[Burner]

I seem to be running into the brick wall that usually causes me to take 6 months (sometimes more like a year or so) off from golf. I've been to Carmel and taken a handful of lessons from Ben and, as of about a couple years ago (thanks, in no small part, to Brian Manzella's "Confessions of a Former Flipper" as well as the 12 or so hours that I've spent with Ben), I'm finally able to hit the chip/pitch/punch shots with a nice flat wrist. I can feel that I'm compressing the ball quite nicely. I'm able to hit these shots with the 3 different hinge actions, which is really great around the greens because now I feel confident to hit it however I need to when I'm 75 yards and in (high, low, etc).

However ... and this is where the problem starts ... I can't seem to translate the mechanics of these short shots into a full swing, which means I get way more opportunities than I'd like to hit those little shots around the greens. On these short shots, for example, I'm standing much closer to the ball and typically hitting a wedge (which is short by comparison). I'm not taking the club all the way back, so my hands are never really getting too high. When I get a longer club in my hand, or even if I'm still hitting a wedge, but now setting up for a full swing, I just don't have the same feeling. I don't feel like I have anything resembling an extension of the same backswing, and I most certainly don't feel like my downswing is is ANY sort of extended version of the downswing I take with the chip/pitch/punch (or even the "pitch-punch", as Ben likes to teach). It's really frustrating because, while I'm out in the school yard with my shag bag, hitting these chip/pitch/punch shots, the casual observer may accidentally mistake me for a pretty good golfer. However, once I take a full swing, anything that I think I know goes right out the window and I may, or may not, hit a good shot.

So now, here I am again, thinking that the best way for me to fix my game would be to take a couple weeks off ... then quit altogether!

Am I the only one who struggles with going beyond the short shots and extending them into full swings? If not, and I do hope I'm not alone, what do people do to get beyond where I am?

My guess is that you are disturbing your alignments once you move from a chip/pitch to a full shot.

It is, and I know from bitter experience, all to easy to add right wrist bend and to cock the right wrist as well as double cocking the left wrist, in the (over extended) backswing of a full shot. It then becomes a real, and unequal, struggle to regain your flying wedge set up alignments on the downswing.

Try to limit the length of your backswing - your hands do not need to go above right shoulder height, think compact, - and see how you fare.