Driver

And now for the much anticipated final installment of my highly successful, and critically acclaimed series of golf swing analysis. and i saved the biggest & best for last. my driver! which is also the biggest problem club in my bag, so this should be full of reasons as to why my golf swing is shit.

here we go! and yes, these photos, and videos are all from my ipod camera and a (free) app that i have for it to look at my swing with these plane lines, and whatnot. they are the same style things used by my old golf instructor Scott when i took lessons, so i am extremely familiar with the use of these plane lines.

so, that is my driver swing. as you should be able to see because you are an avid reader of this site and clearly don't have anything better to do this swing is much longer, and obviously the shaft is longer. my driver has a loft of 10.5 degrees, which is fairly standard, although i do wish that it had slightly more loft, in the 12-13 degrees area because generally speaking the more loft, the easier to hit. also, this driver has a 41 inch shaft, so it is much longer than the others.

just as an aside, driver heads, because they are big hollow metal... things, they are measured differently than irons. irons are fully solid clubs, but such clubs as driver, or woods (which are not made of wood anymore, but various metals). these woods are measured in cubic centimeters, and generally speaking, the more cubic centimeters your club is, the farther you will be able to hit it. nowadays, almost all drivers are built at the limit, which is 460cc and that is the measurement of this particular driver that i am using. i also have a smaller driver, that is 320cc and is generally more consistent for me, but i hit it about 40-50 yards less on average than the 460cc one, so it is to my advantage to be able to hit the club with the larger club head.

same set up as always, but as you can see, i am much less upright with the club, and the yellow line is significantly more horizontal than my other clubs that i have shown you.

now, this is a screenshot i got that shows me just as i start to take the club away. you can see that my hands have moved, and that i have already shifted my right knee, like i discussed in my pitching wedge post

but now, by this point in the swing, the driver head, which i have circled, is lower than the yellow line, but my hands are still in a relatively good position.

now, this is my with the club fully back. i put the green line on it so that you can see the club. through some weird miracle, this is the perfect position for the club to be at the top of the swing. the club is parallel to the ground, and is pointed at the eventual target.

and look at that! somehow i can take a fully perfect backswing, and top of my swing, and mess it up so quickly! as you can see, the blue line is my club on the downswing, and it is dramatically out of position. however, i am still able to get the club to make contact with the ball, no matter what this picture says. the problem is, is that this swing creates a great deal of side spin on the ball because i am not making contact with it head on, but from an odd angle, because i have to correct my downswing. this makes the ball fly dramatically off to the left.

but we will end on a good note, and show a follow through, because i don't think i have done that yet. this is how my swing ends, and it is textbook. the club ends behind my head, and parallel to the starting plane. really lovely, just is hard to appreciate due to the wonky ball flight that i create. 

well there you have it! those are 3 in-depth analysis of my golf swing. this explains a bit of why i (and others) have to put so much work into my golf swing, because it has so many different forms, it can be difficult to manage. all of this exists, and i still am able to go around a play bogey golf. not bad, i think. :)