The New Road

Trying the get the consistency down

I'm working on getting a consistent swing and result down with the whole golf thing. So basically I'm taking a single club, like the 7 iron or 5 iron, and if I can take a bucket of balls (around 40) and hit at least 35 of them pretty much straight and to distance then I move on to the next club and so on.

So here are my learnings of late. First, speed, not so important. Except when you go too fast. Which is easy since we all watch Tiger and his 112 MPH swing, which in turn generates 180 at the club face. Woo hoo! (BTW, he has been doing this since he was 6 pretty much continually. He could sleepwalk a scratch game at TPC Sawgrass too!)

Anyway, so the whole speed thing, turns out that my ideal controllable speed is just above the speed at which I used to pitch. Which is way, way, way, lower than I thought I had to swing it. Which is cool because it's not as much effort, thus not so much joint and muscle pain, woo hoo! I can do a really easy swing and get the 5 iron between 180 and 200. Nice.

Ok, second big thing I learned this week was posture. I was really bent over into the ball which made the whole mechanics of the swing really goofy. Fixed that. Check.

The third thing was getting my left arm shotgun straight on the setup. And that seems to have done a miracle job on my consistency as well.

Anyway, long and short of it, feeling really good about where my irons are right now. Next step is to get into the hybrids and the drivers.

Is it just me or do drivers freak everyone out? I mean, come on, it's the hardest club to hit in your bag. It's the one shot that starts off all of the others. And you do it all alone after making this long walk to the tee box with everyone looking at you. That gets my heart racing every damn time. Makes me want to take out a 4 iron that I can hit pretty dependably, hit it 210 straight and give up the extra 30 yards.