I had a hunch, I wrote a couple of weeks back, about something I had been looking at 12 years back with regards to the relationship between the back pivot and the down swing involving the concepts of “push” and “pull.”
Seems I was right on the money back then, and it took looking at Mike Dunaway’s “Peace River” video demonstration of his own back pivot concept to spur me to check it out once more.
That sounds very counter-intuitive, I know, and it’s a little like the conundrum of the chicken versus the egg, but it’s been my experience.
Do you want to know why so few people understand or even get Ben Hogan’s pivot action?
I can tell that I’m getting closer because my down swing plane is shallowing out even more, and I can show some visual proof in the form of one of my better swings last year vs the last time I was at the range.
I went from a very steep plane that appeared at some point in my swing research years, to a fairly neutral plane, to one that is actually getting “under” the plane that is my shaft angle at impact.
Have you noticed that so many athletes who excel or who have excelled in other sports tend to have much more athletic-looking swings than the ones who play the game for a living?
I saw a swing of Tony Romo’s on the PGA Tour’s Twitter feed, and there is some good stuff to look at there.
I sometimes struggle with finding ways to prove things about Mike Dunaway, because he never played competitive golf and his long drive days (of the sort that inspired Art Sellinger, founder of Long Drivers Of America) were long before the advent of YouTube.
Therefore, you don’t see a lot of “proof” of how powerful and long Dunaway was other than things like LDOA naming him the Father of Modern Long Drive and awarding him a lifetime achievement prize for his pioneering work.
Responding to longtime WAX Nation citizen Goose’s comment yesterday on the concept, here is the “Figure 7” that Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway used to explain the nature of the leading arm and leading side leverage.
I have said before that, even after I stopped trying to model the MCS Golf Swing after Mike Austin’s model, that there is still probably 90% commonality between his and Dunaway’s and the MCS models.
I’ve been talking about the difference between a “flippy” or “casting” release and a proper, powerful and mechanically-correct release action.
Let’s take a look at the late great Mike Dunaway, the “Father of Modern Long Drive,” demonstrate and and explain what I’ve been saying about the release action, more specifically with the left or leading head release.
When I talk about the “swing angle,” I mean that you must get the arms, hands and club behind you with the tightest position possible for the most efficient leverage generation.
You can see how efficiently one is leveraging the club when looking at the trailing heel at impact, for example.
I’m sure that, to many people who are dominant in one side or the other, it has been a little disconcerting to read my thoughts on the optimal swing requiring both sides of the body.
I have a simple gif. I created a little less than 2 years ago to demonstrate the role of gravity in the down swing, but I can’t find the posting for which this gif. was created, so let’s just do it here and now.
