A Full Range Session with Robert Rock

right behind me over there is a man in possession of what many people think is the most aesthetically

pleasing and technically good golf swing in the game and the last time we did a video with Rob

you guys loved it the comments were popping off so I've come to Rob's home course so we're going

to do a little practice session let's get stuck in oh that was a good one wasn't it Rob hello good

to see you mate. Morning mate. We are here at your home course right Little Aston? Yeah Little Aston

yeah. So this is where you do most of your practice? Where I do my practice and my coaching

now yeah it's a lovely spot. So what we wanted to do we had a great video out in Abu Dhabi last

time I saw it. It's slightly different weather wasn't it but this is equally as beautiful here

So what I want to do today is I want to go through what you would do in a typical practice session

because you still look after your game right you still you still play some stuff and you're still working on you've just been telling me before and working on some other things in your game

so you still practice it so I want to see what a typical Robert Rock practice session would look

like now and almost talk me through what you were doing when you were playing full-time on

the European tour that would be great sound right yes good yeah yeah absolutely could be loads of

bucket of balls but it could be a lot of the time it was a lot of filming a lot of thinking about

what I was doing a lot of rewinding watching swings again trying to trying to always move

forwards with the swing to get it where I wanted to and that just took a lot of stopping and

starting and now I know a bit more about my own swing and I understand it better now it's more

putting it back into where I want it using the notes and knowledge that I've sort of gained on

my own game is what do I need to put in today to make it work if I'm playing a tournament this week

and it doesn't take me as long thankfully. So talking of clipping boards well let's go let's

it going so when you just turn up here are you pre-stretched do you stretch here do you just not

stretch do you use someone who just gets into hitting shots and uses that as a stretch i didn't use to stretch before i would just build the swing up slowly with a six or seven clip some away when

we're talking people want to see you hit ball yeah so nowadays i'm putting the well and before i would

be just my stretching would basically be rehearsing the swing in slow motion just feeling where i'm

trying to get to in the whole action, this bit at the end hurts a bit more than it used to

so that's what I'm wary of when I'm building it up, I've got to loosen up so that that happens okay

and I have to do more shots in sort of a slow motion version like that to build up, I've already

hit like 20 shots, probably takes me more like 40 to get up to full speed. I'm going to caddy for

as well Rob, give me that club. Oh you're not happy with that? No no filthy, let's get some proper shots

Thank you. So that would be a drill that you do, so obviously you set up a little station here for your swing

plane and your alignment? Yeah it's a seven iron, trying to keep myself as close to the edge of this

stick as possible so that this one's relevant, I'm trying to skim my way up that one and come

down pretty close to it hopefully over the top of it and is this something you would do at the start

of the session so you're kind of calibrating plane at this point and then you get on to some other

stuff where i did i kind of when i was using irons i had this here all the time so it was it was a

good reference when when i was playing tournaments my takeaway was pretty much everything to me and

if that sort of flowed up that line i played really nice i remember from abu dhabi there's a couple of

times when you were hitting shots where you'd get to that and you just wouldn't you just stop and go again because i with this as a reference i can sometimes feel that i'm going out away from it

and trying to find it very rarely i go to inside and clatter it so when i snatch the club away a

little bit quicker i can feel that it goes too far out and then i'm trying to pull it back and

that's what messes me up so i want to feel a really smooth incline to that which i've done in

various ways to be fair it's about finding what what do I need to do to get this club head to

because the grip really isn't doing much well the butt end of the club I'm trying to get the club

from pointing straight down at the ball to be pointing away from the target and you can control

that with all sorts really so that varies the position I'm after will always be the same but

how I actually get there is determined by what what do I feel I need to move more on a particular day

Oh, let's see it again then. So I'll try and do it as slow as I can

Caught that a bit fat. And I don't really pay too much attention to how I'm hitting it

You're just finding positions. I'm just trying to get comfy with building the backswing up. Then when that flows a bit easier

then I start trying to put the other bits into play. So you're not sort of counting balls in

You're not going, I hit 10, 20 using this, then I move on to this. This is a feel thing for you

when you start to feel okay that's good then you might remove that. Yeah you move on when it feels

good and looks good. Okay cool. So it's got to feel good from here while I'm taking the club

away it's got to feel like it's going back smoothly it's got to look good from there and from there. So you'd be in a session now that you just turned up you'd be recording this you'd be constantly

referring back to what you're seeing and cross-referencing. I mean you've got two cameras

here I'd generally do it one I'd have one camera there and when it starts to feel nice from this

for you i check it if it feels nice from there then i go this side does it marry up with what i

think loads of early days this side would look great that side look terrible gotta start again

this is the stuff that's fascinating because but keep clipping away but people when they watch your golf swing it's so fluid it's so natural it looks like you were just born swinging it like that what

people don't understand yeah yeah yeah saw it we picked that up on the camera so people don't

understand what sound that was by the way that was pretty people don't understand the the level

of work and maintenance that's going in to make something look as easy as you're making it look

it is not my natural swing because going back to your early career maybe you're saying something

like you you sort of figured out early on that you what your current technique wasn't going to cut it

wasn't going to take you to where you wanted to be so that that was kind of when you started those

seven eight all day practice sessions right to to get you to where you want to be and you was that

independent research yeah and it was just watching other players i thought i just can't do that

watched some other great players play different shots that I couldn play This is good isn it And I thought if I going to be a proper pro and understand my job and my craft properly I got to be able to do 99 of it

What was it specifically that you couldn't do? You said shots you couldn't hit? Was it strikes? Was it ball flights

It was a strike of irons, it was consistency of a starting line, it was a shape. Something that was basically attacking flags

you've got to be able to home your iron shots into some degree and your medium to

short irons they've got to start going close not not long irons right I don't

think I've played with anyone that's great with long irons no one hits long

irons tappings really very often I could probably count some of my memorable

long irons but I didn't do very often I hit lots of six sevens eight nines close

but not really threes and fours okay cool see another one of these

but it was yeah it was about me also being aware that my putting probably

wasn't going to be my strongest part that never bothers me by the way i know you brought that up

off camera so that's kind of because you're where you're setting this up i see a lot of people

setting this kind of drill up and they're moving the ball kind of like three or four inches this

way you've got loads of leeway it's got to be tight to match that because it makes that irrelevant right yeah exactly otherwise you've got to keep moving that so i'd i'd keep hitting out of a hole

because I knew this was set up right so on tour practice areas where I was just

I didn't really didn't have enough room to move back a lot couldn't move side to

side because somebody front and back so I would just end up just taking out of

holes like that because I knew that it was alright and I wasn't really paying

attention too much to the chart it didn't really matter. Another bit of tour sauce here while Rob's

Clifton is away. I see many men with a graphite design tour AD alignment stick

That's a big flex everyone. Just for you Joe. Big flex. Very flashy this guy

Flush. I also knew that this bit, being so close and I was trying to fade it, I was going to skim it

So I didn't mind that. Cool. So let's assume now we're in the position, we've checked the camera, you're in a position where you're feeling things are good now

Are you moving that out of the way? Are you moving everything out of the way? would you get into a point now where you're just kind of like i'm gonna hit some shots i'm gonna

shape some is that what you do next or where do you go very very rarely did that okay i trusted

that what i'd set up and measured if you like or saw on the video that it would make me hit a little

fade okay and it generally did if i got it all right like all the the viewpoints of it and i was

taking a nice divot cutting across it tiny little bit they should fade while i'm doing this so i

paid attention to some of the shots at the end and i may have taken that out when i wanted to be a

little bit more um rhythmical and yes that's what i'm getting at so i guess this is would be classed

as kind of like i never get the terminology right but like block practice technique work right this

is this was swing building for me that i felt like i had to redo every monday okay but then so say

Monday halfway through that session you that's it that's what you do you're just rebuilding

recalibrating this technique you're not then going I'm going to discard those I'm going to

hit some sharks I'm going to shape some I'm going to do this you're still just staying in yeah I'm staying in this this zone because I knew if I did this on a Monday and however long it's

some some some nice days it only took the morning's work and I went home thinking well

that last tournament I played okay checked it on the Monday morning and it wasn't far off

a few little tweaks in the setup and the takeaway maybe a little bit later on and I'd

work through it nicely and there wasn't a lot to do then I would give myself a bit of a break

and not hit so many balls on the Monday knowing that I'm then going to go out on Tuesday or I'm

flying Monday night or I'm flying Tuesday morning then I've got to see whether the swings made it

on the fly over with me which is a funny yeah funny thing but often it didn't often it felt

amazing at home on monday and then just the environment of being at a tournament and trying

to redo this setup at a tournament didn't feel the same let's clip a couple more so in terms of

i don't see i mean obviously you've got a guide here for club path and swing point are you someone

who obviously your fundamentals when we look at everything from a face-on point of view which we'll

show you now your grip which only you use the gold pride of line grips which i think help get

you in a nice neutral position you all we've spoken about here is is what's in your brain of

this position and this takeaway fundamentals of alignment of grip of posture is that something

you're always looking at on camera as well or is that just now ingrained with you it's because of

all because of this um i would have my caddies check my alignment once i got to on the course

stuff yeah i mean instead i mean there's nothing to alignment here is it's already done for me so

it was one variable that needed checking once I got out on the course where there's nothing

no reference points to me. A lot while I'm doing this in practice sessions at home I would be

coming back here just trying to picture the alignment stick and this as a plane so that I

could walk into it and kind of build it into my pre-shot routine which sometimes I manage to do

on the course but it when the takeaway and the alignment felt nice the game was easy

but as soon as I had a well hitting the ball was easy as soon as I had a doubt about my alignment

that changes this so if I'm thinking I'm there but I'm here or the other way around

this has got to move and that put me off so i did easily put myself off interesting well i'm still

trying to get to the bottom of this session so we've done our maintenance work we're happy with

takeaway we're happy with what's going on here is that literally like you just said the jack

nicholas right cool i'm good i'm moving on are you not going are you not even clipping any drive

i'll hit some drivers yeah i'll change this i'll shift the angle of this can we do that hit some drivers yeah we might break stuff but we'll try it today that's fine yeah so i've got a club repair

shop we can sort that out yeah we can sort that right out all right like my little last and head

cover i do that's beautiful i'm actually going to pick one of these up i told you i got a little jones bag yesterday and that's going to look great on it a little vintage look i'll treat you to one

of them mate oh what a man what a man you've got that on camera right i'll treat you to them um

there's also we'll show a little b-roll of it now a lovely little sounder sunday bag clutch

tortillas should we use we got a lot going on you take your pick you take your but you got You got some lovely teas haven you I got a nice little tea bag as well haven I She gorgeous yeah Halmstad I don know when I got them Himalund clutch

Come on then, let's have a little look at how you would recalibrate this. I need to do this on video

but I'm gonna trust you to help me do this. Okay, well that's not a wise move. No, probably not

Let's give it a whirl. So again, I might cut myself a little more slack with the driver, because it's not easy, is it

And this is the first one. And this is the first one. And in truth, coming slightly underneath this with the driver is no big deal

You big wuss. He's got that basically horizontal guard. I put his light on the ground

I wouldn't do many of these. I want to make sure that the swing moves feel the same

Gives me a slightly different position at the top because it's the driver. But I want the takeaway to feel nice

And I would assume the work you're doing with 7-iron is going to bleed into this. It should be the same. I might only do a handful of these

cool okay once everything's organized and pretty good there'd be previous days like in early 2000s

i'd get the six iron looking good driver oh my god looks horrendous so now i'm starting again

and it looks horrendous from the front more importantly i used to bend my left arm lots

and used to hate it so you can't see that so clearly from down the line so that's why i'm

constantly doing both views because the bending was the fault that I hated, the

the line wasn't always terrible, I dropped it back and shallowed it too much, I

didn't like that, it's been a big fad but I hated it, nothing good in that I don't

think, so and it's something I do and I don't really want too much of it, lay it

down too flat it's no good, so I'd constantly be thinking about what's it

going to look from there and what's it going to look like from there is this feeling better um

so i had to try and marry two images up in in my head at the same time which is quite quite difficult

just as you're clipping these away i want you to think about because what you said there about bent left arm a lot of people at home will have that problem i've got that problem so i'd love to

know what you did to rectify that it's not such a big problem i made it a bigger problem than it was

in your head yeah okay i hated it i could feel it because some people think an extra lever isn't

Yeah, it kind of is, yeah. I used to drive it brilliant with a bent left arm. Right, okay

Right. Okay, scrap that. I felt like that was the reason why I couldn't strike my irons really, really well

Got you. Probably wasn't. Okay. So, but I didn't like the look of it

And the fact that I couldn't fix it irritated me. So it became a thing to do

Unnecessary thing to do, maybe. I should have spent more time on putting than the bent left arm

Aim-pointed. Aim-pointed, exactly. well I think we only need one of those Rob that's pretty good yes if I'd done

that after a session and it looked right I'd be like I'm done brilliant but those

days were few and far between do it again show me it wasn't a fluke but I think there's some great lessons in it you can't do two in a row you must be able to

you're Robert Rock you've got to quit so there's some good lessons in here for me

like but that could have been great right but if it weren't right at the top and

it didn't look right from there I'm still going we're not stopping I'm not

showing you that just assume it was good this this could be wasting my time now couldn't i

so that's a very good point but i guess the lesson here for a lot of people at home is that

rather than that yeah that's really good by the way there's a bit i can't do now which i hate is

the fact that my right leg skips forwards because my back hurts rob calm down it looks great there's

you gotta bank it in a bit better than that the lesson in here is that search for me there's so

many people trying a different swing thought every week going for a lesson with their club bro then a

messing with someone else and getting all these different things there once you get like you've

said you've found your key to what what your checkpoints and what make yours makes your swing

work do it to death and never deviate away from it and in no time your swing will look like that

and start to actually enjoy what you've got and i wish i'd i wish i'd enjoyed my swing a bit more

and actually in the end i was really happy with what it turned out but i think it was good from

probably 2008 onwards. But I guess that self-critical part of you, you wouldn't have got to where

you got if you didn't have it, right? No, I wouldn't have got there. That's true. I could have had

somebody blowing smoke. I could do that for you right now. I should have employed you to do that

and then that would have made me feel better. not bad just slightly faster would be good wouldn't it yeah if we could speed it up a bit

I mean let's just go steady you're getting you're getting a new like speed we can do that for me

can't you right give us one more rob and then we're going to wrap this up that is absolutely something I didn't mention. I used to do this off AstroTurf with no tee

Okay. Just so that, because you can't tee it up on a mat, at home I was in a, it was on

an artificial putting green where I didn't have a tee and I couldn't be bothered to keep bending over

teeing it up. You started doing driver off deck. So I just kept doing it off the deck because I could hit it off the same place and I wasn't bothered where it went because it into a net. I guess the

side benefit of that is the precision of strike you need to do that, you're training something else

strike was good and it helped me keep myself from tilting too far back which I thought was one of

the reasons why I was bending. Because you'd bottom out too early? Yeah, I would bottom out too early, yeah. So I would do them all like this but I'm not going to do one of these because I'll probably

top it. No, you're going to do it now. You're not, but it's easier like that. I would do that

and I would just, I mean I probably topped hundreds of them, but I was just building a swing with

a ball to hit at not trying to hit a shot because you can make a practice swing and make that look

nice but as soon as there's something to hit it changes doesn't it so I didn't I didn't care really

what driver's shot was hitting at the time I just wanted a ball to swing at at some sort of pace

to make sure that things are lined up and actually struck it all right so I do I did hundreds thousands

like that so we've got our alignment sticks down we've got your plane set up are you other than

this are you uh a training aid sort of a guy do you use anything else to kind of get stuff

we've got trs here just chucking in training trs everything we're gonna just i didn't use a load

of training aids to be honest but i mean these were what do you call these training aids or not

they're just sticks aren't they right but um part of the process for me later on was trying to

to maximize my practice time and make it more efficient because I couldn hit the thousands of balls I wanted to hit So when we talked about my takeaway and the takeaway really was the key part for me but building it up to the top and the transition obviously transition like major isn it

in the swing to make sure everything's working properly. And I was, one day I was trying to think a bit further ahead

and I wanted to be sure my right arm was doing a certain job at the top so that I could think further

into the downswing to see if my idea was gonna work. So I bought a load of seatbelt off eBay and a couple of clips and made this

And the idea was I wanted my arm to be... So just back to that, you literally just bought a seatbelt off eBay

I bought a seatbelt off eBay and some plastic clips. Pretty much close to what we've got

other than the nice fancy bit that Liam did to it in the end. So one seatbelt strapped around the chest

Because I tried putting a glove under my arm. I didn't like how that felt and it didn't do the job that I wanted it to do

tried the towel under the arm drill which is basically the same thing and that doesn't work

either because it just keeps your arms fixed in one point which I don't think they should be doing

so I made this bit to give you a little bit of room and a tiny gap yeah so it's not it's not

wedged to me like it would have to be if I've tucked this under there right so this has got

like a what we got there like three or four millimeter gap and the ability for it to to move

so it's on a level with my chest and I wanted my right arm to be able to do that

to its basic maximum range of motion going backwards whilst it was flexing

right so I wanted to be able to get my right arm folded and I wanted to get the

the arm around my body as far as I could without it drifting up off my side

sure because I wanted to get the order of the downswing better so I wanted my

right arm to be the furthest point behind me at the top, not pinned in front of me

so it became the last thing to come down in the order of the downswing

But not floating like you said. So if I let it go way behind me with my right arm sticking

miles out behind I knew that was no good because the elbow would get stuck coming down. So I want it to be in order but also relatively close and have some relationship to a body turn

and you hit shots with this right this isn't just a yeah it was it was me trying to go go ahead like

a month's worth of work so if I strap this close to me I can keep going in the backswing know that

it's knowing that it's within certain boundaries but I can stretch my backswing out more because I

was getting getting a bit older and less flexible so I didn't want to just let my right arm go loose

and go anywhere but I wanted to stretch it further back so I wanted that to go deep as far as I could

so that then when I unwound my body I could give myself more time for my shoulders to unwind because

one of the faults I had was that the shoulders didn't unwind quick enough and if the arms come

down too soon you haven't got time for your shoulders to open up so that was the idea

So this was to get the arm behind feeling a bit more behind my shoulder and then use

my shoulder turn to then create space for my right arm to fit into on the way down and as a

little bit of a by-product it kept it quite nice and all good organized on the way through but that

wasn't the original intention yeah that looked pretty good didn't it and it does feel pretty

much like what my swing normally feels like. Whereas if you were using a towel or tying a

rope around yourself or the glub, restricted. It's not realistic. Yeah, it's not realistic. Got to be tight around your chest so it doesn't give you too much room and it's got to sit level

Beautiful. And I did notice that I actually started to hit some really good shots with this on

and I found a pretty good rhythm with it and it did do what I wanted it to do was

the bottom line so we ended up making it. Do we need to, next time you're playing a

tournament, do we need to take your sweater off and check you haven't got it on underneath there? I'll keep I can keep this one on the day can I, just hold the

belly in a little bit. For most people the follow-through part will be the more restrictive feeling, the backswing

should be okay. And if it doesn't feel okay chances are you're doing something wrong right

Yeah and then I mean it's only to give you a feeling of how close the arms can be to

the body whilst still getting a full swing in. It shouldn't make the swing too short and it's a bit like Ben Hogan's drill of having his..

He had his arms strapped together sometimes and he had his arms strapped to his chest with a belt

I believe, to try and get that and that relationship which you see in his swing where his elbows..

The right elbow folds in nicely into his side coming down but then he refolds this left arm

really well that's something i haven't been able to do but i wanted to be able to do is to get that to fold quickly like that without the wrist having to do

that the elbow folds better on the way through you get a better release up the plane i think but i haven't managed to quite train myself to do that

rob that is absolutely fascinating stuff there's some really good lessons there everyone can take something different from that really appreciate that people really want to see hope we've not

spoken too much over that because I wanted to just get loads of Rob Rock swings because that's what people want to see and if I have spoken too much of that I apologise. Cue a really nice

cinematic slow-mo montage of Rob. Thank you