Golf Lesson 5: Get the core activated and starting to get proper wrist movement
In between lesson 4 and lesson 5, I played a few rounds of golf and felt like even by minimizing my weight shift backward and implementing my full turn in the swing that the quality of shots I was hitting off the tee and with my irons improved. I played three times in between lessons. The first time I struggled with setting towards the front foot in my backswing and was a mess. In the next two rounds, I focused on not shifting weight back and other things and scrapped the setting of the body weight on the course, and kept trying to work on it in practice.
By the time I got to my lesson, I felt pretty good about the rounds I had played but was very frustrated about that setting motion. We talked about it and wanted to take a different approach. We talked about what my belly button was doing and having that move forward and attempting to point to my left at the end of the swing.
Thinking about my belly button got me out of the headspace of thinking about that forward-setting motion I had become preoccupied with. This also made me improve the timing of the weight shift forward because it naturally will pull you in that direction as you move your belly button through.
One thing I didn’t foresee was how much I could feel this in my core and how tired it made me feel. I was not activating pretty much the most important muscle group in most sports through my swing. That woke me up to realize how much I have been using my arms throughout my swing.
The other movement we focused on during this lesson was getting my wrist forward and beginning to lag instead of forcing my arms through. This was accomplished with a drill of me leaning forward and swinging down on the ball to compress it, not in a chopping motion but by pulling my arms through.
The idea was to work on these two drills rotating between the two to put both together eventually.