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A month ago I made some predictions on the players to watch this year. So far Ross Fisher has come a solid runner up in China, Adam Scott has won in Qatar, Tiger Woods started like a tornado last week at the Buick Invitational winning by a massive 8 shots and today Miguel Angel Jiminez did this on the seventh hole at the Dubai Classic:
An amazing hole in one not even touching the sides on its way into the hole and can you believe there wasn’t a hole in one prize available!
A short message for Justin Rose though who is the only one of the five names to watch of 2008. Come on Justin sort it out your letting the side down!
No I haven’t lost the plot, the fact of the matter is I saw this done years ago by a guy that had just had an operation on his right wrist meaning he couldn’t play. However he was a golf coach and was still teaching even though he wasn’t allowed to use that arm for anything while it was healing. This did not stop him teaching with the good arm and a few years back I realized why this was a good thing to practice.
Notice I said practice! This isn’t one for the course but here it the reason playing shots with just your leading arm on the range can benefit you on the course.
The normal golf shot is played with two hands on the club and the leading arm is kept straight through the back swing all the way to around 85% of completion of the follow through. So imagine you can hold the club with a solid grip in your leading hand (this is the one facing the target)
Keep everything as you would normally in your setup but place your back hand behind your back (see told you I wasn’t losing the plot) and using only your front arm and your body movement (which is what you should be doing through your swing) keeping that front arm straight take a swing.
OK few things I need to point out:
Make sure you take a number of practice swings
When choosing a bay on the range make sure it is a closed bay as balls have a habit of going astray with this method
Don’t try and knock the ball a long way, your natural swing will do this
Grip the club slightly more than normal with the hand you have on it, your resistance on the club is half what it normally is with two hands
Practice makes perfect.
This is one of the drills I use on the golf range when I am working on my swing, it helps improve control of the club head and pretty much forces me to use body rotation in my swing.
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