Tinkering

The good news for me is I played a little better last week - mainly because of better chipping and pitching. However, I did three-putt three or four times and hit a few wayward drives. But any time you play better than your handicap it can't be too bad.

I'm not going to tinker with my revisited Swing Machine body rotation swing. I'm happy with the concept of using more rotation to initiate and power the swing, keeping the arms as powerless as possible and the wrists as free as possible. It works well, even if I'm still not fully trusting it and therefore hitting a few pull-hooks.

What I am going to tinker with, if that's the right word, is my swing plane, ball position and putter.

Firstly, I've always had a quite flat swing path, taking the club back inside and behind me, trying like most people to create a swing path from inside to out. Now knowing that this is patently wrong-headed and that a flat backswing plane is actually more likely to promote a casting, over-the-top slice swing, I also know that I need to neutralise this back-inside backswing.

The mistake I could make in trying to correct this would be to start picking up the club, much like a Jim Furyk or Inbee Park. This can work, but there is probably a happy medium, where the arms do go higher, but stay connected to the body (most golfers know what connected means). I'm going to tinker with this backswing plane issue, but try not give it too much emphasis - you don't hit the ball on the backswing.

The other thing I intend to tinker with is ball position. Some of the things I've been reading lately suggest that moving the ball back and inch or so for the mid to short irons is well worth considering.

At the moment, I'm reasonably consistent with my wedges, but mid-short irons (4 to 9) are at times very ordinary. I think it's probably worth trying to play the ball back an inch or so for these clubs to see if I can make more solid and consistent contact. I'm aware of the potential dangers of this - mainly because of the effect on the swing plane/path, but it might just work, so I'll experiment.

The final thing I'm going to tinker with is my putter. I recently went back to my old Ping blade putter to try to increase my awareness of the club face for short putts. Unfortunately, for much of the time I'm not making solid contact with this club when lag putting - hence the three-putts. I don't intend to change my putting stroke fundamentals, but I am going to go back to my Odyssey centre shaft putter, which has a smaller head and face, to try to improve my contact consistency. The bottom line is it's impossible to lag putts well if sometimes you hit the ball in the middle of the club face and sometimes you slightly top or slice the ball.

That's probably enough tinkering for now. Let's see what happens.