The reason the optimal golf swing is vertical and not rotary or lateral is because, as I’ve said before, you are using leverage and gravity to swing down into impact, and if your position remains laterally stable, you are golden with a modicum of practice.
I have taken a 5 iron swing and a Driver, to illustrate how purely you can strike the ball without jumping out of your shoes or breaking yourself in the gym.
I have so many thousands of swing clips that I’ve compiled over the years between 2007-2022 that it is sometimes surprising to look back on the various models I’ve worked on.
It is beyond doubt to me, however, that my favorite ever driver swings to watch face-on are from May 15, 2015 – I hardly ever swung exactly the same way from day to day, as I was conducting swing research, but that day stands out to me as the day I nailed it.
I came across a YouTube short of Xander Schauffele’s driver swing, which is pretty good as it really only has one flaw – but that flaw leads to another flaw, and then a required compensation to avoid injury.
While listening to the USGA narrator, I heard yet another Modern Golf Swing myth that I have been hearing and seeing for years, so let’s take a look at it, shall we?
I’ve shown the old school Classic Golf Swing players here forever, and if you ever wonder why I’m so negative in my posts on the golf swing, it’s because I can’t sugarcoat or gloss over what I see online or on the television.
If I have already pointed out countless times how one should swing, I have nothing left to do but point out the glaringly obvious problems in the Modern Golf Swing universe, in an effort to steer people away from it.
A little levity on this Friday, perhaps?
The solitary nature of my swing research means that I’m usually lost in my own world of swing analysis for hours at a time hitting balls, and I tend to forget that A) There are other people at the range, unless they do something to bother me and B) Not everyone can drive the ball over 300 yards.
I get some chuckles at times when I’m back home making swing clips or just analyzing swing after swing looking for things to work on, and then I notice what others around me are doing while I’m working out.
The reason so many people struggle to maximize their power with the golf swing is likely because they’re not set up in the proper manner in which to do so.
It is also a reason you’ll find all sorts of professional players who contort themselves coming into impact – they manage to get the power they want to generate, but at a cost to consistency and/or physical health.
As promised, here are two drives from August of 2022 showing me swinging from a virtually optimal setup that will essentially comprise the setup I describe and provide instructions for in my upcoming video.
This is a neutral setup, meaning you can set up this way over the ball whether you are left or right-dominant in swinging.
If you want to know why Rory McIlroy is such a long driver of the ball but also a very woeful one accuracy-wise, then you only have to look at what he’s doing with his pivot.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with his setup – I’ve commented on it before and how it supports my hypothesis on the address position – it’s when he gets moving that the issues begin.
I have been going over the changes to my stance as shown down the line (** more on this at the end of the post), and it has been a while since I looked at any of my archived video from the “E = MCS” video released in 2017.
While I would not consider the setup shown down the line as what I want to see today, I was still surprised by how close I was to it 6 years ago – not too bad at all.
WAX Golf 