The Teddy Bear Drill

I have one more lesson with Mike but I don’t want to schedule it till I can learn how to stop releasing the club early. So I resorted to surfing the Internet for golf instructional videos, which is a bit like wandering a street market in Marrakesh. You never know if clicking on a link will lead to a Moroccan souk hawking the next indispensible golf gadget.  

After watching some really bad and unintentionally funny videos, I finally found a good one. It’s called How to Stop Casting & Create Lag in Golf Swing by Herman Williams, PGA. Casting is the golf term for releasing the wrists and extending the club too soon before impact. Lag refers to the clubhead trailing the hands at impact.

The video has several drills, and they are all pretty simple. One of the drills is similar to the “pump” drill that Mike taught me. In another drill, you hinge the wrist at set-up, then move your body so that your clubhead is touching a wall. Then you finish your swing. This drill forces you to maintain the wrist hinge till you get closer to the bottom of your swing. If you unhinge too early, you’ll hit the wall.

The idea of this drill makes perfect sense to me. In my normal swing, I hinge the wrists last. So on the downswing, I would instinctively unwind in reverse order, unhinging the wrists first. After all, last in, first out is a principle that works with most other things in daily life, like getting on an elevator or unpacking groceries.

The only thing that doesn’t make sense about the drill is using a wall. I was afraid it might leave me with quite a bit of drywall patching to do. Instead, I set up next to the edge of my bed. To give me an extra incentive not to hit it, I propped up a stuffed teddy my hubby once gave me.

Cute, and effective. For me, anyway!