First lesson of the season!

[MsWalkrOfSky]

I had my first lesson of the season today. It's always disheartening to hear that you've managed to bork your grip for months. When I had my first lesson, I had a very in the palm grip. Over the winter, I lost my bead on where I was supposed to be gripping and had the club entirely in my fingers of my left hand. It was forcing me to work my wrist quite hard to get square at impact. Just the grip change alone fixed a lot of my issues, but I feel like I'll have to re-learn some clubs all over again.

My coach had three drills that I'm going to be working on at the range:

The first is a body power drill, where you hit balls without allowing yourself to take the club above the waist as hard as you can. This is to focus on the fact that power is coming from the body, not the arms. Hitting these can feel weird, and the goal is to really not take it too far back. It might have even been slightly under waist level.

The second is a drill that forces you to keep your right shoulder down instead of standing up on the ball. You put your left hand at the very bottom of your grip, and the right hand then grabs the club shaft. This really forces you to keep your shoulder down to make contact. This is done with a full swing.

The third drill was a wedge drill. I used my pitching wedge. He picked out a target about 40 to 50 yards away, and had us focus on maintaining forward shaft lean. The ball should be coming out relatively low and fast. I found that for me, squeezing my core gently as I initiated the swing helped a lot with keeping my forward lean position through the downswing. This was taken at a little under a half swing for me with the pwedge, and about a 3/4 swing for my sw.

Another big part of my lesson was working on driving. I have a very bad habit of coming down at the ball, causing a slice. My coach is working with me to get the motion to be more of an in-to-out draw motion. He put an alignment stick for my feet, another going diagonally to the right where the tee was, and a third planted in the ground where if I came over the top and outside to inside, I'd hit the stick. I managed to not hit the stick the whole time!

Our warmup drill was rather fun and worth trying if you haven't. Place an alignment stick for your feet aimed a target out on the range. Then, walk about 8 feet in front of where you put the alignment stick and plan another in the ground. Make sure it is exactly on the path between the one on the ground and the target. Then, try to hit balls that start right of the stick, but end at the target on the range. We did this with a half swing, to really focus on club path. We also did this with the body power drill.

Edited May 12, 2023 by MsWalkrOfSky