to help Abby gain a feel of what her hands—
the greatest determiner of how the club
is delivered at impact—need to be doing
through the strike. Soon she didn’t need to
begin with the clubface open to produce the
correct action and she started to ingrain the
feeling of the club’s natural rotation into the
follow-through.
POWER HITTER FROM THE STRIKE ZONE
In order to ingrain the feeling of the hands and arms
role in the golf swing, Portyrata would incorporate a
drill in which she’d start with the club from an open
position and rotate it back to square.
RIGHT WAY TO ROTATE
Providing students with an understanding
of the general type of motion they should
use to hit a golf ball is a simpler and
more effective means to improvement than
actually attempting to teach them how to
make that strike. If I asked someone to
chop down a tree with an axe, I wouldn’t
need to follow that request with an axe
swinging lesson. Making sound contact with
a golf ball is not as straightforward an
undertaking, but once the task has been
clarified, most people find that they already
intuitively know how to produce a powerful
strike—they just don’t realize what type of
action is relevant to the task.
After adopting a more neutral grip, Abby
worked on perfecting a fairly easy drill
that you can replicate on the range during
your pre-shot routine or in the comfort of
your home. Using a short iron, she would
address the ball with her new grip, while the
club would start about 30 degrees open to
the target. Then she’d slowly rotate it back
to square via the counterclockwise rotation
of her left hand and forearm. Initially, Abby
found this to be a strange sensation, but she
soon realized that when performed as part
of the motion through impact, it would
produce a consistent strike, immune from
the exaggerated flip or lift evident in her
old swing.
You probably aren’t thinking, ‘That’s really
exciting stuff,’ but this drill was introduced
28
In order to help Abby gain the sense of the
club swinging more down her target line
and not so far from the inside, we introduced
the ‘strike zone drill.’ This technique is also
effective if you tend to deliver the club too
much from outside the target line—a far
more common problem. I’d lay one club
on the line of her feet and set another club
parallel to that straight back from the ball.
We began with a slow, halfway back to
halfway through swing—and that’s how you
should start if you want to make this a part of
your practice session.
In her old swing, Abby’s motion into
impact came so dramatically from the
inside that her shaft would point well to
the right of the club on her foot line as
it approached the ball. This translated to
an almost ascending blow, the root of her
disparity of divots. The purpose of this
movement is to get the club’s shaft to align
with the club on the toe line when it is
parallel to the ground at approximatel y the
waist-high point in the downswing. From
there, the student should feel the club move
outside his or her hands on its approach to
the ball. This sensation is naturally attained
VIRGINIA GOLFER | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013
if the rotation of the left forearm and wrist
from the previous drill is incorporated.
In the early stages of her changes, the
grip alteration was so dramatic that Abby
began hitting a push-slice, a sure sign that we
were affecting that once-nasty hook. It was
also a reminder that she needed to become
more comfortable with the requirement for
rotation rather than her old blocking motion.
Eventually, by repeating this drill, Abby
became aware of a more down-and-through
striking action, resulting in much more solid
contact and consistent direction. She also
eliminated her ‘reverse C’ and finished more
easily with her weight over her left leg.
A lot of golfers spend one session on the
range trying to make a change and think,
‘I’ve got it,’ only to later fall back into old
habits. Even for a talented player like Abby,
it took us about six months of constant work
for her to feel (there’s that word again) as
though this was becoming a natural part of
her motion.
SNAKE-PROOF SWING
Today, Abby owns a plus-Handicap Index.
During this process, we reinforced the
belief that an effective golf swing is the
product of an understanding of the proper
striking action and the development of
one’s feel for the club throughout that
motion. Keep in mind, it was not a quest to
master specific body positions or sequences
of movement that are actually already more
natural than most of us realize. Most of all,
I’m glad I was able to help Abby finally kill
that snake in her pocket.
When Portyrata’s club gets level with the ground on the downswing,
it’s in the ideal position to set up for a solid strike.
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