[BerntR]

Is your left wrist level at address?

I tried to make that work for about 6 months. It went really well, actually My median score went up with approx 6-7 strokes per round and I never had three good strokes in a row out on the course. I had a lot of rounds where none of the full strokes felt really solid. I was spraying balls everywhere. And the best shots were still flirting with loss of lag pressure at impact so the distance control was not good.

The bottom line is that I run out of left arm if I start from a level left wrist. Thus I need to stall something to find the sweet spot. That basically happens automatically but the result is highly unpredictable. If my hand and eye coordination didn't work overtime I would be topping every single shot from that address position.

I knew I was back to good old self when I was the anchor man in a scramble this Sunday. On an "almost" reachable par 5 (for my distance) I first hit a low draw that curved around a fairway bunker and came to rest about as close to the green as you could get while still being in the fairway. Plus 1 yard. I hit the 2. shot with a 5 wood from a down hill semi rough lie close to the water with bushes blocking my flight line towards the flag. As I addressed the ball with the hands low and way forward of the ball I "knew" I had the shot. And that I could hit it as hard as I wanted to. I didn't flush it, but it still curved nicely around the bushes and came to rest about a yard outside the green. We didn't get the eagle but the birdie was a formality.

To get back to topic, I think a flat shaft plane doesn't necessarily indicate that a plane shift is going on. You can see a very distinct plane shift in some players but in others it looks like a more gradual thing. The club head could very well be moved on a steep plane even though the shaft is kept on a flatter plane at all times. It could even be moved on a curved plane for all I know. A plane that gradually flattens towards impact.

A shiftless compensation free TSP stroke is problematic unless you're playing somewhere in outer space. Earth gravity plays a part in this. Just think what it must take to keep the club and the hands on the same flat plane throughout the down stroke while mother earth with it's 9.81 m/s2 acceleration moves every part of the club 5-10 inches towards the ground. It goes without sayin that a pure rope handling stroke without any shaft loading and steering must have a moving aiming point that starts outside the plane line and gets closer and closer to the plane line - to account for earth gravity.

But I also think there are biological reasons for a flat shaft plane. Our shoulders like to turn quite horizontally and so do our hands when they are close to impact, holding a club. It takes a lot of hula hula to steepen those motions for more than a brief span of the total motion. And - as is evident in most of the freshmen to this fine sport - if you don't tame the horizontal part of your pivot turn in the early part of the down swing you will find your club outside the plane. A flatter shaft plane enables us to utilize the shoulder turn better through the ball than a steep plane. But you can only utilize that if you bring your clubhead and hands down towards the elbow plane.

Somehow it just seems much easier to sustain horizontal lag than vertical lag without dancing all over the place. Basically talking about accumulator #3 lag here. It has a far bigger range of motion than Accumulator #2. When you approach impact with a flatter shaft angle you have the opportunity to save more Accumulator #3 lag for longer.

I also did my homework with a swing laser this last winter. The lesson I learned was that it was rather difficult and quite powerless for me to perfectly trace the plane line with the club shaft in the upper half of the swing. As soon as I stepped on the gas the grip side of the laser was pointing way outside the plane line. This happens regardless of how steep I am swinging with my hands.

One of the really fundamental differences between striking the ball with a TSP shaft plane and an elbow shaft plane is how you can thrust with your pivot through the ball. If you swing on the TSP you need to release more accumulator #4 earlier and there will be a sense of disconnection between the hands and the pivot at impact (relatively speaking). This disconnection coincides well with starting the back swing with a right forearm pickup. What goes up will come down.

When you strike the ball with the shaft on an elbow plane you have the opporutnity to take advantage of a much tighter connection between the pivot and the hands through impact, and hence, more acccumulator #4 release later. It almost feels like I'm firing accumulator #4 straight into the ball when I hit my most solid shots. At least with a short iron where I can really keep things tightly connected for a long time.

If you don't want your pivot to dominate impact you can thrust with your Right Hand - or both hands - and go fully manual through impact. To me that feels like much better hands' control although less independent hands' motion than trying something similar on TSP. On the elbow plane I can basically hit the ball as low as I want to with any club and I hardly ever go for automatic trajectory height inside 150 yards. Lower seeems to give more predictable distances. The notion that elbow plane is pivot controlled hands doesn't make sense to me.

To appreciate the good hands' control that can be had on the elbow plane it is important to realise that the vertical swing center in the body has to be lower through impact on the elbow plane than on the TSP. If you don't lower the physical swing center within you, you will get a tendency to flipping because the push pull forces through the hands will not maintain a balanced relationship as the shaft plane progresses downwards.

I think perhaps some of the TSP ambassadours (slash elbow plane dismissers) really haven't figured out how they need to adjust the pivot motion to get the best possible result and max hands control on the elbow plane. There has to be a greater separation between the plane(s) of the shoulders turn and the plane that the ball is struck on. If you're used to TSP you need to feel as if you're swinging above the ball with your shoulders, yet swinging through the ball with your hands.

Further, to balance the push and pull pressure that is transmitted to the club through your hands (and important for clubface control and basically everything that matters) you need to keep more of the horizontal part of Accumulator #4 angle and you can drive your hips much farther through before you strike the ball. That will assure that you have more lag left at impact and thus a larger margin for timing error.

The difference in impact position between Brian Gay and Jim Furyk shows what I'm talking about. Those two are possibly as far apart in this regard as you will find on the highest level of the game. Jim has his hips almost facing the target at impact. He has a lot of Accumulator #4 lag left before the club overtakes the pivot. Brian's hips are facing the ball, and if you look at still pictures it looks like he has fired the last charge before the ball is gone. Seing the whole motion tells another story though, but it is clear that Brian goes through the ball with a lot less total lag than Jim does. And based on my own experience I would say that Jim probably feels more ground force through impact than Brian does. Personally I think Jim Furyk's swing is a work of art.

Jim Furyk:

Brian Gay: