The Ultimate Siege Weapon

Of course you all know what that was.  It's the trebuchet, certainly.  It was know to throw a 90 Kg projectile a full 1000 yards.  There is a recurring joke about that on Reddit.  But it's true!  It ruled the siege weapon world until gun powder came along.

But what has this to do with the golf swing? 

Actually the trebuchet uses a golf swing.  There is a bucket full of stones and it pulls down on the short end of a long lever, which then pulls on a sling with the projectile on it.

The sling is flexible and this engine is quite efficient in what it does.

The golf swig is basically the same.  We have some muscles pulling the shoulders and arms around and eventually the club comes around and is delivered to the ball.

Note that there is no attempt to help the club into the ball.  Nor to move the arms away from the body.  All of that will happen as the torso twists.  It's the same as water coming off of a spinning bike tire or the movement of your body in a car going around a corner.

Another way to think of this is that we want to emulate a skater who is spinning.  They are usually interested in bringing their arms to their body to speed up the spin.  We reverse this process to speed up the arms and slow the body.  But it's the same physics.

Using this as a model for the swing allows you to do very little.  You have to fold the arms to the chest, and you want to cock the wrists to make our fly wheel as compact as possible.  The longer the shoulder turn, the more time you have to spin them up to speed.

The unwinding is done by the spinning of the torso which will move all the goodies to their proper positions without anymore effort.  The timing is automatic.  I don't know why the timing works to perfection, but it does.  I asked the physicist why the timing worked out.  If I remember correctly he had no answer.

If you want more speed, then you can delay the club's release with some wrist effort that will cause to move faster later.  But don't try to flip the wrists at the ball.  (It is theoretically possible to add some speed doing this, but you need very fast wrists and very precise timing.  Miss the timing and you will slow things down.)

This automatic arm/wrist movement is not common to a number of sports.  Tennis and baseball require the very hand action that you don't want in the golf swing. 

My sports background contains both these sports.  I think I've been trying to use some of these old habits in my golf swing.

But today, I was concentrating on not doing any of that.  Wind up and then spin and let it all work itself out.

I played quite well.  My irons have become longer, my driver has come along too.  It's all good.  I'm back the putting game as an area of concern.

There is a lot more information at tutelman.com, where I gleaned all of this knowledge.  Dave Tutelman has a nice golf section on his site and I've found he is more than willing to answer questions by email.  Highly recommended for reading.

If you want to see a trebuchet in action, they are still in use today in the Pumpkin Chucking contests.  I would refer you to YouTube for some action videos on that.