What a game!

Having played a blinder a week or so ago, I went to the course for my next game desperately trying to lower my expectations, knowing that high expectations usually mean the round will end in tears. Unfortunately, the golfing gods do not reward good thinking any more than they reward good stroke making with good scoring. I then played some of the worst golf I can recall playing in recent years. Consistency seems to be as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel.

In both rounds I had been attempting to make a return to the Paul Wilson (PW) concepts of body rotation, passive arms, loose wrists, etc. But while this worked a treat one day, it didn't work at all the next day. My game collapsed, my confidence with it, and my frustration soared.

So, I am now in search of a new strategy (for want of a better expression) for my next game.

I have been working for some time on what I regard as three key elements of the golf swing - no sway, weight on front foot at impact and no over-hitting. I see no reason to abandon these. But I feel like I need a model or method, or maybe a picture of a swing to copy. I don't mean a tournament pro golfer's swing, however, that at my age and with my physical limitations, would be silly.

The model I am coming back to is not Paul Wilson's, which although excellent in may ways, has a few too many 'adjustments', maybe 'refinements', and I'm not sure what to call them, to work for me consistently. The model I like a lot and the one I'm going to try again is the one promoted by Ross Duplessis, whom I've mentioned before.

To paraphrase loosely, or borrow from his method, the critical thing in the RD golf swing seems to be an awareness of the finish position together with the avoidance of lots of adjustments in the downswing to achieve a good, consistent finish position. Awareness of the target is another important element of the RD method.

If I have this correct, to achieve consistency, RD advocates a set up with most of the weight (60%) on the front foot (not unlike stack and tilt) and the club set in line with the lead arm. The wrist position is then maintained throughout the swing, with very little if any use of the wrists or hands. The swing is essentially about body rotation back and through to a finish position facing the target (not unlike the PW method, but without some of the requisites of that approach).

In a way, the RD method, and I apologise if that is an inappropriate word for his approach, is an extension of the widely accepted approach to hitting mini shots or chip shots - weight forward, wrist-cock retention, etc. It is, just like the chip shot, aimed at repeatability and consistency, and I think it has quite a bit going for it.

Anyway, in my next game I am going to try to use this approach and, as always, going to try to keep my expectations low. Let's see what happens.

Stacking but not sure about tilting

I've been scoring fairly well lately, but mainly because I'm playing smarter and my short game is a bit tighter. My shot making is sometimes good, sometimes bad, including my driving, and it has been annoying me.

Therefore, over the past day or so, I've been looking again at Stack & Tilt, not because I want to adopt the method or system or whatever it has been called, but because I think it does offer some interesting and helpful thoughts on how the average golfer can play more consistent golf.

It's the Stack part of the equation that most interests me, putting and keeping the weight on the front foot during the golf swing. The Tilt part is, in my view, an obsolete term because in some respects, and in some new interpretations and implementations of S&T, there now seems to be less tilt than in the original 'model'.

The key thing about Stack is that it eliminates the need, contrary to a lot of golf instruction, to move a lot of one's weight to the back foot, the so called loading of the swing, before transferring it back to the front foot. This transfer of weight is, again in my view, one of the major causes of inconsistent ball striking in the game. The S&T advocates cite consistent bottom of the swing position (or words to that effect) as a key objective.

Professional golfers and good amateurs, who hit thousands of golf balls, have the skill and the time to develop the timing needed to achieve this back and forward weight transfer and hit the ball in the same part of the down swing time after time. The average player does not have this skill or timing, and contacts the ball differently almost every time.

By stacking the weight on the front foot and basically keeping it there, albeit adding some weight to it just before and at impact, there is much better chance for the average player to make good ball contact. It should be noted that this assumes one subscribes to the view that the ball must be struck before the ground for most iron and hybrid shots.

I'm fairly sure that this approach works quite well for fairway woods as well because plenty of average players have more trouble with topping their fairway woods than chunking them. Of course, ball position and a range of other swing factors will come into play, so a period of trial and error will be needed for everyone.

Using a stacking approach for the driver is a slightly different kettle of fish. There is evidence to suggest that it is necessary to hit up on drives, not down, in order to maximise distance. The S&T people address this issue by suggesting that more hip slide is needed with a driver and slightly different club positioning (check out the relevant 'academy' website for details). This is not something I've experimented with so far, but it is an important issue.

Suffice to say, weight on the front foot at impact is a concept that is ignored by the majority of average golfers, despite the evidence of their eyes in watching good golfers on TV and elsewhere. My previously espoused fundamentals of weight on the front foot, no sway and no over-hitting fit nicely with some of the S&T principles, so I'm happy to endorse the approach in general terms, and continue to work on my own ball-striking consistency.

By the way, I read recently that S&T is in many ways an extension of well-established short game set up and swing principles and I think this is absolutely correct - weight on the front foot, quiet wrists (straight arms) and swinging with control (no forcing).

A second by the way: I'm not convinced that any particular 'method' or 'system' is going to work for anyone or everyone. However, there are individual ideas or concepts that are often worth a try. The main thing is that whatever the idea or concept, it must be 'practical;, that is, it must be something that can be applied, and applied with relatively much less effort and time than is available to the average player. Trying to implement complex swing concepts that relate to the swings of top-line players is often useless and often counter-productive, which is why most 'tips' simply don't work.