New Evidence

In a continuation of nature versus nurture in the golf swing in re distance, I ran across two new points that I would like to add to the discussion.

In a video from Athletic Motion Golf they mentioned that while measuring swing speeds for amateurs and professionals, they found that when the club shaft was parallel to the ground that the amateurs had a faster club head speed than the pros.  However at the ball contact, the professional's club was moving 12 mph faster than the amateur.  This was for a seven iron.  The position of "club parallel" is one which requires some understanding.  If you never cocked your wrists then this position would be reached with the shaft at the height of your shoulders.  If you kept your wrist cock at 90 degrees then the shaft is parallel at the height of  mid thighs.  Obviously this positions would occur at different times.  The downswing is a small part of a second in duration.

Note that the mid thigh height and the shoulder height are not possible because there is usually/always some wrist cock for the amateurs and due to the physics of the swing, it is generally not possible nor beneficial to have a 90 degree wrist cock when your hands are between the thighs.

Now, who is who?  It is the pros who have delayed the opening of the wrist cock until a later position in the swing.  The amateurs lose the angle in an effort to hit the ball further. 

But the point I think is important is that the speeds attained are probably closer than one would suspect and that it is a swing flaw that costs the loss of distance in the amateur player.  The understanding that being slower earlier in the swing is a path to more speed later is not, like a lot of golf ideas, obviously intuitive.

The second bit of evidence is one that comes to us from the golf disc world.  There was a golf disc tournament this weekend in Livermore and I wandered over early Saturday to take a look.  Lots of young people with tattoos, half of them from San Jose, made up the crowd.  They claimed about 30 but I think I saw 20 tops.  I've tried disc golf and dropped it because the Livermore course was a goo place to break your leg and I've never been good at throwing a disc for any kind of distance.  I think I was good at tearing bits of finger as I searched for more distance.  I was curious to re-look at the disc throwing technique.  I turned to YouTube for some guidance and ran across a video by a professional disc golfer whose video described the basics of giving a disc an efficient toss.

The secret he said is that the motion is not intuitive and obvious.  The motion is that of starting a lawn mover with old pull cord.  The model is that the throwing arm is pulled back, just like golf, we have a body turn, we are 90 degree to the target but as we generate some speed the right elbow needs to bend.  As the bent arm gets past the body, then we allow the elbow to straighten and we have a bit of a snapping action as the disc goes flying.  He had a towel drill to demonstrate the proper motion.  Basically we drive the elbow forward and let the forearm straighten in a late snapping action.  I suspect that a physicist would tell you to not try to help this action; aka it would be the same as the golf swing.

If you don't bend the elbow, then you are just spinning the disc around your body and will not generate the speed nor the directional control possible. 

If we assume that this guy is more correct than not, then we can see some similarities with the golf swing.  We maintain a bent lever, either elbow or wrist, then release it late in the action.

As I think about what I've written, I'm not sure that the disc throwing information adds additional evidence to the idea that amateurs just don't know what they are doing, but I'll leave it in there since I may try to coax the boys up to Walnut Creek where there is supposed to be a nice disc course and I'm curious to give it another try.