Lydia Ko when she was swinging her best

As some are beginning to notice, Lydia Ko is starting to slump a little bit.  There are some concrete reasons why her game has started on the wrong path.  And it has to do with the changes she has made with her instructor David Leadbetter on her golf swing.  On the right side is her latest swing from 6 months ago.  

  

This is her old setup.  Her left hand grip is a standard strong grip as well as her right hand grip.  Now we can see both her grips are weaker.  This change toward weaker grips is going to straight away promote an open clubface throughout the swing which inevitably will lead to a rolling release (which is bad because it increases the timing required to hit consistently on target shots).  So unfortunately since these great natural talents are unaware of what makes them great, a kind unassuming instructor who has the "credibility" of helping some big name players can talk them into changing to become even better or to gain more distance.

Unfortunately, these changes are just making her more inconsistent and although sure she may be a 5 or even 10 yards longer, if she keeps hitting it offline like she is right now, she will certainly lose that #1 world ranking for good.  Note: Jordan Spieth is on this track too.

     Not much difference here

Look how she is loading into her left side before her backswing is finished.  This is going to lead to less rotation and invite a flip and roll increasing the chances of an inaccurate shot.  This is the difference between Ben Hogan and her.  Ben Hogan had great body rotation and had a great impact with a bowed left wrist and stable clubface through impact.  This is what Lydia had before meeting Leadbetter and it is why she was so consistently great.  But now she is working towards the opposite of those moves that the best ball strikers including Hogan had.  She is losing her body rotation by sliding onto her left leg -- which is affecting the once great impact she had and destabilizing her clubface through impact.

  

Look at how much further left she is nowadays.  And the rotation she once had is almost gone.  Also you can tell that now she has almost no Right Lateral Bend in her spine (look at the green lines -- she used to have the curve in the right side of her body indicating the Right Lateral Bend) which means that her right bicep will likely contract too early leading to the flip and roll because an early right bicep contracting causes the lag to be released.    

From these two pictures you can see that her clubface angle is more open in her new swing.  This means that she will have to time it closed.  And there is just a lot less rotation due to how far she slid to her left side.

Notice how much faster the logo on the golf glove disappears on her worse swing (on the right).  Also notice how her left elbow is rotating away from the target which is also another indication that she has to time a rolling clubface.    

Tips and Help for the Struggling Engineering Student

Engineering is a challenging subject that is intimidating and sometimes demoralizing if you let it become that way.  I certainly did for my first 4 years of college.  I really struggled through it and almost failed a few of my classes.  I was unsure of how to study well and I really struggled with MATLAB and understanding coding.  Finally in my fifth year I was able to figure out some of the best strategies to study and averaged above a 3.0 GPA in my final year.  

Now some backstory: I actually had above a 4.0 GPA in high school so I was under the impression that this would translate to college because I believed I worked hard.  Well, that certainly was not the case, because studying engineering at a university requires more effective study strategies especially since the material we needed to learn came at us very fast (we were on the quarter system at UC Riverside) -- way faster than in high school.  In high school as you may remember we had a lot more time to mull things over and exams were not 80% of your grade.  As long as you did your homework and generally paid some attention in class, you were pretty much guaranteed a B.  

In engineering school things are different.  Here are some things that I learned during my 5 years.  

#1  Make sure you do like engineering and find it fascinating or curious.  First of all you want to make sure that engineering is a subject you want to pursue.  Never listen to those who say that you should join because you make great money.  Why?  Heck you can make money being a cuddler!  No joke, you can make money just cuddling people all day and make $80,000 a year.  If designing engines, analyzing flow, etc. doesn't intrigue you at all then it is best to look elsewhere.  Don't get me wrong that just by going through this major you will become a much better problem solver, however if you aren't curious about why things work the way they do or have some sort of calling to it then you will want to search elsewhere.  I myself was skeptical of it because of all the paperwork problems we had to do and we never had any time working in a lab hands on until my 4th year.

However, a fantastic way to add this "hands on" component to the sometimes mundane studies is to join a engineering club!  I myself joined the Engineers Without Borders chapter and UAV (Umanned Aerial Vehicle) during my five years at UC Riverside.  They were definitely the experience I was looking for as we had a large team comprised of over 25 individuals who were split up into many different subteams.  I was on the "wing" subteam; my duties were to analyze the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFDs) of different wing shapes and then submit them to a team evaluation meeting where we gathered and decided on which wing shape would best suit our drone.  Some of the criteria we went through were maneuverability, airspeed, drag and lift characteristics.  

 There are many different engineering fields to choose from so make sure you research and choose the one that interests you the most.  I chose Environmental Engineering at the beginning of my first 2 years, but then switched to Mechanical Engineering for my last 3 years and this is the degree I graduated with.  I switched because I struggled with Organic Chemistry (got C's in both classes) and thought that Environmental was just a lot of data collection and problem solving which seemed rather boring compared to Mechanical where you actually had the opportunity to design things.  Nevertheless I still want to work in the Environmental sector of the workforce.

#2  When you are struggling seek help.  Yeah this is obvious, but I felt like I should and must be the one to figure this stuff out on my own.  This is such a terrible idea because it takes many hours to do homework assignments and it becomes easy to just give up once you hit an obstacle because things can stop making sense quickly.  

So make sure to go into your engineering computer lab to study and do homework because there everyone will be working together to figure out each problem.  It is a lot better to work together with your peers because you laugh and joke together and are able to bounce ideas off each other when you are stuck on solving a problem or understanding a concept.  

Another huge reason to meet people and study with them at the computer lab is that a lot of students will be there who have already taken the classes or had professors that you have right now.  And they can give advice or even give you past exams, quizzes, and homework solutions which can be a huge help since a lot of professors don't change much from year to year.  This is a helpful advantage that will make studying a lot more stress free since you will know generally what to expect and whether or not the professor likes to throw in similar problems to the homeworks/ quizzes.

Under this umbrella of seeking help, go to office hours when you and your study group can't figure things out because the professor is the best source of helping you understand a concept and they do care about you and your struggles.  Also it is great to know the professors and learn about what they do for research and ask them how they were able to succeed in engineering.  

#3  When studying make flashcards.  I wish I would have realized this sooner, but creating flashcards made a big difference in studying.  Not only are they useful when you are waiting in a line somewhere or when you are walking to class, but they compartmentalize the information and concepts in your brain and make it easier to remember the concept and the corresponding formula.  I would sometimes create flashcards of problems that were tricky to solve for the same purpose.  This made life so much easier once I started doing this.     

#4  Motivation and commitment is key.  How does someone continue to stay hungry?

Get around where it is better and people who are hungry.  Who you spend time with is who you become.  I got these ideas straight from Tony Robbins and other well known speakers.  Another quote
is that "you are the average of your 5 closest friends."  Whether those friends are your mom, dad, uncle, aunt, or

  It is very true, whomever you spend the most time with, you want to strive to keep up with them if they are doing better than you.  If they are doing worse than you, you will tend to slack off and drop down to their level.  Thus, making friends with the top students or the students who have a great understanding of the material makes things so much easier.  This is probably the best advice I have ever received because trying to struggle through things on your own is often a fruitless pursuit especially when you hit a roadblock, because then you feel like giving up and playing video games or watching Netflix or (Enter other time candy here).         

This is one of the things I would have done differently if I could go back and do it all over again.  I had a great friend in college who was very hardworking and smart.  She really went above and beyond and did research for professors, maintaining above a 3.7 GPA all the while commuting to school everyday.  I really regret not becoming better friends and doing study sessions together.  I know I would have become a more disciplined person and I would have definitely done better all my exams.

Instead I worked at my apartment attempting to do my homework but getting lost very easily and then concluding "Well I might as well look up the answers..." and I subsequently went to chegg.com or the solution manual to copy down the correct answers.  It's not enough to just copy down and look over the answers in order to learn the material.  You really have to go through each step of the process and understand the "Why" of how and why they used each equation, the overall concept, and the force balances (if applicable).