According to Mike Bennet and Andy Plummer the first golf fundamental is to "hit the ball first and the ground afterwards." Any golfer who has hit "fat shots" (ground first, then ball) understands the importance of this fundamental. The Bennet-Plummer solution to this imperative is the Stack and Tilt (S&T) swing, pictured in the right two frames above. Compared to the conventional width swing, pictured in the left two frames above, S&T maintains the weight on the left side (toward the target) throughout the swing rather than shifting the weight backward on the backswing.
A second imperative of a good golf swing is that "you generate enough power to play the course." In S&T, the power is generated by the standup move. The swing thought for S&T is "stack-tilt-standup". Over time, this swing thought has worked pretty well for me but it is not without problems: (1) my bad shot tends to be a push, (2) I have not been generating enough power and (3) I can still occasionally hit fat shots!
After a lot of experimenting this summer, I returned to an old video tip from long drive champion Steve Griffith (video above, you have to get through some promotional material to get to the tip, but not much and there's lots of interesting footage of Steve crushing his driver). To generate enough power to hit it long, Steve focuses on the shoulder turn. His tip is pretty straight forward: turn your left shoulder back under your chin and, snap, replace it with your right shoulder. The rapid unwinding of the upper body generates the power; the more rapid the unwinding, the more power.
I have been a little reluctant to share this tip because, as I well know, if done improperly it will result in an over-the-top shot (you can watch a video explanation of this fault here). What is interesting about over-the-top shots is that they usually go further (and further to the left) then your normal shot. What we would like is the power of the over-the-top shot without the misdirection.
So, let's go back to S&T at the top of the backswing (third frame from the left above). At the top, you are in a very stable position with S&T compared to the width swing. Quickly replacing your right shoulder with your left shoulder, as suggested by Steve Griffith, should work fine from this position. But I can still sometimes hit a pull shot suggesting a little over-the-top.
The answer, I found, was to return to the description of how to start the width swing (see the description of the "Switch" on page four of this document):
"Your downswing starts with your left shoulder moving away from your chin as your club moves out toward the target line. Let your upper trunk rotate around you left leg while your right elbow clamps back to your side. Copy John Daly and Jack Niklaus to learn this move" (Adams, et. al. 1998: 137).
Possibly because I have the endomorphic body type suited to the width swing, the shoulder-separation move as the first step in rapidly replacing my left shoulder with my right shoulder prevents the pulled, over-the-top swing.
To recap, I concentrate on maintaining a stable stacked position at the start of the swing, take the club back on an inside path to a 3/4 position at the top, start the swing by moving my left shoulder toward the target and then trying to rapdily replace my left- with my right-shoulder on the follow through. Right now, when done correctly, this move has given me another 10 yards on the irons and 20 yards on the driver, exactly what I have been looking for. In the future and at my age, there are probably decreasing returns to more rapid upper body rotation. For right now, I'm really happy with the results (increased accuracy and distance) being produced. As a bonus, I have hit no fat shots since taking this approach to the course!
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