The main reason I said many years ago, when Tiger Woods officially hooked up with Sean Foley (he’d actually been seeing him on the sly for at least six months before breaking with Hank Haney) that he was going to break his back was because of his changed setup.
He changed from his right-to-center bias that you saw in his early years to what Foley was teaching, which was a Stack & Tilt type setup by any other name.
Sunday thoughts.
One thing that has struck me, since I began to unravel the mystery of the pivot action and since I have figured out the optimal grip (Classic neutral), has been how unnecessary and literally obsolete “tips” and “drills” have become.
This is, I suppose, because proper technique eliminates the need for little special things that you find all over YouTube and in magazines.
I watched an analysis of 3rd World Ranked Cameron Young’s golf swing from a couple of years back and noticed that he’s performing the Late Hogan pivot (very good), but his down swing is all wrong (mechanically), as was the analysis of his whole swing model.
It’s amazing that, to today, they’re still going with the “using the ground” nonsense with the Flying Foot (Trevor Immelman calls it a “floating foot) and trying to call it a power-enhancing move when there are two reasons for Cameron’s Flying Foot.
We already know that Mike Dunaway was a powerful individual, as he had played football before an injury led him to turn to golf. So, he was always going to be a long hitter given he had sound technique.
The answer to the mystery of his prodigious length however lies in that technique, the swing model he used.
Yesterday for the first time, I was swinging completely pain-free with the Momentus Heavy Iron.
I still have to warm up by stretching the shoulder and doing some resistance band work before the pain goes away, and I am careful of over-doing it, but I am hoping to be hitting balls sometime this week.
I was talking last week about the 3 pivot actions I’ve isolated, all of them related by having different hip and leg actions because of the subtle differences in setup and balance.
They all feature the “Leaning A” setup but it varies to produce the 3 different pivot types, but the variations are just the 3 major ones in a sequence of pivots from the traditional Classic Golf Swing (the first) to the 3rd, the “adjusted” Mike Dunaway type of pivot.
Whatever one may think of Mike Austin, he got pretty close to figuring out the optimal golf swing model – he didn’t by any means build the “perfect golf swing” model because, as I have written, his swing didn’t even match the model he taught.
Mike Dunaway, with Mike Austin, nearly got there – but the optimal golf swing model wouldn’t have a shifting head, because as we all know, the admonition has been there forever not to let the head move during the swing, so the rightward head shift is something that wouldn’t be in an optimal golf swing.
There was no post yesterday because I was working on something that came to fruition today.
It shouldn’t be a surprise what I said in the title because, let’s face it, the pivot is about how you move the hips and legs to make a back pivot.
I solved the pivot mystery without having hit a ball since May of last year.
What mystery is there to the pivot?
Those of you who are still here from the Mike Austin/Dunaway era of the blog (2009-13) may remember that, when I built the MCS Golf Swing model and had it essentially finished around 2015, I said that it was simply the Mike Austin swing model but with a stable head on the back pivot.
Here is the proof of that statement, because I am now doing what I didn’t have the technical insight to do 15 years ago – you’ll all recall that my blog began as the documentation of my search for the perfect golf swing (let’s say optimal now), and I was still learning even as we all discussed golf swing mechanics.
Before I proceed – this is not a slam on Mike Dunaway, whose golf swing I think was awesome. I will be talking about theory vs execution here, just to be clear.
I spent years looking at, discussing and trying to replicate Mike Austin’s swing from the years 2009-13.
I tried to be very diplomatic when I left the camp, because most of my readers had come to my blog out of interest in Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway, but to my surprise, when I broke with the Austin school and went my own way, most of you stayed with me, which was great.
WAX Golf 