Let me be frank – it has been extremely difficult, bordering on depressing this past 12 months.
I have been athletically active virtually my entire life since the age of around 7, and when this Frozen Shoulder Syndrome struck me out of the blue last March, I thought little of it at first.
I’ve had little issues here and there as we all do when we’re active, from an aching knee after kicking the ball around the park with my son, or such things, but this issue put me right out of commission right up to today.
That is the curse – I love swinging and hitting balls and playing when I’m not doing research, so I tried to find something else to grab my attention – enter the protracted posting last spring and summer regarding just about anything to do with Ben Hogan.
Those of you who were around will remember all the following:
- Posting clips from YouTube of charlatans pretending to know how Ben Hogan swung, and purporting to teach his mechanics (they weren’t),
- My investigation into how Modern Golf evolved from a misinterpretation of Hogan’s mechanics and that video I consider to be the manual on how to get it all wrong,
- The theory I chased that Tiger Woods had been taught a distorted and incorrect golf swing from boyhood based on these errors of analysis of Hogan’s swing,
- Pointing out how Hogan’s pivot had evolved over the years from a loose, lunging swing with a high-heel back pivot to the liquid, low-heel pivot he had in the 50s and
- Everything else I looked at regarding Hogan.
I was also scouring my personal swing archives looking for the best swings I’d ever made, mechanically-speaking, and analyzing how I had likely nailed the MCS Golf Swing model as far back as 2015 but that my own idiosyncrasies (too strong grip, swinging left-dominant) kept me thinking there was something I was missing.
At that time, you’ll remember me saying there was nothing left to look at, that I had got the MCS model right in theory but my personal execution was flawed.
All of this without swinging a club. All because I couldn’t swing a club.
Then, somewhere along the way, while still looking at my swings, something clicked when I looked at a gif. of Hogan that I had posted back in February to show his slide-release action with the trailing foot:
… and I said to myself, “I’ve seen this before…”
I don’t know how long after that I watched a swing clip of mine from my archives, a gif. of which has been on this blog since 2017:
… and I said, “Bingo! – I’ve actually swung with the same lower body pivot action myself!”
Then I started seeing it in many other of my swings, like here:
… and here:
… and the strange thing was, they were all from the spring of 2017, when I was making the “E = MCS” golf swing video.
Somehow, I had found that Hogan pivot action without even realizing it, and had gone away from it back to the higher-heel lift pivot.
Again, a lot of this came from my personal swing flaws leading me to believe I was missing something in the model, so I kept tinkering and trying different things in search of a solution.
Instead of fixing what need to be fixed.
So, last summer, I knew I could perform this pivot.
Here comes the curse again – I couldn’t swing because of my shoulder.
So, I went back to the pivot drills I always do, trying to nail that lower body action, and eventually I found it.
But I still couldn’t swing.
I actually began to think my swinging days were permanently over unless I went to a specialist for something radical like shoulder replacement surgery or something.
I decided somewhere along the way to include this pivot action in my next video, the one I’ve just finished and which kept going off-track with every sort of delay you can imagine – my old video editor going bust, having holidays and friend/family visits, getting sick, changing my mind several times on how to present the video… on and on…
And the whole time, I couldn’t swing. Which kept me focused not on swinging itself, but on the pivot action.
When I finally nailed down the precise manner in which to perform it was around the time that my old mate The Welshman suggested isometric exercises for the shoulder, so I began to gingerly do some exercises, and then Joe Gallant in the comments section of a blog posting from March 23 solved the mystery for me – Frozen Shoulder Syndrome.
When I looked it up, I said, “Yup – that is exactly what I’ve been experiencing, and I’m only able to do the exercises now because it’s been a year and FSS typically resolves in a year to 18 months…”
Fast-forward to today – I have been doing that same pivot drill from the new video and I am absolutely stunned by how it works.
Yes, it’s similar if not identical to Hogan’s action, and yes, it’s basically the same manner in which Mike Dunaway pivoted (his looks different because of his left-biased setup), but it’s so much more.
I don’t think there is a better way to pivot to produce power, accuracy and consistency all together – and there’s power, because this pivot has given me the highest ball speed I’ve every recorded without swinging a long drive club:
187 mph ball speed and on a day where I’d been swinging already for an hour with regular and long drive clubs, at the end of which session I took out the Swing Speed Radar.
This swing again is from 2017 – I was so close, nine years ago, and missed it!
But here is the blessing that came from the Frozen Shoulder Syndrome and my long layoff from being able to swing: I couldn’t have figured all of this stuff out if I had still been swinging.
In fact, I might still be conducting swing research chasing ghosts that don’t exist, because it was only after I was unable to swing that I began to do all of this looking at swing clips, watching YouTube and deep-diving into the Ben Hogan world.
I am hoping to be swing-fit by the end of April, hopefully by sometime in May, because I can’t wait to get out there and show WAX Nation what this pivot action can do and what it looks like with the stance and pivot work I’ve been doing the last week.
I was right in a way when I called Ben Hogan’s pivot action “The Perfect Pivot.”
Just not the one I studied – the last one he used really was a perfect pivot action.
None of these swings, in my opinion, are close to what I’ll be able to do having studied the mechanics and worked on them.
If I am able to swing again, the time off swinging because of my shoulder will be the one thing that allowed me to stop swinging, start thinking again and finally figure all of this out.
So, provided I can swing again, it will all have proven to be a blessing.
WAX Golf 