Season Kick-Off Lesson With Jack
I consider my lesson with Jack Lumpkin yesterday to be the unofficial start of my season. I started practicing “for real” about 3 weeks ago down in West Palm Beach, FL. Over the last week, I took a few videos of my swing and saw some familiar tendencies in my lower body stability. I worked on this for a few days prior to the lesson.
Jack agreed that I needed to keep working on my lower body stability. Specifically, I need to keep my right knee from moving too laterally and maintain a consistent flex in my backswing. On the downswing I need to turn onto a “posted up” left leg by moving my weight toward my left heal.
In a case of “chicken or the egg”, I also need to swing my left arm lower and more around my body after impact. This is easier to do when my weight moves properly on the downswing. Swinging my left arm lower and more around also makes it easier to move my weight properly on the downswing. It seems that, like many things in the golf swing, these two aspects are tightly related. Once he showed me where I need to be it wasn’t very difficult to get there.
Finally, he noticed that I was changing my grip a bit stronger right before I began my backswing. He was OK with my grip either way…pre or post-move. We settled on the slightly stronger grip because we felt like it would promote the lower body movement and arm swing that we were working on.
On to putting. I told Jack that I was very happy with my full swing progress in 2006 and moderately happy with my putting. I felt like I putted better overall in 2006 than I had the previous two years, but that it was still not “there” every week. I had a few weeks where I felt like I was stroking it well and would make everything. The majority of the time I felt like my putting was only good and that I was almost “holding it together”. I believe this season can be something special with the really great putting every week that I know I am capable of.
So, we took some video and talked about it for a while. Jack identified that my hands were hanging slightly inside my shoulders making it difficult for me to make a naturally straight stroke. I was slightly outside-to-outside and had to hold the face square at impact. By getting a bit more bent over and keeping my upper arms close to my torso I was able to correct this and make a more natural stroke. However, with a 33 inch putter, I was getting very bent at the waist. Jack had me putt with a 35 inch putter that was more upright and my stroke looked even better. It was much easier to get my upper arms close to and in sync with my torso while maintaining a more athletic posture. This also caused my hands to hang right below my shoulders.
I came away from this with two prescriptions. First, I am building a new putter at 35.25 inches and a 71 degree lie angle. This is 2.25 inches longer than my current putter and a few degrees more upright. This will help me to achieve the second prescription - keeping my arms close to and in sync with my torso and my hands below my shoulders.
Overall, this was another great lesson with Jack. I felt like I was hitting it and putting it about as well as I have in a while.