Like most of you guys, I don't really get to actually play as much as I like.
It also means making wholesale changes with my swing is also difficult. So every fall/winter, I go into golf hibernation mode. I stop playing golf, I seldom go hit balls, and I sit in my basement trying to fix things in my swing.
Tinkering with my golf swing is actually the part of the golf hobby I enjoy the most. The experimentation and having full knowledge of what your body is doing is the part I relish. I stop trying different equipment, and hold off on tinkering with stuff until swing changes are ingrained.
My off-season goals are some fundamentals that ended up wreaking havoc on my golf game this year. Also, aside from the pain issues I've had this year, I'm always attributing it to how my lead arm functioned in the downswing. In an attempt to shallow the club, part of the pain came from undue stress to do it.
1) Grip. I have the opposite of the prototypical grip, I play a weak grip with a long thumb. I want to be normal LOL.
2) Posture. With a weak grip and a quick flexion in my hands, I put a lot of downward pressure on the grip, which has had me have my hands lower and lower at address. I want to fix this. The reason is when I'm on, I'm ok, but when I'm off, it induces some early extension. I'm working on setting up with my hands up further away from my body, as my hands tend to get low and tight to the body at address. Working on this part has already made my ball striking trash right now, as having the hands higher and further away from my body has made totally lose any feel on the takeaway.
3) Aim. Shit, this sounds pretty boring, but in every golf round, there would be 3-4 shots where I would get over the ball, and just feel like I was not aimed properly. 9/10, the result would be terrible contact because my body did not feel like it was aimed or aligned properly.
4) Early Extension. Towards the second half of this year, I started focusing on trying to get rid of as much early extension as I could, and while some days I made a lot of progress, there were definitely plenty of days where it made my ball striking dog shit.
Last year, I could hit a fade on command, almost to a fault. This year, the fade was gone.
What are you guys going to work on for next year? Post up what you are going to work on, and any progress.
January 2020.
Late September 2020, before rehaul.