The Reilly Project Lesson 1

Being inspired by the TV series featuring Hank Haney in the Golf Channel I have decided to do my own mini version. The videos featured in this blog are of Stuart, the Marketing guy at Chartridge Park Golf Club. Stuart is a self confessed hacker. He is my version of Charles Barkley (featured in the Haney Project, check out his swing here), he currently struggles to break 100, often shooting scores towards 120. He has broken 100 in the past, but right now has trouble hitting the ball consistently. My goal is to get him breaking 90 in six months. 

First lesson I asked Stuart what he thought he was doing wrong. I like to ask this to my new clients just to get some idea of how their movements and their feelings are related. Often swing faults are exacerbated by people working on the wring fixes. He described his problem as coming over the top and he felt his problem was his weight falling forward on his downswing. He had been shown a drill to put golf balls under his toes in his setup to prevent this from happening. 

Now my philosophy in my coaching has been to always get to the root of the problem in the swing. This is always based in the setup first.

As you can see in the top video, Stuart is bent over with a lot of curvature in his upper back, he also has quite straight legs. Stuarts has quite a longer body with shorter legs, this means poor posture will result in him  This is not an athletic posture. The majority of the lesson was dedicated to fixing this. I got Stuart to get his spine into the correct straight back position with the muscles of his core and his upper back engaged. We also worked on getting Stuarts' thigh muscles engaged, holding him strong and balanced. As you see below this is a much more athletic position. All he needs to do now is practice so that he can actually relax into this position as lose some of the unwanted tension you can see.

The other thought I wanted Stuart to work on was to improve the transition from backswing to forward swing. Stuart has a common problem amongst amateur golfers in that he starts his downswing with a turn back at the target. There is so much talk about turn in golf magazines and books that people often think the downswing should start this way. In fact the real important move before turn is the lateral movement of the hips towards the target. This lateral move allows weight to shift to left foot and also to get the club started in the correct plane for the movement through the ball.

Stuarts original swing

The results of these changes were immediate. He has begun striking the ball better and hitting his woods with a nice draw. Obviously this is just a start and we have plenty of work to do to break 90. Keep in touch for more videos and lesson information.

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Stack and Tilt Experiment Conclusion

It has been two weeks since the start of the Stack and TILT experiment and I have decided that it is time to end it. I feel that I have given it enough time and enough practice to gain an understanding of the principle movements and techniques of the swing.

My intitial reaction to the stack and tilt was very positive, upon reading Plummer and Bennetts book I found that a lot of the information and thoughts in there were just sound biomechanics and swing geometry. The spinal tilt towards the target, the swing centre remaining constant. On the downswing they talk about the explosive power from the legs and hips. These are all good swing thoughts for all players even without stack and tilt.

The real crux of stack and tilt is that they advocate that there is no weight shift on the backswing whatsoever.  The right knee should be allowed to straighten and the hips should rotate 45'. This is a real change from standard swing coaching such as Jim McLeans X-Factor and pretty much every other text on the swing.

It is this lack of weight shift that I found a real problem with. Using irons the strike was pure and distance similar to that of my usual swing. However this became a real difficulty when using the fairway woods and especially the driver. It was a real surpise to me that the book makes very little reference to power and also has absolutely no images of players using driver and only  one paragraph describing the driver swing. It talks about moving more weight to front foot at address with driver and moving ball position forward. What it really only gives brief reference to is how to create a shallow enough angle of attack to hit driver.

Modern launch monitor technology has proven that optimum distance with a driver is obtained by a high launched and low spinning ball. This requires an upward angle of attack of around +2'. Stack and tilt creates a shallower angle of attack by the hip drive towards the target. This really can only ever create at best a level angle of attack and Bennett and Plummer refer to this being the trend and suggest that pros were moving towards teeing it lower and using this level angle of attack. Myself and the obvious proof that launch monitor results bring would argue otherwise. It was very difficult to stop the ball spinning with the swing.

The other problem is also the ability to generate power using a single pivot move. If you are swinging around your front foot then my problem is how can you drive your hips forward with any momentum if you are pushing off the front foot. Imagine throwing a ball or serving at tennis without shifting your weight back. When I was swinging the longer clubs trying to generate power was very difficult, the swing felt weak and that I needed an almighty use of the hips to get even close to the power of my previous swing. It was this that stopped me continuing with the motion.

The book really never mentions an increase in power, it explains how hitting the centre of face will help you hit the ball farther. This is correct if you weren't already striking the middle of the face!

Now I can see that a lot of people will get real benefits by a lot of the information in the book. Staying centred over the ball will help everyone's ball striking with irons. Allowing the hips to rotate will help those who lack the flexibility to turn their shoulders independently. Also the explanation of generating power from the hips is really well described.

For now though, I will be reverting back to my original swing with some feelings I learnt from the S&T.
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