playing the game, practice, shot-making

The Importance of Technical Golf

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Ansel Adams (click the link to get a Google search, then click the Images link on that page) was a legendary American photographer of the mid-20th century. His breathtaking landscape photographs set standards that few have met and none exceeded. He was a virtuoso artist whose medium was the photograph. Behind the beauty of every photograph he released, though, was a master of the photographic craft.

Most of the dramatic prints he made were photographs of fairly mundane scenes. But Adams knew, before he pressed the shutter, that if he gave this much exposure to the scene on this kind of film, and developed the film with this kind of developer, and printed it on this kind of paper using this kind of print developer, and by manipulating the heck out of the negative while he made the print, he would produce a masterwork.

Because he had mastered the technical side of photography, he could concentrate on the art of photography: choosing just the right the subject and framing the shot just right.

Golf is the same way. If you have done your homework on the range, you will know in any given situation which club to use, and which setup and swing variables to select in order to hit just the right shot for the situation you’re in.

For example, consider the short pitches from 25 to 60 yards. The main course variables are the distance from your ball to the edge of the green, and from the edge to the pin.

If you have truly learned how to hit these shots, then for any combination of these two distances, you will know without thinking which club to use, and which setup and swing variables to tack on. Then you can concentrate on the feel of the situation and have the clear mind necessary to pull off all that technique.

When you’re trying to figure out the technique for the shot at the same time you’re trying to keep your mind focused, you won’t be able to accomplish either one.

A few years ago I saw Retief Goosen on TV hitting from about seventy yards to the right of the green, in front of the one on the neighboring fairway. He had little green to work with, and the shot was blind because he had to hit over a cluster of trees. He flew the trees and stopped the ball inside six feet from the pin.

Don’t tell me that was lucky. He knew from his practice exactly how to hit that shot.

The more technical shot-making skills you can develop on the practice ground, the easier this game gets and the better you will play.

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anchored putting, commentary, rules

My Comment to the USGA on Anchored Putting

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The USGA is inviting comments on its proposed Rule 14-1b, which would ban the anchored putting stroke. The comment period ends on February 28th. My comment, which I sent off yesterday, is printed below.

——————

February 12, 2013

United States Golf Association
PO Box 708, 77 Liberty Corner Rd.
Far Hills, NJ 07931-0708

This note is my comment on proposed rule 14-1b which bans the anchored putting stroke. I am opposed to the ban.

Golf is a game played primarily by millions of recreational players worldwide. They come in all ages, and all physical capabilities and conditions. The combination of the long putter and the anchored putting stroke has enabled many people to play the game enjoyably who would otherwise play in discomfort or not at all. This combination has also made a difficult game a bit easier to play; not a cakewalk, by any means, but a more approachable game in which beginners can achieve a satisfying level of success in a relatively short time.

It is recreational golfers that the rules of golf must accommodate. They are the game, not the handful of gifted players who compete at the highest levels. For those millions, the anchored stroke is not a corruption of the game’s principles or its intent. It is a way for them to have as much fun as they can.

We’re not asking for a different set of rules, but the preservation of the current ones. There is no point in changing the rules to make the game harder. Whether anchored putting contributes to golf’s growth is debatable, that banning the anchored stroke might well diminish it is not. I can easily foresee golfers with a marginal commitment to the game or physical handicaps quitting over this.

It seems the main argument brought up by the R&A and the USGA that the anchored stroke is a violation of the traditions of the game, that “a player should hold the club away from his body and swing it freely.” (Golfweek, December 7-14, 2012). That’s a tradition of the game because it’s a law of physics. If you want to hit a ball sitting on the ground a long way, you have to rear back and whack it. I suppose if someone wanted to have a belly driver with a 60” shaft (yes, I know the rule on shaft lengths) and swing it with an anchored stroke, they might be able to hit the ball 100 yards. We swing freely because that’s the only way to hit the ball and get anything resembling distance.

Putting, however, is not a distance stroke. It’s a finesse stroke. There is no need for it to be a free-swinging stroke. The anchored stroke is not part of golf’s tradition only because no one thought of it until recent times. But then, metal and graphite shafts aren’t traditional, either, as are not metal-headed drivers and moderns golf balls. The sand wedge and the Schenectady putter were nontraditional when they were introduced, but golf survived quite well following their acceptance. Anyone been stymied lately? It appears that golf’s rule-makers are being selective today as to which traditions they feel are necessary so the game can “sustain itself” and which are not.

There is an “unfair advantage” argument that you hear. If you think anchoring gives other golfers have an advantage, than you can start anchoring, too. PGA members who anchor have not taken over the top rankings in putting statistics, nor are they even close. No advantage that I can see there. If one of my playing pals switches to an anchored stroke and lowers his handicap by four strokes, I’ll be nothing but happy for him, because he’s having . . . more fun.

There is also the “nerves” argument, that the anchored stroke takes the nerves out of the game. Well, it doesn’t, and even if it settles them down a bit, recreational golfers don’t play golf to test our nerves. We’re not in competition. We’re out there to have fun.

So. To summarize. Golf belongs to the millions of recreational players, not the handful of professionals. We play golf to have fun. Anchored putting lets many of us not only have fun, but play the game, period. Let us keep this part of golf that does no harm to anyone or to the sport, but does many of us a world of good. Anchored putting so far hasn’t been the killing blow to recreational golf and it won’t be if it is allowed to continue. Rule 14-1b is a solution to an imaginary problem. Let’s keep the rules just like they are now.

Thank you for your attention.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

rhythm and tempo

Tempo + Rhythm = Timing

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In the old days when cars had carburetors, getting the ignition timing just right was critical to the engine’s performance. If the spark came to soon, the explosion collided with an upward-moving piston, making the engine work against itself. If the spark came too late, the explosion pushed on a piston well on its way down, applying power where there was no work to do. 

A golf swing is designed to put the clubhead in the right orientation at the moment it meets the ball. Given the mechanics to accomplish that, consistent tempo and rhythm ensure that happens at the right time, swing after swing.

Let’s be sure we understand the difference between the two words. Both terms originated to describe music.

Tempo is the overall speed of a musical piece. Rhythm is the varying duration of the tones being played. You can play “Stars and Stripes Forever” at two different tempos, but they will have the same rhythm.

In the same way, two golfers might move through their swing at different speeds, but the rhythm of the swing should be the same.

In December, I posted this comment on tempo, which explains the importance of swing tempo, and why it is slower than you might feel is right.

I also posted this comment on rhythm, which gives you an explicit method of finding the right tempo for your swing and what the right rhythm feels like.

Learn to groove the right rhythm first, using the procedure described in the aforementioned post. Then go to the range, with your metronome, and hit balls with that rhythm but at different tempos until you find the right one. It’s the swing that lets you hit your best shots and stay in balance throughout the swing.

Believe me, when you find it, you’ll know.

Spend a few weeks drilling this critical fundamental into your swing, and refresh yourself once a week or so during the golf season. You’ll love the difference it makes.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

Uncategorized

I’m Back

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My involvement with this blog has fallen off lately. The reason is that I spent the first five weeks of the year finishing writing my next book, The Golfing Self. That wasn’t much creativity left over for this space.

But last Friday morning, I put a tweak on the one sentence that still wasn’t right, and I’m finished. I made contact with the layout artist and we will get that part of production going later this week. The book is due out in April.

So! Starting tomorrow, you’ll be getting the usual supply of insightful instructional posts that is the backbone of The Recreational Golfer. In addition, this year I want to post short comments when ever it strikes me to, so the blog will be much more active than before.

For long-time readers, who are aware of my medical issues, I want you to know I played nine from the red tees last Friday, and the Friday before that. Everything went well. I hope to playing eighteen from the whites by mid-summer.

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distance

Power Leaks in the Golf Swing

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Every golfer has a maximum clubhead speed. You get it by eliminating power leaks. Here are a few things you can change that are robbing you of precious MPH at impact.

You swing too hard. Swinging hard actually slows you down. Muscular force doesn’t generate speed. A relaxed swing lets power accumulate and multiply on its own.

You grip too tight. This puts tension in your hands which radiates throughout your body. You end up holding back the club instead of letting it go.

You swing too fast. Remember, you want clubhead speed, not “youspeed.” You don’t have to turn your body at 90 MPH to make the clubhead go that fast.

The club fights against your grip. Especially a the top, you sense this and use up effort hanging on to the club. Grip down so the club feels balanced. Then it will never feel like it is trying to pull itself out of your hands.

You aim your swing. To get the most speed you can deliver to the ball, you have to let the swing happen. If you care too much about where the ball will go, you slow yourself down.

You start your downswing with just your hands. Start your downswing by turning your lower body. Let your arms just drop down and follow. It’s a gravity move with the arms, powered by turning your lower body.

Each one of these things can be changed in a few minutes. The major patch is to hit the ball on the center of the clubface while it is square to the swing path. If you want to get this one down, take lessons.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

impact

What Happens at Impact

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Because of a flexible shaft and a heavy clubhead, both flung at a stationary ball at high speed, impact in golf does not lend itself to a simple description.

From the top of the backswing to impact about 1/5 of a second elapses. The accelerating, clubhead builds up a considerable amount of speed. It meets the ball with a force of almost 2,000 pounds and remains in contact with it for 0.0005 seconds. During that time, the clubhead travels from 3/4” to 1”.

The force of impact with a stationary object, the golf ball, immediately slows the clubhead down by about 25 percent.

Spin gets applied to the ball, about 3-4,000 RPM with a driver, and about four times that with a 9-iron.

The heavier clubhead was in front of the shaft near impact, giving the shaft a concave shape in relation to the target. The collision of the clubhead and the ball slows the clubhead down more than the shaft, so the shaft flips into a convex shape in relation to the target.

Centrifugal force built up at impact pulls on the player’s hands with a force of about 40 to 60 pounds.

The golfer feels the shock of impact, but not simultaneously with the event itself. The vibration takes 0.00067 seconds to travel up the shaft to the player’s hands. By this time the ball has already left the clubface. From there the nerve impulse takes 0.01 seconds to travel to the player’s brain, by which time the ball has separated from the clubhead by almost 12 inches. Were the player to react in some way to the feel of impact, by the time a correction could be applied, the ball would be almost fifteen yards down range.

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equipment

How the Golf Club Behaves During Your Swing

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During the golf swing, the shaft bends in so many ways and in so many places that we wonder how the ball can be hit straight. But it all works out. Read this description of something that looks simple only when we see it at high speed.

The clubhead of an iron weighs about eight ounces. The entire golf club weighs about fourteen. When the club moves away from the ball, the flexible shaft gets ahead the movement of the clubhead; that is, the shaft bends in a concave direction in regard to the target. The clubhead remains in this lagging position throughout the backswing.

At the top of the backswing the clubhead catches up again just before the reversal of direction the swing. But as before, when the clubs starts swinging down, the heavy clubhead gets left behind, bending the shaft again, but in the opposite way than it bent at takeaway.

The downswing accelerates the clubhead, whereas the backswing it was decelerating. At some point in the downswing, the accelerating clubhead passes the shaft, causing the shaft to bend in the opposite direction, a concave shape relative to the target, as the clubhead approaches the ball.

The clubhead now behaves as if it were a freewheeling object. This bending of the shaft causes the clubface to be closed at impact by about 2 degrees. In addition to being bent a bit backwards, the shaft also bends downward, somewhat like a fishing pole bent downward by the weight of the lures tied to the line.

This downward bending causes the lie of the club to flatten out, and must be taken into account when the lie of the club is determined during club-fitting. The amount of the bend can between from 1 to 3 degrees, depending on shaft flex and clubhead speed.

So again, we manage to hit the ball straight in spite of this high-speed noodling. Knowing this makes golf a little more interesting, but don’t get caught up in all of it when you swing. Let this be something that keeps club designers awake at night.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

rules

Gotta Know the Rules!

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Tiger Woods got socked with a two-stroke penalty for taking an illegal drop in the Abu Dhabi tournament last weekend. If he had been reading the rules review in this blog last summer, Woods would have known that you can take a drop from an embedded lie through the green only if the ball is in a closely-mown area (Rule 25-2), which his was not.

What’s worse, his playing partner, Martin Kaymer, didn’t know the rule, either.

So as not to be as inexcusably ignorant as the best players in the world, why not do a rules review of your own?

You can start with the first post concerning the teeing ground. Or click on Rules in the label listing and away you go.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

mental game

Consistent Golf

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People say they want their golf to be consistent, but I think they really mean predictable. When you swing identically every time, you will have attained that goal. Though we can never do that, we can get close by learning what it means to swing identically.

Begin with a simple greenside chip, that has maybe a three-foot backswing. Learn to strike the ball identically every time with that simple stroke. Be very strict when it comes to judging your strike. Identical means similar in every detail, exactly alike. Really close doesn’t count.

Is the feeling in your hands that contact makes identical? Is the sound of contact identical? Do you hit just a bit thin or a bit heavy?

You know what identical means. The more rigorously you apply the concept to this exercise, the more demanding you are of perfection, you more will get out of it.

Big hint: this whole thing is a mental challenge, not a physical one.

Generally, the first two or three chips you hit will be identical, because your conscious mind has not gotten engaged yet. But when the thinking mind takes over, trying to hit identical shots, it all falls to pieces.

At first, you weren’t trying. You just swing and identicality (now there’s a word!) just happened. The practice is to keep hitting using the unthinking mind that you used at the start, to not let that change. The goal of this exercise is not to make your stroke predictable, but to make your mind predictable.

If your mind gets used in the right way, every time, the ball-striking it leads to will be predictable. The reason it’s not isn’t because you haven’t hit 10,000 golf balls. It’s because you haven’t trained your mind not to change with every swing.

That’s hard to do, but infinitely rewarding when you learn to do it.

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distance

How to Think About Clubhead Speed

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Though several factors are more important than clubhead speed in hitting the ball a long way, we must not neglect it. The problem is that most golfers think to get more speed they have to swing the club harder (harder=faster). Let’s look first at the speed that is built into the club and see if this is really necessary.

Watch a record turning on a record player. Or, if you don’t have a record player handy, remember what that one looked like. Or, if you’ve never seen a record player, just go with me on this.

A 12” long-playing record, turns at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute. Every part of the record, from the outside edge to the part right next to the spindle in the center, turns at that same rate.

The very edge of the record turns at approximately 21” per second. A spot one-half inch from the center only has to move at 1-3/4” per second. Because these two spots have to cover different distances in the same time, they move at different speeds, in order to travel at the same rate.

Over to golf. A 9-iron is generally 35-3/4” long. A driver is 43” long. If you swing these two clubs at the same rate, the clubheads will travel at different speeds.

Think of the driver’s clubhead as reaching to the edge of the record. A point representing the relative length of a 9-iron would travel at 17.3” per second, a bit over eighty percent as fast as a point on the edge.

Trackman data from the PGA Tour shows that the average swing speed for the driver is 112 MPH. For the 9-iron, it’s 85 MPH, seventy-five percent of the speed of the driver. Data from the LPGA Tour yield roughly the same ratio (94 MPH and 72 MPH).

Now the arc traced by a golf swing is not a circle, and there is acceleration in the swing, so the math is a lot more complicated than for a spinning turntable. The numbers work out differently, but the principle is the same:

If you like the way you hit your 9-iron, hit your driver the same way, and you’ll get the clubhead speed you crave.

If you don’t believe the math, believe your eyes. Watch LPGA Tour players especially. They don’t pound their driver. They swing it with the same ease as with any other club, yet they hit the ball farther than you do. Maybe that’s the reason why.

This post is about relative distance, the distance you hit your driver compared to your 9-iron. If you want to increase both of those distances and everything between, your absolute distance, see Two Simple Ways to Get More Distance

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Little Differences That Make a Big Difference in How Well You Play