**Updated At Bottom
It occurred to me that the whole idea of swinging with a lifting heel versus a “planted heel,” as I like to term it (deliberately pressing the leading foot into the ground so that the heel doesn’t lift) has become a tiresome debate.
This may be due to the fact that I don’t think a proper swing has anything to do with whether the heel lifts a lot, a moderate amount or even a minimal amount.
Byron Nelson’s only swing “flaw” if I were to call it that, was the shifting of his head on the back swing, although it is related to what I was talking about in yesterday’s posting, so it was really not a “flaw” but a compensation to avoid shanking the ball.
I have said before that “restricted hips means ‘shank!'” and for the same reason – when you swing with the hips and legs, you will tend to shift forward (to the left) and therefore you will come into the ball early – welcome to Hosel City.
There is something that Moe Norman used to do in his setup that fascinated many people – the way he’d get behind the ball, then set up seemingly half-way into his back swing.
“I have to be here,” he’d say, setting the club down about a foot or 30 cm behind the ball, “I want a low takeaway, so I might as well start from here, and I’ll have the perfect takeaway every time…”
It’s become all too clear to me, while working on this latest video project “E = MCS,” that the fundamental key most people are missing in their swing is of proper positioning.
Even great swingers and players can have a better position from which to begin the back swing, and you see weekly on television the results of improper positioning (and of course, motion, when it comes to the modern golf swing models in use).
I’m sure everyone heard the buzz about amateur Cameron Champ who played in this year’s U.S. Open, and his driving average of 337 yards.
I’ve found some video of his swing, although the one I can’t find online is the rear view of his swing that showed a separating left heel on the back swing pivot.
It could just as well have been a one-off however because from what I see in other clips I’ve found online, he doesn’t seem to do it all the time, and that is the only concern I would have for a 22 year old who’s driving it 350 yards – that he be doing it with a mechanically-sound swing action.
I slipped out to the range today for an hour to hit some balls, to see how things would go after having practiced my setup procedure for a few days.
I had just gone out to get some exercise and make some full swings, but I predicted late last winter that I’d be increasing my numbers with the tighter pivot that I had worked on.
**Update At Bottom
It is so simple when you distill the golf swing to its most basic elements – the proper setup combined with the “perfect pivot” action that Ben Hogan used for his own swing.
Those two basic elements are the Alpha & Omega of the optimal golf swing. In fact, I can’t think of anything that would cause a problem in the swing that wouldn’t be solved by the grasping of these two elements.
If you want a simple pictorial illustration of why MCS is the optimal model for the golf swing, let me show you simply how it harnesses leverage over muscle power, creating the effortless-looking swing that you can create with it.
I’ve talked about the “dropping the hammer” concept and how it helps to set up the impact position at address, but when I took it a step further and worked with it a little to combine it with a previous method of setting up the address, something very cool occurred.
Video Shoot Day 2 is now in the books and after reviewing all of the video, I can now say that the initial portion of the “E = MCS” video production is completed, and I can now move on to the tutorial portion.
The weather has been doing its best to spoil the party but there was enough dry weather between the last days of rain and the current cloudy-rainy-thunderstormy stuff to get the job done.
**Update At Bottom
I’m a little miffed about it as well, considering I just had it re-gripped a couple of weeks back, but that’s life.
I had gone to the range to see how close my established address position was to what it should be for an optimal impact, and the Welshman was there for a few moments before he had to depart on business.
