Lesson 3 and Lesson 4: Wrist of Woes, Tempo, and Chipping
Scooping is continuing to be a problem
I’ve mentioned before that I tend to scoop the ball; I know in my head that using my wrist is important, but I used my wrist incorrectly. Scooping leads to inconsistent contact and it also doesn’t properly allow me to compress the ball. Not activating my lower body is probably my consistent number one sin (well on the golf course) followed closely by scooping the ball.
We have been working on getting my wrist activated properly in my golf swing and having it flat in the swing. Part of it is how I swing through the ball and the other part is how I activate the wrist in the backswing.
Also, part of the third lesson was talking about my tempo. I often swing “quick”. There are different thoughts on tempo, traditionally a lot of people think it should be a 3:1, a count of three and then one through the ball. In discussing tempo with my instructor and how I swing we landed that I am more of a 2:1 type of guy.
While some of the things I have been taught have been hard to apply or take, tempo by far has been the thing that I have been able to apply right away where I have seen immediate improvement. Also, it gives me something to always think about when making my swing, “one, two, one” instead of “don’t hit this right” or some other negative swing thought that pops into my head.
I am going to blend lesson four into this as well because it was kind of recapping what I have done previously to bring everything together and we started to work on chipping. Guess what came up when we started to look at how I chipped? Scooping with my wrist.
We basically stripped chipping down to the purest form: ball in the back of the stance, weight forward, rotation through the ball, tempo… It’s the area of my game that needs the most work so boiling it down to the basics is the right start and has already been paying off.