I’ve been taking Golftec lessons again and trying to play a bit more. Recently we’ve focused on getting the club less steep (more around my body) on my backswing. It’s been a struggle and I haven’t felt like I’ve been able to hit it very well with the new move. Today made a lot more sense of it when we worked on my hip and shoulder turn.

I have a big shoulder turn — actually quite a bit too big according to the Golftec target data — and part of that is because I also have a big hip turn. Combined, that makes for a long swing which makes it harder to get back to impact well. Here’s a quick before swing.

Before

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My hips get very closed and with a bit turn on top of that my shoulders are actually past 110 degrees closed at the top of my backswing. What actually creates most of the power in a golf swing is the difference between your hip and shoulder turn. We worked on maintaining that difference but getting both numbers lower. The goal was to make my swing shorter overall but keep the big coil in my backswing and keep the club in a good place without getting too far across the line at the top.

After a few drills to keep my lower body quieter the results were pretty obvious. My swing is clearly much shorter, and I hit almost every ball dead center which was clear feedback to me that as my swing gets longer I have a really hard time keeping everything in line through impact. You can actually see one of the drills in the “after” swing in this video. My instructor held a club between my knees so that I couldn’t rotate (much) against it. This felt awkward, but again, the feedback was pretty clear that I hit it great with the more compact move.

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Despite lots of travel, I’ve squeezed five GolfTec lessons into the last three weeks, with a round at Half Moon Bay Old Course in the middle. Progress is great and my ball striking is improving dramatically — two birdies, lots of good swings and just a few loose ones — and I’m feeling good heading into The Annual.

The lessons have been pretty consistently focused on getting my club on plane and shortening my swing. We worked a lot on “getting to impact faster,” which meant both speeding up my tempo and abbreviating my backswing. The result is a swing the is a lot simpler than what I started with — looking at it, it’s hard to believe that I’m hitting the ball as far, if not further than before, given how little motion there is.

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Since my last trip to GolfTech was technically a swing evaluation session rather than a lesson, today was my first lesson.

Last time we worked mostly on my takeaway, getting my shoulders controlling my swing rather than my arms and decreasing the angle in my wrists.

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Today still focused mostly on takeaway, but on my swing plane and keeping the club face square through most of my swing rather than opening it and flipping it shut at impact.

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A couple weeks ago Nick Momrik introduced me to GolfTec, a data-heavy golf teaching company. Last week I took my first lesson (technically a swing evaluation) and it was great. I’ve been wanting to take some golf lessons for a while but hesitated because I didn’t want to just randomly pick an instructor. GolfTec appealed to me because of how committed they are to using analytics. Also, you get a ton of materials from your lessons to go over at home…as you’re about to see.

First, the “before” swing with a 6 iron:

Swing (Before)

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