Four members only. Golf Smarter number three hundred and eighty seven pubblished on June four, twenty thirteen.
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If you want to minimize deceleration of the club, then you're going to have to get busy with your post impact intentions to keep driving that thing through. That's the key. It's not just over when you strike the ball, You've got to drive it through. It's a martial arts. I interviewed a champion brick smasher, but he said that the point of acceleration is always well passed the first brick.
If he's chopping eight bricks, he's thinking about way past the eighth brick all the way down to the ground, like he's going to move his whole body and move all the way down through all the bricks, and he has to folks on a point, well beyond.
This is beyond follow through though.
Yeah, just all the way to the finish, right, You got to stick the finish and you got to work it all the way through. And that is what the great ball strikers do. And if you know what to look for, you can see it.
Improve your swing from impact backwards with lag Erickson. This is Golf Smarter. Welcome back to Golf Smarter for members only.
John, Yes, thanks, it's great to be back.
I love when people do that when we haven't done anything. We've been here the whole time. Bifurcation. I brought it up at the end of the last episode, and I find it a very interesting topic because I truly, yes, we all get to play the courses. We can go play pebble and Tory Pines, and there are public courses that we get to play that we've seen on tour on television and the pros have played. But the PGA follows the rules as laid down by the USGA and the RNA.
The end.
Then there are some rules that the USGA says no bifurcation, but they'll go yes, we're going to institute this rule immediately for the tour, but for everybody else, we're gonna wait four or five years. Okay, so that is bifurcation basically.
Yeah.
Really, you know, come on the wedges and the whole putter thing. Wait you wait thirty years, somebody starts winning with a long putter and you gotta get rid of anchored putters.
That's pretty ridiculous, isn't it.
It sure seems that way to me.
I'm against it, you know, I'm against banning the long putters, even though I don't use long putter and I don't like the long putters. But the fact that it's been around this long for them to just go ahead and say it's banned.
Without talking to anybody about it, you're just doing it.
Yeah. I mean, the USGA has made a lot of big mistakes over the years. It probably started by allowing metal woods in the first place, because golf was a game of woods and irons. I mean, for the entire history of the game from the very beginning was woods and irons. So when you talk tradition, woods and irons right all the way through. And now baseball they're still hitting a wood bat right, leather glove and a leather ball, right. I mean, it hasn't changed that much. Football they still
have a leather football, I think, don't they? Yes, you know, cricket still a wooden bat, so you know, nobody's jumping up and down about that. Are they with baseball using a wooden bat?
Well, baseball and on the professional levels pretty much the only level that is using wooden bats. Everybody else is using metal bats.
Yeah, that's right. And Little League right everything.
Yeah, And as a matter of fact, the National League is the only league that doesn't have designated hitter. If you go on all the other leagues, designated here is kind of like the standard thing. But people are like, no, it ruins the tradition. Oh stop it. But so, how do you feel about hybrids? I mean, in thirty years, the USGA may come out and go, you know what, hybrids make it too easy to hit out of the rough.
We're going to make them legal. It's like, wait a minute, we've been using these, we were raised on hybrids.
Now it's not fair for a kid, for or a kid that was, you know, eight years old, picked up the game and just his dad handed him a long putter and said, hey, yes, this it's easier, and he learns how to use that. So to take that out of his hand just isn't really fair. It's ridiculous actually, But I would argue that it never should have been legal in the first place. I mean, long putters never should have been allowed in the first place. Metal woods and the giant frying pans and cavity backs and all
this stuff never should have been allowed in the first place. However, since they have, you can't just go back all these years later and then make them illegal. So I'm against that, but I'm against what they did in the first place, if that makes sense. But given be consistent, Yeah, but be consistent because that's tradition. Like I was raised that golf was a game of respect and tradition. Right, you don't cheat, you know, you learn, it's a gentleman's game.
You're you know, it's not like other sports, like you're you're polite, you're playing.
There's no coach along referees.
Yeah, and that was one of the beauty, the beauty of the game and one of the great virtues of the game, and and brought a lot of great people to the game. But all that's gone now, you know, that's gone now because with the gear and the break from tradition has been I can't think of a sport that's been more run over by technology than golf has. I mean, I think it's it's crazy. This game of tradition is no, it's no longer a game of tradition.
It hasn't been for quite a while. It's now more, really more a game of technology.
So the PGA Tour should have their own set of rules.
Well, some tour should, I mean, whether it's PGA. I think there should just be a new a new tour that starts up like a person tour, where you just say, okay, we're our own organization. These are the rules.
Oh you think the TV would buy into that? Yeah, I think I don't. You know, some people love seeing the ball fly three hundred and fifty yards.
But on TV, so you can't see it fly that, you know what I mean, It wouldn't matter. You can't see much on TV.
So oh, look the balls up in the sky. What's I have no idea because they're doing a close up with the ball the whole time. You don't know that there's a Yeah. When I first started playing, I was blown away. It's like they said, oh, what a beautiful shot, but he hit a way to the right. What is that? I had no idea that was such a thing as a draw, you know, and it's like, oh, that's supposed to do that. No.
I mean if you look at other sports, let's say, other sports of bifurcation is happening, right, I mean look at football, for instance. I mean you've got the Canadian rules football. You've got these different indoor arena you've got in soccer, rugby, rugby, union, rugby league. I mean there's these different versions of you know, how about softball, you know, softball, baseball,
you know, there's different There's there's professional women's softball. If there's professional women's softball, there can certainly be professional men's. Per Simon to her, I think, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be as big as the PGA tour, but this could be a place where you know, the real shot makers and the real players like they go
maybe like like a jazz club. Okay, this is a real good the good musicians go down here and they played out at Smokey's or whatever on you know, Tuesday nights at midnight or whatever. From you know that sort of thing. I think there's room for a tour like that where there really more of a ball Striker's Tour because on a tighter course or the rough's higher and you have to hit it straight and this sort of thing.
Greens are smaller and all this. It's a different game, right, and having to shape and curve the ball and work it correctly and position in the right side of the Pharaowah. It's not how many farries you hit, it's about are you hitting it in the correct side of the faraway?
You know, that's how good the guys used to be, you know, to be able to hit it which which side of the pharaoway, not just his swing as hard as you can and figure, okay, half the time the ball is going to land in the faraway and that's kind of Guys are winning on the PGA Tour hitting less than fifty percent of their ferries. That's crazy, that's not that's not professional quality. So by furication is necessary I think for golf to to really hold some kind
of traditional value which is lost now. So other sports again what so interesting?
It's interesting topics sports, I mean, other.
Sports are all are all, you know, branching off. I mean most other sports have branched off. I mean football's branched off.
I mean, well, yeah, and you even have you know, from from the college level to the pro level, there's different rules on a lot of sports.
Yeah, a lot of a lot of different rules. So I think it's just a natural progression, and I hope and I hope that conversations like this and well, obviously more and more people are talking about it. When I you know, I didn't play golf for thirteen years, so when I left the tour, I didn't want to be a club pro and sit in the shop and sell socks or whatever. That just wasn't my thing. So I
just went off and did you know, other things. And when I came back to golf, Actually, my wife wanted to learn how to play golf, and she didn't even know, really I was a golfer. She found some old maggating clippings or something, you know, and saw, oh, while you were like a champion golfer, and uh, and I we talked about that. She said, oh, I've always wanted to learn how to play golf. So I kind of looked around for a driving range.
How did you tuck that away and make it like it's part of your life?
I had played in thirteen years, so I mean I had I had, you know, clippings and boxes and stuff like that, but I just I just didn't play. It just wasn't interesting to me to go out and not play as well as I used to. Like, that wasn't something I wanted to do other things. Oh wait, well made you quit the traveling? Oh?
Is that what it was?
Yeah, I got tired. I was on the road eight months of the year for seven years, so it was a lot of traveling and that's exhausting. Yeah, I just, uh, I when I retired, I had full exemptions and everything. I didn't quit because I wasn't playing well. I just thought there's more to life than just doing this and I wasn't reaching the level. I didn't put good enough really to to win consistently. I was able to win, you know. I won on the Canadian Tour shot seventeen
ninnder hitting per Simon and blades. Never hit a par five and two. You know, it's not like the guys are playing par sixty eights now because they hit every If you're hitting every par five with an iron, that's it's a par four. Ye Yeah, so it's a par sixty eight.
But it's par five for the rest of us.
But yeah, but attill level at the pro level. But I'm seeing when I was playing on the pro level, say, for instance, the week that I won, the par fives were not necessarily reachable in two. I didn't hit any of them in two all week. You know, there were three shot holes, so that was actually a par seventy two. I shot four straight rounds in the sixties, you know, and I'm proud of that. I'm proud that I did that with persimmon and blades. So if a young player
thinks he's a good golfer, let's see that. Let's here's persimmon and blades go ot. Let's see you go shoot seventeen nineer where you can't hit a par five and two and so can you do it? Well? Can you do it? So?
Then you don't like cavity back blades either. You want to see blade just blades.
Well at the professional level, Yes, I think that would be better because it's going to be a better test for the professionals. Again, there's the bifurcation issue. The club players can that's fine, you know, if eighty year olds want to propel the ball out farther. But another way, it is kind of silly, because that's why they have like the different te's, like the white tea and the blue te's and the black te's and that sort of thing.
So as you get older, you start moving up, right, I mean really you could still hit per Simmon and just and the the barettis play.
It forward that movement that was going on last year and trying to catch some steam and it doesn't seem to be. But that's just so everyone can be able to TF where you want, as long as you can get an eight iron, you know, approach shot like the pros do, you know, make it more like that.
But another thing for the club players is when they when they do have professional tournaments on their course, the members that are club they don't want to see the pros come out and shoot sixty two in their golf course, you know, oh gr course. You know, they want to see the pros, you know, shooting par or maybe a couple under par, a lot of the pro shooting over par,
and that gives them pride. A lot of the members at these classical courses, they have a lot of pride in their course and they don't want the pros coming here and just driving their par furs. And hitting wedges into par fives and on a little sixty five hundred yard course or something. I mean, it's disrespectful to the course interest to the members. You know, like this course right out here, beautiful little golf of course. Members don't want to see that. They don't want to so.
They want to do it. They don't want to see someone else doing it.
Yeah. But if the player, if the pros are hitting it, hitting the ball, say two hundred and fifty yards like they were when the course was designed, it was did the bunker the placement of the bunkers is based upon two hundred and fifty yard drives, right, and then the course is relevant, it's historically relevant. And another thing is course records. You know, like a course record that was shot in the sixties where guy was hitting for Simon and Blades. I mean Rancho Park in Los Angeles is
a perfect example that course record. I think it's sixty two and that was shot in nineteen sixty eight or sixty nine and it still holds to this day. Wow. You know, even against all the modern gear, that really says something. But even if a young player goes out there and shoots sixty one with the modern gear. Yeah, let's see you do it with the old staff, then which was better? Or what if a kid shoots sixty two with the new stuff? Well, which record is better?
M You know what I mean? Which is better to do it with persimmon and blades and a blot of or doing it with a ball in a club that hit drives the ball fifty yards farther?
How do you compare different eras? And like that conversation in basketball I always find really interesting because the guys have gotten taller and stronger, but the court's the same, The ball is the same, the height of the rim is the same, and scoring is basically the same. And even today scoring has not changed dramatically that much with all this new gear. But it's easier to hit with the newer gear when you and I'd love to let's
talk more about Advanced Ballstriking dot com. In your method of teaching, do you teach people when you get someone new, do you stick per simmons and blades in their hands and say, let's start with this and then once that gets easy, you're going to love the game.
I don't. I don't require my students to hit persimon, But I explained to them the advantages of doing so. For one, they're heavier as well, and to play them. I mean, for one, there they're heavier and your body's going to get stronger by swinging them. So all of a sudden, the club that seems really heavy. Six months later you pick up a modern club, you're like, what the heck is this lightweight piece of garbage? You just want to throw it away, But you can't feel the club.
See golf. Golf is a game of feel, and you can feel a heavier club in your hands. You want to be able to feel where the club faces throughout your swing at through impact. It's not just a blur down there. You're not just swatting at it. It's not just nothing. So there's that aspect of being able to
feel the club so that you can hit it straighter. Now, when you have more masks in the head and you start holding shaftles, then you can hit it farther than you would have when you first started hitting per Simon. And then there's also the aesthetic of persimmon. It's beautiful, you know, piece of wood down there, they're refinishing and you can work on the personmon yourself. I mean you can drill holes in it, add lead to it. You know,
you can do all sorts of modifications, personal modifications. We've got a lot of our students are getting into the art of the craftsmanship of person and restoration and altering their clubs so that they can like the li angles
are I play very flat? You know, it's about six degrees flat li angles, And we teach typically a flatter type of a swing because if you swing flatter than the club works more around your body, so that now when you turn your body towards the target, you're using your body rather than you're using your body to propel the club rather than lifting it up above your head. And then it's more of an arm throw coming down.
You can't really start turning your body and this just comes straight down over the top, you know, and you hit a pole. And the worst place to miss a green typically is long and left over a green, because that's going to give you a downhill chip that's sloping left to right. For a right handed player. That's the most golf courses, especially the older courses, that's not the place to hit it. You're better to miss short right because it's an uphill chip from and it's a right
to left chip, which is usually easier for people. So we want to set up our gear and our swing so that we don't miss long and left, and that the miss, while it might not be pretty, our miss is going to be short and right and not long and left. So we set our gear and our swing up to that end. And what's happened is a lot of the students are improving by leaps and bounds because they're hitting the ball straighter and they're not missing long and left, and they're not coming over the top of
the shot, and they're getting better contact. And the main thing is that they're hitting the ball straighter, and then they get they end up hitting the ball longer because from the drills and exercises that we do, because we're very interested in increasing our flexibility and our muscular strength through training, and over time, the players end up getting
much better. I just played with a student yesterday that was a he was a nineties shooter and he's now shooting in the mid seventies and this is over about two years and he's hitting per Simon and blades real. So what does that say. It says something good is happening.
Mm hmmm. Well, and it sounds like one of the things that you seem to be a big advocate on without saying it, but strategy, And I think that that
is one of the things. And I think we talked about this, But the way I think about this whole concept of golf Smarter and how I got started with this, is that I really believe that if you have a strong mental game, which you talked you touched upon initially, if you have a strong mental game and you understand strategy, you can lower your scores a lot faster than if you just work on your swing mechanics.
Oh. Absolutely, yeah. Course management in the in the later.
Course management is you know, that's I call it strategy, but everyone else calls it course management. But you know, it's it's not hitting your driver on every hole. It's not on the par five's hitting your three wood on the second shot because you want to get it within thirty yards of the green because you know you're not gonna make it. And then you have a thirty yard
shot and you don't practice a thirty yard shot. You know, strategy it seems to be more demanding when you're using per simmons and blades.
Right, Yeah, And there's there's just a there's what you want to have the there's a beauty and an art to playing golf, and a lot of that is a strategy. Once you learn the ball striking, we learn how to hit it straight. That's what we teach people how to hit it straight, so that then they can start applying strategy.
If you're hitting the ball all over the golf course all the time, then I mean you can kind of strategize a little bit, but for the most part, you're just trying to make contact and just sort of get the thing out there somewhere to get it down or the green. But when you become a better ball striker, it's like, okay, well if where's where's the where's the miss here? You know where's the miss Okay, here's what
I want to do. But if I'm gonna miss it, I'm going to miss it over to the right, or I'm going to miss it here or there or whatever left of the pain and are below the hole, I'm going to keep it below the hole. You want to be putting uphill you want to probably be putting. If you're a right handed player, you probably want to have right to left putts. If you can and below the hole and as far as shots into the greens, then you know, you want to be hitting off the faraway.
It's easier to hit the ball farwy than out of the rough of the trees, so you want to be in the fair. I'd rather be in the faraway hitting a foe iron than in the rough hitting a six iron.
Yes, for me, I would agree with that.
But at some point, like I say, with the PGA two or the guys are hitting it, you know, three hundred and forty yards, so they're hitting they'd rather be in the rough with a wedge than playing golf thirty forty years ago where they're hitting two iron out of the rough, you know, or four iron out of the rough.
So it's changed. But yeah, strategy. So our course of advanced ball striking we have eleven modules, and the early ones are base about, you know, training the muscles and getting the swing correct so that you can We work towards holding shaftles, minimizing club face rotation post impact, and swinging the club on plane through the strike, but not
on the backswing and not necessarily even at transition. We believe in flattening the shaft out at transition so that the swing plane becomes three dimensional and not two dimensional. We don't believe in the two dimensional swing plane. It's it's not a plane really, only through the strike, and that's created through tension and opposing forces. So you've got something pulling one way and then pulling the opposite way.
So in an other words, you know, in the sense you're trying to come from underplane pre impact, and then post impact you're trying to pressure the club out the opposite way. So this creates an opposing pressure and an opposing force in the hands, which creates more feel. So you're there's a term that we use called fighting the orbit pull. So in other words, if you let go of the golf club at impact, it's going to hit the ground and kick out to the right. But we're gonna resist that.
We're going to try and move the club more left and around our body as we swing through it. But for that to work, we need to be coming from what we call the four thirty line, which is more from the inside coming down. So you come from the inside, then you work it around the body, and the only way to do that is to anchor it through ground pressures, through proper application of foot footwork, legwork and the hips
and the torsa rotation. So there's a little bit of technique involved, and that's why we train hard in the beginning to get that down so that then the later modules, as we get into modules nine, ten and eleven, then we're all it's all about shaping the ball and curving it and how we're gonna do it in a more sophisticated way. And the beauty of the approach is that to shape the ball, to curve it left and right, draw and fade it. With the ABS method, you don't
have to change anything in your setup. You don't have to change anything on your back swing, nothing to transition, nothing on the downswing. You do it all post impact.
Oh so that's what you're talking about when you say impact onward?
Yes, yeah, onward. So in other words, the modules are set up basically so that you're always swinging into something that you've already rehearsed. So we sort of train the swinging backwards, like we teach what the muscles should be doing after you strike the ball, so that when you go back to working on the backswing and transition, then when you come down to the ball, you already know
what to do, so you're swinging into familiar territory. Most golf instruction would say, okay, you know chronological right grip, stance and posture, and then we work on the backswing, and then we get you perfect at the top, and then we work on it. But what happens is you can have all that stuff lined up. You can go to the driving agency guys with perfect setups, perfect backswings. It just hit the ball horrible. So the idea that a perfect setup is going to lead to a perfect backswing,
it's going to lead down to perfect impact. It's just false. It's just fallacy. It's just fiction. M So what you want to learn to do is to strike through the ball properly and post impact, because the the golf swing doesn't just end at the ball, and that's a tough thing for people to get. They say, well, you know, the ball's left the club, it's over with, right, what does it matter? You know, that's what everybody thinks.
I've always thought that the contact was in the middle of your swing, right.
Most people think that once the ball leaves a club, hey, that's it, that doesn't matter. But what they don't understand is that the impact. And when I talked about in the other when we were talking earlier about the sound of the golf ball and being struck, you different frequency holding shaftles and hitting it with pressure and force. Uh,
this has to be worked on post impacts. In other words, if the golf club's coming in at one hundred miles an hour into impact, the less the club had slows down, the more feedback you're going to get through the shaft, and the more deeper you're going to compress the golf ball. If the club is say moving ninety miles an hour after impact, it's compared with it moving sixty miles an hour after impact. So you come in at one hundred and it leaves at sixty, the club heads moving sixty
after impact. That's you don't you don't want to have that big loss. See so everybody thinks, well, what does it matter. Well, if you if you want to continue to have the club moving, if you want the club, if you want to minimize deceleration of the club, then you're going to have to get busy with your post impact intentions to keep driving that thing through. Okay, And that's the that's the key. It's not just over. When you strike the ball, you've got to you've got to
drive it through. And that's it's martial arts. It's talked about martial arts all the time. You look at karate, and I interviewed like a champion brick smasher guy. You know, they chops through bricks and with his fists and head and everything. But he said that the point of intention of acceleration is always well past the brick on the
first brick. If he's chopping eight bricks, he's thinking about way past the eighth brick all the way down to the ground, like he's going to move his whole body and move all the way down through all the bricks, and he has to focus on a point well beyond.
This is beyond follow through though.
Yeah, just all the way to the finish, right, you got to stick the finish and you got to work it all the way through. And that is what the great ball strikers do. And if you know what to look for, you can see it. You know, it's a lot of it's keeping the pressure moving through the strike so that the ball gets the deepest compression and that the club head decelerates the least possible you want it
to you know, you can't. Actually, I don't think anyone who has actually been able to have the club head moving faster than it was after it strikes the ball. But that's because of the weight of the ball and the collision, the physics collision of impact.
Oh, sure, it's going to slow down.
But if you take the ball out of the equation, then yes, you can move the club faster beyond low point if there's no ball there. You see what I'm saying. That's a different kind of thing, and that's the kind of swing. It's going to hit the ball better. That's what the greats did. They moved the club. I mean, Ben Hogan talked about that in his book. I mean I go back to Ben Hogan just because people are more familiar with that, but there are a lot of other great strikers too.
Don't tell me you figured out his secret, please.
Oh absolutely, I figured out. Oh you have holding shaft fluck. Sure, yeah, it's everything that he talked about holding shaft flucks. Yeah, but of course there wasn't just one secret. That's silly because in the golf swing there has to be a two secrets. Because if you if you say, well, you have to slot the club a transition, Well, then you have to do something else post impact to handle that. So it has to be there's always if this, then that so secret. It has to have anes on it.
There has to be at least secrets. And of course I think it was just something he had fun with. But you know, did did did Hogan have a secret? Well? Yeah, you know he had a lot of secrets.
It's dark, very dark. Do you screen your students? Do in a way that you're like, you know what, I think I have another teacher that would be better for you right now? Is a beginning golfer?
I yeah, I do all the time. Yeah. I have them fill out a questionnaire with a lot of questions that I look at and if I don't feel like they're a good fit, then I just you know, there's I'd rather give my attention to people that I think are correct. And it doesn't necessarily mean that.
Is it more about a level of commitment or.
It's a lot of things. Yeah, it's an attitude. It's commitment like.
Oh, I'm going on vacation this week. I just need to be more consistent. You know, it's give me a lesson or duw, it's going to help, and you're like.
No, yeah, I mean, I'm not doing this necessarily just for money. I mean, it's not a money thing. I mean, there's other ways to make money that are much more lucrative than being a golf pro or teaching, you know pro. I do this because I think I think the game is suffering. I think people are wanting to improve and they don't know how. And there's a lot of people that really want to learn the old art form of hitting the golf ball. It's not so you playing people.
Those aren't beginners. I mean you're not.
Yeah, I mean I take I take on beginners if they have the right kind of attitude, you know. Does that mean, in other words, if they if they are passionate about learning how to strike it, like, you know, maybe say, Hey, I'm a beginner, but I've been watching you know, some old YouTube footage of some of the old shells matches, and boy, I just like I can see you know, I understand. I've been to your site. I can I can see what you're talking about. I'd like to learn it that way, you know. I want
to learn how to hit it straight. I want to learn strategy. I want to learn you know, I want to feel connected to the history of the game. You know, I don't want to feel the disconnect. You know, somebody writes me a letter like that, I'm going to say, absolutely, I'm gonna take you on as a student, right, But what if.
They say, I want to learn this. I want to learn that, I want to become better at this, but I really don't have time to practice. I can only play once maybe twice a week, and if I practice, it's my warm up before around.
Well though, those people a lot of times will work well for me too, because a lot of the drill, a lot of the drills with that we do are maybe you can do it in your basement, your garage, or in your backyard with an impact back. At least you get started the first three modules. A lot of like just strengthening, so that stuff can be done for someone that doesn't have a whole lot of time to be out there pounding golf balls. You know, you have time to hit five hundred golf balls a day, or
you know, play six days a week. I mean, most people don't. So this is a way to learn how to strike the ball well without necessarily having to spend you know, four or five hours a day grinding golf balls and playing. So yeah, but again, if somebody just comes to me and says, hey, you know, I I
want to play. You know, I have an upright swing, and you know I want to keep swinging a frying pan driver with an upright swing, and I want to swing it like you know, I'm only concerned with how far I hit the ball, and but can you teach me how to hit it farther? And but I just kind of want to you know, I don't really want to do these modules or the stuff that you're talking about. Then you know, I'm just going to pass on that. Yeah, you know that sort of thing. So it just depends.
I mean, i'd look over the questionnaire.
And you know how many questions on your questionnaire?
Oh? I think there's probably about twenty maybe.
And is one of the questions you ask whether people gamble when they play golf?
No?
No, Because I worked with the club fitter and he had this one hundred and ten questions you know that he wanted, you know, because he was going to be screening who he's going to be working with, and one of them was do you gamble in golf?
That's a good question. I should probably add.
That, why tell me why. That's a good question.
Because a gambler isn't going to want to suffer for a few months and have to you know, change their swing. You know, some of the students, you know, you have to kind of take a couple of steps back, you know, you have to retrain what the body's doing. So you know, it's not uncommon for somebody to not play as well for the first few months and then when they get the hang of it and then all of a sudden catapults them forward, then they play better than they did.
So but yeah, that's a good question because a gambler wouldn't want to you know, he's not going to risk losing his money for a couple of months, right, So that's well.
It's funny because when when he was reviewing my questions, he went through and he goes, you don't gamble when you play golf, and went, no, not at all, And he goes, what's the point why do you play golf? It's like, really, does it have to be about money?
Yeah? Does every I mean, how about surfers? You know, I think about surfers lotsuse I grew up along the coast. And what about surfers, I mean, are they out there? You know? Is it all about money and Gavolet.
You know, it's about the next wave, right, It's like.
It's about the experience, you know. And golf there's a lot, you know, some of the most enjoyable moments in golf for me are just playing alone, just going out there in the afternoon with a few balls, dropping the ferry,
just shaping it and just you know, it's quiet. You know where I play, uh, you know, out of Mayor Islands, my home course, and you got wild turkeys out there and all sorts of nature, and there's you know, fresh blackberries along the sides of the faraways and even I've even found like a wild asparagus growing along the you know. I mean you can go out there and just dine.
Well. Mare Island's an interesting course too. It's you know, it's I think it's the oldest course west of the Mississippi. It was a nine hole course built on what it's an army base or navy base over there.
Yeah, it was a may Island naval base, right.
And then it was expanded to eighteen holes. I don't know if you knew Robin Nelson. Robin grew up the back nine or yeah, he did the back nine. He grew up in Marin County. Here. He went to school with Pete Carroll, the football coach, and unfortunately passed away last year. He was he was a great guy and came out once. We've had multiple conversations, but yeah, he used to have the heat. So he did the back nine on Mary Island and it's it's a fun it's a fun track. It's a really fun tough track.
When I was out there yesterday, I mean because it could be wind blowing thirty five miles an hour out there, and the ferries are, you know, super tight, and you can't miss I mean that the third hole, that part three. I mean it's you're hitting a three or four iron into a green and the shrub brush on the left edge of the green. It's elevated tea and you're dead into the wind and you're back there with a long iron and that the green looks sounds like a poster stamp.
And if you miss the green, you make double period. Yeah there's no bail.
It's not that long, but you're still hitting with the you got.
Raspberry bushes on the right side of the green, and you got shrub brush on the left side of the green, and then you got a bumper in the front. So if you missed short right then in that bunker maybe you make bogie. But you know, I took out a fearm, just stuck it in their fifteen feet yesterday. And just how long is the hole, my birdy? It plays about two little over two hundred yards too, but it's a dead end of the wind. And then the eighth all of course, you know that two hundred and twenty yard
part three, you know, just tough. You know, it's it's a hard cour you have to hit a straight out there. And that's why I love playing because it's there's no level lies on the course, nop. I think maybe one, maybe eleventh. Ferry is the only place you can get a level level eye. So it's side hill lies, combining that with wind into small greens that are tricky and you have to keep the ball below the hole. That's golf, I mean for the good player, that's the gamy stuff.
Let's let's see you go play there. There was a kid that was a you know, want a good college player down at where I went to school at Fresle State. A couple of them came up to play Mayor Island you know with me, and these guys were just barely broke eighty out there, you know. So interesting it says something for for of course, not having to be long. I mean, may Island is not a long course, but
it's it's tough, you know. I have yet to In fact, anytime I bring a pro friend of mine out there, I say, if you can break par okay and this little course, there's one hundred dollars waiting in the cup for you on eighteen that I'll give you if you can do it. And you can break par nobody's done it yet.
It's a good bet to make. One of the things you wrote on the website that I found interesting is the comment of how a great swing feels in the mind and the body.
Yes, yes, yeah, please, because the fact that, well, for one thing, the heavier gear of the past you have if if you use heavier gear, you have to engage the bigger muscles in the body so you can start to feel the sensation of swinging the club using the
rotational the torso rotational muscle and the legs. The hips and to feel that inside the body is something that I think was more accessible in the older in the older days with the heavier gear, and now with a lightweight, it's just very easy to slap at it with your arms in your hands, because that's what people just intuitively want to do. They don't want to turn, they just want to swat at it with their arms in their hands.
And with the modern gear you can kind of get away with that, you know, especially with the driver and the hybrids, and maybe not as much with the irons, but especially with a driver, a lightweight driving just kind of swat at and the thing goes out there two hundred and eighty yards so and that's good enough for most people. So they don't really learn how to feel the swing from the inside. And then the way we teach is all about feeling and sensation, universal feelings and sensations.
It's I don't teach it baseball. Well, this is just what I feel, So this is what you do. But if I say that, you know, when you come down from a train transition, you know you need to feel like you're putting the shaft on a table top. Well, that's like a you know, that's a big tangible sensation that's universal to feel that way. So we talk about these big tangible sensations that you need to feel in
the body. And I don't create a new module or a swing drill unless it's tested by me and a few select students that I'll have work with something for about six months, and then I look at it and I say, okay, where are we at here? And then if we all agree that these sensations are you know, very universal and tangible, then then we go ahead and release it really through the program. But I don't just sit there and say, oh, yeah, I have some idea,
you know, here's swing this. I don't I believe in always swinging a golf club, Like I don't really believe in swinging any number of different drill devices, this sort of thing, all the different swing aid clubs and super
weighted clubs. I don't believe in, or anything with like super whippi shafts or like a fan on the end of a club or anything that I think you want to develop your feel that you're swinging a golf club and something that you would use like you need to feel that club and you can strengthen the muscles through
resistance and impact bags and that sort of thing. You can you can get strong doing that, but you want to always have the feel of a golf club in your hands, because the golf club also has a way that it's balanced right, So they're toe heavy, there's more weight out on the toe than the heel, so it
kind of flip flops in your hand. And that dispersity between the sweet spot feel and where and the line of the shaft is very real as you're swinging the club, and you need to develop that not only as a feel, but also as a spatial awareness in the swing. So so swinging these training aids are a lot of times are counterproductive because I like to be training everything at the same time, like club face alignment, feel, shaft, where's
the shaft, where's the clubhead? You know, and the weight distribution. And I also have a very different view on how to set up golf clubs so that they're all the same right through this set Like I don't believe in frequency matching golf shafts. I think it's crap, it's bs, it's not right. You want to have your shaft set up deflection, so if they're pressured by a certain amount of weight that the shaft deflections are going to be consistent from wedge to driver. And most people don't do this.
A few of the great ball strikers did this in the past, but that's in one of those little secrets of the past. Right If you put an eight pound weight on the end of my golf club, the shaft rate's going to be the same deflection from wedge to driver in my set, so I can use the same swing from wedge to driver. I don't have to change anything. But if you've got shafts that are they may be frequency matched, which is really nice if they were guitar strings,
you know, but they're not. You know, golf clubs are not it's not a musical instrument. You know. It's not a series of guitar strings frequency matched. You know. That's not what shafts do because when you change the direction of the golf club at transition, you're putting a stress load, about eight pounds of stress load at transition. So you need to stress your shafts based upon that, and then
work your set around that. Seve of your shafts cut and tipped so that they're correctly set up that way, and then you can just use the same swing from wedge to driver. You don't have to change anything. But everybody is using driver shafts, and we've got a graphie shaft in your driver, and you've got something different in your irons and all this sort of thing. And I had a very well a well known teacher come and visit me, and he wanted to just talk about his
own swing. So I worked with him a little bit and we looked at his clubs and he was hooking his driver. I took out his three and I said, hook this. He couldn't hook it. He had a bent flat and he was happy and really stiff shaft, but he could hook his driver. I said, what do you want to keep hooking your driver? He said, he's not really And he said what do I need to do to change my swing? I said, absolutely nothing.
Change the shaft.
So I gave him. I gave him my driver with a personmon with a you know, telephone pole and a really stiff shaft. But it's really not that stiff relative to my irons. It's the same. It's the same. I don't use driver chefs. I use iron shafts in my driver.
Wow. So I get and how long do you have your shaft on the driver?
Forty forty three? Yeah, okay, I have a couple different drivers he is with forty three to forty. I've one that's forty four, I feel, which is shorter than what it's normal forty six And.
Yeah, they're they're coming out longer and uh.
Well you've made it farther that way with a longer shaft.
Yeah, but you don't necessarily hit it. I mean I I Tom wish On, who custom club maker, who's been on numerous times talk about that the shafts are too long on drivers these days.
Well, it depends. It depends. If you just want to hit it far, then you want to have as long as shaft as possible, as lightweight as possible. But you want to hit it straight, Well yeah, but you want to it straight. Well, that's what I believe. Some people don't care about hitting it. Most golfers couldn't care less about heitting it straight. They really, come on, they just want to hit it far. You just go out there there they're talking about that's crazy.
When not the golf smarter audience.
Okay, well that's good. Well that's right, because we're golf smarter here, that's right exactly, Yeah, we're smarter.
Go over if you can briefly give me an overview of your modules. You kept you keep referring to these modules and what they are, what they do, and then we'll send people to you.
Well, basically, we we teach the golf swing in sections. I think to just say there's one secret move to the swinging the clubbing. If there was, and I just teach that, it'd be great. But it's not so different than learning to play the piano, for instance. You know, you're not going to let you have to learn the chords, you have to learn the scales, and you have to learn to put all those together. You're not going to just sit there and rip off some classical concerto or
whatever because you learn the secret move or whatever. It's just not It takes practice. So we teach it in sections and stages. And we started impact first module one, and we learn proper forum rotation and how that relates to the body and torso rotation, and there's a lot of protocols for that and all sorts of things that
we look over. And then module two we deal with ground pressures and how to learn to apply the vertical and horizontal and rotational pressures in the feet so that we can anchor properly and get ready for Module three, which is post impact pivot thrust, So we learn to accelerate the torso post impact gain, picking up shaft speed post impact, and we use so we're building off what we did learned to MODU one and module two. Module
three takes us up to the finish. So then we go back and we work on hand attitude so that you have the right grip pressure and how the risks need to feel it. Transitions. We got a module very critical module for that. For module five, Module four basically going back to Maus before, we just talk about swing plane and through impact and I show the student exactly where what they need to be doing with the shaft through impact and that ties one, two and three together.
So then five we get into hand attitudes. Six we get into transition, how to transition the club at the top of the back swing. I don't spend a lot of time on the backswing because there's a lot of different ways to take it back. You got guys that pick it up and loop it behind him. You got Jim Furich that just picks it straight up and throws it behind him. And then you got guys like Raymond Floyd, they just pulled it way inside and then slotted it, you know, coming down that way. So that's kind of
the self discovery journey for people. I let them choose their own backswings, except there are protocols that are that must be followed, like you know, you have to we've got to get your forms rotated, and we got to get your torso rotated, and we need some spine tilt to make a path passageway for the arms to come down and find the four thirty line. So other than that, how you get there that that's up to you. The student's grips vary. They have different kinds of grips that
happens from the impact bagwork. Their hands find the right place on the club for them, So there's room for personal variation. So then we get module seven. We get into tying the whole thing together. We work all the modules that we learned and put into one fluid motion, and we also integrate how to transfer weight through the strike rather than you know, transferring weight to the left and then just chopping down on the ball like a
lot of guys were doing a few years ago. We teach them how the great players transfer the weight through the strike. And this is all supported scientifically. There's been plenty of studies at the great strikers transfer their weight through the strike, not not at the beginning. And then module eight we get into striking golf ball, so you know, where I'm watching the students hit golf balls, and we start fine tuning and I get a feel for where
they're at with everything. And then module nine, you know, we get into like drawing and fading the ball with post impact intentions out of curve it correctly and all this, and then ten and eleven then you know, we just get into course management and strategy and playing and trajectory control and all this stuff and how to. It's so it's comprehensive, very comprehensive, very comprehensive, and it takes, you know, several years for those students to get through those. It's
not it's kind of like taking karate or something. You start with, you know, you get your first belt or whatever, a brown belt, blue belt, black belt or whatever. You work your way up to being a black belt. So the advanced students are you know, these guys are you know, like black belt golfers. I mean, you got guys that are a student that was he was a high seventy shoot. He went out and shot sixty five last year. Wow, you know with persimmon and blades.
Wow.
Yeah, oh yeah, it's impressive. It's impressive. And he's been winning all his club matches and club comps and people can't believe it.
Must love you, you know.
Yeah, he's doing well. But you know he's he's a student, has been dedicated, you know, he he he sends his videos in every week and he's you know, he's taking it. I'm there to help out the dedicated students. Now, a lot of guys sign up and then they quit. It's like, okay, well if they quit, then they quit, you know. But the guys that send their videos in every week and and we work with them, then they were really getting their money's worth out of me for sure.
Early in the first episode, you mentioned when you were on the tour that you didn't have a tremendous amount of success because you weren't a very good putter. So I just need to I'm so curious your nickname is lag Why that was just.
A handle name when I was on the one of the TGM sites when I first returned to golf after not playing for thirteen years, and I was just kind of just wondering. I hadn't really followed golf, you know, I was I missed the whole Tiger era, like I didn't really I didn't watch it. I didn't I wasn't seeing seeing golf.
Your wife got you back into this, Yeah.
Yeah, so interesting. And then I kind of wondered. I wondered if like the golf Machine was still being taught or anyone was still doing that. And I looked online and there were a couple of websites, and I thought so I contacted one of the owners of the site and I said, hey, I was one of the early, you know, prodigies of this method. You know, you're interested in hearing my thoughts on it, which he said, sure, of course, my thoughts weren't all that positive about it.
You know, he didn't really like the fact that I had some bad things to say about the golfing Machine, but a lot of it was good too, a lot of good things, but it's not perfect and it does have some serious flaws. Yeah, and I'm the one to tell you because I experienced them firsthand, even not only through junior golf, college golf, but out on the tour.
I'm looking over your shoulder at my library because I know we did. There was a book about the golfing machine. I'll fall pull it out and mention it in the clothes anyway, John, Again, the website is Advanced ball Striking dot com. And please, if you want to communicate with John, you can either click on the Hayfred button hey and ask me to put you in touch with John. I can do that, but I'll also have links to his
website on our blog for these two episodes. So again, I appreciate your time, a fascinating approach to all this. It's unique and special and I really enjoyed having you here today. Thanks so much for stopping by.
Yeah, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.