Product Review - InsideApproach

The Inside Approach is a great training aid. Fully recommend it. Bought it off my Pro before he left.

It's basically plastic and foam that's made in China, so you're paying alot for it. But then again so is music.

Two reviews of the Inside Approach from Golf.about.com and Intheholegolf.com.

And a YouTube review of it.

Basically quite comprehensive reviews of the training tool.

 "Of course, they haven't really cured their slice until they can take that new swing and repeat it consistently on a golf course. But it's an impressive display of the effectiveness of the tool in getting golfers to re-route over-the-top (slice-inducing) swings. And there's no doubt that regular work with the Inside Approach - 15, 10 or even 5 minutes a day over time - can help eliminate a slice and produce a good swing."

Agree with this comment made. It's a training aid and doesn't teach you the golf swing. You might even compensate and come too far in or create other movements to compensate. But it does give good feedback to you to understand what an inside approach feels like. What I like to do is to combine it with a folded towel placed behind the ball, about a foot, depending on the length of the club you are using. This allows you to keep the lag and hit the divot after the ball.

So highly recommend you get one.

More Swing things

Three more things that I found out while practicing again.

1. Loose wrists when putting. Need to maintain loose wrists when putting, this will help distance control when putting and this would be really useful for  really fast greens.

2. For the pitching, I need to hinge my wrist more and takeaway more, especially with the hips to load the hips. And need to use more hips for the swing. Also the hips and the arms have to be in unison and coordinated. Further the wrists need to be hinged till impact and then released back to neutral (and not do a full release).

3. For the irons, I need to maintain the lag till impact. This will allow me to hit the divot after the ball. Must try to improve hitting the ball before the ground. My divot is moving forward, albeit slowly.

Anyway Good Luck for my golf game tomorrow.

BTW bought 2 boxes of Pro-V1s at SGD55 each.

Still the same faults

Golf can be really testy at times. Still trying my best to get rid of the old faults.

1. Left shoulder opening too early. Have to add a few points to the earlier post. 2 more points that I find affect it. First being the head is not lateral shifting enough in the back swing, i.e. not loading the backswing properly and this results in a cast and left shoulder open to bring the club back in plane. The second is the alternative way of looking at the second. The hands on the down swing aren't inside out enough and it also results in the left arm pulling in too fast. Such that at the 9 o'clock position the club is too far left and pointing the left of the target. And this is in part affecting the shoulder.

2. Tempo still very bad. Need to slow my backswing at the top and not have that jerk. And also to delay the release of the club head. It's a weird feeling to describe but it feels like you have to slow down. But the body some how knows to speed up after that and you end up with a higher club head speed and hitting further. This is assisted by the hip turn.

3. Not turning the hips fast enough. Recently have been using more upper body, and you know it because you start to sweat more as more energy is required. So if the hips come into play earlier, there will be more power with less effort. Realised it thanks to this website Lock and Roll tennis. Check out the monkey drum video and also the lagging video. Very much like tennis is golf. But please note for golf the shoulders stay square until after contact, whereas the shoulder opens earlier in tennis. Maybe that's why I am opening my shoulders, too much tennis recently. So today on the range, just spinned the hips and it gave me more distance, less sweat and sort of improve the shoulder spin. Prevented the shoulder spin because the hips move out of the way so the arms and drop vertically then hit an in to out.

Such is Golf.

Happy New Year - swing faults don't go away overnight

Hi all. Back to the range after the busy holiday period. Still the same few swing faults.

1. Still have the left shoulder spinniness. This could have be a combination of tennis and my old swing. Results in a slight pull and cut. Accompanying this error, not sure if it is caused by it or just an end result of it is that the arms don't come down vertically. (the first movement; bum of hips and the arms dropping while maintaining the wrist hinge) The arms then pop out a bit and contributes to the in out swing and possibly lends to casting. The early spin out of the shoulder also upsets the delayed head position. And because of the aroundness of the swing, its impossible to swing on the proper plane to get the correct 'extension'. Without extension, you are unable to accelerate the club properly after impact with the ball.
Crap.... it seems golf is a cascade of things which may or may not be linearly linked. That's why at times a lot of the swing mistakes are not correctly fixed, cause the error corrected is in the middle of the cascade rather then the root or start point of it.

2. Second error is still a fundamental problem of mine. It's the swing tempo. The metronome helps and counting off ' one thousand , two thousand' definitely helps. Maybe should really consider getting the orange whip. Will talk about this training aid another day. Apart from the tendency to swing fast and spin out and throw the club head, I have this jerky thing. I usually do a nice take away to the top, but at the top of the swing I tend to push back a bit more to get the swing going. This is a problem that I a slowly eradicating. Whats so bad about it? That quick jerk tends to change the swing plane cause the motion is not consistent and also results in shoulder tilt or shoulder rotating. And because the jerk is a load up tension type of jerk, it causes me to throw the club head with the resultant loss of lag. It also causes the swing arc to be smaller and tighter too, not what you want.

So that's that. Here's to a great year of golf ahead and great swing!