Tinkering Can Ruin Golf Swings

Upon hitting the ball quite well I started tinkering with my swing to ensure I was using my shoulders on the takeaway and not arming the club to the top. That sounds like a reasonable goal, right? In doing so I've added 2 strokes to my hcp due to shanks and a general lack of confidence to hit the ball well with any club. How could that happen? Recently I've been fighting the shanks, and shanked 30 balls in a row on the range and gave up on practicing...this is how bad the shanks can get LOL. I also know that shanks are most often the result of some flawed fundamentals.

So what happened? My goal was a shoulder-driven takeaway which sounds good on the surface. What eventually happened was I began to roll my wrists on the backswing. So from address, my wrists would progressively roll to the top. Not an initial rolling or flip, but a progressive rolling. This led to a VERY inside takeaway and flat backswing that also caused my right elbow to jut out at the top, or flying right elbow. On the range I tried moving closer to the ball to stop shanking, I tried putting my weight on my heels, etc, and nothing helped....just shank after shank.

So after watching Tom's takeaway video's I looked in a mirror and performed my normal (current) backswing and saw the face of the club rotating wide open as it progressed around my body. At the top, the shaft was more near parallel to the ground than upright...yikes. During the first 3 feet of takeaway, my clubface rotated to facing more skyward, or up, In Tom's backswing video he shows it facing downwards towards the target line. So my "current" swing clubface angle is nearly 50% over-rotated in the first 3 feet. Upon my initial practicing in a mirror, Tom's swing fix feels the opposite of my "bad" takeaway but feels like how I took the club away before all the tinkering. My balance feels back to normal vs. heel-toe rocking feeling with the bad swing. The odd part is I know better, but in my quest to improve one thing, I created a monstrously unreliable swing. Also, the other noticeable positive change is the club feels a LOT lighter at the top vs. the bad swing, and I'm pretty sure the weight of an iron head on a flat plane will want to propel the club out towards the ball for a shank from that position.

Tom is spot on when he says the first 3 feet of takeaway is critical to how the rest of the swing unfolds. The trick is to not take the term "rotational swing" out of context as I did. A flat swing is rotational with rolled wrists, but it also creates an unworkable position, at least for me. The trick, for me, is to think rotational in a more vertical feel. not "around" my body. Tom's visual to have the hands being able to high-five each other after the first 3 feet of takeaway makes checking the correct position very easy. I'm not going to expect perfection to get back to normal, but at least the path is in place vs. "not knowing WTH is going on". LOL.