I recently switched my old driver out to the new Mizuno ST-230 Max and while I will talk about this new driver, it also made me wonder how much do new clubs even matter? My previous club is 5 years old now, which is a Cobra SpeedZone Extreme. I actually hit it decently well but I wanted a bit more distance and being that my miss is hitting it low on the club face, something that can still get the ball up in the air in those low misses. I did a bunch of research, watched YouTube videos, and saw that there was so much new terminology being used, but wondered, does this actually matter? I guess the big thing for 2024 was the 10k driver, which means 10,000 of some unit to measure moment of intertia. I also saw that the new Ping driver had this technology, costed over $600, and actually released a club back in 2017 that also had this technology called the G400.

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A few years ago, I sought out an instructor to help me figure out something that was plagueing my golf game: fat shots. I could not for the life of me figure out how to consistently strike the ball without hitting it fat, meaning hitting the ground before the ball. I purposely wanted to find an instructor who did not rely on launch monitors and fancy technology, but someone who had been around the game for a long time and was a career golf instructor, not an aspiring pro who teaches on the side. After much digging and reading reviews, I found my man: Lee Breckenridge. Lee actually taught from an indoor space about 20 minutes from me, so I gave him a call and booked a lesson.

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I realized if I really want to get the most of my golf rounds, I really should be walking rather than riding. The amount of calories (and steps) you burn when walking doesn’t really compare to when you are riding a cart. You also save a few bucks per round too. The thing that had been holding me back up to now was my back, as I felt back pain during my round so I really did not think I could last walking 18 or even 9 holes with the way my back was. However, after making swing changes and seeing a physical therapist, I finally got to a place where I could play pain-free. It really is a liberating feeling and if you’re going through a similar situation, I highly recommend you seek a good PT, especially one like mine that specializes in golfers.

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After using the Ping Hoofer Lite stand bag for a couple of years, I was looking for something new to replace it. There’s nothing wrong with that bag and as I mentioned in my review, if I had to use that bag for the rest of my life, I would be perfectly happy with it. However there were a few things I was looking for in a replacement. I needed something that was still pretty light, was made of a durable material that was easy to clean/keep clean, and I really wanted someting that was a little bit less common. I saw that the Vessel Player was pretty popular but also pretty pricey and I wasn’t looking to spend that much. I watched a couple of video reviews of the Sunday Ryder on YouTube and saw they had a leather version of this bag so I became interested in that.

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In the past few weeks, I’ve been rebuilding a lot of my golf swing. I’ve been trying to reduce sway in my backswing, loosen my grips and wrists, implement proper weight transfer, work on a full shoulder turn, and fix my early extension. It’s just a lot of things to think about at once and impossible to do all at once. On the range, I tried doing one or two things and once I got those down, move on to the others. It’s also often been said that if you’re out there on the course, you should have at most one swing thought, let alone a dozen.
I recently watched a video of Bryson DeChambeau giving a lesson to Grant Horvat, and he said something really interesting. If an instructor is giving you a swing thought and you can’t immmediately implement it, it’s probably not the right swing thought for you. Or it needs to be explained to you in a different way. It really resonated with me because lots of times instructors (with good intentions) will give students a swing thought and the student just cannot implement that change after dozens of tries. I’ve definitely had this happen to me on more than one occasion and it made me walk away from the lesson wondering if golf is just not for me because I don’t have the raw athleticism or hand/eye coordination for it.

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