So Why Not Just Do it Right?
For late-beginning golfers, for those who did not learn to swing as kids, the transition move has proven almost impossible to learn. Most older amateurs decide to take lessons after deeply ingraining a fundamentally poor swing. They find it nearly impossible to change.
Teaching pros despair of teaching the transition weight shift because too many students play much worse during their learning process and blame the instructor! Many golf books suggest drills to learn the transition weight shift.
The most popular are, "baseball," in which the golfer takes a normal stance and backswings horizontally like a baseball batter, exaggerating the weight shift to the back foot, then makes the "step in a bucket" weight shift to the front leg, and then swings through pivoting around his front hip. Next is another "baseball" like drill in which the golfer starts with with feet together and the club vertical in front of his body, wrists fully cocked.
The backswing is done WHILE the golfer strides toward the target. AFTER his weight has shifted to and settled on his front foot he pivots forward swinging and finishing around his front hip. Other suggested transition training drills use a heavy club, the idea being that its very heaviness forces the golfer to make the transition weight shift, much as we would be forced to do while swinging a heavy implement (like Harvey Penick's Weedcutter).
A visit to any driving range and/or discussion with any experienced teaching pro will elicit the news that essentially nothing works. Either the drills don't really ingrain the transition weight shift move, or the average amateur will not persist sufficiently to permanently change his golf swing. The bottom line is that only a few elite amateur golfers make the transition weight shift. |
