Thursday, June 9, 2022

backswing

 


SWING TIPS

Pivot Like a Pro: Two of the best drills for a backswing that sings

May 31, 2022

J.D. Cuban

It's true that there are many different backswings at the tour-pro level, but the one common denominator is that no one is doing anything that hurts his or her chance of hitting a solid shot. Many amateurs get their swing off to a poor start and have to make mid-swing adjustments so that they can make reasonable contact with the golf ball. It’s a recipe for inconsistency.

We get a ton of sunshine where I teach in Southern California, so one of my go-to drills is using your shadow to train for a better backswing. Before we get to that, here’s a simple way you can groove a better takeaway and make those first few feet of your swing more valuable.

Grab an iron in your lead hand while placing your dominant hand on your trail thigh. Now take the club back with one hand, stopping when the shaft is parallel to the ground (above). As you repeatedly do this, feel how your lead leg responds, preventing your body from swaying or sliding away from the target—a common backswing mistake that makes it really tough to get the club back to the ball in a proficient way. If your hand moves up or off your thigh as you take the club back, you’ll know your body is starting to slide instead of pivoting. Now that the start of your swing is fixed, check out my shadow drill below.

—With Ron Kaspriske

THE SHADOW KNOWS

To get to the top of the swing the way the pros do, find a spot where your body can cast a shadow at address, then drop a rod down so that it vertically dissects the image. Now make a backswing, paying attention to how your shadow moves in relation to the rod. When you turn back with your body, your shadow should remain fairly still in relation to the rod (above). It shouldn’t drift noticeably in either direction. Remember that feeling when you’re back out on the golf course.

TASHA BROWNER BOHLIG is one of Golf Digest’s Best Teachers in California. She is director of instruction at El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana.

Check out Tasha’s new Golf Digest Schools Series, “Fundamentals of Golf,” and other great instruction videos at schools.golfdigest.com.


one hour a day to learning

 

with Alex Berezow ● Thu 9 June, 2022

And hello again Big Thinkers,

My favorite color is green. Nothing gives me a sense of tranquility like surrounding myself with evergreen trees, and I’m blessed enough to have a home in the Pacific Northwest where I can do just that. At the bottom of this email, you can see a picture of my “office” for today. (That’s coffee, not booze. Would I drink on the job?)

Wherever you are today, I hope that it’s peaceful — and this week’s newsletter can help! This week, we feature articles on the “5-hour rule” and the power of habit. Also: MIT has invented a $4 desalination device, and a physicist argues against building another giant particle accelerator.

Cheers,
Alex

THE BIG IDEA

 

The 5-hour rule: How to turn a wasted day into a successful one

After a long day at work, most of us prefer to relax, watch some TV, and perhaps have a drink. But if you want to get smarter, faster (and more successful), you should spend one hour per day ​​learning, reflecting, and thinking. That might sound boring, but it doesn’t have to be. Read a book, watch a fun educational video, try a new hobby, or do something completely different than your typical routine. Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates all claim to follow the 5-hour rule.

LEARN MORE



The 5-hour rule: How to turn a wasted day into a successful one

We each have the same 24 hours in the day. How will you spend yours?
Credit: Andrey Popov / Adobe Stock
KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • We each have the same 24 hours available to us. What we do with those hours varies by culture and gender, but we each have at least a few hours to spend in leisure. 
  • The 5-hour rule asks us to devote at least one hour a day to learning, experimenting, and reflecting. It's a trick used by the richest and most successful people in the world. 
  • Here are three easy steps to start your own 5-hour rule.

Ilike to make chit-chat now and then. One of my go-to conversation topics — most people’s go-to conversation topic — is TV. I might open with, “are you watching anything good at the moment?” This often opens a half-decent, mostly entertaining discussion. But sometimes, my opening salvo falls flat. The other person says something like, “Oh, I’ve not got the time to watch TV.”

It’s an answer that bothers me. For one, it’s laced with not a small whiff of condescension: If you’re watching TV, you must be lazy. But mostly, it bothers me because it’s not strictly true. What people mean is, “I’ve prioritized other things in my day.” And that’s fine. We each have our own personal values, concerns, and preferences.

“I’ve not got time to watch TV” means “TV doesn’t interest me as much as this or that.”

The fact is that we all have the same number of hours in the day, and it’s up to us to decide how we spend them. Some people will most certainly have more “free hours” than others, but for most of us, we have at least a few hours to spend as we want. And according to “the 5-hour rule,” how we choose to spend those hours might mean the difference between success and mediocrity.

The anatomy of a day

There are 24 hours in a day (or 1,440 minutes, if you really like to count your life away). The average person sleeps around eight hours (with the Dutch sleeping the most and the Singaporeans the least). That leaves 16 waking hours left to spend (I’m afraid those “learn while you’re sleeping” tapes aren’t likely to work). We need to subtract the seven to eight hours a day during which most people work, though those sleepy Dutch work a bit less. So, we’re down to nine remaining hours.

Much of those nine hours are taken up by life administration: shopping, housework, unpaid labor (e.g. care work), and eating and drinking. Of course, there are massive cultural differences lurking in that category. For instance, as Our World in Data reveals that people “in France, Greece, Italy and Spain report spending more time eating than people in most other European countries. The country where people spend the least time eating and drinking is the USA (63 minutes).”

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Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge disparity in how care work or unpaid labor is divided across genders. According to the OECD, “Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men.” This has a knock-on effect in how many leisure hours the genders have to spend. For instance, in Norway and New Zealand the difference is almost negligible. In Portgual and India, however, men have 50 percent more leisure time than women.

The 5-hour rule

Most people have at least a few hours to do with what they want. For more than half of the population, those hours are wasted away on non-work-related phone worship. But these are not the people who will become the entrepreneurs, innovators, and success stories of tomorrow.

Over the last few decades, a cottage industry has sprung up that examines and dissects the habits and values of “self-made” millionaires. One of the key findings that comes up again and again is known as the “5-hour rule.” In short, this is the rule where we spend one hour a day learning, reflecting, and thinking. The rule dates to Benjamin Franklin, who would devote (at least) an hour each day specifically to learning something new. Franklin would rise early to read and write. He even set up his own club of artisans and experimenters. Today, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates all employ some version of the 5-hour rule.

The idea is that devoting an hour of your day to education exercises the mind, improves your skills, and rehearses great discipline. In education-speak, the 5-hour rule gives us both knowledge and skills.

How to spend your hour

Even accepting the wisdom in the 5-hour rule, it can still come over as daunting. After a long day, with tired eyes and a throbbing headache, most of us will reach for the TV remote, not Tolstoy. But here are three “first steps” to the 5-hour rule.

Learn…however you can. Reading print on a book is one way of learning, but it’s not the only way. In fact, if you don’t enjoy reading that much, it’s likely you’ll learn less from it anyway. Today, podcasts, audiobooks, and spoken radio are all great ways to spend your hour. What’s more, the internet is full of educational, entertaining, and enlightening long-form articles, which are much more digestible than huge, hand-aching tomes.

Experiment. Bettering yourself does not always mean cramming your head with facts. The most successful people in life were not those who stumbled on some magic treasure in the woods, but who tried and failed, tried, and failed again. In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford says success means we “first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.” Try something new. Try something differently. When we experiment, we both have fun and learn a great deal

Reflect. Failure is only valuable insofar as it improves the future. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Each failure is different, and each defeat is closer to victory than the last. There are many ways to reflect. For some, it might mean a diary, journal, or ten minutes spent simply ruminating. For others, it could mean talking things over and unpacking what happened. When we reflect on our days and our mistakes, we turn failures into learning experiences.

So, why not give the 5-hour rule a go? At worst, it will make you a bit more interesting at the next family gathering. At best, it might make you a few million dollars.

Jonny Thomson runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.


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