I suppose that makes sense when you have to ice-pick your range balls free:

and when your backyard looks like this:

At first I was a bit dismayed by this as I was on a scoring streak, but then I realized that this is the perfect opportunity to step back and spend a couple of weeks working on my driver and hitting the gym.  I am still nowhere near where I want to be with the driver.

It’s pretty blatantly obvious when I do a TrackMan combine that I need to work on that stick.  Yesterday my total score was a 70.7, which isn’t bad, but without the driver part my score is about a 74, which doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a huge difference.  And, my driver score was 41, which is lower than what they say the average high handicap golfer should score.

To translate, I shoot just under the average college golfer with all distances except the driver, which is too erratic both on the range and course.  With that stick I was around where a 24-30 handicap golfer should score.

I have known this for a while and Bruce was getting me into the right positions and we were making progress, but I think that I spent a little too much time on the course lately and have reverted to some old habits.

Knowing that, I had a friend come help me yesterday who is familiar with my swing (and extremely knowledgeable about the golf swing in general) as well as what Bruce was wanting me to work on.  We shot some video and right off the bat he noticed that I had gone back to a handsy takeaway which was producing my old flat swing, which in turn was causing me to attack the ball way inside out so I was having to snap the face shut at impact in order to not hit a huge push slice.   It was a swing that produces a two-way miss:  I either snapped the face shut too much and hooked it or left it too open and pushed it.

Here is the before video:

We worked for a while on some takeaway drills and finding that one-piece move again that Bruce had me doing and then talked about how important it is to not play for a while and just work on getting this stick on plane.

When I got it back on plane it was so much easier to go after the ball and produced a great ball flight.  I was getting a couple more mph right away and by this time it was about 35 degrees out, so once the club is on plane and it’s warm enough to feel the fingers I think good things will come of this winter “break” from playing.

Here is after.  It’s perhaps hard to see in real time, but my arm angle has gone from 26 degrees to 40 at the top of the swing:

I’ll be on the course, for sure, but only to focus on the priority at hand which is to solidify this driver change before visiting Bruce in the desert and getting an earful from him about how it takes me longer to make a change than one of his 8-year-old students

I also talked with Goal Guru Stuart yesterday and he says that I need to do something transformative with my driving because I was not improving that club at the rate we had decided upon.  I hope that stopping in my tracks and grinding away at that one club will produce the transformative change that I need to make happen.  Now is the time and as long as the roads are open I will be up at the range grinding away.  Just have to remember to wear as many layers as possible..

For those of you not versed in this system, TrackMan is a ball flight monitor that is radar based to track both the club through impact and the ball flight.  I’ve had one for a while and use it to see what’s going on with my swing.  It helps me figure out  aspects of club path, face angle, attack angle, etc.  And, they have set up a “combine” that anyone in the world can use to test their current ball striking abilities compared to pros and top golfers across the globe.  This combine measure 60 shots from 60 yards to driver then gives you a score on how well you did according to proximity to the target in feet.  The current world record for this test is a 92.1 and there are a handful of PGA Tour players that have scored in the upper 80s to 90.  This pic shows some average scores according to different levels of golf player:

Here is today’s combine for an example of how my specific score breaks down:

Combine 11/25/2013

As you can see I was pretty solid in the short game, but left the door wide open for targets of 180 and driver.  I suppose this makes sense as the long game is what is killing me in my actual game and this got me thinking that I need to create my own test from 170-200 yards to see if I can improve upon these distances.  Luckily, this is possible in the software so I created my own distance test to see how I would perform and was pretty shocked by the results:

Dan’s distance test

These results brought some great realization to the table.  Obviously, I need to work on the long game both finding my distances as well as figuring out how to control the club face through the impact zone.  Everything was way inside to out which makes for intense misses when that face isn’t correct to the path.  I need to figure out how to get the club going more squarely through the impact zone in order to tighten up my left and right misses.

All of this was confirmed yesterday when I played my old home track, CECC, for the first time in 6 months.  A member invited me out and it was great to see everyone out there.  I had missed that place and was happy to return for the day.

I started out hitting good drives on the first five holes and had a bunch of tap in pars, one missed 5 footer that resulted in a bogey and one birdie to be even through 7.   After that I started having some big misses with the driver, two balls hooked and ended up just 100 yards off the tee in the trees and one sliced into water.   Each of those three times resulted in double bogeys.  I ended up shooting an 80 out there almost solely from big tee misses.  When I hit a fairway it was par or better.

My misses need to get tighter and using TrackMan’s Combine is a good way for me to focus on that with added pressure.  I’ll be spending quite a bit of time working through this over the next 5,300 hours

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make that trip feasible and having a place to crash for at least 3 weeks definitely makes the drive down worth it.

I also found out I have a cousin who is a PGA golf pro down there that I have not seen in about 25 years.  He has a family now with two boys and is the head PGA Pro of a course (leaving the name out for now as I don’t know if he wants me talking about it/him yet). It will be interesting to catch up and meet his family.  Who would have known that I had a family member in the golf business?!  I love it.

That’s the news for January 2014.  I will be down in Palm Spring and probably head out January 2nd from Portland, driving down there.  There is a long time reader of the blog, Mr. Crane, that I want to visit in Northern California along the way, and if anyone else is on the Portland-Palm Springs route please hit me up and let’s play 18.  I don’t want to dilly-dally for too long, but a couple of rounds on the road is a great way to break up a 20 hour drive.

Also, I just received confirmation that I have a Titleist fitting date on January 15 down in Oceanside.  Carlsbad/Oceanside is about 2 hours from the desert so will be a great day trip to see the guys in the fitting facility and have an updated club fitting.  As regular readers to this site know, I have been loving my Vokey Wedges and AP2 irons, but have struggled with the 3-wood and hybrid.  It will be extremely interesting to get their feedback on why I have been hitting it as I have.

Speaking of that, I have been working hard with my TrackMan lately to figure out why my misses are so askew.  The first thing that stood out when I had a driver session today was how far inside to out I have been swinging the club. A lot of people struggle with coming over the top in the golf swing, but for me, my big miss is when I come too far from the inside. I’m talking like 10-12 degrees from inside out.  When you do that and don’t have immaculate control of the club face you get a major two way miss.

Here is the link to today’s TrackMan session:  TrackMan driver and 7-iron link

One caveat:  My goal was to find club path and figure out how to better square up my path.  Also, I was working with limited-flight range balls hitting into the wind on a 47 degree day with 10mph winds directly into face.  So..  Don’t get hung up on distance or some-such.   The point of the session was to figure out how my club was going through the ball and work on that.

Through this session I learned a lot about what it felt like to get through square.  To me, it felt like I had to cut the stuffing out of the ball just to get the club path number to 0.  I was pretty shocked, but then again that’s golf.

I did have a major breakthrough once again while working through these swings.  I realized that what I needed to feel through my drive was a total different sensation in my entire body starting with my glutes.  I took this feeling out to the course and shot a 79 from the blue tees with a triple on the 12th hole at Riverside.  I still only hit 5 fairways, but that’s way more than I have been hitting lately and the ones I missed were when I lost my feel.

That brings me to the point that I want to investigate.  What is the best way to ingrain a feel into your game.  How do we forget something that we have done for so long and “know” the new aspect of our swing/game.  I want to know more about the science of learning and will be delving into this shortly.  Posts will come soon on what I find.

Cheers!

That’s just one shelf of about 8 this size dedicated to demo clubs.  It’s a good place to spend a few hours and they have about 20 TrackMan machines so the feedback is pretty straight forward.  If you are a righty you have unlimited choices.  But, even us lefties had an option in every “tour” and regular category.

I got there in the morning and the left-handed bay was open so I was able to get straight to work.  The guy helping me was nice and as soon as I warmed up it was game time.  I’ve been curious about this stick for a long time and wanted to see what the differences were between the brands.

First thing that stood out was length.  Not of the ball flight, but literally of the shaft length.  The standard length of the Adams, Ping and Titleist was about 1/2 to a full inch shorter than the Nike, which was itself 1/2 inch shorter than the TaylorMade.  TaylorMade have by far the longest shafts of any club that I have seen.  When I hit that one I had to grip up well down the shaft to be able to manipulate it like a normal hybrid. It felt more like a 3-wood in length and how the swing needed to be.

The Nike was actually the most forgiving club out of the bunch and I was pretty interested in how it was adjustable from 17-21 degrees.  That’s pretty awesome and could be used to your advantage depending on the course that you are playing.

To get started.  Here is a list of images. First is the screen capture for a decently hit shot via TrackMan and then the image of the club that produced that shot:

Titleist 913 Hd 20 degree:

Cobra set to 20 degree:

Ping Answer 20 degree:

TaylorMade RBZ Stage 2 Tour 18.5 degree:

Nike Covert Tour set to 19 degrees:

Adams Idea 20 degree:

That was the gist of the day. Total distance between all of the clubs was between 210-230, basically.  The biggest difference in carry numbers was the length of the shaft and strength of the face.  Spin was low on the Nike and pretty high on the Ping.  That’s just how it reacted for me.

That’s the biggest learning experience:  “how it reacted for me”.  All of the clubs had a pretty good feel and each had a similar stock stiff-flexed shaft which seemed to launch the ball at a similar height when gripped up to equalize the length of the shafts.

The funny thing was that I just couldn’t hit the Titleist.  I think it could easily be a mental thing, but the demo 913Hd 20 degree reacted a lot like mine does on the course.  I hit it how I think it should be hit and it ends up starting right and then drawing (I’m a lefty, so that’s a pull draw).  I didn’t have this problem with any of the other clubs, except perhaps the Ping.  When we looked at the TrackMan numbers my club path was 2.4 degrees from the inside out and the face was .4 degrees open.  That should have produced a very nice baby draw, but it was starting right and then hooking about 25 yards right of the target.  It wasn’t about where on the face I was hitting it, either as you can see from this pic:

I’m sure there is something that I am doing wrong, but I can’t figure it out, so am going to head back in the next few days and pick up a different hybrid to experiment with on course.  I’m leaning towards the adjustable Nike and the solid feeling Cobra.  Will post about it when I put something new in my bag.

This is just the beginning.  Clubs can be adjusted and fit and there is a lot more to learn with the hybrids.  I wish I had coach Bruce with me for this experiment, but he is in Palm Desert so I had to surmise what I could from the numbers alone.

Much more to be posted on this pursuit soon.

Check it out:

I have also made a backyard driving range that I have found to be both convenient and a wonderful way to eliminate outcome from practice and get more process oriented.  When you are on a range it is so tempting to obsess over the ball flight which can be a good thing as you can learn a ton about your swing based on the ball flight, but when you want to work on one or two very specific aspects sometimes too much external stimulus can be a negative.

Here is a video of the setup I have going on right now:

Utilizing the awesome resource that is TrackMan I can pinpoint one part of the swing at a time to focus on and practice.  For this session, I was trying to figure out what it felt like to not shut the face at impact.  Since making some swing changes with Bruce Furman I have had a tendency to do everything correct except to still flip my wrists at impact, which is something I used to have to do to square up the face.  Now that I am keeping the club on plane I no longer need that correction in my swing and need to establish a new feel.  By hitting into a net I can focus solely on that feel.

It’s not exactly a world class range, but when in need the backyard can make a great practice spot.

For the next three weeks I will have to find a new routine.  I’ve gotten pretty spoiled in the past two years by having access to a wonderful practice facility and now will have to alter my day-to-day activities.  To be honest, I am not sure where I will be practicing, but I do know that I will be varying my location which is a good thing as far as learning is concerned.  Over the past few days I have practiced/played on 5 different courses and learned something new from each of them.

The courses around town are quite pretty too.  Here are a couple shots from Heron Lakes:

So much good golf in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ll be working my hardest to get a solid letter to CECC’s Board for their late June meeting, but in the meantime let me know if anyone is around Portland and wants to practice or tee it up at one of the courses around town.

This scene is going to be very common now that the weather has turned in Portland:

For the past couple of months every day that I wanted to get the unit out it seemed to start raining just before setting up, but the next ten days here look clear and after that we are approaching the Portland summer which is an amazing time of year and perfect for bringing out a ball flight monitor and laptop.  Since January, when I wanted to use the TrackMan I went down to Trails End driving range and hit off the mats as the range is covered from the elements.  Now, though, I can start collecting data based on hitting off of grass, which is ideal for really understanding your impact zone and ball flight numbers.

Over the past month I have been collecting data with the PW, 5-iron and driver to send to Dr. K Anders Ericsson in order to better understand the current state of my swing, which we are deeming as the “base level.”  What they surmise from this base level will help determine what aspects of the swing that I need to focus on in the immediate future as well as down the road.  Anders and his associates are not experts on the golf swing and are not offering swing advice, rather he and his associate Len are exploring the data looking for consistency issues in the swing.  For example, if they see that my PW has an average variance of 25 feet from the designated target and the PGA Tour average variance with that stick is 8 feet we look at the club variables to see if there is one blaring aspect causing this variability and then I can break down that number with my coach to figure out what I need to change in order to create a more consistent swing.

The goal of this will be to shore up the inconsistencies and get my swing into an appropriate, or PGA Tour level, groove where my average distance from target with each club is at the appropriate level.

I collect data both randomly and in a blocked format.  On day one I hit 10 PW, 10 5-iron and 10 drivers all in a row and save that spread sheet.  Day two I hit 10 of each club but run through them in a random order.  I have been switching these styles of days to gather more information for them to analyze and am not sure what will come out of it, but will definitely post any results that they find.  The idea is to change up my routine so as to not turn into too much of a range robot.

Because of the wonderful amount of data that TrackMan collects we can analyze a huge number of different parts of my swing to figure out what is causing the flaws.  If you look at the data sheets like this one from a couple weeks ago: http://thedanplan.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Dan-Plan-2013-04-21-Multi-Group-Report.pdf you can see how it would be possible to break the numbers down into countless subgroups to better understand what is going on with the golf swing.  It’s possible to paint a brilliant picture of someone’s swing without filming it at all, rather through understanding how it is impacting the ball.

Another fun aspect of gathering data is that once my new clubs are here and broken in we can see how the numbers change from the data that I am collecting right now.  It will be absolutely fascinating to see if/how the Titleists differ from the Nikes.

TrackMan is a powerful piece of equipment and the more I use it the more I realize that I have just begun to scratch the surface of how it is going to play a huge part in making me the best golfer that I can possibly be.

If you have never used one, I would encourage you to find one in your area and give it a test run.  I will be posting new data soon and once Dr. Ericsson and Len have had time to break down my base line swing I will definitely post their findings.  Together we are going to help shed some light on what can literally help improve my game and, in turn, help any golfer who wants to break through to the next level.  That is the goal and that is what I hope comes from these sessions.