So great to be back swinging again, if only just practice swings at home with the Momentus Heavy Iron that I am using right now indoors.
I am not going to say I’ve cracked the Mike Dunaway model until I have actually swung and hit balls with it, but from what I am doing now, I believe I have.
It is a beautiful thing – I actually said to myself on the last swing before sitting down at the computer, “the man was a human Iron Byron with this swing…”
There are of course a million different ways in which someone can swing a golf club, but the focus on this blog has been on building a mechanically-correct and proper golf swing.
Even here however, as you can see with my exploration on different pivot actions over the years, there are variations you will find in swinging in a mechanically-correct manner.
This is my latest line of inquiry.
It may seem counterintuitive, but that is actually true – a shorter back swing with a flatter top position CAN mean increased power translating into club head impact speed because of simple physics.
We tend to think that a longer back swing with the club going past parallel is the best way to increase club speed, but that isn’t always what happens.
I have said for years that there were two different mechanically-correct pivot actions – the traditional Classic Golf Swing with the rotary hip turn and lifting leading heel, and the second, what I am now calling the “Shift & Post” based upon having called it that when talking about Mike Dunaway.
Now that I have isolated and can replicate and explain the “Shift & Post” pivot action, I am wondering where we go from here.
I am solving some of my previous “mysteries” regarding the golf swing and pivoting now that I’ve been able to identify, isolate and deliberately perform the “Shift & Post” action which I had previously performed without knowing it.
Going all the way back to 2007, nearly 20 years ago – I have a whole VHS videotape cassette in my bedroom closet, and an old VCR that is missing a remote control, which contains golf swings of mine from 2006 going through 2008.
I’ve been thinking that the “Late Hogan” pivot action needs a better name and, after investigating the similarities between that pivot and Mike Dunaway’s, I can confirm that the proper pivot action is a “Shift & Post” pivot.
You may think, “they don’t look anything alike,” and you’d be correct – they look different at a glance because of the differences between Ben Hogan’s and Mike Dunaway’s setups, and also their overall swing actions.
The main reason I didn’t choose Ben Hogan’s swing for the MCS model is that he was a feel swinger who practiced endlessly, and so his setup would vary almost day to day – he would get the feel of how he was swinging on a particular day and go with it.
That’s not going to breed consistency – Hogan could do so because he hit balls every day, every single day, when he wasn’t actually playing. Most of us can’t do that, and even if we could, we can simply avoid having to by building a consistent and repeatable setup over the ball.
You’ll all remember my saying that Jack Knapp was “so close” to having a perfect swing?
Well, I haven’t looked at his swing in a year, and it was before I noticed that I had swung with the same pivot as the one Ben Hogan used late in his career, and something made me go back to what I’d posted about him and how easy he generated power.
Something I noticed instantly when I began to make practice back pivots, now that my shoulder is improving enough to do so, was the much flatter plane I have at the top compared to my previous, more typically Classic pivot style.
I began to look into it, wondering why I didn’t have much higher hands at the top the way I used to, a la Jack Nicklaus, but the flatter plane is actually a feature of the “Late Hogan” pivot action.
Earlier today, I posted about how I view the optimal swing to consist of the Jack Nicklaus setup with Ben Hogan’s pivot, and I mentioned Mike Dunaway as well.
I couldn’t remember exactly what I had named this gif., so I had to go searching for it month by month in my media archives, remembering that I had made it when I was producing the “MCS – Drop The Hammer” video in early 2017.
WAX Golf 