For so many years I have had a high single digit handicap. Right in the 8-9 range, occasionally playing like a 10. The reason was clear to everyone who played with me: that kid has speed, but man, that driver can break free.
With that one word – loose – you can imagine the images: high, right and away.
To explain, I have to drop humility for a moment. I’m athletic. I have good hand-eye coordination. I grew up playing baseball, basketball, football, you name it. Hence the swing speed: 180 to 180 km/h with driver, just below the Tour average. And the contact is often all around the center. Not perfect, no. But sometimes perfectly straight from the center of the face. And although that should produce a good result, sometimes the hits in the middle were the ones that ended up furthest from the fairway. I spent years in the resulting confusion.
My problem with all that speed was that I wasn’t patient enough to use it. I didn’t give myself enough time for it finish the backswing for my legs, hips and core shot ahead of my arms and hands. My upper and lower body were trying so hard to get in sync right before contact, instead of getting in sync somewhere earlier in the downswing.
I created natural deceleration and enough torque, but struggled with a steep downswing – those hands rushing to the contact zone – due to too fast a tempo. What I’ve learned is…this is one of the hardest things to solve. One coach stood behind me and held the clubhead at the top of my swing to make sure I reached that point and paused – just a split second – before shooting the ball. This of course helped diagnose the problem. High-speed cameras would show how my hip rotation was rarely in sync with my shoulder rotation. But over time, without that coach on the driving range, the bad habits seeped back in.
The ingenious idea that Cameron Young’s father used to create one of the best golf swings
By means of:
Luke Kerr-Dineen
So what gives? Why, dear reader, continue to read the travails of a golfer you barely know?
Because your own payout could be similar. Maybe you are as visual as I am.
That’s part of the deal, right? If creating a new, repeatable part of your swing is, at least in part, a self-taught exercise, then we should all take advantage of what kind of learners we are. I am decided not a kinesthetic learner. I’m much more of a visual understanding of the world. I necessary to take notes in college, just to write things down so I could see them on the page instead of hearing them from my professor’s mouth.
All of which is to say that I need images. I need those high-speed cameras. To figure myself out, I also needed a visual swing thought. That’s why I’ve been thinking about Hideki Matsuyama and Cameron Young for most of 2025.
The most avid golf fans know that these two players have one swing element more in common than any other: they pause at the top of their backswing in such a way that it seems like you can’t see anything else. Every part of their swing seems to revolve around that pause point, like a fulcrum that keeps everything in balance. Both swings are fast and violent, but that’s what they are patient. And I channeled them throughout 2025.
No, I don’t have a break in my swing like Young or Matsuyama. That’s because feeling is different from Real. What it all looks like, for my various playing partners, is something much more fluid. But in my mind there is a forced patience during the last 10% of my backswing. I think about reaching my Cam Young Point before I pull my hands back to the ball. The image alone, which is burned into my teeball conscience – just like the one at the top of this article – has created better contact and a feeling of more control in the hitting area, which makes sense. My lower body and upper body feel more in sync during the downswing. I reach a place of synchronicity sooner than ever before, allowing my hand-eye coordination to take over.
What does the result look like?
The big, high, right-side miss has been largely banished, if only by the fact that my natural swing – slicing slightly across the ball – has me starting everything on the left side of the fairway and bleeding gently to the right. The more patient swing is also a much shallower swing. Shallower means less movement in the hitting zone and less spin, which is always good with the longest club in the bag.
So, what’s the takeaway, here on December 31st?
Take an online test to find out what kind student you are. Then find a solution that suits that learning style. For the visual people among us, a simple photo can be enough. For the audio types, it might be whispering your swing thoughts over the ball. Kinesthetic learners may need to perform muscle repetitions for several hours before they become confident. And if you’re a combination of multiple learning types, you might rehearse movements in front of a mirror. Here’s a quiz to get you started on that journey.
#single #simple #image