I have made an issue of how modern technology has made ball-striking much easier, especially with the metal woods and getting the ball in play off the tee with the shoe-box-sized driver heads and lower-spinning, longer flight balls.
One thing that has happened is that you’ll hear Modern Golf Swing proponents saying that “the lighter equipment has changed the way you swing” a golf club, which makes no sense at all.
The problem I’ve seen most commonly displayed by various skill levels of swingers with regards the golf swing originates, of course, in the hips and legs.
This would be natural, I assume, because most golfers below a certain age never learned or were shown how to make a proper golf swing pivot using the hips and legs.
When you start out with golf and your instruction (either through lessons or following the television/magazine “tips” on proper swinging) consists of restricting the movement of those hips & legs, it is difficult to overcome that feeling of “looseness” in the lower body as you try to start to pivot with the lower body.
And yes, this is a tongue-in-cheek posting…
You are always hearing Modern Golf Swing advocates compare the golf swing to various types of throwing, and the PGA Tour showed on their Instagram how the Modern swing principles are bogus, with (of course) a clip of someone showing great form throwing.
Grayson Murray must have had a bad hole on Friday (I wasn’t following this week’s Tour event on television), because what he did after holing out wasn’t exactly a celebration.
And no, that’s not a movie title.
The “curse of the rubber band” is the legacy of the Modern Golf Swing theory that you can somehow create elastic power by separating the torso from the hips instead of swinging with the entire body.
I want to show you the dramatic difference between what a properly leveraged golf swing looks like versus one that relies on muscular explosion to generate impact velocity, as if we are made of rubber (which we certainly are not).
You don’t have to be very perceptive to realize that something is wrong with the so-called “Modern Golf Swing,” and if you are even a little perceptive, you’ll know something is really wrong with it.
You have pseudo-experts in the athletic field advancing a theory of producing power (by restricting the largest muscles in the hips and legs on the back swing and replacing that with a twisting of the lower back to produce the shoulder turn) that would cripple people in other sports (imagine trying that to throw a javelin or shot-put, or to swing a baseball or cricket bat).
I say this with satisfaction, although the feeling is a little bittersweet.
The MCS Golf Swing model as it stands has been what it is for the past three years.
Back in the summer of 2014, I began to revise the model to include certain things, such as a right-biased address, in order to make the swing as simple and as repeatable as possible.
I have been re-reading GolfDigest’s Guy Yokom interview of Mickey Wright, and I can’t recommend heartily enough that anyone interested in the proper way to swing (and even play) should do so if you haven’t.
I had read it initially because of several emails pointing me to her views on the Modern Golf Swing, which are right in line with Jack Nicklaus’ and Brandel Chamblee’s and my own (and with anyone else’s opinion that it is an un-natural and harmful way to swing, especially for power swingers), but there is so much more.
If you think today’s pro tour players are good and that the longer ones among them hit it far (both accurate assessments, because I’m not saying they aren’t or that they don’t), then let me tell you something about my day yesterday and let you wonder what they could do with mechanically-sound and properly leveraged Classic Golf Swings.
Yesterday, I enjoyed a great day on the course out at Royal Ashburn G.C. with David D.
This track is the former Fall Q School venue of the former Canadian Tour, and the ironic thing is that I actually worked there as a locker room attendant for a summer coming out of high school – and never once saw the course!
There has been some buzz of late that while Tiger Woods continues to rehab from his fourth and most serious back surgery (this one involving fusing vertebrae together in the lower region), he is currently without a swing model.
I might be so bold as to point out the problem that exists with Tiger trying to continue his golf career – and I pointed it out in a Twitter chat yesterday on this issue.
I only ask this because a long-time WAX Nation citizen (thanks, KC!) forwarded me a post from Andy Plummer’s (of Stack & Tilt fame) that seems to suggest that Butch Harmon may have begun to have second thoughts about the Modern Golf Swing.
I say “may have” because this is the ultimate in hearsay, but I would imagine that Andy Plummer either heard this directly on a Sky Sports broadcast (Ewen Murray is a broadcast analyst with Sky, as is Butch, for that matter) or someone told him of this.
