2010 NEW PRODUCTS
BY SIMON K H A N
2010 BMW PGA CHAMPION
SHIFT WORK Learn to transfer weight if you want success with the straighter-faced clubs WORDS BY PETER MASTERS PHOTOGRAPHY BY HOWARD BOYLAN
The problem I see with a great many amateurs is that they don’t get on their left side on the downswing – at least not until it’s too late. It’s easy enough to hit wedges with the weight on your left foot, but that’s because you have plenty of loft. The rules change when you start to hit the straighterfaced clubs. This is what the stack and tilters are getting at. They advocate loading the left on the backswing, to get around the downswing problem, but that, I think, is going too far the other way. What you really need to do is learn to transfer weight at the right time. Let me show you here a simple drill that explains what I mean.
SWING THEORY The whole stack and tilt thing is really just an interpretation of something that was out there already. I’ve had a number of lessons with Mac O’Grady and he was the first one to develop this theory of teaching. The stack and tilt boys have taken that and appear to have claimed much of it as their own. Mac looked at the great swingers, the Ben Hogans and Sam Sneads of this world and adapted a move that is based around theirs. In layman’s terms, it’s all about rotating around a central point. The stack and tilters put their weight heavily on the left side and leave it there, while back in David Leadbetter’s day he spoke about two axis points in the swing, one for going back and then another for coming through. I work on a single, central axis point which, I believe, makes much more sense.
102 FEBRUARY 2011 // www.golf-world.co.uk
Address Place a cane vertically in the ground just to the side of your left foot as I have done here.