I'm a happy geek...

...it's not only Hannibal Smith who loves it when a plan comes together. Even the fact that Master Geek appears to be teething and is sitting on my knee at 10.30pm restricting my typing to one handed cannot deflate me.

The amazing thing is that my breakthrough had the most inauspicious of beginnings. I had a pretty lousy day at work, and came home in a mood that refused to lift, despite the best efforts of Mrs Geek. Around 9pm I realised I wasn't going to achieve much, and after some none too subtle hints from Mrs Geek caught up with some angry comedy. I felt a bit bad that I'd not managed any practice but knew that the chances of me managing anything productive were slim.

And yet...the mind is a strange thing. Without realising it, I must've been mulling over this and marrying it to this. As my mood lifted, I had an urge to try this out; My downstairs hall will tolerate anything up to a half swing with anything up to a five iron (this was discovered the hard way. The money to pay the handyman to fix my dents came from my golf fund. The fact I'm still alive to tell the tale tells you how much of a saint my wife is ;-)

Because I've started to practice deliberately, trying to feel my swings, it was easy to feel the right arm extension through the ball and the downward hit; I realised this is what I did when I hit the pitch shots I was happiest with. I then added Terry Koehler's instruction to look at the front edge of the ball if you want to get that crisp, "trapping" strike (more of Terry's instruction can be found here)


I then tried with my eight and five irons, and this was also very promising. I initially used a more pitch-like swing, with the upper and lower body more synchronised. From my time at the range, I know I hit it further if I swing with more of a whip-like action (I feel my lower body turn start first, my upper body lagging a bit more). I did this, and results were again good. To be honest, I'll wait and see which swing is more consistent at the range; I'm pretty sure I can get past the macho nonsense and go for accuracy over distance with my irons. I tried again tonight, and the feeling's still there. And it feels good.

I discovered John Graham (@JohnGrahamGolf) and Jason, the Golf Guru (@onplanegolf) on Twitter, and both are remarkably good teachers.The key for me was the concept that flipping came as a result of "stalling the pivot" and the video evidence both of John's and Jason's showed us exactly what they meant- any ex-golf magazine tip junky knows that "scooping the ball in the air" is bad, but not many can tell you exactly what that means, let alone the way to cure it demonstrated in Jason's blog (John also has drills to stop flipping; he is incredibly involved in the technical aspects of golf, but also very passionate about the need for awareness, something often missed by the more technical teacher).

My suspicion is that, although it may often seem that there are many different theories and ways to swing, a great deal of the variation is due to the same things being expressed in many ways. A truly great teacher won't rest until they have found the correct way to express this so a student gets it (the archetype of this might be the late Mr Penick). Twitter seems to have a number of these teachers, who will not only share their knowledge but also engage with those wishing clarification. I'm a subscriber to the Golf Smarter Podcast too, and there are a great many interesting coaches on there too and the 45 minute average is a good length of time to form an opinion on the methods and theories proposed.

As if that wasn't enough, I had a great run on the putting "leapfrog" to develop putting "touch"- not only did I have my highest score, and my first run with no balls short, I then followed it with a score of 7, with the eighth just sliding past the back marker.

A good couple of evenings all in all, from an inauspicious beginning.