I was going to make it a pdf download and ask people to contribute what they thought it was worth, but I thought if I put the book up on Amazon’s website it would be better formatted for all types of digital readers.  If this doesn’t work after a couple of months I may put a link to the pdf up as well, but for the time being please think about supporting The Dan Plan by purchasing the book here:

Amazon Unites States:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MTC0NJA

Amazon UK:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MTC0NJA?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Amazon Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00MTC0NJA

Amazon Germany: http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00MTC0NJA?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Amazon Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/B00MTC0NJA?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

And most any other country, email me if you want a specific link or search for “The Dan Plan”.

I wish to apologize in advance as a few external links did not translate to this format.  One of the most blaring absences are videos.  On a few occasions I talk about watching a video and it’s just a blank on the page.  Outside of that the content is whole.  I edited out about one third of the posts but there is still quite a bit of content, too much in a lot of ways.  Down the road at some point I will have a professional editor (or a well versed friend, or myself when the amount of time in a day magically doubles) take a gander at the content and polish it up.  For now, this is the story, more or less, word for word from the beginning.  I hope you enjoy and get some value out of the content.

For every book purchased from Amazon almost $5 goes to The Dan Plan.  Thank you for reading and please help spread the word to anyone potentially interested in seeing what it takes to make such a drastic change in one’s life.

Cheers!

So cool.  The certification test was much harder than I thought and took me about an hour to answer 20 questions.  The test covered everything from diagnosing potential swing faults by watching videos of golfer’s swings to describing what potential swing characteristic someone may have based on physical limitations and how to improve upon those physical aspects.  After reading through the 220+ page manual a couple of times this past week I feel that I have a much firmer understanding of swing mechanics as well as new ways to improve upon my own swing.

I am getting a bit tired of hearing myself talk about golf specific swing stuff so won’t go into too much detail, but the biggest weakness that I see in myself is my right glute muscle not firing enough to post up properly late in the round.  It gets fatigued and I start losing posture while finishing my swing.  Knowing this and how to strengthen the muscle helps me become better at finishing rounds.  There’s nothing worse than playing 14 good holes just to fall apart at the end and the cause of this is usually either mental or physical fatigue (or in a lot of cases a bit too much beer  I’m safe from that syndrome, though, as I don’t drink at all).

If you don’t know the cause you can’t figure out how to fix it.  TPI addresses the physical swing and helps golfers pinpoint specifics to work on.  If you are around Portland I would love to get some practice in and do some free TPI Screenings.  Let me know and we can meet up at Heron or somewhere around town.  I’m new at this so it may take a little while to do one, but if you are willing to work with me we can figure out how to help you improve.

Speaking of improving, I had another lesson with Bruce Furman yesterday and it was an awesome one.  We have been focussing on the takeaway for a couple weeks now and it is looking better.  The next step is getting my head to move away with the backswing a bit during driver swings.  And, I am going to focus on building some swing speed.

For swing speed I am going to do a drill that the TPI guys told me during the two-day seminar in Seattle.  I asked TPI’s Lance Gill what was a good way to gain some speed and he told me to get a heavier driver and a lighter one.  Swing the heavy one ten times as hard as I can, then do that with the lighter driver and finish the drill with ten full swings with my gamer.  The heavy driver builds power, the light one speed and then your gamer translates those into your actual swing.

I have done that for a couple of days as well as some Jane Fonda-esque glute exercises.  I’ll stick to this routine for the next couple of weeks and see if there are any number changes on TrackMan.  Right now my driver is about 105-107mph when I go at it pretty decently.  That needs to be about 112 to really compete.

I suppose I ended up talking about my swing again   I promise that there is more to this than golf mechanics and will have some good juicy personal blogs soon.

There is so much happening with The Dan Plan at the moment, but all of it is up in the air.   Instead of talking about potentials I want to wait until things get concreted.  Soon there will be some big news.

At this point, I do not want to write a final Thank You blog post as I hope that this is just a speed bump rather than a final goodbye so will hold off on finalities.  But, if they choose to not renew my membership then I will have a lot to write about as so much of my golfing life (2/3) has taken place there and it will be hard to part ways.  I love CECC and have met countless friends while putting in about 3,000 training hours over the past two years.  More about that to come soon regardless of the decision.  I believe that a final answer will arrive in about two weeks.

Just because my home changes, doesn’t mean that anything else has to.  I will keep grinding away either at Heron Lakes or one of the other great municipal courses around town and be spending at least one day a week with my swing coach, Bruce, down at Langdon Farms.

Heron is a great option with two different courses that offer very different styles of golf.  It’s quite beautiful too.  Here are a couple of shots from the Great Blue course.  It’s rated 73.2 140 from the tips, so definitely a challenge:

I am officially TPI Certified now!

So cool.  The certification test was much harder than I thought and took me about an hour to answer 20 questions.  The test covered everything from diagnosing potential swing faults by watching videos of golfer’s swings to describing what potential swing characteristic someone may have based on physical limitations and how to improve upon those physical aspects.  After reading through the 220+ page manual a couple of times this past week I feel that I have a much firmer understanding of swing mechanics as well as new ways to improve upon my own swing.

I am getting a bit tired of hearing myself talk about golf specific swing stuff so won’t go into too much detail, but the biggest weakness that I see in myself is my right glute muscle not firing enough to post up properly late in the round.  It gets fatigued and I start losing posture while finishing my swing.  Knowing this and how to strengthen the muscle helps me become better at finishing rounds.  There’s nothing worse than playing 14 good holes just to fall apart at the end and the cause of this is usually either mental or physical fatigue (or in a lot of cases a bit too much beer  I’m safe from that syndrome, though, as I don’t drink at all).

If you don’t know the cause you can’t figure out how to fix it.  TPI addresses the physical swing and helps golfers pinpoint specifics to work on.  If you are around Portland I would love to get some practice in and do some free TPI Screenings.  Let me know and we can meet up at Heron or somewhere around town.  I’m new at this so it may take a little while to do one, but if you are willing to work with me we can figure out how to help you improve.

Off to Langdon for my next swing lesson.  It’s just over a month into the change process and I am starting to better understand what it should feel like.  I played 36 at Heron yesterday and shot 80-80 on the two courses.  A lot of the misses were club face at this point, I haven’t been hitting it fat in a couple days; definitely a sign of progress.