We started to make some real progress with lesson #4. Patrick was pleased with my backswing so we started a very brief conversation about the downswing. I was to continue to work on completing the backswing but the idea of the downswing would be important moving forward.
In essence, the downswing is squeezing your right obliques and allowing your right shoulder to fall down to your right hip. Wow, is this hard. For someone that has thrown the club at the ball from an over the top position for over five years, it is nearly impossible to think that I should use my obliques to start my downswing. Who does this?!
I briefly asked about hands and arms and Patrick explained that we work away from the core of the body. The hands and arms are the furthest thing away from the core, which creates the speed of the golf swing, so we will address those last. It is interesting that he hasn’t talked about grip or hands at all as most coaches or golf instructors want to address that first.
The good news is that we are now going to speed up the process with two lessons a week.
UPDATE: We are now 103 lessons in and we still talk very little about the hands and arms. In fact, we never talk about the hands and we only briefly touch on the arms less than 5% of the time. It is interesting that I explained it as squeezing my right obliques which then allows the right shoulder to fall behind the right hip. While it is that easy, it is not that easy.
Also of importance is the fact that working on my backswing back then had absolutely nothing to do with my lower body or keeping my spine angle or hips stable. I cannot even imagine how bad my shoulder turn was when I first started this adventure. It is still very short because my hips aren’t flexible but it is significantly deeper than it was.
