Golf Smarter number three hundred and thirty nine, published on June twenty six, twenty twelve. Welcome to golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the Golf Smarter podcast. Great golf instruction never gets old. Our interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations like this that are no longer available in any podcast app. People should
be aware of that there's pretty master fundamentals. This applies to mainly the golf swing, but also do the short game a little bit the putting. In terms of physical skill of the golf swing, there's balance issues, there's mechanical issues, and there's coordination or timing issues. Can swing changes really lower your scores? With Jim Waldron this is Golf Smarter sharing tips and insights from golfers and golf profess to how blower your score. It's worked for your host,
Fred Green, Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Jim, Thanks Fred, great to be great to be back with you again. You have a topic in mind and contacted me to cover this. I just love that idea and that is all about what's been going on with Tiger Woods swing changes over the last couple of years, But also you wanted to talk about how that affects us as the average golfer. Yeah, how it affects the average golfer
and what it takes to make a swing change. You know, what, what do you have to do to go through this process of working with a teacher, which is in the news right now because especially you know, we actually talked about doing this before Tigers went last week in memorial But how how how perfect timing comes from but sort of sort of in the middle of the middle of the pack and then just blows the fields away at the memorial,
which was kind of cool. I thought, yeah, yeah. But the press over the number of years over his career, because he's made multiple swing changes and coach changes and then swing changes, He's done this multiple times, and the press has been relentless on him, like why are you doing this? You're the best player out there, Why would you do this right?
Right? Right? You know, And I find the whole topic of how and why you go about working with a teacher being one myself obviously to make a swing change to be really fascinating, and also an area that the golfing
public is sorely lacking and real knowledge about it. And because there's that lack of this sort of body of knowledge and not talking so much about the technical information, obviously that's part of it, but more about the psychology and the philosophy of how you go about making a swing change, which is very seldom
discussed. And hence we have this this sort of rift between the golf meeting and Tiger being the example we're going to use today, every press conference they ask him the same question and he pretty much responds with you got to give got credit of quite a bit more patience than I would have. And he uses the term process a lot, and he used it with You, used it with when he was with Butcher, and he used it with Haney, and now he's using it with Sean Foley. And I'll give you a great
example. A couple of weeks ago, I forgot what tournament it was. It was one or two before Memorial. Someone asked him a reporter, Tiger, I don't understand, why are you going through all these technical changes with Sean. Why don't you just go do what you did when you were a kid, when you didn't have a teacher. You weren't thinking mechanics all the time, and he just went out and trusted your swing and played golf.
And there was this long pause and Tiger sort of looked down and I'm thinking, because I know the history of this guy, and he said what I was thinking. He said, well, first of all, your premise is totally wrong. I've never not had a teacher. I've always worked on the process of making my swing better. My first teacher from age eighteen months until about that, he said, like age seven or eight was his dad, who was a good player. And then he went to a guy named Rudy
durry On. Then he had a guy in high school, and then he went to Butch when he was seventeen years old. And then he left Butch and pretty quickly, I think he was alone for only a year without a teacher. And then he went to Hani, and now he went to left Hani went to Foley. So he said, I've always had a teacher.
I've always worked on improving my technique. And this idea you guys have that I have this sort of natural talent that if I just stopped getting in my own way and go play golf, I'll be perfectly fine is just basically wrong
amazing. So where do we go with that? You know? I mean, because when I'm you know, thinking about it and talking about it and playing with people, I don't think people go so, you know, the average golfer goes so much through swing changes as tweaks correct and my favorite is when they try to tweak it themselves, thinking they know what's going on right
right. Well, part of what I'm trying to do in my sort of my golfing mission in life is to educate the golfing public about some stuff that I've acquired, a kind of a body of knowledge I've acquired, and other good teachers I know have acquired over the years that they've been involved in golf and teaching golf, you know, and the average student that I get and
that my teaching buddies get just doesn't know this stuff. We talked about this in the past and more about some other areas, but specifically, what does it take in terms of sort of categories of thought. How do you sort of compartmentalize your understanding and what you're about to engage in when you improve some aspect of your game, and most often that's improving your ball striking. That's the big demand in the golfing instruction marketplace is for ball striking improvement, much
more than say putting improvement or short game improvement or mental game improvement. But that is one of these things that people should know. There's four major skill areas putting, short game, ball striking or long game, and mental game. And you know, if you're going to embark on a game improvement plan, one of the decisions, says students, you have to make is which
of those four areas do I want to engage in? Is my primary sort of big change strategy, because if you're working for a living still, if if you're not retire you have to you don't have time to work on changing all four of those you know, you only have time to work on one of those right major skill categories. And I've always thought that it's almost impossible, well not impossible, but it's so rare when all four of them work in any round of golf. Yeah, that's true too. You know.
One of my one of my little sort of things like little bits of wisdom I try to impart is look, you know, spend eighty percent roughly off your practice time on the one big change, capital B, capital C that you're working on in one of those four major skill areas and spend the other twenty percent of your practice time just trying to maintain your current level of skill and those other three skill areas and just doing that, it just pushes the
whole game improvement process to another in a higher level because you're you know, a lot of it's about how do I portion my time and my energy so I can train I can train my way to better golf, you know. And that's one of those examples I always use in terms of a body of knowledge. People need to know some of this stuff. Right. Here's another
one people don't know about making swing changes. There's two major kind of There's two major kinds of instruction, and one is called fundamental instruction, which is basically learning what the rules or the laws of proper body motion and proper club motion are. And the alternative approach is called swing corrective instruction, which is where you're not really trying to do a radical change. You're trying to do
more of a more moderate to superficial change to your existing golf swing. You're not going to change from one one of the forest wing styles to a completely different swing style. Everybody has one of these forest wing styles, which we'll talk about in a minute. But you're trying to stay with the swing you currently have but basically polish it or as you said, refine it and kind
of tweak it. And there's effective rules for how you about doing that type of training that are different than the than the rules you need to train on making more radical changes, more fundamental changes. Right, there's pros and cons of each approach, and I think you know, the golfing public out there needs to know what those pros and cons are before they can make an informed decision about which of those two they want to work with. Is there's their
main sort of strategy. And this should all be done in advance, before we even talk to a new teacher about taking lessons or at golf school. I think it should be. It should be information you've already sort of digested. Right, Well, let's talk about those four styles. There's there's four, there's four. Traditionally, there's been four ways of splinging in the golf club that have worked historically. That one majors I call them in no particular
order. I'll start with the most common, the one you see today in about ninety five percent of tour pros, both males and females. Probably I don't know, seventy five percent of low handicap you know, really good low handicap aminger players, uh probably call leverage spinning or leverage spin. It's it's a swing that has very very few moving parts on plane, club shaft, the club schaft, that stays on the original plane angle relative to the ground
from start to finish or pretty close to that. Fairly wide arms at the top of the back swing, you know, not arms not close to the body, but kind of push pushing the arms away from the body at the top. That's that's one of the one of the levers or potential source of clubheit speed, full wrist cock, but a very active rotation. That's the spin part of the body, especially in the forward swing with the upper arms
connected to the chest. There's an extreme version of that which is another one of the forestyles, which is based on Hogan swing, which is basically not so wide with the arms and even even more rotation of the body. That's today's probably Zach Johnson and Jonathan Byrd Chad Campbell are the probably three modern players who exemplify that style of the most. Then there's a style we call the slinging or the throwing style, which is young Jack Nicholas. The only great
player today who's using that younger player is Bubba Bubba Watson. So there's lots of independent arm motion, lots of independent leg motion moving. Yeah, does Bubba even know that he's doing that? I mean, Bubba claims to never take lessons, never look at his Yeah, that's something else I'm willing to buy. He's never paid someone who calls himself a teaching pro to take a
formal lesson. But don't forget he had a high school golf coach, coach and a college golf coach, and all those guys coach their students, so he's had instruction. I think it's probably been the more informal variety, more of the swing corrective type as opposed to the fundamental type. But to think that he's never taken a lesson, it's just just ridiculous. Of course he has, it's just going to have been informal. You know, the guy's
won the master. Yeah, you know, that's the most moving parts, and that's why you don't see it very much anymore, because it's it takes so much more talent and so much more timing to hit the ball solid with that style that it's really a throwback to another era and you're not going to see that many more people. I mean, the only the guy I can think of who actually uses that style today, he's somewhat of an older player
now, almost a senior, is Colin Montgomery. Those are the only two guys on the tour today who have won majors with that in the modern are in the last say, twenty years, is still playing. Colin Montgomery is still playing, Yeah at one in a while, Yeah, and he's still playing. Didn't have it heard his name in a while? Yeah? I
know. And then there's who I call it thrusting, and sometimes I call it a hitting style, which is guys who are extreme endomorph which are which are you know, the most inflexible the three body types they tend to have, you know, deep barrel type chest, wide shoulder girdles. Overall, they lack a lot of flexibility. So they can't use a rotary style swing because they don't have they don't have the flexibility to rotate. And so someone
like Rocko Media or who else is Guffy Waldorf or Craig Stadler. They do what I call a thrust style. They still pivot, Don't get me wrong. I mean all four styles use the pivot as the primary source of power, but these are more secondary differences we're talking about anyhow, So you know, you got to decide which are those four styles you're going to use, because some teachers only teach one of the four and they don't teach the other
three at all. I prefer never to teach the slinging or the throwing, you know, the bubba style. Although if I'm working with someone who's already about maybe a twelve ten handicapper better and they just want to tweak it, I know enough about that style to be able to tweak it. But if someone's higher than a twelve or roughly at twelve, I'll usually try to change into a simpler method if they're willing to put the time in. Obviously, it takes time to make the swing change, which is one of the big
things I wanted to talk about. Tiger brings it up. He says,
you know, hey, guys, it takes time. I'm changing a neuromuscular path or several neuromuscular pathways from my existing old style neuromuscular pathways, and that literally takes lots and lots of repetitions, lots of patience, lots of persistence, lots of perseverance, and eventually I'll form, you know, either a dominant habit or a close to dominant habit, which is apparently what he's doing now with this the second win of the Year memorial, which he obviously he
was. He led in greens and regulation, he led in total driving, he let him driving distance, He hit a ton of fairways with his driver, which is which you know always in the past that was his big weakness, Yeah, traditionally. Yeah, it looks like it also look in that event that he led in confidence too. Yes, And I was just going to say, that's the other big issue, and you know, that's one of those chicken and egg arguments. So how do you get confidence? You
know? And I always talked about the John Wooden Bobby Knight basketball too opposing ideas about confidence. You know, Bobby Knight's idea was he had a sign in the locker room saying confidence is BS, meaning you got confident because you worked on the mechanics of dribbling, shooting, passing free throws. That's how you got confidence by improving your physical mechanics of the sport of basketball. And
when you really get better at those skill areas, you see improvement. You score more points, you win more games, you pass better, you shoot better, you dribble better, you play defense better, you block shots better because your technique is better, and then you get the confidence. Right, So it's sort of like the confidence the end result of this process of physical
skill acquisition. Whereas John wouldn't believed, I think more correctly that you can practice confidence as a fundamental mental game, fundamental of basketball that's completely separate from whatever current skill level you have in terms of the mechanical skills of the game of basketball. And you know, and my approach balance point, right,
I teach both. You can get confident by improving your technique and you can get confident by not doing anything your technique, just leaving your technique alone and just working on accessing that state of confidence as part is they're in the early stages of your preshiot routine and staying with that state of confidence until the finish of your golf swing. Both both both methods work so why not use both.
That's kind of they're not exclusionary in my opinion. But anyhow, so you know, you got to figure out what are these force Which are these four swing styles you're going to work with, because they have some of their
components are not compatible with the other three swing styles. Can the recreational golfer, the average golfer, can they determine for themselves which one that they want to do or do they need to have an instructor to say, in watching what you've been doing, here's what I think would be best for you to focus on. Well, I think it's again it's sort of in the middle
there. I mean, I mean, obviously, if they have zero knowledge of golf swing theory and they don't have the interest or the time to study books or going online read some of the web forms where these issues are discussed in depth, then yeah, then they pretty much have to go with what
the teacher recommends. But if they want to do a little investigative research and study some of the stuff that's on the web, look at some YouTube videos, it quickly becomes apparent of which are these four styles that they're more likely to want to gravitate towards some of it. That's to do body type obviously, which is a physical limitation. Again, if you're an extreme endo, you don't have a choice. You've got to use the thrust or the hitting
styles. If you're a moderate endo, the only style that's probably going to work for you is the leverage spin. The only people that can do the ultra spin, which is the Hogan sort of Hogan four point zero, you know, the modern version of the Hogan swing are people who are extremely flexible, with extremely strong cores and have a natural ability to you know, rotate or to turn their body on the forward swing, especially at a very fast
tempo. So fast tempo is part of that type of ultraspin swing style. And my guess, yes, I'm sorry, my guess is that that comes from starting to play golf when you're very young. I mean, yeah, you pick up the game, you pick up the game, and later in life. You know, I've talked about it. I started when I was playing forty. I got an email from a listener that recently who said,
I beat you. I started playing when I was sixty. You know, yeah, I mean, but it's not those We're not those kinds that are going to be the ultra flexible you know, correct, Well, that's why I saw most people. I just say, look, of the four styles, probably ninety five percent or more of the population should should choose the leverage
spin. It's actually the easiest to learn of the four by far, takes the least amount of practice time to get pretty good at, and you can you can do it with anybody type except the extreme and extreme endomworphs are probably less than one percent of the population. But the reason I say that is you may go to a teacher who only teaches the old nineteen sixties leg drive reverse see Johnny Miller, Tony Lee, the Jack Nicholas slinging or throwing style,
and that's you know, they're older teachers. Guys my age are a little older who'll only teach that, and they'll tell you to drive your legs for power. They'll tell you to swing your arms across your chest to impact. A lot of stuff that I think is, you know, it takes well above average athletic ability to do well and still hit the ball solid. Although obviously Bubba does it right. He's but he's sort of like a freak
of nature, right, But for the average person. I mean, the average person is already kind of doing sort of the natural golf swing that everybody brings the table except for extreme endowarfs. Is the is the slinging style. It's a very leggy, very armsy type of swing. And the practice rangers of the entire planet are full of people who are twenty five handicaps and higher who are trying to do that swing style and they're never going to get any
better, I mean, no matter how much they practice. So obviously I'm not a fan of that one because again it's from a biomechanical standpoint, it has the most moving parts, It tends to be the hardest to stay in balance. It requires the most timing. You know, in timing issues and balance issues are two of the big reasons why average golfers can't hit the ball
solid anyhow. So that's stuff you have to know. You know, either whether you work without directly with a teacher or without a teacher, you've got to know that there's these four main styles and what the pros and cons of each, And then you got to decide do I want to do Do I want to do a tweaking or corrective type approach, which is more about finding a one or more flaws and then doing basically the opposite. So, you know, it's the old saying and golf, how do you teach people not
to slice? The answer is you teach them how to hook it. That's swing corrective. This is like Butch Harmon is sort of the premier swing corrective coach in the game today. Not that he doesn't teach some of the fundamentals, obviously he does that as well, but once the grip is there, the grip pressure angle, you know, the posture to set up some of the basic balance stuff. He basically does what his dad taught him to do, which is fine, what the person is doing wrong and get him to
stop doing it right. It takes the least amount of time to start to see some degree of immediate improvement to the ball flight. The problem is sometimes quite often, in fact, it tends to be kind of band aidy. It tends to be short term improvement, and after you invest a little bit of time on the range working on these swing flaw corrective exercises, they tend not to manifest into long term permanent changes. Well the way the band aid
tends to come off. So that's the downside to it. Yeah. Now, let me ask you this, because you not only have individual students that come to you on a regular basis, hopefully you also the balance point golf schools. You'll have people come out for two, three, five days, correct, right, So my question is when people, from your observation, when golfers come out to a five day school, are they looking for a swing change or a swing fix? Unlike somebody who's committed to coming to you
every week for a year or two. I mean, like they're just totally committed. What do you see as the norm and what do you see you know? Well, I mean you got to remember because I'm so clear about this issue on our website, and I talk to every new student who signs up on the phone for usually at least thirty minutes, sometimes an hour or two in advance. I try to disabuse them of the notion they're going to come to school and form a dominant habit, you know. And the joke
I always say it every school. I say, well, if you're expecting to have a tour pro quality golf swing when you leave here in three days, you came to the wrong school. That's our million dollar tuition school. So if you're expecting a miracle, you're going to pay for it, right ye, Meaning it's impossible, can't you can't. You can't get to that
level of dom even you can't get even fifty percent of dominant habit. You might get ten percent there after three days, but to get to the fifty percent mark, which is where where most people will be really happy and see a lot of improvement, you're talking like, you know, nine months, a year, year and a half of training after they graduate to get to that level. Because again, we're talking about changing you know, we're creating
new neuromuscular pathways. It's you're literally changing the physiology how your brain and body work together. Uh So most of those people already know that, So I would I would put it this way. Part of their ego, hopefully a small part is sort of hoping. I'm sort of not telling them one hundred percent truth about that, and they're kind of hoping that a miracle is going to happen. But I think that's a pretty tiny part of of their conscious
mind. I think for the most part, they're not expecting a miracle. In my mind, golf schools, you can you can correct, you can you can learn a lot, but then you have to go back and work on it on your own, I mean correct and I know that you'll you will continue the conversation, you will look at videos you know of people, but still you're not there. And really, I really believe that you if you're going to be working with a coach, you're not going to learn a
lot. You're not going to be able to correct things by watching YouTube videos of the golf channel. You really need to have somebody who's going to be there and hold your hand and say and literally hold your hands and guide your hands, you know, get you through that. Yeah, that's right.
So you need we tell people you need follow up lessons, either in person or or or by YouTube where we talk on the phone after I analyze, which works fine for people who have been through the program because they have all the conceptual knowledge. You know, they know. So if I say, okay, your arm extensions you know too narrow at this point, or if I say your spine angles you come out of your spineing angele four inches at this point, or you flipped your wrist, they know what I'm talking about
because they've been through that three days of intensive training. But any So that's the downside of swing corrective. It tends not to laugh. And that doesn't mean it never lasts. Sometimes it does last. I'm just saying that's that's a precondition that people are that's an aspect of swing corrective approach that any educated golfer should be aware of that it may not be permanent improvement if the underlying fundamental that's the basis for the swing flaw is so absent. You know,
it's like building. It's like building a house without putting a foundation down. I mean the fundamentals of the foundation. And when you're when you're patching a hole in the roof, that's the swing corrective. So in our golf schools we do, you know, probably about ten to twenty percent of the time is swing corrective. In the other eighty to ninety is fundamental training, And
in private lessons it's just the opposite. It's probably you know, I don't know, sixty or seventy percent swing corrective and the rest of its fundamentals. And then the other thing is there's there people should be aware of that. There's what we call them the three master fundamentals. I mean, this applies to mainly the golf swing, but also do the short game and a little bit to putting, which is there's there's three sort of you know, in
terms of physical skill of the golf swing. There's balance issues, there's mechanical issues, and there's coordination or timing issues. So an example of timing or coordination would be tempo, which is you know the length of time or your in your of your swing can start to finish rhythm, which is that there's a there's a difference in time between the length of your back swing and then
from top of back swing the impact. So there's a sort of internal beat or rhythm that you that your body moves to and order the time your golf swing properly so you arrive at impact with a square club phase right. And there's some other ones the proper sequence of motion of your forward swing body parts. But so that's coordination. Balance is self explanatory. You set up in balance, you stay and balance dynamically all the way up to and including the
finish really important fundamental. And there's and there's there's the mechanics, which is how the individual body parts move in the golf swing. So you know, you don't want to be trying to like do a little bit of each. I mean again, you're going to try to pick one of those three areas as your main sort of focus for your practice time. Is it going to be that you have a balance issue, Is it you have a mechanical issue?
Or do you have a tempo, rhythm or timing issue? Because again, if you're working for a living, you don't have time to do all three. It's not going to happen, right, And so it's kind of like the whole jack of all trades, master of none thing. You want to avoid that. You want to be a master of one right, right, right? And then back to Tiger, you know the big thing he keeps doing. Yeah, it's it's you know, uh, he obviously has done exactly what I do in my gospools. If you if you study what
he's done with Folly. Now, they're pretty they keep it pretty close to their vests, both he and Folly. But they have done, you know, enough interviews with individual journalists and plus the press conferences, and they've let some of the information working on kind of leak out. And so what apparently what it is, it's sort of a kind of maybe I don't know what the exact persons, but it looks like it's close to fifty to fifty.
It's like roughly fifty percent radical swing changes for Tiger, which you can clearly see now if you look at his swing now on YouTube from last week in slow mo and looking you know two thousand when he was winning everything. Yea, And when you say, again, let's clarify that we're talking about the memorial in moorial of twenty twelve, correct verset swing in two thousand, because yeah, but the point is you compared that swing, this present day swing
to twelve years ago. It doesn't even look like the same person. It's completely different, and in my opinion, it's much much better. It's it's better from a biomechanical standpoint, it's better from a geometry standpoint. The club chaft stays on plane throughout the swing, where his old swing it was moving around a lot. It made a lot of shifts and loops and kind of dips, and his old swing was way more leggy and especially more armsy.
He's basically got his arms under control. That was probably the biggest things that I know of. Again, they may have been working on stuff they haven't told anybody about. I can't. You know, I'm not inside Sean Foley's head or in Tiger's heads. I'm just I'm sort of guessing here. I'm speculating. But but what I can see so far is that they have talked
about this a little bit. Is the biggest difference is his arms are trailing the right amount behind his body, not too far behind, which is what this big problem was before on the way down, and then he would then he would pull his arms across his chest trying to get him to catch up with his body, and if he did it too much, he hit a pull hook. If he didn't do enough, he hit a push or a block slice. They fixed that lack of synchronization issue between his arm motion and
the down swinging in his body motion. So now his body and arms are more in sync. The club is more in front of his body, and he doesn't have to sling his arms across his chest to try to square the face. All he's doing is turning his body while his upper arms take glued to his chest, kind of like how Hogan discovered back in the nineteen thirties. So he's more connected on the forward swinging through impact. That's the number
one biggest change. The other is more of a swing corrective. He's not dropping his spine angle if he used to, if you looked at them. Even though for a few months ago when he was kind of in a bit of a slump there and some of those shots they showed on the TV broadcast, he was dropping. He was increasing the angle the spine forward toward the
ground by like ten inches. So you know, if he doesn't stand up by tent by, you know, at least at least by six or seven inches, he's going to hit it really fat, right, They drive the club directly into the ground, which he would occasionally do it. He would occasionally hit a driver where the club would bounce off the ground like five six inches behind the ball, something that we do all the time. Yeah,
the average people do, right. So, although for a different reason, most people don't don't increase their spine, the average person listening to his broadcast does the opposite Tiger's floor. Instead of dipping increasing their spine angle. They're coming out of it. And the reason they hit the grounds because they throw their wristcock angle away way before their hands get below waist high in the down
swing. Anytime you stay in your spine angle, don't dip, don't stand up to stay level, but you throw your wristcock angle away before your hands passed below waist high. In the downswing, you're going to steep in the club shaft plane angle the shafts to get more upright relative to the ground than it was when you started. And effect it's going to get you know, two or three four inches longer in effective length, which means you're going to
hit the ground right. That's that's one common reason why people, by average golfers hit that so anyhow, so that's what I see. He's less arms. He uh, he's fixed, not completely, but he's much better on the spine angle issue and the other big changes. That thought which is hold because we've hit our time limit here, and please hold that thought. And I would love to continue the conversation on a members only episode. Could you hang around and we continue that. I'll do it. Awesome fun, Jim.
We will continue this conversation on the next episode of the Golf Smarter podcast. Please yeah,