As I noted in the comments yesterday, one of the major teachers of the arm-powered golf swing is Manuel de la Torre, who works with LPGA golfer Sherri Steinhauer, among others, and has worked with players like legend Carol Mann. His father, Angel de la Torre, was (as I understand it) the first golf professional from Spain as well as a student of Ernest Jones, a teacher who has been commended by players as varied as Bobby Jones and Gary McCord.
Ernest Jones was an English golf professional who lost his right leg in World War I and set about learning how to play well without it. His book Swing the Clubhead is still available and considered a classic of golf teaching.
Manuel de la Torre is the current master when it comes to the Ernest Jones method. I don't like to quote extended passages from any book, but this introductory section from his book Understanding the Golf Swing is a brief explanation of the arm-powered golf swing that's probably better than anything I can do in a single post. Hopefully this will give you a clearer picture of what current arm swing teachers focus on; it's slightly different from the arm swing used by players like Harry Vardon, but only because the guy who developed it was missing a leg. It's from pages 8 and 9 of the book:
The swinging concept maintains that if you produce a swinging motion with the golf club:Obviously, in #4, the right elbow would be the left elbow if you're a leftie, and what it means is that you don't consciously pull the elbow to your side; it just "ends up there" if you swing correctly. And yes, that awkward phrasing in #2 is copied correctly. Read it a few times and it will make sense.The problem with trying to do any of these things consciously is that we overdo them, and, furthermore, whatever we try to do will be at the wrong time.
- The left arm will be extended (not straight) by the centrifugal force produced by the swinging motion. It simply has to be responsive.
- The head will remain down sufficiently long through the instinctive human reaction of looking at whatever is going to be struck.
- The weight will transfer to the left foot (right foot for left-handed players) after the club strikes the ball by having the body respond to the centrifugal force created by the swinging motion.
- The body turn that takes place on the forward swing as the body responds to the club's swinging motion will produce a definite closeness of the body and the right elbow. It is not the elbow that gets close to the body.
- By using the arms in the forward swing, the club will start correctly from the beginning of the forward swing without trying to use a pulling action with the left hand (right hand for left-handed players) to start it.
- Wrist action will be an involuntary reaction to the coiling action (backswing) and the uncoiling action (forward swing) of the club. It is caused by the circular motion needed to swing the club over the right shoulder (left shoulder for left-handed players). In the forward swing it is caused by the centrifugal force created through the swinging motion.
To repeat, the emphasis in our presentation is that, having set the club on a true swinging motion the golfer must then allow the body to respond to the motion of the swing itself.
The big difference here between this swing and a leg-powered swing is that the latter requires you to consciously perform actions in a certain order, while the arm-powered swing de la Torre is talking about focuses on swinging the arms and just letting everything else happen as a reaction to the arm swing.
It may sound bizarre when you read his intro here, but it's actually an amazing swing. I can swing both ways -- arm swing and leg swing -- and the two feel distinctly different. I can also tell you for sure that this arm-powered swing takes less energy than a comparable leg-powered swing, but it develops a lot of clubhead speed. It truly is a swing where feel means as much (or more) than technique, because the feel of the swing almost creates the technique.
Anyway, I hope this intro from de la Torre's book helps explain the arm-powered concept a little better. His book is one of the few I've seen that devotes a lot of time to using the swing to create different types of shots.
GASP ! How could you leave out the great AJ Bonar !!?? :-D
ReplyDeleteIt's that weird baseball bat driver he uses. Creeps me out. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Ken Green has thought about visiting de la Torre... that would seem to be a good move for him.
The principle difference between de la Torre's teachings (and Jone's) is that they focus on the movement of the club instead of the movement of the body or its parts. While de la Torre does give substantial time to describing and prescribing the use of the arms, that which is critical is not what you use to swing the club but that you use the club with a swinging motion and that the motion be in the direction of the target (for all clubs).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the input, GT. I don't disagree with you at all -- my focus in this post (and several of the other posts on "arm swings" and "leg swings") is more about how the swing feels when a player makes it. As I said, I can swing by feeling the swing both ways, but the way I feel it makes some minor differences in the actual mechanics, such as the amount of hip movement.
ReplyDeleteOne good example of this #6 in the list above. All players should be doing this, agreed? But (at least in my case) if I feel the swing being powered with my upper body, I seem to be "more aware" of my elbows. By contrast, if I feel the swing being powered with my lower body, I seem to be "more aware" of my hips.
I think knowing how a player feels the swing is important to developing consistency. If, for example, you feel the swing is mainly powered by your lower body but try to incorporate moves that don't integrate smoothly into that feel, you spend more time thinking about your swing than your shot.
I can certainly agree that the sensory experience of using the arms to swing the club is very subjective. The problem with using a "feel" to confirm that you are using the arms to make the swing is that feels change from day to day and feels are difficult to recall. Imagine drawing a triangle inside of a square. Wait a day and repeat the drawing. You'll find that you are unable to remember the feel but will vividly remember the image. Feels are fine. Mental images are more reliable.
ReplyDeleteFeels do change from day to day, and you need something objective to help you check that your feel is accurate. I agree with you in principle, but the drawing example isn't a good comparison to a swing. You aren't standing inside the square, and your whole body isn't involved in drawing the triangle. Try instead to draw that triangle in a square with invisible ink, or by drawing it with your eyes closed. That's the closest you can get to making a swing with this comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe feel in a golf swing, unlike in the drawing process, is somewhat defined by your body's limitations. You could draw the triangle without remaining inside the square at all, but you can only make your swing within a limited area -- even if you aren't really trying to make a certain type of swing.
In large part, the problem is point of view. Your POV is an external one when you make the drawing, while your POV is very different when you make a swing. That's one of my big problems with how "release" is taught; it's described as it appears to someone standing at a distance and watching the swing, rather than how it appears to the player making the swing. The external viewer sees the hands "pass over" each other, while the swinger sees his hands remain in pretty much the same relationship to each other throughout the swing.
Ideally you use both feel and image when you swing. For example, while I like players to develop a feel for where the club should be at the top of the backswing -- I often describe it simply as "swinging up to HERE," wherever their HERE happens to be -- I also try to find some image that will help make that position more repeatable, such as having the right shoulder visible under the hands and between the forearms at the top position. You can check that to confirm that your feel is the same from day to day.