Colin Weston - ModGolf Welcome back to The Rebuild. Okay, now it's time for the club that does not agree with me too much, and that is the driver. So, Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro, who's been working with me in the two previous videos. The first one was on the short game, chipping and pitching, reworking my spin loft and my attack angle, because I had that completely backwards. So I've learned a lot there. My short game's already improving. Then the second video was my regular swing. The swing sequence, I was getting that all wrong, working on that, getting this left hip forward. I was getting back, so that's starting to kick in slowly. Really enjoyed my time with Quinn on that, but now it's time for the driver, the one for years that has been my big problem, the bane of my existence. I'm one of those ones, I get way too quick, way too handsy, come over the top. I'm not a super slicer of it, but still, not a lot of control and not a lot of power. There's a lot of, how do they say, I'm looking for effortless power, and it seems like I have powerless effort. So I've got to flip that script on that one, and that's what Quinn's going to be working on with me today to get that driver going in the right direction. All right, here we go. It's driver time. All right, Quinn, where do you want to start? You want to see me hit one? Yeah, why don't you hit a couple for me? Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Okay. We'll just take a look, and we'll go from there. Colin Weston - ModGolf Okay. So even though I hit a fairly tight-ish fade on that, I can never get a positive number with a driver, yet. Not yet. There we go. Not yet. The way I phrase that, yet. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Generally, is that seven degrees kind of what you're typically used to seeing? Colin Weston - ModGolf Yes. That's what I'm usually playing for. Once again, when it goes bad, I'll snap it hard left, or if my sequencing is really off, then, yes, I'll flare out something really weak to the right side that's out of play. So even there, that's my first swing, but yeah, at 94 miles an hour, that's very low for me. Like, usually I'm around 96, around 97. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Yep. Okay, 96, 97. You're right. Club path, very similar. Yes. Struck it quite well. Solid strike. Carry more than the last one. Yes. But still a pretty significant amount of left path. Colin Weston - ModGolf Absolutely. Right. And for me, at a carry at 225, on average, that's a good drive for me. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Yeah, yeah, totally. Colin Weston - ModGolf That's one of my better ones. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro That's a solid struck drive, for sure. Colin Weston - ModGolf Absolutely. I'd be more than happy where my golf game is right now to take both of those drives. I'd be okay with those, because I'm in play. There's one that I would not be happy with. 191, it's probably out of play, it's behind a tree, it's in the water. Okay, so that's what we have to work with. So now I'll leave it to you, Quinn. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Yeah. So the path being fairly significantly to the left is something that is going to always lead to inevitably a slice. If your club face is perfectly square all the time, you're just gonna hit big pulls. But there's a few different ways to kind of go about driver specifically and setting up for more of a neutral path, less of a left path. Things like ball position, shoulder tilt, setup overall is definitely going to play a role in the direction that your club is moving. Similar to what I used earlier with your chipping, when I had that cloth there, that's something that I don't see utilized nearly enough. When you look at the range and you're looking at two or players on the range, they use things all the time, something that I don't see almost anyone. When I'm at University Golf Club, watching people hit balls, they just swing one after another. Sometimes people don't even take both hands off. You know what they're ironing, they just kind of rake and smack. With good players, they're methodical in how they go about things. So if your path is moving significantly to the left consistently, then we can confidently put something in the way to say, hey, if I can get my path to be a little bit more neutral and get used to that as piece one, then once I'm familiar with that, then I can start to work on the club face. Now, the hard part about this is that there's two pieces. Do you mind if I steal the show? Colin Weston - ModGolf Go ahead. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro So what you typically do is you typically swing pretty good to the left and then you fade the ball to the right. So we're gonna see club path move seven degrees to the left. I've got carry about 210, similar to what you were seeing, pretty high spin rate. I hit it solid, smash factor, I hit it pretty close to the center of the face. Right? But now what we can actually do is we can say, okay, let's put something in the way. Let's be smart. Let's go and spend all the money. You get five of these for a buck, right? Let's put this in the way so that I have no ability to swing left or I'm going to hammer this towel. Now, if you hammer the towel, do you think it's gonna hurt my club? Colin Weston - ModGolf No. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Do you think it's gonna hurt the towel? Colin Weston - ModGolf Probably not. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro And if you happen to smack it and it goes 20 yards in the middle of range, you say, what do I do now? Get another towel for 20 cents. So this is generally what I see a lot of people do with driver specifically. The reason that I like to go about it this way is subjectively how you figure out how to miss this towel is going to be something that you hold near and dear to become successful with the driver. Now, if you start thinking about hips and shoulders and center of mass and all the things with the longest club in your bag, you're gonna be disastrous pretty quickly. Colin Weston - ModGolf And that's where I've been stuck for years. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro And that's where we don't want to go. If I said, here's a pencil, Colin, that's this long, that's 45 inches long. I want you to sign your name. It wouldn't be very neat signature, right? Colin Weston - ModGolf It would not. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro And it's the same with a driver. Like drivers are long clubs. So if you don't have a method that you feel comfortable with, you're trying to work on your technique and your body with a driver, you're gonna be a disaster. So what I'm gonna challenge you to do is put down something like a towel to discourage your club from moving seven degrees to the left. So now what you're gonna see is you're gonna set up and you're gonna go, okay, I don't want to hit that towel. I want to swing this way, okay? Even if you start going slower. So I'm gonna swing a little slower. Club head speed was right around just a little lower than you, nine to five, right? So now if I swing from the inside, what we're gonna see is we're gonna see you start to do this for a bit. You're gonna hit it dead right because now we're gonna see our club path move seven and a half degrees from the inside. But because you're so used to matching up with a left path and open face so that you can hit these little bleeders back onto your target, your habit is to leave that face a little open through the strike, right? So what we're gonna do is we're going to say, okay, you know what? We're not gonna worry about that for now. We're just going to generally try and get this number to negative two. If it gets to zero, awesome. If it gets to plus one, plus two, sweet. But you're generally at like minus five, minus six, minus seven even. So we gotta move that a little closer to zero. Once you get that club moving a little bit more closer to zero or neutral, so see that was a little slower, 88, right? Then you can start to say, okay, now I'm moving the club from the inside. Now I need to shut the face in relation so I can start hitting these draws. Now we're gonna see club path moved super far from the inside again, but because I shut the face a ton, it hooked. Now I'm starting to swing a little faster as well. Does that make sense? So start slow, focus on one piece of data, and then as you start to get used to this, then you can add some speed and start to close the face to start to see those shapes go the opposite direction. But you have to build. You have to go step one, step two, step three. Does that make sense? Colin Weston - ModGolf It certainly does, and that's why I'm comfortable being patient with this too. After three days or even when you leave here that everything's gonna be fixed. As we said earlier, the longer it takes, the longer it lasts. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro I am just a golf coach. I am not Jesus Christ in the flesh, you know? So I'm not a miracle worker here. I'm just trying to help you understand what it is you're gonna work on when you go and spend those hours on the range and you come here and you hit balls inside and you go back to the men's club this summer, I want you to know what it is that you're working on and subjectively get used to that. That's the key too, having a strategic plan, whether it's for your business or your golf game or your life, map these things out. Colin Weston - ModGolf And for me, yeah, lots of sayings and cliches out there. If you don't know where you're going, you don't know how you're gonna get there. Or something like that. And for me, so far, like you said, for what you've taught me here already for chipping, as far as that one piece that I need, that it seems I'm already going in the right direction with that, with my iron play, especially with the hips and moving forward as far as that center of mass, that's another piece. And now also with this, with the drill, with me now needing to invest a couple of dollars in some towels here. That you've kept this nice and simple here. So like I said, I tasked you with giving us three pieces that'll help my golf game, that'll hopefully again, will encourage everybody watching and listening, will allow you to find those three pieces that will let you move forward so that you feel comfortable with it. And also you feel encouraged and you see the progress. So I'm not looking to go from zero to perfect. There is no perfect here, but even over the next couple of weeks here, as I will be documenting, so I'm gonna be capturing here in between the 12 weeks before we do another big video at the end to see where my progress is, that I'm gonna be both on YouTube and also Instagram with ModGolf. We'll be posting short videos on there too. Just showing both with Cameron and also what I'm working on with you. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Perfect. Yeah. And I'm excited to see this. Slowly, I wanna see this path, right? I wanna see this path over time, get less negative. Yes. We're looking for it to move closer to zero. And a huge piece in that is having one thing to focus on. Your path is what I want you to focus on with this driver. This super high tech training aid tea towel is gonna help us get there. Love it. And I would like to see you do it slowly. I'd like to see you do it without a golf ball to start. Slowly. And try and get used to hitting this tea without hitting that towel. And then start to do the same thing with a little bit more speed. Then you can add the golf ball at low speed. Then you can add the golf ball with normal speed and so on and so forth. And then eventually once you're getting used to that path, then we start to layer in that club face and voila, you're gonna start to hit it like 250 because you do have the speed, the physics of how you're using this when you're adding loft by opening the face, you're swinging down and left, that's increasing that spin loft. And to become a good driver of the golf ball, we need to decrease that spin loft. Colin Weston - ModGolf Yes. Well, one of the things I'm also excited about in the winter time here in Vancouver is, again, being here at Gowanus Golf Club, this virtual membership that I have, that I'm able to come here. I live all of four blocks away, so I just carry my clubs down here. Of course, people are staring at me as I'm walking in the rain thinking I'm a weirdo, but I show up here and I now have the capacity and the place where I can then work on all the good things, especially my driver here and hit shots like that rather than going, oh, gotta drive half an hour out to the range. Great. It's raining out, do I really wanna go? No, I'm gonna sit on my couch. So yes, I'm able to do that here. This is perfect. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro What a great space, beautiful here. Colin Weston - ModGolf Absolutely, absolutely. All right, so to finish up, should I practice a couple of these? To at least get in that right position? Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro I wanna see if we're able to hit this tee without hitting this towel. And then once we've got a few swings where we're able to accomplish hitting the tee without hitting the towel. Okay, good. How odd does that feel? Colin Weston - ModGolf That feels odd. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Good, not supposed to feel normal. If it was feeling normal, you'd smack the towel. Colin Weston - ModGolf Well, because I've been doing it abnormal. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Good, okay, very good. How odd out of 10? Colin Weston - ModGolf Out of 10, that feels like about a nine. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Okay, all right, good. So I'm gonna put a ball there just for fun. Let's give it a shot. Now, I don't want you to try and hit this ball anywhere above 150 yards. Your goal is to hit this tee and not the towel, just the same as the last couple of swings there. Just hit the tee without hitting the towel. Okay, now that club path was seven degrees from the inside, from in to out. From the inside, okay, yeah. Versus seven degrees from the outside. So why do you think that that ball went straight to the right? Colin Weston - ModGolf Well, I can see the club face is wide open there. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Correct. Yes. Club face is wide open. There's also a little bit of a heel strike there. Gear effect's gonna make it fade. But those two things combined are gonna make that ball start right and fade. Now, this is what I tasked you with doing. This is what you're going to get used to doing through repetition when I leave. Once you can do this without the towel, that's when we need to start making sure that strike location is nearing the center so that we don't gear the ball to the right. And then the next piece that's going to be equally as hard, to be honest with you, and I won't lie, is closing this face. Because your brain, your movement pattern, the mountain, the side of the mountain that you've been going down, has been to open that face, open that face, open that face, leave it open, or you hit it a mile left. So we're gonna have to sort of get used to swinging this way and learning to swing and avoid that towel, but then getting that club face to close a little bit. And then before you know it, you're gonna start to see a way, way higher distance because you're going to have this ball speed increase despite your club head speed, even if it stays the same. Even if you're swinging 96, 97, you're still gonna see this ball speed increase because you're lowering the loft by closing the face. Colin Weston - ModGolf Got it. Got it. Why don't we wrap it up there? Because now I've got my three pieces, my three pillars, the three things I need to work on. One piece for my short game, one for my mid-irons or just my golf swing. And now of course, what's been the big thorn in my side for many decades here, and that's driver. As you said, not trying to solve all the pieces at once. I'm gonna start with that and work on that over the next week or so, and then we'll reconnect. And we'll keep evolving and keep going from that. I love this. Well, Quinn Vilneff, again, I gotta thank you so much for spending the time with us today here on ModGolf. This has been great. Between you and Cameron, I'm excited about starting my year off in golf in a very positive way. Since we've been doing the physics thing today here, there's an Einstein quote that I love, and that is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And I have been desperately searching for a different result, a nice, strong, powerful, draw off the tee with the golf swing that I've been using for the last four decades, and that's not happening. So I've been insane with my driver. So now it's time to add some sanity. And Quinn, you're helping with that. Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Perfect. Happy to help. Thank you so much. Colin Weston - ModGolf Hey, before we go here, so I know you also do lessons online, so you don't just have to be in the greater Vancouver area to connect with you. So how can people connect with you if they want to learn more about getting golf lessons with you and some of the clinics that you do also? Quinn Vilneff - PGA Teaching Pro Yeah. So I do a number of clinics and classes all year through April through October at University Golf Club here in Vancouver. I also teach online using the Sportsbox AI app, which I know you've had on the pod before. So I'm online. Just Quinn Vilneff is my coaching profile. And I'm on Instagram as well, under VanGolfPro of Vancouver, VanGolfPro. If you just search Quinn Vilneff, I'm sure it'll pop up. And if you reach out there through like a direct message, I can send you all the information on how to get started that way. And yeah, it's been actually a really cool off season for me here in Vancouver. I've had my online lessons take off more than expected, which is very well welcomed. And a lot of students who are having a lot of positive feedback and positive results from that. So if you're not in Vancouver, we can still work together and I'd love to see your golf swing and see how I can help your golf scores get lower this year. Colin Weston - ModGolf There we go. And as I always do, so for the video here on the YouTube channel, in the description, I'll have all those links for Quinn there. And for the podcast, if you're listening in the show notes, I will include those for you also to make it nice and easy to connect with Quinn. So with that, thank you so much for joining us. This is just the first of many steps on this journey. Hopefully you'll follow me for the ups and downs. And I know this isn't gonna be a straight line. There's gonna be some setbacks here. I'm gonna be hitting a lot of drivers to the right here where it's gonna be frustrating, but I'm willing to do it. Because once again, the longer it takes, the longer it lasts. Thanks so much for joining us today on ModGolf. All right. So learned a lot there as far as my driver of what I need to do and what I need to stop doing. Although it is tricky because I've got tens if not hundreds of thousands of bad driver swings that I have to unwind and reprogram in my brain and in my body, but I'm willing to put in the work. And as they say, the longer it takes, the longer it sticks. So hope you enjoyed this video series, my time with Quinn here at Gowanus Golf Club here in Vancouver. Big shout out to them for giving us the opportunity to shoot this video here. So yeah, if you haven't seen the first couple of videos, I'll keep the links to those below here. And yeah, for my chipping game and the short game I should say, and also for swing sequence and the irons. Which is already improving. I've been playing a couple of weeks now since I shot the first videos or released those. I'm hitting the ball farther. I'm striking it more consistently and hitting more greens. And guess what? Having more fun. That's what it's all about really here. Okay. So also on the fitness side, gonna be doing some more testing. It's been a few weeks already with Vancouver Golf Performance. Big shout out to them too and Cameron. He's been working with me. So hey, these set of videos, these first four are the before and we're gonna be shooting some for the after. So hopefully you'll be joining us for that. I'm gonna redo the fitness testing to see how these hips, how they're moving in the shoulders, my stability and my power. So there you go. All right. Thanks for joining us. Hey, if you like what we're doing here on ModGolf, please subscribe to the channel. Give us some love. Leave a comment. Are you working on your golf game? What are the biggest struggles for you? What are the frustrations? I know I have lots. So I could definitely relate. And hey, I'll get back to you in comments too. So there you go. All right. See you soon. Bye.