Steal Bryson DeChambeau’s secret to swing consistency

Get better swing plane where it matters, near the ball

By Matthew Rudy

The same few words seem to pop up when describing Bryson DeChambeau’s game: Unique, quirky, or even strange.

What isn’t strange are the results. DeChambeau won his third career PGA Tour event at the Northern Trust, smashing the field by four shots with elite ball-striking using his single-length Cobra irons. DeChambeau hit 16 greens on Sunday on his way to his fourth round of 69 or lower at Ridgewood Country Club, and he made just six bogeys on the week.

The precision and consistency in DeChambeau’s game comes in part from his determination to make every swing on the same plane—literally. “I’ve run his swing on my 3D analysis software, and Bryson is literally more planar than the swing robots they use to design clubs,” says Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher Michael Jacobs. “Even if you wanted to try to do that yourself, I don’t think the average player has the coordination. He really is unique.”

But even with DeChambeau’s idiosyncratic method, there are things you can take away and use to tweak your game. “What gets weekend players in trouble is pushing and pulling on the club with too much force that’s perpendicular to the direction of the swing,” says Jacobs, who is based at Rock Hill Golf & Country Club in Manorville, NY. “That forcing of the club makes the club respond ‘out of plane,” which requires you to make a compensating move to recover.”

You don’t need to try to get your swing on a consistent plane throughout, as long as you can produce more consistency through the “execution phase,” says Jacobs—which is about hip high to hip high. “That’s where swing plane really matters,” he says. “Film your swing from down the line, with the camera on the ball line, and practice making swings where the club doesn’t move very much off the plane line in that phase. That’s going to come from a more neutral address position, where you aren’t aligning your shoulders, hips and feet at different targets, and from more neutral body motions. Get that phase down and you’re going to hit much more consistent shots.”

Original Source: GolfDigest

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Take a ‘lie-detector’ test to improve your short game

By: DAVE PELZ

One of the things that separate Tour players from the rest of us is that the former are intimately familiar with their games. They know how different shots will unfold regardless of where the ball is sitting, especially around the green (where difficult lies abound). Not surprisingly, that’s where weekend players tend to cough up strokes.

There are four parts to every short-game shot. Failing in any area will almost surely lead to a poor result. They are:

1. Judging the lie.

2. Selecting a club.

3. Predicting how the ball will react when it lands.

4. Executing the swing.

This article addresses the first — and perhaps the most important — part of the shot equation. If you can’t pull off good shots from bad lies, you’ll never reach your scoring goals.

In my opinion, the only way to develop this skill is through experience. Pros have the advantage of unlimited practice time, but you can begin to catch up with a simple three-shot experiment that I use in my schools. Its entire purpose is to open your eyes to the various backspin outcomes that can be created by the type of lie you’re facing.

For this “Backspin vs. Lie” experiment, you’ll need your lob wedge, a tee and three balls. Select a 20- to 30-yard shot around a green that forces you to carry a bunker but that provides plenty of room between the apron and the pin. Drop one ball into the rough, another into a normal fairway lie, and tee up the third so it’s about a half-inch above the grass (photo, above). The goal is to land all three shots in the same place on the green, about a third of the way from the edge to the flagstick. (Repeat any shot that misses the landing spot.)

Once you’re successful from all three lies, check the results, which should look something like what’s pictured in the photo at right. What you’ll notice is that the shot from the rough rolled out the farthest — the mass of grass that wedged its way between the ball and the clubface at impact killed most of the backspin. The shot from the fairway stopped short of the first, even though it landed in the same spot. That’s because you generated much more backspin due to the cleaner lie. And for the teed-up third ball, which had zero grass on the clubface to interfere with contact, you created max backspin and stopped the ball almost immediately after it hit the green.

Of course, you never get to tee up your wedge shots, but that’s not the point. What this exercise teaches is how lie effects spin, and that controlling spin is the trick to hitting short shots close. It’s an invaluable lesson. Try it from different distances using different wedges. The experience will turn you into a cagey vet in no time.

Original Source: Golf.com

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