The Gatepost Golf Swing

This chapter and the material in it is not for everybody. The first 20 chapters are about finding and developing your own golf swing fundamentals, essentially being your own golf coach. With the wide availability of slow-motion video, that is now easier and more logical than at any other time in history. We encourage you, like most of the great players of all time, to be essentially self-taught. If you are one of these people, then feel free to totally disregard this chapter. It's not for you. We added this chapter when after the publication of Golf Your Way, people began asking me for golf lessons. We realized that for lack of practice time or inclination, they didn't want to be self-taught. They just wanted to be taught a set of simple fundamentals that could be workable for anyone to comply with the ball flight laws. It needed to be based on a simple overall swing concept and a set of universal fundamentals that were easy to understand, learn, and carry out. There are thousands of methods out there already or might be conceived of. The one we selected is based entirely on its simplicity, efficiency, and its connection to the ball flight laws. As you might imagine, it's a lead axis system because of its ability to control low point, although it is clearly not stack and tilt or Gary Edwin. We are not the originators of the overall concept of this default system, which we now call the gate post. We owe that to my friend John Hensby who explores dozens of golf swing theories, some traditional, some unique, some even very radical. We have tweaked his initial fundamentals of his gate post or lead axis swing to allow it to comply more efficiently with the ball flight laws and the information about club face alignment at address that was found in chapters one and two. Any set of swing fundamentals need to comply with the laws of physics. Imagine a gate with one gate post, just one post and one gate. Your lead side is the post. Your torso is the gate. You just open the gate, then slam it shut, your torso revolving around that stationary post. First, set your post. Set a straight line up your lead ankle, lead knee, lead hip, and lead shoulder. Your lead arm will hang directly down in front of the post and your lead hand will be hanging in front of your lead thigh. Your weight will feel predominantly on the lead side when you bump your hip forward to line it up over your ankle. You're going to keep your weight there throughout the swing. From down the line, get your posture by balancing your weight comfortably across the entirety of your lead foot. Your shoulders should be parallel left to the target if you're right-handed. Bend at the waist comfortably to allow the lead hand to hang in front of the lead thigh and your arms to hang softly on your chest. Ball position will be determined by club length, shaft length, the distance between the feet, narrowing as clubs get shorter, and the uniform hand position as shown. Use the hammer and impact drills in Chapter 4 to find your grip. Overlapping, interlocking, or ten-finger is irrelevant other than what is comfortable for you. Your lead arm and hand being lined up over the post will dictate that you are in the little Y position as opposed to the capital Y. Clubface alignment at address will be slightly open to allow for natural closure through impact. Use the clubhead swings itself concept for the backswing. With soft arms, turn your lead shoulder under your chin as fully as you can. Drag the clubhead back, sold for a few inches. Let the momentum of the clubhead take you to the right position at the top and set your soft wrists. There should be no weight shift. It is fine if you actually put more pressure into your lead foot as you make the backswing. On the downswing, you're just going to slam the gate shut, rotating around that front gate post while leaving your arm soft and behind you as much as possible, hopefully eliminating any over-the-top issues. We believe that where we align our body, specifically our shoulders, has a huge impact on club path. Also, where we align the clubface at address has a huge impact on how it's aligned at impact when the ball leaves the face. With the gate post swing, we will be taking advantage of this knowledge to most easily comply with the ball flight laws. Let's talk about draws first. To hit a trackman draw with the gate post swing, we are going to set up as usual, then drop the right foot back. As we do so, we also allow the right shoulder to drop back. It will probably do so naturally when the foot goes. How much? The amount we want our path to be from the inside. We're going to set the face open. For me, I'm setting it up right down the intended path line. To make it clearly visible, I'm setting up here for a big draw. Hopefully, when the ball leaves the face through natural face closure, it will be aimed about halfway between the path line and the target line, and I can pull off a trackman open face draw to the target. You will need to experiment with your face aiming at address. It is likely different than mine. No one can find it but you. For a fade, it will be just the opposite, but a little different with the face aiming. Drop the lead foot and shoulder based on how far left we want the path, but aim the face right at the target. With face closure, hopefully it will leave the face halfway between the path shoulder line and the target line for a trackman closed faced fade. Again, you will have to experiment with face aim at address to find what works for you, but aiming the face at the target for fades at least worked pretty well for Nicholas. Unfortunately, even if you choose to pursue the gate post methodology, you will not be immune from any of the gross motor flaws other than the hang back on the trail side issue, but if you suffer from any of the others, you will find that the remedy suggested in chapters 8 through 12 on fixing the gross motor flaws will work well with the gate post method as they do with any method.