Stack and Tilt: Fool's Gold?
Filed in archive Golf Instruction by Chris Henry on May 12, 2007
Have you heard about The New Tour Swing? It's the product of a couple of teaching pros based in Philadelphia who are making some big waves on the PGA Tour.
Mike Bennett and Andy Plummer have a growing coterie of touring pros who they are instructing.
The list includes two big names in Aaron Baddeley and Canadian Mike Weir, former Masters winner.
When teachers pick up top names, everyone starts to pay attention.
So what is this New Tour Swing?
Golf Digest has several excellent short video samples on their website, demonstrating, by the way the right way to use video on the web (if you can stomach the "must-watch" commercial pre-roll).
But back to the Swing. As Golf Digest's Senior Editor, Peter Finch, describes it, Bennett and Plummer call their swing, Stack and Tilt.
Finch complained that his iron shots lacked power and distance. So Bennett and Plummer taught him their new swing.
And it appears to violate many of the principles considered critical to a proper swing.
For example, Bennett and Plummer instructed Finch to put most of his weight on his left side at address.
On the backswing, they told Finch to move his left shoulder down, not laterally.
The body, they say, remains over the ball. This surely takes away the weight shift that virtually every teacher claims is one of the keys to power and distance.
The club comes decidedly inside on the backswing; the turning body, say Plummer and Bennett, creates an inside path; the backswing itself is shorter to keep arms and torso connected.
The result is a swing that is compact in appearance, to say the least. In fact, it looks condensed or compressed or maybe just choppy.
There is a short video of Aaron Baddeley hitting balls with the new swing. I can't recall what his old swing looked like but his new one is no thing of beauty.
But if it gets the job done (Baddeley has won twice since switching and Weir must see something that he figures will work), then it doesn't matter how odd or unorthodox some might think it looks.
It does prove one thing: there is no single "right way" to hit a golf ball.
However, it emphasizes another point: it is very easy to become confused with swing theories.
Since there is no single correct way to hit a golf ball, pick one method and work with it.
Trying different swing approaches, whether it's the One-Plane theory, the Swing Machine Golf method that I use (or try to...) or this new Stack and Tilt swing, will simply mess up most of us amateurs.
We are constantly looking for the One Great Truth that will finally work. What we end up with might just be Fool's Gold.
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golf swing swing theory one plane swing mike bennett andy plummer 2007 stack+tilt
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