Driver woes!!

Hey Shamed:

One thing that I do not see discussed much on this forum that may help you is working on a solid and well balanced finish position.

This is especially helpfull with the driver swing because it is the longest swing you make with the longest (hopefully not just club length) club in the bag.

A full and balanced finish position has most (95%) of your weight on your left foot and the right toe being used just for balance. The club should be fully around your back with the right shoulder facing at or even left of your target. Your back will have rotated to a position where it is about 45% from your target line. This means you have turned your shoulders almost 270% from the top of backswing position. Take a look at Michell Wei or Tiger to see this full release. You may not be able to acheive quite as dramatic of a wrapped around look but hopefully you see the general idea here.

To achieve this type of finish position you must be supple through your swing with the arms, shoulders and torso. You generate the initial momentum from the top of backswing with your legs and hips and when the club is roughly at parallel to the ground on the downswing you agressively rotate through the ball with the shoulders then the arms, wrists and finally clubhead. I feel like I am flipping positions of my shoulders from the adress position to the finish. The right ends up where the left was and the left where the right was. In the finish I know if i've acheived a nice full swing by two simple indicators. My belt buckle faces left of my target and I am balanced and can hold the position as long as I'd like. Another key that I feel is that I am hitting the ball with my right shoulder, lat and torso muscles. To acheive this feel you have to make sure the right shoulder is dropping down before out to the the target. If you rotate aggresively as I stated you will be moving your left shoulder out of the way to allow the right side to move through to the target. If you maintain a light to moderate grip pressure, you will create great lag with this method.

Often pull shots and pull hooks can happen when we stop rotating at impact. This is due in large part, I believe, to the hit impulse which seems to be the worst with the driver. Before you swing with the driver, take just a moment to visualise a full swing and really focus on the balance and release with a great looking pose. Then take a practice swing recreating that feel and notice how your arms, shoulders and wrists remain supple for this to happen. You may in fact already have this feel when taking casual practice swings at the ground with absolutely nothing at stake. The tough part is recreating that languid feel during the actual swing for sure. You can aid this process by using the tips I suggest and I got those from reading Jack Nicklaus's method .....

Good luck,
Tim

Thanks for all the tips and advice...I have deff. turned my driver swing around. My buddies say it looks perfect, although prob far from that its deff giving me great results. I played 36 holes this weekend and out of the 21 that i used driver i hit fairway 18 times. My avg drive over the weekend was approx. 280 and I smashed one out to 330 yds, (slight downhill roll of ~30yds), another i paced out to be exactly 300, and another im not sure of the net total because i crushed it into a lake thats 310 from the box. One problem i had was to much focus on the driver last week and not enough on irons...this week I will balance my practices so I will be strong with both aspects.

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