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.
If you think think that being a right-dominant swinger doesn’t require you to use the left or leading side equally, think again.
I took a super slo mo of the Mike Dunaway “stick-man” swing to show his down swing transition and the “drop” that he made into the “3 O’Clock” position.
I liked the comment left by long-time Wax Nation citizen Goose, who hit the nail on the head with a perfect description of the right arm action with the club.
In fact, it is the perfect description of what’s going on with a perfect (or as close to it as you can get to perfect) down swing action leveraged by the leading side and powered by the trailing arm.
Wishing everyone a safe and Merry Christmas Day!
I’m not saying you can’t swing forward, but that is not mechanically-optimal and can actually lead to mechanical-correctness issues, which of course means you’re sacrificing performance and raising injury risk.
One of the main issues of trying to swing at the target with the golf swing is that the ball is located near the bottom of the swing arc… so trying to direct force and energy at the target with the club when the ball is nowhere near that point means wasted energy and inefficiency.
