Winter golf plans beginning to concrete

I heard from a friend yesterday who works/practices in Palm Springs from December to January who said he has an extra room for me for the first 3 weeks in January. This is awesome news as it gives me a temporary home base down in the desert where I can work with coach Bruce as well as try out desert golf for the first time.

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!

7 Responses to "Winter golf plans beginning to concrete"

Juan Carlos Munoz says:

November 19, 2013 at 8:45 pm

Hey, if you ever want to head south of the border and continue down, please come and visit Guatemala “the land of the eternal spring” great weather and great golf and you have a place to stay. Keep on going and the good work !
tRichard Chen says:

November 20, 2013 at 7:29 am

Without seeing the actual swing, some factors to check over to improve driver accuracy are:

(1) Hands even with the back of the ball at impact for the driver, rather than hands in front of the ball at impact as for iron and for fairway wood shots. This gives the driver clubhead a chance to flatten out on the bottom part of the swing arc after traveling on the decending part of the swing arc.

(2) Visulize guide lines to swing the clubhead on path. Nicklaus in his video Golf My Way shows visulizing the drawing of a line from the ball to the ball landing point way down the fairway. He then select a point a few feet just in front of the ball along the visulized line as a target to swing the clubhead to and over. Similar to Nelson saying to swing the clubhead not only just to the ball, but swing the clubhead all the way to a precise target point far down the fairway. Names printed on balls can be set up on the tee as guide lines for swing path on impact, as well as for clubface angle at impact.
Richard Chen says:

November 21, 2013 at 7:47 am

The feeling for iron shots is to pull the iron clubhead into the ball (and beyond to the target) with the hands way in front of the ball at impact with a lot of weight shift to the leading foot accomplished by the delayed hit. The feeling for the driver is more on pressing the clubhead into the back of the ball with the hands staying behind the ball (a little at least) to press, and to drive the ball forward. At setup, imagine compressing the back of the ball an eighth to a quarter inch inwards lIike in those slow motion pictures of ball impact. The hands will tend to automatically stay behind thje ball to perform the ball pressing action.
Johnny says:

November 21, 2013 at 1:27 pm

How, are why, has your average driving distance dropped by 30 – 35 yards since January 2013?
Dave says:

November 22, 2013 at 1:38 am

Hey Dan. Keenly following your posts from Australia. My favourite blog. Very keen to hear your thoughts on the learning process. Also how to “unlearn”. Any more posts on effective practice sessions.

Keep it up.

Dave
Sima says:

November 22, 2013 at 7:57 pm

Dan,

Until very recently I was very sure it was important never to practise your mistakes. After all, you don’t want to ingrain bad habits, right? But I think this might have blinded me to something potentially useful.

If, when you’re typing, you’re forever accidentally typing ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’, a possible cure is to try forcing yourself to type ‘teh’ a few times, at least. It’s actually quite hard to do, and you kind of have to try. When you then revert to typing normally, you tend to find that incidences of ‘teh’ fall off.

Strangely, this seems quite a good way of forgetting.

I know you’ve talked about recognising what what’s going on with some of your errors, but I don’t remember whether you’ve mentioned actually trying to reproduce them. I know some people are afraid to try this sort of thing, for fear that it will become habit, but I think that’s a mistake. As you know well enough, making deliberate long-term changes to your basic swing can be very difficult indeed.

If you’re hitting a mixture of hooks and blocks, how about setting up on the range, aligning yourself straight at a normal target, and then picking a target around the place that your blocks tend to go? Try to produce ten ‘good’ blocks at that target. Despite the number of balls that fly out there when you don’t want them to, it might prove rather harder to do when you really try. Then, when you revert to just trying to hit up the middle, at your ‘proper’ target, you might just remember how easy it is.

If you have trackman set up, it might give you an interesting insight at the end of the session, but I’d be inclined to focus what you see and feel whilst you’re actually on the range. You could also factor in some deliberate hooks, but you’d have to be clear about when you’re going to hit at which target, and when it might be best to revert to your proper target. It might be better to keep things simple.

Still rootin for you, Dan. If you’ve tried something like this before, or try in the coming weeks, I’d be very interested to know.
Constantine says:

August 2, 2023 at 10:35 am

I guess I had stopped reading most of the blog by this point, and I didn’t realize how much this was all trending up here. You were definitely doing the right things, reading Trackman, scheduling more time with your coach, etc. So unlucky how it ended. Loved this post though.

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