Five things the best golf instructors see in your swing that you don’t

Walk the range at a tour event and you’ll see a squadron of instructors capturing video, with the teacher and player huddling to figure out which magic adjustment might make the difference between first place and 50th on a given week. It’s certainly interesting to eavesdrop on what they’re discussing—in fact, it’s why we’ve been showing swing sequences in Golf Digest since the 1950s. But hearing about Dustin Johnson’s key to hitting his 4-iron incrementally better is only going to help you so much.

What does a top teacher see when he or she looks at your swing? And what kind of things are you missing when you have your buddy shoot you from down the line during your next practice session? We asked three top teachers—Jason Guss, Jason Sedan and Tom Rezendes—for the fundamental things they look at in an initial swing lesson, and how changing your focus to those things instead of the “prettiness” of your move will make you get better way faster.

“Can we all be honest with each other and accept that virtually nobody has the genetic gifts to roll out of bed and swing like Adam Scott or Anne van Dam?” says Rezendes, who runs the NorCal Golf Academy in Walnut Creek, Calif. “The important part to remember is that you don’t HAVE to do that to play well. A trained set of eyes sees what adjustments you need to make for you to swing your best, not necessarily look like a swing model.”

1. What your face angle is during your backswing

Where the face is pointing during the whole swing might be most under-paid-attention-to fundamental in golf. “Almost every good player has either closed the face or is about to when they come out of the transition at the top,” says Jason Guss, who runs the Jason Guss Golf Academy at Hawk Hollow, in Bath, Mich. “Players who struggle don’t have it square ever, or they’re even opening it at the start of the downswing—which causes a whole other chain of events. If you’re looking at your own swing or any other, is that face angle looking down at the ground when the club is halfway down to the ground on the downswing? I like to help players get keyed in on the face instead of the wrist movements that produce it because those wrist movements are so small.

2. How your technique matches your intention

What you’re trying to can (and should!) have a huge impact on what your swing looks like. “Students send me video of swings all the time and my first question is always the same—what are you trying to do here?” says Jason Sedan, who runs Fore Door Golf at Lake Winnipesaukee Golf Club in New Hampshire. “Most amateurs record a swing on the range, and it’s just a random swing that came after a random practice swing. But every shot should have a goal, a shape and a speed at which you’re trying to swing, and rehearsals that are about that exact thing.

“The next part is that the speed you swing changes a lot of the relationships within the swing. A video of a player making a smooth swing with a pitching wedge can tell a way different story than one where he or she is smashing a driver. You want to look at the full context, not just for one move you want to tear down.”

3. The underlying cause of your main swing problem

Putting an ankle brace on for a broken finger isn’t going to be very effective. Which means you need to look for the main source of your issues. “The phrase ‘over the top’ is one a ton of amateur players read and hear about, and a lot of them accurately see it about their own swings,” says Sedan. “But the way they go about fixing it doesn’t address the fundamental reason it’s happening. You probably see it as a swing path issue, but the swing path issue is a symptom, not the problem.

“If an over-the-top swinger just tries to flatten the club in transition and swing more ‘from the inside,’ all you’re doing is creating a swing that produces weak blocks to the right. Does that ‘fix’ the over-the-top? I guess so, but it just moved the problem into a different box. If you don’t address the open clubface that produces most over-the-top moves, you’re not addressing the problem.”

4. The movement of your swing in 3D, not 2D

A golf swing moves in three dimensions, which is hard to see on video. “You’ve heard of ‘angle of attack,’ but what does it really mean? And it’s so hard to see without a TrackMan or a trained eye,” says Guss. “But angle of attack gives a lot of clues about your bad shots. A player could be hitting these low hooks with the driver because he or she isn’t getting the weight transferred to the lead side. Ball position and swing direction work together. If you want to hit a higher shot or tend toward a fade, you adjust that ball position forward, which moves the swing direction left and the angle of attack upward.”

5. How your body segments work together to produce speed

“Most players (and a lot of teachers, to be honest) are focused on the basics—grip, posture, alignment—because those are the easiest to see,” says Rezendes. “There’s a place for that stuff, of course, and a place for launch monitor data like clubhead speed and distance, but I’m watching for a swing’s kinetics—how you produce force. What is making you do what you’re doing in your swing, and how is it impacting your shots?

“For example, how centered your thorax is over your pelvis has huge ramifications for how much energy you can deliver into the ball. And if your hip joints are working correctly in conjunction with your pelvis, that’s a major differentiator between good players and players with less skill. Good players turn ‘into’ the trail hip joint instead of rotating the whole pelvis in the backswing. That might seem like a subtle difference, but it’s why Cameron Champ hits it the way he does instead of the way you do. He’s producing more energy, not finding a set of swing positions.”

SOURCE:  golfdigest.com

Unlucky golfer’s ball was so deeply embedded even the rules official couldn’t believe it

It might be the most annoying thing in golf. It’s in the top five, at the very least. You hit a shot that, by all accounts, wasn’t that bad, only to find it embedded deep in the ground.

That happened to one unlucky golfer this week, and even the official giving the ruling couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

It came during the first round of the Molly Murphy Crowley Collegiate Invitational in Portland, Oregon. A golfer from University of California—Davis’ women’s golf team hit an approach shot that embedded itself so deeply in an area near the bunker that it was almost underground entirely.

The rules official, after pointing out where the ball was, took a picture because of how rare a sight it was.

Christine getting help for an embedded ball, one that even Steve the rules official says is so rare he wants to get a pic of it! pic.twitter.com/mhWUmi0NZJ

— UC Davis W Golf (@UCDavisWGolf) September 30, 2019

Lots of golf fans were asking what the ruling would be in this situation, and while I’m no rules expert, under rule 25-2, it would appear that because this ball did not embed in a “closely-mown area through the green…fairway height or less,” it’s good old fashioned play it as it lies.

Presumably, she would’ve had to take an unplayable, though. Either that or opt for a shovel.

25-2. Embedded Ball Rule

If a player’s ball is embedded in any closely-mown area through the green, it may be lifted, cleaned and dropped, without penalty, as near as possible to the spot where it lay but not nearer the hole. The ball when dropped must first strike a part of the course through the green.

SOURCE:  Golf.com

GOLF ON DEMAND

Jordan Spieth was on top of the world in 2015. After capturing the Masters, he attributed his success in part to the Full Swing Simulator he’d installed in his home — adding that he was using it to prepare for The Open Championship. There, he finished one stroke out of a playoff. The next year, Tiger Woods put Full Swing in his home and began touting the technology on social media. Amateurs and Tour pros quickly realized that if a Full Swing Simulator was helping these stars play even better golf, then it might also benefit themselves. No coincidence, thousands of Full Swing Simulators now grace homes and businesses worldwide. In fact, the brand won the Golf Digest Best of Award for the third consecutive year, capturing the 2019 Multi-Sport category.

It’s no wonder. Full Swing remains the most advanced system for golfers. Tour pros rely on it because the realism is jaw-dropping: When your club makes contact with the ball, an overhead camera records video and measures your clubhead data. The ball passes through two infrared tracks built in front of the screen — which measure the ball speed and direction, as well as other data points — and seamlessly crosses from the hitting bay into the virtual world with zero lag. You see the entire flight, exactly as you would outdoors. No other simulation technology or indoor launch monitor can capture and analyze action that quickly and with as much precision.

You can virtually play dozens of the world’s top courses, and even simulate wind and weather. During the season, Tour pros practice for events at the digital likes of Kapalua Resort, Pebble Beach, Torrey Pines, Firestone Country Club, and Harbour Town Golf Links, setting their Full Swing Simulator to mimic current course conditions — before actually heading there. It’s that reliable. Average Joes gush over its on-demand nature, where the pace of play is always comfortable. And beginners can learn the game without the intimidation of strangers watching. Then there’s the convenience: No travel time to and from a course; no carrying a bag; no weather issues. And it’s less taxing on the body.

Ironically, Full Swing Simulators are not improving just golf games. Take it from Tour pro Brandt Snedeker and his wife Mandy, for example, who installed a Full Swing Simulator in their home for an even better reason. “It lets me spend lots more quality time with my family,” says Snedeker. “You can’t put a price tag on that. I can get in 30 minutes of range time that would otherwise take 90 minutes at the golf course.” He’s home for his children much more often now and even plays golf with them on the simulator. Like many other families that have installed Full Swing Simulators in their homes, the Snedekers also use theirs as a large TV screen for weekend football gatherings. Redefining home entertainment, Full Swing Simulators are compatible with gaming systems and can come installed with 13 interactive sports experiences, including baseball, football, hockey, soccer, and even Zombie Dodgeball, among others — perfect for getting kids up and moving.

The future has indeed arrived.

SOURCE:  golfdigest

The full story behind Bryson DeChambeau’s single-length iron revolution

One of the most important developments in the recent history of golf club technology began with a single sentence buried in a cryptic tome. Homer Kelley’s 1969 book, The Golfing Machine—its pages bursting with insightful and highly technical swing treatises—has long thrilled and baffled readers. When he was 15, Bryson DeChambeau borrowed a well-thumbed copy from his swing coach Mike Schy. “Mind blown,” says DeChambeau. Chapter 10, section 7 covers what Kelley termed “customized” swing planes. With his idiosyncratic punctuation, Kelley wrote about a Zero Shift swing: “…one Basic Plane Angle is to be used throughout the stroke without ‘a Variation’—that is, No Shift.” Those 18 words raced through young Bryson’s mind for days. Was it really possible to be on the same plane with clubs as different as a sand wedge and a 3-iron?

DeChambeau spent a summer experimenting and glumly concluded that, in fact, he had 13 different planes, owing to the varying length of each club. Having been raised as a golfer to think untraditionally, DeChambeau came up with a solution that seemed blindingly obvious to him: Make every iron the same length with the same weight, the same shaft flex and the same lie angle (72°), allowing the exact same swing plane to be repeated over and over. (Woods and hybrids would largely be left alone, at least for the time being.)

Schy was supportive of the experiment, so a set of old clubs was chopped up in the name of science. Into some old Nike VR heads they inserted 37.5-inch shafts, which is the length of a traditional 6-iron. In any set, the heads of the wedges are heavier than those of the slender long irons. After running a series of calculations in the supercomputer that doubles as his brain, DeChambeau determined that an ideal uniform weight for the heads in a single-length set would be 282 grams. Lead tape was used to make the heads on the longer irons heavier; the extra mass made up for a shorter swing arc. To shed weight on the wedges, holes were drilled in the back of the head and metal was gouged out of the backline of the sole; losing that mass was counteracted by the increased swing speed that came with the longer shaft.

When the work was complete, DeChambeau raced to the first fairway at Dragonfly Golf Course, the humble public track he grew up haunting in Madera, Calif. From 160 yards, he selected an 8-iron. The club felt a little long and light but not overly so. He hit a lovely draw pin-high. On the second hole he dropped a ball 210 yards from the flag and reached for his reconstituted 5-iron. This was the moment of truth: If the shorter, heavier long irons worked, his underlying theory of a single-length set was sound.

DeChambeau flushed the shot. “It was in the air for what felt like forever,” he says. The suspense was awful. Was the ball going to be 20 yards short? Twenty yards long? It landed three feet from the flag.

Less than a decade later, single-length irons are a rapidly growing part of the equipment market. DeChambeau didn’t invent the concept—Tommy Armour Golf tried (and failed spectacularly) to sell a version in the 1980s—but he is now the public face of a fundamentally different way of playing the game. He has had some help along the way. While an undergrad at SMU, DeChambeau became close to David Edel, a fellow obsessive whose Texas-based boutique company has long turned out some of the most gorgeous (and expensive) putters and irons on the market. Edel spent years perfecting the single-length clubs that DeChambeau used to win the 2015 U.S. Amateur and NCAA title, going through three dozen handcrafted sets. From the beginning, Edel could feel a revolution brewing that transcended DeChambeau’s idiosyncrasies.

DeChambeau turned pro after a stellar showing at the 2016 Masters. Cobra Golf had won what its vice president of R & D, Tom Olsavsky, calls “the Bryson recruiting lottery,” but at the outset of his pro career DeChambeau still had Edel irons in his bag. DeChambeau and Edel are both strident and headstrong, and that spring they suffered a falling out that neither cares to discuss. The engineers at Cobra had already been fooling around with single-length sets, but suddenly they had a mandate to build one for their new star, who, naturally, was intimately involved in every detail. “Bryson brought so much knowledge to the process,” says Mike Yagley, Cobra’s senior director of innovation and AI. “We learned along with him.”

When DeChambeau claimed his first Tour win, at the John Deere Classic, in July 2017, he was wielding Cobra irons. A year and a half (and four more DeChambeau victories) later, Cobra has sold some 40,000 single-length sets worldwide, helping a small-scale company gain two more percentage points of market share in 2017 and move up to fourth in overall iron sales. Now Cobra is going all-in on its One Length line, with three different head designs and hybrids on the same shaft. (“They look like a toy, but they’re as long as all of our other hybrids,” says Olsavsky.) Importantly, Cobra has also rolled out an extensive fitting system and introduced a trial program in which consumers can test out a set of One Length clubs for two weeks for a mere $20. All of this is designed to help educate and entice golfers to think different, to borrow a handy marketing phrase.

Even without DeChambeau in the fold, Edel Golf remains committed to the single-length concept. It has over 100 fitting accounts across the country and a bespoke fitting system through Club Champion, and has also introduced a demo program in which the open-minded can have three irons at a time delivered to them to test, for $150. If Cobra is trying to reach every kind of golfer, Edel is more of a high-end niche product—its irons feature a smaller head with a thinner topline and unique Paderson shafts made of Kevlar. Each club sells for $245, more than double the most expensive Cobra model. “As the market gets bigger, there’s room for more variety,” says Edel.

It remains to be seen if an industry behemoth like Callaway will take the plunge. The biggest barrier to entry might be the simple fact that there is not enough Bryson to go around. Every Tour player endorses some kind of gear. They’re paid mercenaries, peddling hyperbole. DeChambeau is offering something much more rare: authentic enthusiasm. “I have zero doubt this is the best way to play golf,” he says. “Not just for me, but for everybody.”

The larger golf world is catching on.

SOURCE:  golf.com

You can still get really good without access to a golf course

If you had to draw up the perfect scenario necessary to create a great golfer, one of the first things you’d probably mention would be access to a range and a golf course. Sung Hyun Park, former World No. 1 and defending champion of the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, wasn’t so lucky. In her first few years playing golf, she barely set foot on the golf course.

“I first started playing when I was nine years old, and I only practiced indoors,” Park said through a translator in her pre-tournament press conference at the KPMG. “It was like a three-meter distance, and I used to hit my shots over there. And playing like that for three years, I probably went on the golf course around four or five times only, which probably means like once a year. And so I always looked forward to going out on to the course and to play.”

If you’re someone who loves golf, but don’t have easy access to a course, there’s hope for you. Park is proof that you can get good—sometimes really, really, good—even if you can’t get on-course as much as you’d like.

We talked to Jason Guss, one of Golf Digest’s best teachers in the state of Michigan, about how you can make a range-centric golf existence work.

Former World No. 1 Sung Hyun Park shares how she learned the game by practicing indoors.https://t.co/XwOuM93F2f

— Golf Digest (@GolfDigest) June 20, 2019

“If you’re a good visual person you can create holes on the driving range,” says Guss. Doing something as simple as picking two targets and visualizing a fairway between them can help you create a golf hole in your mind.

“You can get into golf course mode, you can visualize and you can get pretty close to the real thing,” said Guss. Creativity is the key. “You have to be really good at using the boundaries of the driving range.”

While there’s a school of thought that says you should spend more time on the golf course than the driving range to become a better player and course manager, there are benefits to logging big hours on the range.

“I had a lot of complaints back then, not being able to play on the course, and I always wanted to play on the course,” said Park. “But looking back, I think that time on the range definitely helped me . . . sort of establish my swing and my shots.”

Guss agrees there’s a hidden upside.

“You’re working more on technique than feel and playing when you’re on on the range,” said Guss. “So if you’re working on it the right way, you’re going to have a technical advantage.”

Moreover, Guss points out that you can be more efficient with your practice when you’re on the range compared to when you’re on the course from a time perspective. You can hit a lot more golf balls spending an hour on the range than you would if you spent that same hour on the course.

There are also golfers out there who have the opposite problem Park did, with access to a golf course but no range.

“If you only get to be on course, which is how I grew up playing,” says Guss, “you have to make time for technique. You have to say, ‘Today I need to work on my technique all throughout the golf course.’ You have to turn the golf course into the driving range. Go out and say, ‘I don’t care what we shoot today, we’re going to work on our swings on the course.'”

Obviously, the ideal scenario would be to have access to both a range and golf course, but if you’re stuck in a lop-sided situation, learn from Park and be willing to make whatever situation, no matter how imperfect, perfect for your development.

“It’s great to have the advantage of being able to play whenever you want and hit balls whenever you want,” says Guss, “but if you’re one who’s stuck on one side of the equation, you have to learn how to create on-course scenarios on the range or make the range atmosphere as close as you can on the golf course.”

SOURCE:  GolfDigest