Hammering Nails
Watching swing videos on YouTube to help you correct your swing might be the worst idea ever if you’re actually trying to improve your swing. That never stops me from consuming hours and hours of video content from golf pros on tips and tricks to create the best top position, wrist angle, hip rotation, weight distribution etc. If you’re anything like me, you watch these videos and then go try it out on the range and amazingly you can’t make contact with the ball like the golf pro on YouTube. Who would have thought. I don’t think you can cheat a golf lesson. When you’re with a person who knows what they’re doing, they may give you the same kind of advice you would see on a YouTube video but obviously if you make a mistake along the way they can correct you and you can improve. Otherwise, you just go out there with this newfound advice and hack away like a lunatic, make solid contact once, think you have it figured out, then go shoot a 98. Not at all speaking from personal experience.
Recently I have been listening to a podcast called “Chasing Scratch” at the recommendation of my cousin who I often play most of my golf with. I have been consuming this podcast like a madman. It’s hosted by two guys who are 11 handicaps and wonder if they can bring those handicap index’s down to scratch in a year, without completely abandoning their families and responsibilities of everyday life. Very highly recommended podcast, if you haven’t yet listened, give it a try. Obviously these two guys do just about everything they can to better their average scores, meet with pros for lessons, get fitted for clubs, measure club head speed, ball speed, spin, and everything in between. Then I got to one episode in particular that really seemed to simplify the way you should be looking at how you strike the ball.
Adam Young is a pro that really focuses on the impact zone. One piece of advice he has is to imagine there is a nail through the middle of the golf ball and your job is to hammer that nail through the ball with the club face. If you think about when you have a hammer and you’re trying to drive a nail through a piece of wood, you certainly aren’t thinking about how your wrist is positioned or where your right arm is when you raise the tool in the air. More so just focusing on bringing the hammer down and hitting the top of the nail into the wood. Then idea is to simplify things and worry less about the idiosyncrasies in your swing and more about getting the tool in your hands to hit the object in the correct spot. It makes sense really, it doesn’t matter if you take the club inside out or outside in on the takeaway, or if the club is vertical at the top of the swing, if the center of the face compresses the golf ball and you hit your nail the result is a pure strike. Just look at guys like Jim Furyk and Matt Wolff, both have extremely unconventional swings and both are successful professionals.
All of this isn’t to say that the golf swing is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the impact zone. Obviously you need to have good positioning and some sort of a starting point to set yourself up for solid impact. However, maybe thinking about it from a slightly less complicated lense might help get the ball to fly a little bit better on approach. It also clears your mind and allows you to have less jumbled thoughts as you take the club back. Adam has a bunch of content online and I have been pretty obsessed with his impact zone ideas and drills, and I feel as though the last few range sessions and rounds have seen better contact when I’m thinking of hammering the nail through the ball.
All of this is real junkie behavior, looking for the next fix and the next north star that is sure to fix your game and give you an edge when you're playing skins with your buddies on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I was in desperate need of something new and so I’d like to thank my cousin for the podcast recommendation and “Chasing Scratch” for introducing me to Adam Young, my new drug of choice. I’m sure this strategy will work for a few months and then it will be on to the next miracle cure, but for now I’ll just keep hammering nails.
