in my swing research came when I studied Ben Hogan’s swing closely in the spring and summer of 2014.
I was looking at his earlier pivot style, more like this:
… and this particular swing clip:
… you can see that action in my swing pivot in July of 2014:
This is what I call Hogan’s “rotary” swing action. You can see that rotation in the hips pretty clearly.
From there, when I adjusted my setup from a centered one like you see above to the “Leaning A” setup in late 2014-early 2015, I was still swinging with a rotary hip action, which became the base of the MCS Golf Swing model.
That move to the “Leaning A” would have been my greatest breakthrough except for the fact that the Hogan pivot action was the real jump-off point for me in my swing research.
To me, the eras of my swing research were pre-Hogan pivot and post-Hogan pivot. The “Leaning A” is the greatest breakthrough in my post-Hogan pivot era, but it all started with Hogan.
Fast-forward a few years to the spring of 2017, and somehow, I managed to record myself swinging using the last Hogan pivot action without even knowing it:
… here:
… and again here:
There’s no mistaking that action – a full hip turn but with a very little to no leading heel lift on the back pivot:
Funny thing, I have looked at those swings for years since 2017 and it wasn’t until I happened to see this swing of Ben Hogan’s last summer during my exhaustive series on the Hogan swing myths:
… when I said to myself, “hold on – that looks very familiar!”
I recognized that pivot action because of the similarity in the camera angle – it just jumped out at me.
So, I asked myself, “how exactly did I swing like that?”
Because my swings for the most part are with the rotary action hip turn which produces the higher heel lift:
… which is not a bad way to pivot, by any means – it’s just that I prefer the low-heel lift non-rotary pivot action.
I was by this point already suffering from the Frozen Shoulder Syndrome that had hit me about a year ago this time, so I couldn’t even swing to try to figure it out.
I went back to my old pivot drills that I used to perform to ingrain that Hogan swing action:
… but this was the high-heel lift pivot action, and I was trying to figure out how I’d performed those perfect low-heel pivots without even thinking about it.
It took me a while, but I finally did figure it out, and I was able to do it more like this:
… and there it was.
That pivot just above is from my 2015 video “Kinesiology of the MCS Golf Swing,” by the way, so almost from the time I figured out the Hogan pivot, I was apparently able to actually perform his latest pivot action without realizing I was even doing it.
So, when I describe this pivot action and the drill exercise in the “Basics Of The MCS Golf Swing,” I am giving you exactly what I was doing myself to pivot in that manner.
But as I said at the top, I still have yet to perform the perfect pivot exactly in the way I have laid out in the video, because even though I have myself swinging on video with this pivot, there were other things I was doing at the time that weren’t optimal.
Namely, having a too-strong grip and swinging with left-dominance. I haven’t been able to swing with everything in place because of the Frozen Shoulder Syndrome, and believe me, you have no idea how depressing it has been since last summer not being able to swing.
That ailment has now almost completely cleared up, although I’m still probably a few weeks from being able to swing pain-free with full range, so I’m just being patient.
I am rehabbing with range of motion exercises, resistance bands and light weights, and just biding my time until I’m swing-fit again.
And then, just perhaps, I’ll get those perfect swings on video, because from what I’m seeing and feeling doing the drills and half-swings to 3/4 swings – I have a feeling that my golf swing in the future will be far better than my best swings from the past.
And that, WAX Nation, is what my swing research as always been about!
WAX Golf 