iacas

The front side line is important too. I'd continue to work on the backswing, and not worry about the downswing for awhile.

I'd wager a good bit of $ that your EE starts and is even mostly in the backswing. What you're seeing as the cause is most likely a result of something earlier.

Ha, but you were just playing devil's advocate anyway… 🙂 Yeah, basically. I can see that someone's not doing something, but the tool does a few things: It shows them that they're not doing something. It shows them how much they need to exaggerate something to actually do it. It shows them that they actually changed it and achieved it when they do. It's a tool in the toolbox. They're not useful in every lesson, but they're useful when they're useful. I'd rather have an impact driver and not need it than need an impact driver but not have it. With a lot of tech, what I've found is (and I've typed this before, so I'm starting to feel like @MonteScheinblum talking about the old woman who smokes): Before GEARS, I'd see someone whose pelvis moved 3" toward the ball in the backswing, and I'd show them this on camera, and say to them "okay, try to feel this to accomplish this change." They'd make the next swing, thinking they'd done it, but they'd still move their pelvis 2.6" toward the golf ball. I'd say "no, do it more" and I always thought some of them, in their minds, were thinking "This guy's nuts. There's no way I didn't do that way differently. He can't possibly want as much as he's asking! I don't know about this guy…" Now, on GEARS, I'll put that up as the only data point (or that's the only one I'll talk about while I silently monitor one or two others), and they'll look back at the screen and say "Oh, I didn't do it. I have to do it MORE." 😄 So, often, the tool is for the students more than it is for the instructor. On force plates, for example, you can go into live mode, and show just one graph (vertical, lateral, whatever) and students can experiment, live, with the feels that produce forces. A lot of them seem counter-intuitive to people. Having them be able to see what changes feel like, either live or immediately after a swing where they tried out a feel, is helpful.

Eh. The degree to which each arm lifts will depend on whether you're talking about the lead or trail arm, as: The trail upper arm can stay almost in the same place, but the forearm and the hands will lift a good bit as the trail elbow folds. The trail elbow folding will also lift the lead arm quite a bit (since the hands are going up). The left image shows a good pivot without any arm lifting. The right image shows the role of the arms. I think you'd have a hard time finding anyone who says that's not "very little arm lifting."

Assuming the instructors are the same quality, indoors is better for actually making improvements to your golf swing. Outdoors is a bit better for skills practice, but not as much as indoors is better for technique practice/work/change. Bunch of reasons, but beyond the golf swing reasons… indoors is great. An ideal situation might be an indoor bay that you can close the door and hit out onto a range. If I had such a setup, I'd probably leave the door open while getting initial video, close it for the first 2/3 of the lesson, and open it at the end so they could see the effects on the changes. It'd also unwittingly show them how easy it is to revert to caring too soon about the exact distance, etc. as many would immediately begin reverting hard to their old swing once they see a target flag out there at 170 or something. The greatest advantage of indoors for swing training is that it helps the golfer focus on the movement change rather than the immediate results. It's a lot easier to swing differently when the ball is going to go 15 feet and hit a net or a screen. You can still get ball flight data - I run GSPro and my QuadMAX constantly in lessons. We look at one or two numbers, typically: if your path is +8° we look to make sure it's +3° to -3°. Or we look at the AoA. Or speed. Or VLA, or whatever. Then I'll point out "not a single ball has missed left in the last 10" or something. Look at what Rory did over the winter or at some point. (Two articles on the same thing): https://www.golfdigest.com/story/Rory-mcilroy-offseason-golf-swing-work-no-golf-ball https://golf.com/instruction/rory-mcilroy-unorthodox-practice-play-smart/ I'm doing more and more but my co-host Jayson Nickol uses them a LOT: foam balls. Another layer away, so you KNOW you aren't even really going to worry about how solidly you hit the ball, and you can really make a movement change. I am doing this more and more, like I said, and I like the results. Just got 10 packs of these as I'm going to give away a bunch to my winter Junior program: https://almostgolf.com/products/almostperfect-50-ball-pack. Anyway, the quality of the instructor is the first consideration. Beyond that, if they're close or tied… go indoors.

You're wrong. I'll be brief, though. "Just move correctly" is awfully loaded. No crap, "just move correctly and GRFs will take care of themselves." So will everything else. Ball flight. Contact. Distance. Whatever. How do you GET the student to "move correctly?" Force plates are a tool to do that. This topic is like telling a fitter "just look at the ball flight" and to not use their launch monitors or anything else. Force plates are a tool. Like any other tool (GEARS, HackMotion, a launch monitor, training aids, mental imagery, SAM PuttLab, a loft/lie machine, a rangefinder, etc. etc. etc.), they have a time and a place. Oh, I know all about that. Both sides of it. 😉 Yup. Eh, most EE happens in the backswing. 🙂 Neither here nor there, but… a tour of this forum will show you what I mean.

Unless you're calling "transition" past about P5… no, not everything after transition is reactionary. You can still "do things" after the transition. Not long, and not much past P5. But after the transition? Sure. I'd take that bet, except there's no real bet to be had as "in the future" and "some" are vague. And at 100% speed in a putting stroke? Sure. We can do that now. In a driver swing? Depending on the move, we can do that now. But it's a small list. Dr. Kwon is also not a golf instructor. He's focused almost entirely on speed, so it wouldn't make sense for him to have golfers swing slowly. I've known quite a few people who went to see him, including us a looooong time ago. October 2013. Yikes. That's mental stuff. Decision making and processing speed. It's not training someone to use their wrists and forearms differently to release the club in a way that's foreign to them. Your body is different day by day and feels change. Golfers are often bad at starting with the same exaggeration level when the instructor isn't there to tell them to do it.

Did you watch the Before swing? It's an outlier situation. Okay. Look, I often have someone who comes in for a GEARS lesson make some swings on the force plates. Then we work on GEARS, and… at the end, I measure their swing on the force plates. They're often quite a bit better. Better timing, higher peaks. Everything you do has the potential to change the force plates. Very few lessons gain "significant" clubhead speed. Given that, I reject the premise you proposed before. That's all.

Nobody's said you only make slow motion swings, man. You start at a speed where you can make small mistakes and then go a little faster. If 100 is doing the thing you're working on perfectly, and you're currently a 78, make swings at a speed where you can make swings that are 90 to 110. When every swing you make is like 97 to 103, you can go faster, until you're up to full speed. I think we have a lot to learn, too. I don't think that what we learn will include "slow swings are bad or not useful." Yup. Baseball pitchers and hitters work at slow speeds. Andrew McCutchen is on a show around here going through his batting process. He starts by hitting the balls off a tee just to the outfield grass. He increases the speed so long as he has barrel control. He then gets slow tosses, and slowly ramps up the speed of the pitches he's thrown as long as he continues to control his barrel. The list goes on and on. And worse yet, the golfer will have no idea if they actually changed anything or not.

They're not wasted if they are done with the right purpose. Seeing them as wasted is a thing you may want to get over if you want to get better faster.

Yep. It'll be a bit easier if your weight isn't as far back toward your ankles as that at setup.

Everyone who knows how to teach chipping does.

I disagree. Yeah, I'm having a hard time with that one too… if he was an 8.0 he could drop to a 6.0 with the ESR, so then you're looking at a score that would take a 6.0 down to a 2.6. (6.0 * 7 + x)/8 = 2.6… Solving for x you get… -21.2. Hmmm. Not gonna get there with a 71 on a course with a rating/slope of 75/140. @Wolfric, can you share your GHIN page/chart? Something seems way off here.

I don't think they would. There's no basis in the rules for that. But, you're not wrong at all about how people will at least give him the side eye… … but there's nothing in the rules preventing it, thus, it's legal. And he's not going to be doing it near the green where he'd be testing the green or the ground for a chip shot. All of that said, as was stated earlier… he should just mimic the throwing motion without actually throwing a ball. Should have almost exactly the same effect.

That video seems to be about A/P forces (and pushing in those directions), not the vertical that we're talking about here. I disagree with that one, but I don't know what you've seen. I have plenty of lessons where I honestly don't even look at the clubhead speed, or lessons where I note it at the beginning and at the end, the student is swinging within 3 MPH of their original swing speed, but on the lower side… but they're still having to think about and do "new" things so it's not fully up to speed yet. These students often end up a little faster, but I wouldn't call it "significantly." To see a significant rise in SS requires a significant (doesn't mean difficult) change. Does the second matter if the first is off? The simple truth is that you can often go about a change in two ways. When I change someone's hand path, perhaps, or I change how much they bend their right elbow so they stop bending it 130°… the GRF stuff changes. But am I looking at GRF when I'm helping them not bend their right elbow as much as they're physically capable of bending it? No. But for other things… you can shift someone's club path by where the points of application are in the feet (and when, and how), or you can change it another way. What way is better is case by case. Depends on a lot of other things, too. That's part of being an instructor.

Uhhh, not that long. And "practicing hard" is good. Practicing well is often a different thing.

I mean, one of the items on the list (give it a listen, Monte!) is "be on time and take care of payment." 🤣 A student who no-show/no-calls isn't being a good student. They've wasted your time. But that's one of the few items that isn't really about getting better at golf directly. Most of the items speak to how a student "makes an effort." Or makes their "best" effort. Because you can "make an effort" or really want to and try to get better, but how do you make that effort: Be Open to Change. Be Willing to Work. Ask Good and Relevant Questions. Be on Time and Take Care of Payment. Be clear about your expectations and ability to practice. Don’t say you want to be more consistent. Slow down. Be patient. Be yourself. Have a growth mindset. Work on one thing at a time. Accept that you may hit it a little worse for awhile. Stay in touch with your coach, because they care. Be willing to exaggerate. Now… 1 and 10 are similar, but not identical. Ditto for 2 and 5. 6 is a bit of an inside joke as you know. 12 is different if you're in a place with seasons: I'm more skill based or make smaller changes with more immediate positive results in the summer than late fall/winter. 11 should be read a few times. 7 and 14 are big for me. So, most of the items on the list are how a golf student "makes an effort." Anyway, the episode is less than 20 minutes long, so give it a listen.

If the rule was that adults/spectators don't talk to the kids (and I know I didn't like when anyone not officially involved in the event talked to my daughter except to say something like "nice shot" or "good putt" or "your ball's right here"), then it's a situation where two wrongs don't make a right.* You talk to YOUR child after the event and make him aware of what others will do. Then you let him decide how much he cares about it. My daughter would watch some people like a hawk, and others who couldn't break 90 she wouldn't care unless it was obvious. She also didn't let focusing on the scores of others affect her much. Kids cheat, sometimes unknowingly. But kids have to learn how to deal with someone who cheats, too. * I mean, kinda. Trust me, I get the urge to say something. And by saying something it seems like you stopped future bad acts, at least that day. So it wasn't quite a "don't make a right" but it's just a saying. 🙂

It is, but yeah, you fix setup first and then see what shakes out. I just listened to a tech podcast and a guy was talking about his issue with his A/C units and how no HVAC people seem to have good "debugging" skills, and perhaps my background in software development has slightly increased my capacity for this or something, but I try to go very step-wise with people: fix the glaring thing, or change one thing, and then let that settle in and see where things are next. "Oh, you reduced five warnings to three, but this other behavior changed slightly? Okay, let's go a little farther down the road." If he is standing closer to the ball (and he is), and trying to hit draws, he may be trying to "gain" or "save" depth. Instead, the forearms roll a bit (perhaps after pulling back with his left wrist). And maybe he's done that enough that if he stands the previous distance he'll keep doing it, and then he'll need to fix that too. Or maybe it'll work itself back to the way it was.

I think you were standing farther from the ball before. If that's the case, then yes, your body is going to start to want to pull the ball back to the target, even though face is far more responsible for path. As I say, "path is instinctual" - meaning if you're missing the ball left, your body swings right and vice versa. It's "trying" to help you.

There's no such thing, really. There's ideal for you, and ideal for someone else, but there's not really a universal ideal. And, what you care about most is going to vary based on what you're working on and what club you're hitting.

To be clear, both can be and sometimes are true: The earlier you apply GRF, the faster you will swing (to a point). Faster swingers have to apply it earlier (by shaft angle) because they have less time (or the same amount of time) as a slower swinger to get from that shaft position to P7. You almost never see it. Even if you count someone who doesn't really apply much verticals at all, it's still generally late, not early.

You've probably thrust nearly 3" in that part of the swing. Gotta feel a bit of (or a lot of) this:

Your EE is starting and probably even mostly during setup and the backswing? You have a backswing fix to make, IMO (and a setup one).

I'm glad you like it.