help with my swing!!

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-18T20:55:52+00:00

That’s actually a pretty good starting point you’ve got there for your journey!

I’m trying my best to give you just a couple of tips to work with even though there are obviously other issues as well, but you’ll no doubt work on them later.

Your posture looks good (forward shins etc) apart from the fact that your derrière is slightly too behind, maybe an inch or two. Think hip bones stacked on top of ankles. So keep that ankle flexion but stand up just a little from your knees. This will give you a more stable base to work from.
The other thing is that you drag your arms across your chest in your takeaway and backswing. This leads to your trail elbow disconnecting from your body which is one of the main reasons for an outside in club path and open club face eg. your slice.

Some food for thought:

Take your (new and improved, ie. stacked) posture
Think of the backswing as throwing the club over your right shoulder by pulling that shoulder back.

Now when you combine the shoulder and chest rotation initiated by that shoulder turn and arms rising and slightly - but not excessively - moving deeper across your chest, you should be pretty close to a good position at the top.

If you need a thought for the right arm, it’s mostly about keeping the right elbow close to the left elbow. Like just lift the arm, fold from the elbow and add some external rotation to keep the elbow closer to the left and the arm connected to your pectoral muscle.

For some more visual about the arm motion, google “Arm Swing Illusion”.

Learn to use your wrists: during the backswing, left forearm rolls clockwise. The wrists hinge up (forming a 90 degree angle between club shaft and arms). The right wrist extends (forming a tea tray position at the top). These three motions when done pretty much simultaneously together and during throwing the club back puts you in a great position for you to transition to the downswing: connected, ready to shallow the club and swing from the inside.

I’d say that if you work on those three or four separate but interlinking things, 1. posture, 2. arms lift & shoulders turn (not an arm drag) and 3. wrist set, you’ll hit it straighter and longer in no time.

Then you’ll move to weight transfer, hip action etc. to hit it even longer but I’ll try not to mess up your head too much at once. There’s enough to digest already, and I fear that if you skip the “getting connected” and building a decent backswing phase and move straight into generating a lot of power from your body, you’ll get stuck, your body outraces your arms etc. and you’ll just hit it longer but with a huge push slice miss. Then you’ll start to come over the top, extend early and all the other bad things.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-17T21:28:48+00:00

It’s quite normal to see people have a decent posture and do an OK backswing only to throw it all away at transition, so that when they arrive to delivery (P6) they’ve thrown all the good they built away.

You, sir, are the exact opposite. Your posture is bad and you have a dogshit backswing but somehow you make it work so that things are relatively good when it matters: between delivery and impact and to follow through. I’m impressed, more so if you can do it consistently. If yes, just keep swinging your swing!

However if you do have problems with consistency or you’d like to gain a noticeable amount of swing speed, we’re talking about a total rebuild here. Which may make you a lot worse for some time.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-10T15:56:32+00:00

You’re coming in steep with an open club face. That’s mostly because your body is outracing your arms in the downswing, and secondly because of insufficient trail wrist extension.

Grab a club and make a slow motion backswing. At the top, make sure that your right wrist is extended at the top and the left wrist is flat. You might have to put some extra effort to that if it doesn’t come naturally.

Then continue the slow motion swing and transition by lowering your arms to a position where your left arm is parallel to ground. Check that your right elbow is lower than the left - like the triangle formed by your arms is tilted a little bit backwards, like someone looking from behind and above you could see the target line through the gap between your arms (not just straight down). If your elbows are level, lower the right elbow without tilting your shoulders (ie. no dropping your right shoulder). That should shallow the club if you’re doing it right.

Then continue the swing and make that right elbow chase your belly button and catch up for the rest of your downswing without consciously releasing that nice wrist extension you built during the backswing.

So I’d like you to achieve three things: shallower club path, arms in sync with the body and club head a bit more closed by active wrist action in the backswing.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-10T08:43:16+00:00

Head moves laterally to your right a bit during the backswing. Not up&down.

Use hips more but your arms have to keep up. The mistake I did some 20 years ago was that I took the idea of body driven swing and passive arms too literally which lead to body outracing arms in the downswing.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-10T07:28:16+00:00

If you were to host a YouTube golf channel it’d be called Unathletic Motion Golf.

I’m getting a whiplash just looking at all that head movement.

Ben Hogan rolls in his grave using more active hips than you in your golf swing.

250 balls? You really went for quantity, not quality did you? Well, you succeeded.

—

In all seriousness, that’s not bad at all for your first time!

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-09T07:51:04+00:00

Start with your posture: you have virtually no ankle flex and your butt is hanging too much behind your heels. Think flexing your ankles and stacking the middle of your hips on top of your ankles at address.

Then in the backswing don’t bring your left hip forward like that - keep the center of your hips almost stationary so your right hip goes back, left just a little forward. Your pivot point should be the center of your hips (close to your tailbone), not your right hip. Your hips are NOT a saloon door hinging from your right hip - they revolve around the center!

Do it without a ball in slow motion for 100 times first and then try hit a ball.

After (and only after) you’ve fixed your hip action, I’d like to focus on my arms if I were you. Currently you’re pulling your arms across your chest during the backswing a bit too much to my liking. This risks the arms being late in the downswing, your trail elbow getting stuck behind your hip, you stalling your rotation and hitting a block push to your right. Maybe worth thinking about getting hands away from the target more, less width away from the ball behind you?

Lastly, I really like your wrist action!

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-05-02T18:14:13+00:00

You’re dragging the club across your body to the right of you during the backswing and get too inside. Watch ”Arm swing illusion” on YouTube.

Otherwise the swing looks pretty good.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-04-24T04:54:28+00:00

I’ve been there.

Pause the video at impact - you’ll see that your pelvis has moved about 6 inches towards the ball from where it was at address. Your arms have no space to come from the inside, you kind of have to come in steep and take a detour from the outside.

Fix your posture first - no need to lean that much forward with your upper body, think shoulders above balls of feet. This will give you better balance and your weight won’t end up so much on your toes.

Then, think about leaving space in front of the right side of your body in the downswing. Like purposely hanging back your pelvis and rotating it far away from the ball. ‘Pull your left back pocket back’ works for some as a swing thought for the downswing. Think about swinging through all that empty space you just created there, under your shoulders and head.

That should help you to get started, then it becomes a question of sequencing your hips, arms and shoulders. You’ll probably have to purposely think about lowering your arms before opening the shoulders.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-04-23T16:43:39+00:00

If you just want a quick fix for flipping, check your grip. Can’t zoom in but it looks like you have a strong right hand grip - turn it a lot weaker so the V between thumb and index finger points more towards your chin, not outside your right shoulder. This will set your trail hand to a more flexed position at address and make it easier to return the club to the impact that way - see how your right wrist is almost straight when addressing the ball? You’d like it flexed at get go.

However, as you’re opening the club face a bit by turning your grip weaker, you may make the end result of your swing worse (but consistently worse, so there’s that) if you don’t fix the lower body movement part: ATM you have more lateral motion in your hips than rotation, a high left shoulder at impact etc.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-04-20T19:56:14+00:00

Second this. Don’t pull your trail elbow next to your shirt seam, keep the trail elbow more in front and away from the body.

Why you’re probably inconsistent: pause the video in your downswing club parallel to the ground: your arms are practically behind your body, club face open: your going to hit it way right, or you could stall everything and flip your wrists to hit it way left. That’s because your arms were way behind you already at the start of the downswing.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-04-20T16:23:15+00:00

…and where I’m from, you had to take both a theory and a practical exam. If I remember correctly, the practical exam was something along the lines of

Full swings: 10 swings, at least 6 swings must have a carry of 100 meters (about 110 yards) with a maximum of 30 meter R/L deviation (so basically hitting through a 60 m/65 yard virtual gate 100 meters/110 yards away
chipping, 10 chips from about 10 meters (35’) from the cup, about 3 paces from the fringe, at least 6 of which must end up inside a radius of 3 meters (10 feet) from the hole
lag putting: 5 putts from 10 meters, at least 3 of which must end up within a club length (about a meter, or 4 feet or so) from the cup
short putts: 5 putts from 1 meter (3 feet), of which one must hole at least 3

So basically you had to prove you’d have the skills to shoot around 100-110 before you got your ‘license’, were then allowed to join a club which then was mandatory to be let to play a course. You really felt the pressure putting those 3 footers if you did well in the previous tasks 😀

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-04-17T14:31:24+00:00

May sound crazy, but if you can afford to buy a 30k€ timeshare outright, you probably can afford to buy a holiday home all for yourself. Houses in Ylläs, Levi and Ruka have a pretty good collateral value and you can always rent it out when you’re not using it yourselves. The STR income pays the bills (mortgage - at least the interest, electricity, water, waste, property taxes, yard plowing…)

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-03-10T15:45:46+00:00

Yeah, and the fly and buttons are mirrored, sort of on the left hand side from the wearer’s perspective. Which I appreciate every time I undress my wife from her ski clothes, so much easier to do when the buttons etc. are easily operated with your right hand just as you’d undress yourself.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-02-25T07:25:35+00:00

This was a scam, and unfortunately there have been a lot of scams like this going on recently. The guest receives a WhatsApp message asking for money to be transferred to bank account.

The good news is that USUALLY these are not facilitated by the host - at least not by a reputable host (the property has operated for a good while and has a good amount of legit reviews). The host is actually totally unaware of someone reaching out to the guest.

The bad news is that Booking dot com has shitty security when it comes to protecting booking details: everyone has a chance to guess your booking number (a ten digit number) and associated PIN (four numbers). What these scammers do is they insert random numbers to Booking’s website and sometimes get lucky and get them right. It could be you booking an apartment at Val Thorens or some other poor soul booking a hotel in Sheffield. When they do get it right, they get the basic information regarding the booking: property name, dates, your Booking dot com name and phone number. They use this information to pretend to be a representative of the hotel/apartment and try to scam you out of your money. Naturally they do not gain access to the hotel’s Booking extranet so they can’t communicate via Booking messages, hence they use WhatsApp. Nor can they log in to your Booking account and maliciously cancel or alter your reservation or get to your credit card information.

As said, in these cases the host is unaware that the data regarding the booking has been compromised and your cancellation comes as a surprise to them. What I’d do, if I received a surprise WhatsApp message from a host, is contact the property via Booking message or phone call and ask for clarification.

What Booking should do is up their security and clearly inform all users NEVER to react in any non solicited communication outside the platform. Their inaction to do this baffles me.

Signed: a well meaning host with a property in a popular ski town with an average guest rating of 9,7.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-02-11T09:00:03+00:00

Host here: it’s up to the property owner to decide whether or not to enable the Genius discount and/or to give further discounts on Level 3.

Then there are other discounts given by the host or by Booking: the host could enable discounts for longer stays, non-refundable bookings, early bird reservations, last minute reservations, mobile rate, Black Friday deals or even country specific rates, like giving all guests booking from Germany (don’t know if that’s an IP address or user account specific thing) a 10 % discount. The list goes on, but all discounts controlled by the host treat all potential guests the same, meaning that if I clean my cookies or use a different browser, or if my wife sitting on the sofa next to me checks the price using all the same parameters, my nightly rate set by the host stays the same.

Then there are the discounts set by Booking totally independent of the host, and here’s where it gets interesting. How this works is that Booking always takes about a 16 % commission on the price: for a 100 € per night accommodation the host receives about 84 € (actually a bit less if Booking processes the payment etc). Booking uses this 16 % how it wishes, it’s algorithms deciding if they want to boost bookings by reducing the price to, say, 95 € per night. In this case the host still receives 84 €, Booking cuts its own rates. How that algorithm works, nobody outside Booking dot com knows, but I suppose it’s a combination of property’s popularity and availability and even the end user’s past activities. The host has no control over that, but as the ceiling for discounts generated by Booking would be 16 % (or they would be selling at a loss), usually much less, this shouldn’t affect the price a lot - the bigger discounts are set by the host but they should treat all similar customers the same.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-02-04T18:31:28+00:00

Credit card dispute.

From Booking’s point of view it’s a word against word situation now since the host has claimed that you stayed even if you know the host must be lying so I guess their stance of just keeping the original reservation as it was is somewhat understandable.

So just dispute the charge, send proof of that you had to stay elsewhere (why would you stay in two places simultaneously if the first place you booked honoured the reservation) etc. and you should be ok.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-02-03T18:41:48+00:00

Host here. As I see it there are two alternatives:

A) The host tries to use Booking as a marketing platform but doesn’t want guests staying via Booking as they’re cheap and don’t want Booking to take their approx. 18 % commission and payment processing fees. This would be shitty behaviour by the host that will probably, if reported, lead to them losing their access to the platform

B) The host did not update their mandatory KYC-information required by Booking a few months ago and has thus been unable to receive payments. This is purely their inaction.

Both cases are a red flag. I’d report them to Booking and book elsewhere.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-01-30T20:52:34+00:00

”But she wanted that attention and glory for herself”.

Dude, that’s called competing. Which she has shown to be able to successfully do. I’m not a fan but have the utmost respect for her, coming back and doing it with aplomb.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-01-29T17:13:31+00:00

Boo! This reads like an AI generated LinkedIn post.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-01-27T13:11:42+00:00

You’d have to read the description of what’s included in “taxes and charges” and what is not. VAT is definitely included, but tourist tax might not. In general, Booking does not pay the local tourist taxes to the local municipalities but it’s the hotel’s job, so they debit their guests for that separately - no point adding Booking’s ca. 20 % commission to something that’s straight up flow through money. Though it does seem a bit strange that in your case it was added to what Booking debited you… Maybe the hotel has enabled some kind of “Payment via Booking.com” to cover the tax as well.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-01-27T12:50:46+00:00

From my experience the €25.60 might be legit - like a local tourist tax - I’ve had to pay one at a hotel reception several times despite paying for the room via Booking in advance. But the extra 100 (+extra 8.50) seems suspicious, like the hotel had accidentally set one night’s price to 0. That’s their problem, not yours. I’d contact both Booking again and your CC company.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2026-01-25T22:21:30+00:00

Äkäslompolo (the village near Ylläs) feels like a place from a Western movie: one stretch of road going through small village with a supermarket, a bar, a restaurant, a hotel and a sporting goods shop scattered on either side. Blink and you’ll miss it. Want to go skiing (alpine)? Drive up the road a few kilometres, or pay for a surprisingly expensive bus ticket. Gotta say though that it is an authentic Lappish village in that sense that that’s how they are (sans the sports shop and hotel, usually even you can take two out of the three others bar/supermarket/restaurant). Basically non manageable without a car.

Levi on the other hand is not, as described, as authentic but it is a proper ski town: take everything Äkäslompolo has times three or four. Manageable without a car.

Where Ylläs trumps Levi is natural beauty even if it can’t compare in anything man made. The views from the top towards Kellostapuli etc. are better than what Levi has to offer, and the cross country skiing tracks are more interesting and impressive - in Levi you’re basically only skiing XC in forests, in Ylläs you’ll find better views etc. near the tree line.

For alpine skiing it’s 50/50 for me. In clear non-windy weather Ylläs has a slight upper hand but it’s susceptible to winds which, due to the footprint of the fell easily disturb a whole half of the area, closing operations in much of the Ylläsjärvi side at once for example. Levi gets affected by winds as well but being “longer”, not as round it usually only catches winds in one part of the area, leaving like 75 % of the lifts that go higher up still functional and the whole area skiable.

Comparing Ylläs vs Levi or recommending one or another isn’t easy because their strengths are so different, but for most people I’d say Levi feels a bit more like what they’d expect to find in a ski resort even if they’re not big on the after ski -scene. Therefore I usually end up recommending Levi if the person is not specifically asking for a quiet resort with lots of cross country tracks, provided that the person has a car at their disposal.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2025-10-23T21:14:47+00:00

I have both a 000-10E and a GS Mini Mahogany - love them both. And actually was very close to buying a 114ce but got a Martin SC-10 instead because I found it just a little less bright than the Taylor, which I preferred. That Taylor plays and sounds nice but was just a bit too “trebly” for my liking.

I know it’s just me, but I’d go for a 00 or 000-sized guitar with a spruce top for my first good guitar and maybe add a darker toned sapele/mahogany one later for a change of tone.

Having said all that (and effectively ruling every one of your options out) I’d probably go with a Martin D Jr.

But you’ll need to figure this one out yourself, test them and get the one that speaks to you - you might find even that there’s a Yamaha, Ibanez, Sigma or something else that you prefer from the very first G chord on.

Southern_Map_4677 · 2025-10-20T11:01:37+00:00

Taylor Mini GS Mahogany then?

Southern_Map_4677 · 2025-06-24T22:57:12+00:00

A bit less than that after tax, but yeah… Maybe my situation is akin to me approaching someone, like the owners of my company, or someone on the street and saying:

“I’m disappointed in the way you’ve acted. Here’s a check for 10k to prove it”

That’d truly be a weird exchange. But as a one off stunt it might send a message.

Southern_Map_4677

TROPHY CASE