I see it this way,
If your pivot is doing the right thing first, putting your attention on the hands if fine. The problem with hand controlled pivot is that I see a lot of people getting way to worried about what the hands are doing, FLW,
hinge actions, swing plane.. at the expense of the pivot. A properly working pivot cannot be over looked.
You can swing ’Äúon plane” with educated hands.. you can do flashlight drills all night long in the dark, but if the body doesn't turn, center, fire, and finish, it's not going to do much for full shots.
During the golf swing, my mind is on the feeling of impact. That's it.
A fade, a draw, low, high, or any combination has a different impact sensation.
I pick the shot I'm going to execute, address the ball, aim it, feel that execution in advance in the cells of my body, as soon as I gather that feeling, I pull the trigger and execute that impact sensation.
I don't think about anything other than impact. No hands, no pivot, nothing.
I do all that stuff at home, drills, etc… once I'm on the course, it's
ball, target, feel it, execute it.
Now as far as learning the swing, I would agree that you do need to monitor the hands, they DO need to know where the are and where they are going. The pivot must also be worked on. I'll put my mind anywhere it needs to be when I am working on my swing. Feet, hands, hips, arms, legs, anywhere I feel needs attention. I never do this anywhere near a golf course.
Flashlight drills have value, sure.. especially for beginners, but the plane does change as it approaches full speed… and I don't think flashlight drills tell us much at full speeds through impact from P3 to P4, where it really counts. It's just hard to see it at 100 mph.
So I don't think I am going against the grain, both hands and pivot need their time and focus in the learning process. At the end of the day, the more the hands, arms, and pivot all feel a oneness, the better.
Things can be trained with this in mind right from the start.
Lag Pressure throwaway is the root of all golf’s evils
This has got to be the best post in this entire thread. Lag – you explained it beautifully! Dap – just to clarify, I am not a TGM teacher, never read the book until 1995 after spending some time the previous year with O’Grady and he recommending that I study it. At the time, I was 99% to completion on my own research project on the golf swing, that started many years earlier. I was amazed upon first reading the book how much Homer and I had in common in terms of understanding golf swing theory. I use my own model in teaching, but I think I have enough of a basic “grammar school” level understanding of TGM to be able to participate in this thread in an intelligent conversation with the true experts here. T
The TGM notions of “pivot controlled hands” vs its opposite I think has long been misunderstood by most TGM teachers and students. In some ways, it should never have been included in the book. It is not describing in any way an objective, physical reality. It belongs more in a book on neurophysiology or perhaps a book on golf philosophy under the chapter heading “Epistomology”.
Most people think it is describing body mechanics. Instead, it is describing a golfer’s Intention as to “what moves what” or cause and effect at the level of the mind first, then body. It also has an Awareness aspect. “What do I feel is creating the motion and what do I feel is responding to the first cause of the motion.” We call that the Motion Point vs the Moving Focal Point. Is the dog wagging its tail or is the tail wagging the dog?
The reason I think Homer put this in his book is because this has been a very big deal in the history of golf swing theory for a long time now. At the time Homer was researching and writing his book, the dominant teaching theory by far was that the tail was wagging the dog, ie that Hands and Arms teachers dominated, from Henry Cotton (from whom I believe Homer got the idea of Educated Hands) to Bob Toski, Harvey Penick and at the time most tour stars talked a lot about their hands and arms, not much about the Pivot. A lot of them had hand-eye cooordiantion dependent golf swings and a lot of “hand save” in their motions.
The “theology” of the time – and this concept is still dominant today among most golf teachers – was that your Intention to move or “place” your Hands via independent Arm motion to a certain position in the swing motion was paramount, and “the body pivot will respond” to that notion. Today, Jim Flick is the high priest of this religion. And I use the word religion because that is precisely what this concept truly is, its a belief system with absolutely no basis in objective physical reality. From a biomechancical and kinesiology standpoint, the dog always wags its tail, it only “looks like” to the human eye under the influence of optical illusions, that the hands are moving the body.
Having said all that, there is another way to understand “Hands Controlled Pivot” that makes perfect sense, and I think it was the way Homer understood it. We teach here at Balance Point, that there are two primary “systems” one can use to learn a golf swing. One is the Fundamental Based system or “feed forward” system of creating motor programs in the subconscious mind that automatically (dominant habit level) instruct muscles to move body parts. Same way most other sports are taught and martial arts especially. No hand-eye required. The goal is compensation free body motion.
The second is “feedback” or the Sensory Feedback Loop System which means using your innate athletic ability to compensate for poor body motion by sensing where in space and where in time (rhythm and tempo) certain body parts are, especially the Hands, and then allowing your subtle or pre-conscious mind along with your creative unconscious mind to perform mostly unconscious high speed adjustments to your body motion, especially pivot, to get the Hands to be where they need to be. The Hands have the most sensory feedback nerves of any part of the body, so the brain/body connection can be used to “sense” and then to “compensate” or “adjust”.
Here’s the problem with any golfer relying on the feedback system as the only (meaning not doing any fundamental based training) or primary means of learning a good golf swing. IF your body pivot, or postural support, or lateral weight transfer, or spine angle, or Balance are non-existent or really bad, focusing on your Hands and expecting the feedback system to compensate for those missing pieces of the puzzle is beyond naive. You are living in fantasy land if you think that will help!
Training the body must come first, it’s the Law of Cause and Effect. The other problem with the Hands/feedback system dependence, in the real and pragmatic world of teaching golf to mid to handicappers that I live in, not too many have the natural ability to wake up or develop their Feel sensory channel. For a number of reasons, most golfers can’t or won’t be easily coached into feeling their Hands – or any other body part for that matter. And not every golfer has a lot of athletic ability in the first place. You need that in order for the compensations to happen in the first place.
We teach an extreme form of Pivot Controlled Hands (extreme compared to traditional teachers using that system) to all of our golf school students, beginner to pros, as the Foundation of the whole training program. But – we also use the Sensory Feedback system as a secondary approach when working on certain swing problems with individuals in private lesson format.
