Tigers New Swing

Posted: Sat 23:38, 17 Dec 2011

I would like to hear what people like and dislike about Tigers new swing...What changes have you observed?

Posted: Sun 0:42, 18 Dec 2011

bguinnup wrote:

I would like to hear what people like and dislike about Tigers new swing...What changes have you observed?

Hello Bob, hope all is OK, mate Cool

Well, someone asked me a similar question not so long ago, thus, I believe the answer is still valid (macroscale perspective only of course with a bit of historical review):

Harmon had a relatively easy job - probably just to correct some microscale issues with young Tiger's amateur motion aimed at achieving the best release of kinetic chain without thinking that always is a qui pro quo. He just let the general principles of his swing go without paying any attention that his TSP shaft angle during the downswing is not what the best ballstrikers did. Either max distance or max precision. Young Woods chose the first since his body was young enough and his clubs forgiving enough to offset the general tendency of breaking pivot early and throwing arms too much in front. Harmon and noone else paid any attention that he destroys his lead knee joint because of jumping with his lead foot off the ground and stumping down to a rotated knee with all dynamic power. This is how kids swing since they want to hit the ball far. Leading with hips leaving upper body closed - a big kinetic disproportion between hips and shoulders.
Then, his knee problems appeared. Haney proposed an unreal (but theoretically very appealing) concept of congruent angles. Unfortunately, for him and his pupil, this concept could be valid for Iron Byron and not a living biped. The more hips are open (which is a proper thing for a biped aiming at killing the ball) the more he needed to be laid off to match parallel planes principles. Read: even more compensations. He needed to tame his hips while still throwing arms in front of the body - still 2-way miss and timing problems.
Foley brought flexion/extension problems in the name of saving his knee. The result, that was easy to predict is that Woods started to jump off his shoes again and his knee will suffer a lot. Instead letting the lead leg be passive during the backswing and bend inside in the knee joint (even if his lead foot rolls to the inside and the heel comes off the ground) he picked up some silly S&T concept of footwork that no previous great ballstrikers ever did before. What is even more funny, Tiger's stance practically did not improve from Haney's times - still parallel without any diagonality - while Haney had no choice with his flawed concept (vide: Iron Byron), now it should have been immediately abandoned as the first thing.

Just remarks to give the big picture. I could go on and on.

Cheers

Posted: Sun 2:25, 18 Dec 2011

Great observations. I still haven't really grasped what Foley is teaching. All of Tiger swings seems to be little knockdown shots, more on the stack n tilt type swing. He took that Cory Pavins practice swing, which I am assuming he does to try and get away from throwing the club and his arms at the ball and swing out too much towards the target. Seems like he may be trying to keep his left arm more bent through impact is trying to maintain the index finger pressure point on the forward swing.

Posted: Sun 11:07, 18 Dec 2011

Yep, good points. As far as I read, his path pre-Foley was ca. 10* in-to-out, so it is logical that Foley (especially that he consults everything with Trackman specialists) wants Woods to introduce an OTT element to his transition.
However, it is beyond my comprehension why he does not want to change his setup as well as upper body rotation (to match his pelvis rotation) and still leaves him with upper body pivot stall and throwing his arms in front of his body. It creates unnecessary steepness when Woods is being told to swing OTT and hard left. The guy has got no luck to coaches.

Cheers