[BerntR]

Thanks for asking, Innercityteacher.

The game is gradually recovering. Scores are going down. The short game is back. But the ball striking isn't really back yet. I have a few holes on every round where I completely lose it from tee to green. I am still struggling with bad habits from when I tried to start with the right forearm on plane. (And probably some bad habits that are even older) When it happens I completely lose the pressure point balance that enables me to pull & push and trap the ball. With the driver then, the club comes inside-out with open club face. The swing feels OK but the ball ends up on someone's roof - if let the pivot go all in. I discovered the other day that I am arching with my left wrist on the top when this happens. That is something I can deliberately avoid if I think about it. But then we're talking hand manipulation. When I have the alignments right I can just swing back and strike through and the ball gets trapped without any manipulation whatsoever. When I'm out in the back yard and just sweep through the grass I get regularly reminders that I still have have it.

The swing clicks in from time to time when I play too. A couple of rounds ago it clicked in on the back nine when I tried to hit a low percentage shot with a hybryd 200 yards away from the pin, with a small but steep hill right in front of the ball. Unfortunately I didn't get the launch high enough to carry the hill so it went into overspin modus and went half the distance. But I knew I had it then, I proceeded to hit the ball to 2 feet from 100 yards, saved the par and went on to basically hit every green for the last 5-6 holes. I could go out and play in the 70s tomorrow but I don't think it will happen for quite some time yet.

My experiences with plane shift is almost entirely the opposite of what Daryl has written so either he is wrong or I am rather untypical. I need to keep the shaft on a rather flat angle to get stability and a max lag pressure through impact. The steeper the shaft angle becomes at impact the closer I get to a flip release, the less lag pressure I am able to apply through impact and the less predictable the result gets.

I am not 100% certain whether I am really plane shifting or merely keeping the club shaft on a flatter plane throughout. As OB Left has pointed out, the swing plane doesn't have to be the shaft plane. The stroke looks like a shift down to the elbow plane, but it feels like being on the plane at all times. It could be that I'm using a Hank Haney type of parallell planes, with the club head on plane all the time. The whole stroke feels pretty much like a dual horizontal motion with an accumulator 3 motion that is very flat, so to speak. Anyway, this shallow shaft plane gets me as far away from flip territory as I can get. It works pretty well in the short game too.