Lesson 4 - Lessons Learned

NOTE: The information below is specific to my golf swing and is not intended to be a lesson plan for you. If you are working on your swing, I highly recommend signing up for private lessons with a golf pro. Yes, I would highly recommend GolfTEC.

How exciting! I got my shoulder turn level in the past couple weeks and I'm pretty consistent now. Tim was very impressed at how quickly I was able to progress with that. What he doesn't know is that I worked really hard to making that happen. Lots of practice.

Because I had made so much progress, Tim decided it was time to move onto my backswing. I was very ready for this. This has been on my mind for some time now. Look at this video of my swing before we worked on it. Notice at the top of my swing my clubhead is pointed to the right. In fact, my entire backswing up to the top of the swing is pretty sloppy:

Tim had me start with the takeaway. As you can see from this picture, my takeaway was way off from the get-go.




And at the peak of my swing, I was all over the place:



What Tim had me focus on was keeping my left arm and club shaft parallel to my toeline (checkpoint 1).



The next step was the peak of my swing. I tend to turn my shoulders a little too much and really wind up before the downswing. To work on this, Tim recommended that I keep the butt of the club pointed at the target line (checkpoint 2). My left arm should be parallel with my shoulders and my hands should be in front of the right shoulder (checkpoint 3). Finally, I need to work on keeping my wrist flat and not cocking it (checkpoint 4). All this may sound easy, but it really does require me watching myself on video to make sure I'm doing it correctly.



At the end of all these changes my backswing looked great! Check it out.