July26 Stack and Tilt

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Last September, after rookie Eric Axley won on the PGA Tour, Andy Plummer allowed himself a little reflection. He called his teaching partner, Mike Bennett, and they talked about what to do when more players came calling. You see, Axley was the third player in six weeks to win his first event, and Plummer and Bennett were teaching all three of them.

Known on Tour as the Swing Whisperers for their almost mystical ability to help players win, Plummer and Bennett now work with 15 to 20 pros, including 2003 Masters champion Mike Weir and Brad Faxon. They were unknown when they coached Aaron Baddeley to his first win, in 2006, but when he won again in February, Plummer and Bennett were the hottest teachers in golf.

Their secret is a geometry-based swing model that contradicts almost everything being taught in the game today – dubbed ‘Stack and Tilt’.  In short, their swing has the player tilting dramatically to his left on the backswing, and then springing up through impact. Players who get beyond its radical look marvel at the pure strikes it produces.

Plummer and Bennett say: “Some people say it’s a reverse pivot, because the weight doesn’t shift to the right on the backswing. But why would you shift to the right when you know you have to be left at impact? Not even the pros are good enough to do that and get back to the ball on a consistent basis. And many of them are asking us why they were taught that way.”

But the model isn’t only about Tour wins. Their plan is to change the way all golfers swing the club – a quest they rather immodestly call The Revolution. To back up their teaching, they’ve set up a high-tech research-and-development facility outside Philadelphia, in the USA. So while the Plummer-Bennett model is bagging Tour wins, a team of researchers is starting to test, measure and catalogue what makes the swing they teach the best one a golfer can make. This video shoes are the basics of that swing – and in the new issue of Golf World magazine, you can see step-by-step advice on how you can try it. 

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