Diary of PGA Seniors’ Championship by Kitchenaid - Lessons to be Learnt
The lesson to be learnt is that no golfer - champion to child - knows which swing positions are IDEAL for an IDEAL IMPACT (ie maximum distance, straight direction, correct trajectory).
What top-of-backswing positions WOULD be IDEAL? Those which allow the left side (for a right handed golfer) to be higher than the right at impact, with the shoulders square. Why? So the LEFT ARM can be the radius of the swing, (with the body-weight at the ball and moving forward). That is THE SIGN that the club arrived from the inside and can maximally compress the ball.
Of course, golfer-kind has found all sorts of manipulations or compensations to somehow arrive at the ball from the inside with maximum speed, but those manipulations/compensations take years and years to groove in, and even then, fail when a golfer is under pressure and mis-times the downswing.
The MAIN problem arises when we try to ROTATE the body (like a merry-go-round) and move the arms UP-AND-DOWN (like a ferris wheel) AT THE SAME TIME. We end up doing NEITHER CORRECTLY.
MANY BODY PARTS (shoulders, elbows, forearms, wrists, hips, knees, ankles) get into awkward positions from which they INTERFERE with the LEFT ARM’s JOB of being RADIUS OF SWING, AT IMPACT.
The slo-mo video below of Hale Irwin, Jay Haas, Peter Jacobsen, Bernhard Langer, Dick Mast and Curtis Strange describes which body-part positions at top-of-backswing can be termed ‘awkward’ and would prevent a SYNCHRONIZED DOWNSWING MOVE. See for yourself which golfer has which body parts not quite perfectly ‘aligned’.
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2vJeND7Od4[/embed]
[Note: the information on this blog is based on 18 years of research; an educational background in anatomy, biomechanics, physics; plus twenty five years of working with every skill level of golfer.]