You’re Not Clearing Your Hips!

January 29, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

“You’re not clearing your hips”, he said. Chances are good that, if he is dishing out advice, it is because you have been listening to him. You’ve been a thirsty traveler, and he has been filling your glass with sand. I feel bad for you. But, there is hope. Clearing the hips is not your problem.

Clearing the hips is a marker for a swing that is ailing. It is noticeable because the way the golfer moves indicates an illness, and the eyes focus on the center of the body for answers. If I can affect any change in golf at all, I hope it is getting people to understand the causal relationship between set-up and movement.

Extension through impact can be misinterpreted as a problem with the hips. Misdiagnoses inevitably lead to bad advice. We need to be aware that movement is incidental. It expresses intent, no matter how clear or fuzzy. Over time, clear intent may eliminates the ‘doubt that keeps us sane’, but it will also save our golf swing.

“Clearing” the hips is movement employed to maintain acceleration in the clubhead once the clubhead speed overtakes the speed of the hands. The counter-balancing motion in a conscient golfer’s swing will either prolong or arrest the movement preceding it.

If the backswing is quick, for instance, it is short. If it is short, the clubhead launches from the top. An early release requires the brain to send opening signals to the body – just to make contact with a golf ball. The incidental, opening motion actively moves the ball back in the stance, which serves to steepen an otherwise shallow impact.

These things snowball, don’t they? The moral of the story is that we have to be immune to any advice targeting any area of our moving golf swing that is above the knees. You can use any device you want to fix any malady you have. But, your problem will metastasize or return to other areas of your swing if you do not address the underlying cause.

It is almost a metaphor, or similetaphor, to our physiological health. “You are what you eat”. Our diet (Of golf swing advice) will lead to health or illness. The closer we get to consuming what the earth supports, the healthier we become. The earth supports us through the placement of our feet.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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“Covering” the Ball

January 23, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

“Covering” the ball has never been discussed in an understandable way to the golf community. We have been told that covering the ball is necessary and that it is what separates the pro from the amateur. I disagree completely with current reasoning, but let’s put that aside for now. We also know how TV personalities love to hoard secret information, but I’m just going to give it to you. I suppose it’s good that I’m not conflicted in that way.

Ladies and gentlemen, “covering the ball” means putting your body in position to deloft your club face at impact. It’s that simple. I guess the tough part is putting yourself in a position to do it. The following remarks are based on a golfer who already makes solid contact half the time. I also make the assumption that, before impact, your trailing elbow is in front of your trailing hip. Your trailing elbow creates the most important structure to carry into impact. This is an advanced tutorial.

If your leading arm currently stays against our chest well into our downswing, it’s because our instinct is to steepen impact. Our path will tend to be outside-in without a sufficient weight shift to lead the downswing. Starting our downswing with leg drive delays the opening of our body to our target. As a result, our current “covering” upper half can work to square impact.

If your leading arm does not stay against your chest before impact, it is because impact needs shallowing for some reason. Posture is nearly always compromised when trying to shallow impact. Club-path tends to be inside-out with copious leg drive. But our path changes with leg drive changes.

Keeping our leading arm against our chest deeper into our impact zone is part of our counter-balancing mechanism for our earlier post. Posting earlier is our key to a body sequence that leads to “Covering” your ball. Furthermore, our torso will eventually do what it is supposed to do to hit our ball. I’ll cover that in a later post.

The Open Stance relieves golfers of a covering motion along the target line while maintaining “Cover” along our toe line. We can cover along our toe line without doing so along our target line. Also, our club shaft may lean ahead of our ball while our leading arm moves away from our body to obey the target line. If “covered” along both reference lines, vertical shoulder rotation must occur to mitigate steep impact. Consequently, we add power and speed to our swing to counter the imbalances created.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

How to Adapt to an Open Stance

January 17, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

The following video touches on how to adapt to an Open Stance. Motion is the only connection to the golf ball once the body is set. Therefore, our body must cooperate with our golf club and our brain to return to solid impact. We can make adapting easier with pre-set variables like our set up and our swing thought. Here, I describe parts of the mechanism, the image, and the dynamic of adapting to an open stance.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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You’ll Never Hear, “Excess Leg Drive is Your Problem.”

January 13, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

“You have too much leg drive in your downswing…” is something you’ve never heard an instructor tell anyone – ever. Does that seem strangely true? You’re probably asking yourself, ‘How have I never noticed this before?’

The answer has been elusive because the wrong questions are being asked. We are either asking the ‘What?’ and the “How?” of a golf swing from our instructors, or they most-likely answer any query with “What and How?” answers. The question and answer should be about the “Why?”, again. Why is leg drive never a problem? If leg drive could be a bad thing, we would have heard about it by now, right?

You have never heard of such a thing because leg drive is never a bad thing. It is a positive effect of an underlying cause. That cause is need, as usual. The substance between cause and effect is comprised of a few different disciplines from need to the expression of need. But, for our purposes, let’s assume an Open Stance is the vehicle for getting from the beginning to the end of a straight, solid golf shot.

Leg drive, or leg action, is an athletic substitution for hip-rotation as the chronological, kinesthetic, driver of the downswing. It supplants damaging over-rotation on the leading knee and hip with a smooth, momentum-based power source for beginning the downswing. Why is this necessary from an Open Stance, you say? Because we don’t want our club closing to the plane before impact.

We need to delay the release of the club along our foot-line in order to keep the clubhead square to the target line at impact. The only other way to mitigate the steeper impact of an opened Stance is vertical shoulder rotation. There should be a combination of these two athletic compensations in any golf swing – based on individual physiology.

The reason leg drive is never a problem is because it is either absent already, which make it tough for your friends to diagnose – or it is ample, which makes it beautiful to watch and never to correct. I guaranty that you will NEVER see leg drive like Lee Trevino’s from a golfer who may hit is straight from a set-up that is square or closed.

Watch this video on the topic, and like it if you learn.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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It’s Tough to Play When You Sway

January 13, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

Henrik Stenson does NOT sway! I just want to get that out from the start. Henrik has a lateral shift toward his back foot that triggers his golf swing. Swaying is not a trigger. It is more like moving the barrel while trying to hit the bullseye. It will work one time in a hundred. However, it will never lead to precision.

A Sway is an unmanageable weight distribution in the backswing that causes, occasionally or frequently, unmitigated disasters at impact. These events are always deleterious to power and precision. The Sway causes the arms to disconnect to counter-balance the issue. Therefore, our timing problem produced by this malady is incidental to the real cause. See if you can guess what I’m going to say now….

The Sway could be a problem for golfers who set up square, but it is most prominent in golfers who set up closed. The reason is because we mistakenly believe in our ability to manage our set-up with motion. However, the knowledge to understand our role in the shot and why we move in the first place, is the problem. But, that is a topic for another discussion.

For those golfers who set up square or closed, a sway may be employed to combat a ball position issue. The brain knows where we should be, at impact, to hit a desired shot. Therefore, if our ball “feels” like it is back in our stance, our brain senses it. Then, our brain tells our muscles to move our body away from the target to reposition our ball more forward in our stance. However, instead of doing it with their feet, these poor bastards do it while they’re moving.

If the ball is played too far back in the stance to hit a straight shot, a sway could occasionally help produce this, understandable result. Mistaking moments of success for repeatable efficiency can be the kiss-of-death for a golf swing. Interpreting one result or a small collection of shots in a practice session as indicative of success is the folly of “Bug-cutters” and “Choppers”, as the Kat-man would say.

We need to help these folks get on the good foot by giving them Open Stance advice. Let’s cure golf swings from the ground-up people! Speaking of the ground, I’ve had some cynical thoughts about catch phrases we have been hearing for the last few years. I’ll post a disappearing article about it soon.

In the mean time, here is a video that speaks to the Sway in a way that will stay with you all day. Okay? Enter Happy Gilmore reference here.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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It Was Only a Matter of Time…

January 9, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

If you think you have to stop coming over-the-top, then this video is an indication that you are not the only one. Shawn Clement gets it. He is obviously paying attention to my work. In any case, it is only a matter of time until the truth comes out about the golf swing. Thanks to John for sending me this other off-shoot of my own work. I’m encouraged that more famous and influential instructors are also open to learning the truth about the golf swing.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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“Getting Stuck”

January 4, 2018 John Wright Leave a comment

Getting “Stuck” in a golf swing means one thing – the set up has not been planned well. Getting stuck is very common in a golf swing, so you know. The definition of being “Stuck” is when the trailing elbow is unable to recover its proper position in front of the midline of the trailing side as the clubhead approaches impact. The causes are not always clear. But, the solutions are.

To accurately diagnose the swing flaw, we have to understand that it is a by-product of a tempo problem. Tempo is a by-product of necessity. Necessity is incidental to the relationship of the feet to the ball and the target at address. The set-up relationship is an expression of philosophy – intentionally chosen.

Getting stuck means the shoulders are turning too fast and too soon from the top of the swing. In other words, to square a club path that would, otherwise, be too much from the inside to take the ball first, the shoulders start the downswing instead of the legs. Most of us have had the club stuck at one time or another. Most times, the need to turn our shoulders out of sequence with the rest of our body stems from being closed with the feet at set up, over-the-line at the top, or both.

Our brains are designed to communicate its orders to our body, which carries them out in movement. If doubt or fear enters the equation, the lines of communication are interrupted. The signal gets confused, and the movement becomes more about survival than commitment. That’s why great mental Sports Psychologists like Henschon and Rotella have focused on planning the shot through visualization, process, and percentages for forty years.

These are all subsets of intention – something that requires commitment and disciplined practice. If a golfer sets up to a golf ball in a way that demands excessive signals be sent from the brain to the body, they will waste their athleticism on compensating instead of using it for committed shot-making. A set up that is rigid, disciplined, INTENTION-driven philosophy is the dynamic needed to cure the inefficiencies leading to “getting stuck” and to cure inconsistent tempo. The Open Stance provides every solution to any swing flaw.

Watch and like this video on the topic.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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The Grip (a.k.a. The Hands on The Handle)

December 24, 2017 John Wright 2 Comments

The grip is part of a golf swing fundamental – holding on to the club. It expresses a golfer’s individuality and intention (if any) with their golf ball. Done well, the grip can facilitate a repeatable, powerful golf swing. At it’s worst, it can facilitate a real love of Chess. Some think the set up trumps all, and some think the grip trumps all. It is probably clear where I stand on the side of set up when causality is discussed within the golf swing. But what, then of the grip?…Who should we listen to?

Ladies and gentlemen, no one knows more about how a grip affects a golf swing than Carl Lohren. Carl is a Ben Hogan disciple who expresses his respect for The Hawk by placing his hands on a golf club in an optimal way. He is the man. He was a great sounding board for me to learn more about the grip in our time at BallenIsles CC (the old ‘JDM CC’). I suggest you watch ALL his YouTube videos. Just understand, his perspective about the grip is causal, in nature. The aperture through which he sees the golf swing orbits around what happens with the hands on the handle.

Mr. Lohren and I agree on 90% of the golf swing. We both acknowledge that set-up is the most important part of swinging a golf club. If we we don’t agree on 100% it may be because I see the grip as an incidental part of the set-up philosophy a golfer may employ. I believe the set up philosophy will create a cooperative grip. The desire to create a specific result with a golf ball will facilitate a refining of the grip within a set up philosophy.

Carl states that the grip is 90% of the 90% of why the set up is so important. Carl believes the grip is independent of movement or, at least, that movement can change to adapt to the proper grip. He teaches objective movement under the assumption of an subjectively ‘neutral’ grip. His is an interesting study of the kinematic sequence.

He demonstrates the physiological differences of arm-hang and grip tweaks. But, my opinion is that Carl essentially nullifies his set-up axiom with these subjectives. His discussion covers the orientation of the hands in relation to the golfer, but not the club face, target line, or toe line. I question how a grip can be optimal per golfer without discussing their set up orientation to the target, at least.

What I would like Carl to discuss is the relationship of the grip to the target line. I’d want to hear how it changes with a stance that is closed versus open. I’d like to hear a discussion of trajectory and grip orientation to the depth of a divot, shaft lean, ball speed, etc. Maybe Carl could cover the grip in relation to the rotation of the body to square impact. I’d like to hear about the relationship between the grip orientation and the swing plane…. stuff like that.

Finally, if anyone thinks my research of his work and conclusions don’t differ from my philosophy, then I would like Carl or anyone else to disprove my theory that the grip is a choice made to cooperate or compensate for a set-up Philosophy and that it is not the foundation of the set-up. So, if someone knows more about this dynamic, please speak up. You’ll save me lots of wasted motion.

In the meantime, learn more about how the choices we make about putting your hands on the handle affect what we do to compensate. Mr. Lohren talks about the thirteen different parts of the swing the grip ‘affects’. Once you know the loop he discusses, come on back for the explanation about how set-up philosophy affects our choice of grip.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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Ball Position With an Open Stance

December 13, 2017 John Wright 2 Comments

Why do I get so many questions about ball position within an open set up? Probably because my subscribers have an awareness of cause and effect in the golf swing. They know there is a relationship between golfer, ball, and target on every swing. And naturally, excellent golfing minds ask better questions. In fact, most of the questions I have received about the Open Stance have revolved around BP. Where to position the ball is just one of those questions.

But, if I don’t make assumptions about the readers, then what is the logic? It seems clear to me that ball position (BP) can help create an efficient golf swing within the set up or ruin a golf swing by fighting the set up. Choosing a philosophical path depends upon our underlying intent or lack, thereof. Understanding that BP determines things like contact, club path, and shot shape, we can plan it out with each club. Utilizing an Open Stance Philosophy is a deliberate, measured choice that leads to attentive indifference within the improvement process.

Ball position is also a choice. It can be changed a little or a lot depending on the intended shot. Let me advocate that you always intend to hit your ball absolutely perfectly on the clubface and straight at a very thin vertical window (Target). Such a specific intention requires a specific coordination and cooperation of body parts. By choosing to set up in an Open Stance, we can at least guarantee that our hands will beat the clubhead to an optimal ball position along the toe line.

The target line and toe line change our perspective on ball position. For instance, the ball moves forward in the open stance along the target line. The logical, adaptaptive choice is to move the ball backward along the toe line. If we do, it keeps the relative BP the same along the target line.

The set up and BP are measured by the target line. They are not determined by it. Use the target line (Alignment sticks/shafts) to determine where you are set up before the swing, so that you know how to measure your feedback post-swing. The process for changing BP is regimented. It is regimented so the swing can begin to adapt most-quickly.

The following video addresses the choice, the different perspectives, the underlying unit of measurement, and the process involved in adopting and adapting to a ball position choice.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

Over The Top Explanation

December 4, 2017 John Wright 1 Comment

“Over the top” is a phrase used to describe any excessive or unnecessary behavior. We can all identify with examples of over the top behavior in the age of social media and Hollywood excess. The way people dress, their language, their attempts at getting attention, et.al. Even the presentation of things like birthday cakes, parties, etc. Over the top even describes excessive or unnecessary movement. You guessed it. We will now hear about the over the top golf swing.

All joking aside (for the moment)… Do you have a problem with coming over the top in your golf swing? A lot of golfers do. I spent many years coming over the top. It was a compensatory move to offset a backswing that was ‘over the line’ and a ball position that was forward in my stance. My college coach planted this seed without watering and fertilizing it.

Eventually, I compensated for being ‘over the line’ by moving my ball position backward so I could keep from coming over the top to manage impact. I adapted pretty effectively, and was able to strike my ball perfectly solid. At that time, my ball flight was a big, sweeping hook with every club. I think I was even hooking when I went to the bathroom. The only problem was that I couldn’t play on a tree-lined golf course. It was ugly.

Then, one day in South Florida, I was hitting balls on the range after work and puring it as Marvin Glauber walked up to watch. I’ll never forget Marvin Glauber for his friendship that day – even though we weren’t not friends, per se. Anyway, I started shelling my three wood into the trees right of the range when Marvin walked behind me.

There must have been something said that needed a response, because I remember Marv saying, “Your club is pointed forty yards right of your target.” I called “Bull___t!?” So he said, “Okay. WhaddoIknow”. I felt a bit bad for snapping, at first. Then I went to get a camera to tape my swing. What I found out was that he was exactly right. The next day, my good golf friend Marvin got an apology.

That was the last day I practiced without awareness of where the shaft of the club pointed at the top of my swing. But, it was the first day I realized how important positioning the club was in my golf swing. When anyone asks me what determines path and start line, I will always say “Where the club points at the top”. I say this because impact is incidental to Movement. Movement is incidental to set up. Set Up is incidental to philosophy. How could impact be responsible for anything?

Good friends like Marvin are such a blessing. They spare no words to provide the help we need to figure out just why we are so messed up. Without them, how else could we improve ourselves? Their words and wishes, hopes and fears, can help to guide us through good times and bad. Sometimes they can even help our golf swing with their observations. Tell me, do any of these helpful comments sound familiar?

“Take two weeks off and quit, brother.” “You are so far over the top, you might as well pretend that thing in your hands is a magic wand.” “If you were any more over the top, you could make a practice swing and your actual swing from the same stance.” “Hey Lefty! Your club shaft is pointed in the trees to the left at the top and you’re getting mad because you can’t hit it straight. Are you mental?” Ahh, friends.

Start cultvating an awareness of where your golf club points at the top of your swing. You may have to move your ball position to adapt to a swing that is on plane, but it will be worth it. Then, your over the top move will be history… unless you bring it out for nostalgia, exhibition, or a laugh. Enjoy.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

Visit some other posts here.

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