Shoulder Turn Range Of Motion
Ok, this post so that I can sleep tonight — get these thoughts out of my brain.
Just played nine holes and it took until the 9th to finally resolve what I had been talking about with the last entry and the left shoulder being more active.
What I realized is that after all this time denying that such a thing as “spinning out” could be a problem, I now believe I was sort of doing just that. Here’s my explanation:
Stand very square to your target, making sure your hips, feet, and shoulders are perfectly square. Next keep everything from moving except rotate your shoulders towards the target as far as they go (don’t let your hips budge, or anything else change.) When I do that I feel some tension on my left side of my lower back. When I reach the end of my range of movement, I can hold myself there with my core muscles. Now here’s the trick — I believe that the end of range of what you can do with your muscles should occur at or perhaps slightly before impact. But where you are standing now probably doesn’t feel like impact. Your hands are probably over your left toes and you are turned closed to the target line. Well, staying in that position, bring your right elbow so that it’s close to the left elbow and in front of your body, without moving your hands. You should be able to re-square your shoulders up to the target even though your torso is still holding this fully shoulder turned position (your core muscles may be feeling it now). You should be able to find an impact position, probably different than what you are used to — perhaps it’s more forward in your stance.
So, the first question I had when this occurred to me was “well if I’ve hit the end of my range of motion, then what about my follow through?” Well, the answer to that is that at high speed the hips will open and then the club and your arms will shoot almost straight up, like you were going to fling your club over your back, though you’d be now oriented right at the target for a really high finish (not a horizontal around the head finish). The second question I had was “what about my hips? aren’t they supposed to be also used for generating power? I haven’t used them to get into this impact position have I?” My answer to that goes directly back to Hogan’s book. He very specifically said the left hip goes straight back like an elastic band was attached to it. He never said anything about spinning or sliding like so many people suggest, and this makes perfect sense. At the top of the backswing, the left hip moves closer to the target line (parallel to the shot line), and on the down swing it pulls straight back, but not so that it spins out, just so that it gets out of the way so you can get into the impact position described above.
Anyway, this is all pretty raw but it provided me some pretty spectacular results right on the golf course, so it’s already somewhat acid tested. More in the next few days.
