First of all little update regarding my holydays. I have understand a few things and practice in a local Golf where I was.
I am pretty happy with my technique now, the main focus is going to be on mastering the technique I have in my mind, know that it’s clear. I don’t think I have major change to make in the future and that I am near reach my full potential. The only changes that could occur are subtle things, that I can work on while focusing on being performant.
To summary now i feel the I have the mean to fight and compete. So I pretty happy with that I didn’t felt like that for a while. So in 2021, My focus is primarly going to be on golf course and competition. Target high performance.
My technique
I can summary that in 3 part:
- Weight shift to the right from setup position
- Weight shift to the left for transitionning from setup to full lag position
- Release by rotating through the hitting area
- Iron & woods > Normal
- Driver > Pushing my right hip through the hitting area to keep my head behind the ball
About my training session of today
I the video of the trainning session that I have took during the session. What I realised is that I am not shift enough to the left during the transition.
Before this training session I was affraid to do it too much. But clearly too much is not an issue. Here is the utility of taking video of your swing. To compare your sensation with the actual reality of things.
So because I am still in holydays, I didn’t realy have a plan of trainning. I just wanted to practice my overall technique and get more and more confortabla with it. This is what I have done.
Now I understand that the part I need to focus on, is the weight shift to the left during the transition. I am not doing it enough.
Also, the temperature was low 5°C, so the sensation wasn’t realy there. That’s why I didn’t realy expect much from this training. Just wanted to practice and see what happen.
Understanding post training session
After the session I watch the video. And saw that the biggest issues I have between what I want to realise and what I actualy realise is during the transition, where I am not nearly enough shifting my weight to the left side.
And it got me thinking. I am trying to do it but yet, it doesn’t happen.
Tow things come in my mind:
- First, I am shiting my weight way too much to the right. which make it even harder to come back to the left side. I should only shit my weight using a roation of my hips, and that’s it no other descritionnary weight shift moves. Just that!
- Second, It’s about how I take the club back during the takeaway. Before I change my swing to this new way of doing. I was keeping the wrist extremely passive and let the momentum of the club and the hips restrication set the club. Which cause me to shifht my weight even more to the right. So I need to create a left to right movement with my wrist, to generate a force that will help me shift my weight to the left during the transition.
So on my next session the focus is going to be on the left weight shift. But I will apply those little modification and observe the result.
Heart Rate Coherence
During my holydays and for my Chrismas I have bought myself a subscription to Whoop. And I started watching my heart rate during the practice range.
And to my surprise, It was very high. And the less I took break between 2 shots the higher and higher my heart rate was. Going up and up.
So I start thinking, about the difference of performance that we experience between the practice range and on the golf course.
If my average heart rate during a practice range session is between 140-150 and on the golf course between 110-120. So we are training on the practice range in a completely different physological state than what we have on the golf course. (I took those numbers just as examples)
But I will make a dedicated post about it.
So long story short. Until now I was just experimenting changing my heart rate during my practice session of my holydays. But since I have my Whoop, I have never actualy spent a session just training as I was doing it before I got one.
So my goal regarding that was just spending the session training normaly, and then look at the result. Which is:
During this session I hit 2 buckets of balls. Which you can distiguish by the drop in my heart rate at 24 minutes. which was the time when I stopped hitting balls and went to get my second bucket.
On the first bucket what we see is that my heart rate just keep increasing higher and higher. This has 2 main reason:
- First because my heart rate get elevate after a shot and if I don’t slow down, or wait, on the next shot my HR will go even higher.
- Second, during this, I was using longer and longer club from the LW all the way to the driver. Which could have help
Where basicaly, at the end of the bucket I reahc my maximum HR of 173.
Then on the second bucket, my heart rate is less study. I remember starting to feel less good. My assumption, is that I pushed my heart too hard during the first bucket and then I completely collapse during the second bucket.
Summary
So to wrap things up.
On the technique side, I need from now on to focus more on the weight shift during the transition. Until I am able to exagerate it by having my weight shift almost as soon as when I reach the top of my backswing.
To do that I need to us my left wirst and rotate it in clock direction (toward the right) to use the force generated to help my lower body shift to the left.
Regard the HR Coherence. Now I have a benchmark of what I was doing until not. Basicaly, giving 100% from the start and then collapse. But also on HR baseline of 150-170 when I am hitting balls on the practice range.
Now I need to establish my average HR when I am hitting balls on the golf course. To then establish the difference and adjust my practice range training accordingly to match as closely as possible my physiological state on the golf course.