Time for some current news and an update on some of what is in store for Secret In The Dirt in the upcoming weeks and month.  First as you have probably noticed we are now hosting our videos at YouTube.  The idea here is simple.  First the videos are going to be more easily shared throughout the web and will load faster for our friends in more distant parts of the world.  Second and more importantly all of the video in The Vault are now shareable and embeddable.  This makes them more usable now to everyone in forum posts, blogs and profile favorites and it also means that The Vault vids can be used not just in Secret In The Dirt but also pretty much anywhere that golfers talk golf on the web. The best thing a Dirter can do for The Dirt is to make sure that when you find a Vault Video you love whether here or at www.youtube.com/secretinthedirt please share it with your golfing friends.

For quite a while now I have been asked in personal messages and so forth to recommend drills for improving people's golf swings.  I've never been much of a "drill guy" except that in the 90's I became fascinated by Paul Bertholy and his static hold drills.  I thought Bertholy was a genius.  Still do. These were basically like dynamic holds of various positions in the golf swing and I actually pointed to some of those positions and demonstrated them in the original Sevam1 videos on YouTube. If I were to describe Bertholy's approach I would call it a static, macro or whole body approach to positions and drills.  These were essentially dynamic tension exercises tailored to Bertholy's informed vision of the golf swing.  He was revolutionary and largely ignored.  A shame, that is.

Every year around this time all of us up here in the north start to get that nagging itch to tip it up and play some golf.  We want to play but mother nature is just not quite ready to let us have a go out there.  If you can't play, the next best thing you can do is prep to play. To me, prepping for the season is mainly about conditioning and for my kind of swing action 90% of the conditioning I focus on is for the hands wrists and forearms and the legs.

Saturday, 5:20 am. It was a cold and foggy morning in Pacific Palisades. The only lights you could see were coming from my Riviera issued golf cart. The deer at this time were scurrying back into their homes on the outskirts of the course. The work day had only just begun.

The answer to the title is - we CAN DO BOTH...

Better golf without practice. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I recently picked up a book of the same title written by Alex J. Morrison in 1940. He is the same author who wrote “A New Way to Better Golf”, which by all accounts online seems to be the better and more widely read of the two.

6 Month Recap - The Big Picture

One of my resolutions for 2012 is to read at least 100 books this year. Throughout my life, I’ve read about 40 books on golf, and I hope a good chunk of the 100 this year are golf related. On my most recent trip to the LA 84 Foundation, I happened upon a copy of the Golfing Machine, one of the books that has slipped through my fingers during this quest. I decided to take the plunge, and after skimming through the book a few times, I’m getting excited.

As another year draws to a close and a new one begins it is time to take stock of where we are and to think a little about where we are going. Improvement in golf is an incremental thing. Those of you who have been in The Dirt for a good while know what I am talking about. It happens when players think wide and are open to a wide range of ideas.