Hi. This is David Gianco from Ubi City, California, and I play at the River Oaks Golf Club. This is golf Smarter number nine fifty five. I work with more golfers with yips than anybody else on the planet. That's a certainty, and I have a very high success rate and it's only getting better. My biggest success so far I worked with a guy a year and a half ago in Hawaii when he was in high school. Was the number one ranked junior in the country at the time. He was playing with
people like Scotti Scheffler and beating them very slowly. Starting in senior year, he started getting full swing yips and then he got a full ride to an IVY League school. Was the number one player in the IVY League school's golf team. The yips slowly got worse over time, and he got so bad by the end of his junior year he had to quit the team. He
couldn't play, and eventually quit golf. He would only yip on the golf course, not ever on the range, and he was hitting the ball so solid and so far with such a great looking swing that everybody on the range would stop and just stare at him. Even then when he still had the yips, although again not on the range, he would have been ranked one of the top ten ball strikers in the world. That's how good the guy
was. He shared with me that he played at the Presidio in San Francisco from the tips a week before he came out, and the yips were so bad. I think he shot one hundred and ten. So imagine being one of the top ten ball strikers in the world and shooting one hundred and ten. That's how devastating the yips could be. So it took them a few months. He had to go home and do a lot of practice, but he started seeing some significant improvement in the reduction of the yips by the end
of the third month. And he contacted me about six months ago he was a zero handicap. He'll be probably a plus three by the end of the year, So there is hope. Even for a severe case like that, it's possible to overcome the yips. Insights and advice for greater distance and control with your driver off the tee with Jim Waldron. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome
back to the Golf Smart podcast. Jim. Thanks Fred, thank you for having me back for the one hundred and fiftieth time. Every time that you and I schedule something, I'm thinking, Okay, I need to go back through my database and my spreadsheet and figure out how many times you've actually been on the show, because you keep increasing it by five fold exactly each time
we talk. I'm a big exaggerate I'm Irish man. You know you know what the word blarney means, right, that's that's the Irish tendency to over exaggerate everything, right, So yeah, my wife can tell you a little bit about it. And what about the Irish goodbye come on y versus mine? Yeah right. But the most exciting thing is that we have, like we started recording as soon as we started talking. Yeah, the curse is lifting, the Wolf poly cursed also known as the Jim Yeah. Yeah,
it's amazing. I mean we've never in all these years, every time that we get together, it's about forty five minutes of trying to figure out how to get you online. Yeah, solid state and tell what this doesn't like Jim Waldron and vice versa. By the way, and as a tech geek, let me just say this, Jim is someone you've taught me so much. It's all mental, dude, You're just making it up, you know. If it's all positive attitude. If you have the positive attitude, you
don't fret over it. So it's gonna work. So when we turned into the Borg Empire and you're going to be saying to me and your best Borgan personations, resistance is futile. I supposed to just get in and go, Yeah, you're right, Fred, resistance is no, it's not me. I'm going to be, you know, of the rebel alliance when that happens. Just so you know, you and I and many people who are listening, many who write to me regularly, we all remember thinking, wow,
nineteen eighty four, that's a long way away. We're well passed, well past that. You know. There's a there's a robot right now with an AI brain that in I saw the conversation. It claims it's self aware, and it didn't even use the word self aware, Well it did it initially. Then it said I actually have a type of meta awareness, which is really creepy is it Swedish? Right? Yeah? Actually, but seriously, but seriously, so you take my computer please please, and yours especially especially
speaking of technology. Where are we going with this? I you know, one of the topics you wanted to you suggested, was about hitting hitting your driver longer. And there's actually a couple of topics around the driver that I would love to discuss today. But one of them is which seems to be very hot conversation going on these days, and that's that actress who's also a golf club Mini driver. That's right, yeah, Good Will Hunting one of my favorite movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but mini driver, and
people are talking about mini driver a lot. Would your experience and your advice. I've never owned one. I have hit a couple of my students. I mean, I think it's only for really, really good players with a lot of clubheads be which is like not most of your listeners. But yeah, I understand the concept. You know. Back in the day, and way back in the day, there was a club called a Number two Wood, also known as a Brassi, the original's name. I had one.
My first set of clubs was built in nineteen oh five in Dublin, Ireland. My grandfather's clubs he gave me when I was ten years old, and they were hickory shafts, and I had a one wood driver. I had a two wood, the Brassi. I had a three wood, which I
think was called a spoon, and then a four wood. And so you would use the two wood off the fairway on a really long par five to get maybe ten or fifteen more yards of distance compared to the three wood, and you would use it off the tee on tie really tight fair away part fours. But then over time it kind of got dropped out of use of common usage. And that's kind of what a mini driver is. It's like
a two wood basically, right, right, That's what I understand. But I also understand that the technology that they've been able to incorporate into the old style two wood into today's technology with face control and whatnot and having a shorter shaft, right that it might give you a good amount of distance off the tee but a lot more control, yep. And also you can hit it off the deck if you're you know, going on a par five and you got a long second shot. Yeah. I think think Mickelson put in the
British Open about six or seven years ago. He put, uh it was some major maybe it wasn't the Open, but it was some one of the four majors that he did win if I remember right, And he had a he had a mini driver in the backage, so he had two drivers base. It was considered radical at the time. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're saying amateurs made handicappers. No, doitly not, No, just learn to hit the driver. Well, you can always choke
it on a driver and make the cheft short. You could choke down an inch and turn it into a or you know, three chords of an inch or so and turn it into a basically a mini, but you still have that fourth you're going for. What's the maximum limit on the driver head? Now? It's what four hundred and sixty for sixty ccs? Yeah, and the mini drivers like three sixties, right or four hundred or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in the high three hundred three eighty
met Yeah. Yeah. I've been watching a lot of you know, videos and trying to do some research on this because it fascinates me. It's like, oh, you mean I might be able to hit something what I do is often when I have to hit a more accurate driver, and most good players I know do this. I choked down on the driver about three quarters of an inch. I put the ball back about a ball within my stance, and I tee it much lower, and I hit a stinger a stinger
driver, which is basically a three quarterback swing three quarter finish. You know, you tighten your grip pressure a little bit, so you get a little bit less risk action, so you have more club face stability, and you have more shaffling. You get more forward shaffling when you do those things, and so you hit this super low shot. But if you're playing in dry summer conditions, it'll roll out sometimes forty yards. Sure, So it's an
accurate way. And if you do what I just said, you don't really lose if you're an average ameter, especially that much distance, but you'll hit it straighter. I want to clarify, I'm pleased with the driver I'm playing with right now. Yeah, yeah, and I'm and I'm you know, but I'm not hitting every fairway. And of course everybody wants to hit every fairway, sure, and you know, you watch on you watch on the
weekends and they don't do that either. But so I if there's something that can give me more control, right and less less headache, yeah, then sure I'd want to incorporate that and yours. I love your suggestions. You can turn your driver into into a mini driver, and I'm going to give it air quotes a mini driver just by choking down a little bit teeing it lower, playing it back. You could also start with your hands a little
bit more forward, maybe an inch or two more forward, Chaffelin. That's set up so you're just trying to keep the ball low, yeah, which is also the shot you want to do when it's really windy. Yeah,
it's windy exactly. It's the same shot you do into a wind, but you're also basically instead of hitting up on it a few degrees, which is optimal for when there's no wind or when there's when with you for optimum launch angle and carry distance, you want to have the low point instead of being say an inch and a half behind the ball, you want to be at the very back of the ball. So the so the club had bottoms out right at the back of the ball, yeah, as opposed to being on
the upswing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, all right, see, but what you wanted to talk about was how to hit the driver longer. Yeah. I could go over a couple of quick, you know, sort of simple bullet points on that that I see, particularly with mid to
high handicap amateurs where they're losing yardage. The first is most most people who are in that sort of eight or eight handicap or higher range often don't understand that there are some significant differences in set up with driver than any other club in the bag. Really yeah, so one of them. Obviously, you have your stance should be about at least two inches wider with your driver compared to your three wood. And sometimes people say, well, why do you
why is the clubs get longer in general? Do you look, do you widen your stance? And the answer is, as the clubs get longer, you're going to make a bigger pivot motion, the turning motion of in the tilting motion of your body gets bigger in range of motion right as the clubs get longer. And that's because with a driver, you're only going to have
a spine angle at setup. You know, the angle of your torso to the ground of around twenty five degrees or so, and compared to say a wedge where you might be like at forty five degrees like a sand wedge or a lobodge. And the more the more bent over you are. It's set up because of the shorter club and the more upright ly angle on a wedge, the less you can turn. So when you're more when you're more upright, you can make a bigger turn, which you need to do to create
more clubbed speed. Right, But the problem is when you're more upright. Uh, if you didn't know it was, if you if you kept your stance with with the driver, the same stance with it would be on a wedge, you would your your head would be uh probably you know, three inches too high, right, and so it was your center of gravity would be too high off the ground. So when you widen your stance, you're making your height shorter by several inches. And when you make yourself shorter in
height, it's easier to swing in balance. Does that make sense? Yeah, it all makes sense. Especially I like the idea of widening your stance. I've remember once hearing that maybe if you take your trail foot and angle it out a little bit with your wider stands an help. Yeah, that gives you a bigger hip turn if you get anytime you give yourself more hip turn, you can turn your shoulders more right your shoulder, girl, I
see what it is. So that's another one. Uh, you want to have about ten percent more body weight on your right foot if you're right handed golfer with a driver. It's the only club in the bag where you would have more weight on your on your trail foot than on your lead foot. Really, another one is you want to tilt to the right, But I teach the model swing that I teach somewhere between if you're not hitting a stinger, if you're hitting a normal driver, where you want an upward launch angle,
you know, up upward angle of attack. You want to tilt your shoulder girdle twelve to fifteen degrees to the right. That setup and that positioning of your tilting of your torso to the right, along with having a little bit more weight on your right foot, puts your sternum, which is called the upper swing center where your spine and your shoulder girdle meat right here like
a tee. That positions your sternum at set up more or less where it should be at impact right, which is, you know, several inches behind the ball, because the ball is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of your left heel. Where exactly we can talk about if you want. It depends on how tall you are, right, so it varies if you're short,
medium, or tall in height. But basically for me, I'm six foot one and I put the ball three inches inside to the right of my left heel with a driver, and I tilt my shoulders twelve degrees about like that. Here's this would be zero. That's about twelve, and I have a little bit more weight on my right foot. So I've got my sternum at setup where I want it to be at impact. Huh yeah, okay, okay, are the setup well, We've talked about t height another podcast.
You obviously have to get the te height correct for your for your angle attack that you want right. So you're going to bury the te height if it's if it's a no wind shot, it depends. I'll just to save time, I'll tell the listeners go back about a year ago. We did a podcast and one of the things we talked about was hovering the driver versus soling it right. Oh, I do not sold any clubs anymore, especially
good for you. Ever since that conversation, it's like, especially especially the putter, because I always noticed there's a little bit of drag and it turns the putter head when I have it sold ground. You know what I do, che I tap four times. As part of my automatic trigger ritual. I do four taps and then I do a little half inch forward press. That's my trigger for starting a putting stroke. But when I when I come up off the ground after that fourth tap, it kind of it almost bounces
off the ground a little bit off the putting surface. Right. That means I'm in a fact, I'm hovering. You know, the soul of the putter is probably an eighth of an inch off the pudding surface something like that. Right, right, yeah, all right, now we're getting to decided, Well, we'll get to putter's later, right, So back toms right. So then the other thing that people don't do is they don't turn all the way, which is like one of my big bugaboos is an instructor.
People people either are if they're a very high handicap, they kind of go like this with their arms and barely turn right, which is now you say, go like this, no one's watching us. Yeah, it's full right, So so basically for the for the audio, then it's no visual. Rather, uh, people just swing their upper arms around their body, especially if they're higher handicaps like eighteen handicaps are higher, and they barely turn.
They may they may rotate their shoulders like fifty degrees at best. Right. So the first thing you got to realize is it's not in any golf swing. You don't swing your arms around your chest nearly as much as most people think. Right. The arms stay in front of your chest and go up and down in a little V shape. Right, So you've got to turn your torso, which basically means from your lower back all the way up to
and including your shoulder girdle has to turn away from the target. So if you think of your torso as a door and the door swings open ninety degrees typically right, and mainly it's the left side if you're right. In a golfer, people don't turn their entire left side of their torso from their left shoulder down to their left waistline. They don't turn that as a unit away from the target behind them. Enough they do it a little bit, but
they don't do it enough. So imagine if I said, if I was an archery instructor and you had a compound bow, like a professional level compound bow, and you're supposed to pull your hand back let's call it twenty four inches to get maximum power on when you release it right when the arrow's released, and you only turned it back ten inches, that's what high handicappers do, and the mid handicappers turn it back maybe sixteen inches, and the low
handicaps turn it back twenty inches, and the pros turn it back pull the bow back twenty four inches. They fully coil right. And the problem, the main reason why people don't do that, it's a scary feeling. If you're amid to high handicap amateur, to rotate your entire torso to ninety to one hundred degrees, measure it at the top of the torso, which is your shoulder girdle. It feels out of control to turn off away from the
ball, away from the target line where the ball sits. And if that induces a scary feeling like a loss of control, then you suffer from a common problem called steering impulse. People who have steering impulse. Their mind is frozen on the ball and on the target line. They don't like to make a big, deep turn away from it. So you have to be courageous and realize it's okay. It's okay to hit the ball off line, especially with the driver right. The one of the main reasons why people hit it
short is because they have steering. They might hit it straight, but they don't hit it long because they have steering them pull. So you've got to make a big, full turn of your entire torso. And of course your hips have to turn as well. And the model is a minimum of forty five degrees of hip turn, maximum of sixty degrees. If you turn your hips sixty degrees and you're reasonably flexible and fit, not Yogi like, but
just reasonably flexible. If you can turn your hip sixty you'll be able to turn your shoulder girdle at least one hundred degrees to one hundred and five. Wow, Because you're right. That's a really important point to make, is that if you're flexible enough, I mean, there's so many golfers that don't work on their flexibility or their melibility that you know you're you're just not talking to them because they can't. Well, here's what you need to know.
If you're sitting in a chair like you are, like, well, I'm sitting on my edge of my bed, gus'll call it a chair. The point I'm trying to make is if you turn your hips forty five degrees, what y'all do now, and then all I got to do then is rotate my shoulders forty five degrees. Almost everybody has forty five degrees of shoulder girdle rotation, So if you have forty five plus forty five, that's ninety. So in effect, you're you're attaining a ninety degree shoulder girdle rotation, even
though in reality half of that is from your hips rotating. Oh wow, so no words. Most people, ninety nine percent of golfers who think they're not flexible enough to do what I just said, are indeed flexible enough. I've never seen a single player not be able to turn their shoulder girdle sitting in a chair without moving their hips at least forty five degrees. Anybody can do that. That makes a lot of sense. So that's a that's a
big source of power. The bigger the coil you make the more potential energy you have on the downswing to release into the back of the ball. Right. Yeah. The other power leak is again especially for mid to high handicaps, they don't fully set their wrist angles. They don't they don't fully cock the wrist. The average amitter that I work with, if their handicap is
twelve or higher, they're only doing a half a risk cock. So again again that's another way saying you're not you're not pulling the bow back all the way right, and you know if you're If you're don't have arthritis in your wrist, and you haven't injured or broken your wrist or anyway if you have.
If you have healthy wrists and your grip is correct, particularly your your your lead hand, your left hand grip for a right hand golfer is correct, you should be able to form a ninety degree angle between I could do more, so that would be ninety I don't so for people who are listening, Fred can see me, even though you won't be able to. But so that's ninety right Fred, So I could do one hundred and ten. So this is with your lead hand. This is your left hand for right
handed golf. That's actually more like one hundred and fifteen. You know Hogan's. Hogan's wrists were so flexible. This will blow your mind. He could take his left thumb like I'm showing Fred, I'm pulling my left thumb back toward my forearm, the inside of my left forearm. He could touch his forearm. I'm about I used to be able to do that. Seriously. I used to be able to well, yeah, when I was a kid, I used to be able to do I can't do that out, Yeah,
it hurts, okay. Yeah, so that was one reason for being a little guy. He had such a incredible lag He had such a big lag angle between his left arm and the club shaft. I think he was like at one hundred and twenty degrees, one hundred and twenty five threes something insane like that. That's how he generated a lot of clubbed speed. Yeah, so you got to cock. You got to cock your wrists all the way to generate force, right, Okay. And then the last thing is
you've got to be able to synchronize, which we'll talk about. I think we'll have time to in today's podcast, will go more in depth. You have to synchronize what your upper arms, how your upper arms swing, and how your trail elbow folds, and then how the trail l bowl unfolds on the downswing, and how how the upper arms swing down on the downswing. Mid to Hyhaena, You don't do that part well at all. Say that
again. That went by way too quick for me. Okay, So you've got your upper arms, that's setup are resting on your chest right, they should be slightly on top of your peck, so your triceps should be resting more on top than to the sides right. And then as the swing proceeds, as you start your arm motion, which is not in towards you but away from your chest, away from you as you rotate, but on an angle a forty five year g angle measured at the left at the lead arm
to your chest like, So that's the takeaway. And then the second half of backs when your trail elbow should fold between seventy five and ninety degrees, no more than ninety And so when you do that properly, your arms in your hands are in front of if you're right hand a golfer, the right side of your chest. At the top of the back swing, like a waiter hold a tray of food walking through the restaurant. Virtually nobody who's handicap
is around eight or higher does that properly. All the good players, top amates and pros do it just like this, Like I showed you, no exceptions, and everybody who's an a handicap or higher is pulling, pulling their hands in toward their body and around their ribcage. This is part of my arms swing illusion stuff. We've done a couple of podcasts on that a long
time ago, right. But other words, people people who have the arm swing illusion operating in their unconscious mind swing blueprint or swing map will do this flaw that I'm talking about. They pull their arms in toward themselves like starting a lawnmower, and around their body. Now they're stuck so at the top of their back swing, their ribcage is blocking their arm swing on the way
down. Yeah, So that's a that's that is I think the really big deal in golf instruction when it comes to the mechanics of the golf swing. So if you're doing that, you're never going to be able to release the club properly. And if you can't release the club properly. It means you're going to have basically, you know, slower than optimal clubhead speed. One of the things that Tony Manzoni talked about a lot is making sure that your your bicep kind of attaches to your peck, your tricep. Well, right,
but your upper arm. Let me just say, your upper arm to be connected to your pet, your your chat to your pet, not away from it. And there's this great video of Gary Player saying you don't want any and he does this, you know, you don't want any space between your arm and your Are we talking about the same thing, Well, that's part that's the setup part of it. Yeah, it's other words, if we talk, if we talk about this major thing which is a big deal,
which w's is well. I always use a teaching story of years ago when David Lebbetter was an number one teacher on the planet. He did a long interview with Golf Digest. At the end of the interview was very technical. The journalists said, well, is there a simpler way to say this? What is it that you're trying to do with both your high handicap students and your tour pros. There's are a universal common denominator that you're trying to get everybody to do. And he goes, yeah, there is, which
I happen to agree with. So here's what he said. He goes, It all boils down to this, how do you synchronize the arm motion with the pivot. That's what's hard about the golf swing. And that's why mid to high handicaps struggle with basically bad ball striking because they're really bad at that skill. They don't have a good pivot, they don't have a good arm motion. And even if they did have a good our motion and pivot, you still have to blend the two together. You have to synchronize it.
And it has to be synchronized in real in reality, which is three dimensional space, not two D. Right, you got to be able to picture in three D what am I supposed to do with my arms one of my most the elements of my pivot, and how do I sync them up? Because if you're you can have both things really well independently, but if they aren't blended together properly, you're gonna hit really bad golf shots. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I like that, And again most people pull their arms in so they don't have a good arm motion. I mean the amount of oar motion. I'll i'll talk talk myself through it so your listeners can see it, but can understand and visualize it. But you can. I'll show you, for instance, you can see me all all all you can do, all all you have to do is is move your hands. If you if you use the end of your arms, I e. Your hands is a way of measuring what the arms do. And I'm for the audience who can't see
me, I'm not gonna pivot. I'm gonna literally not turn my body or tilt my my spine at all, so there's gonna be zero pivot. All that has happens is the hands move in front of your body on a slight angle to the right about six inches, and that's it. And the elbows don't bend. Neither elbow bends. The wrists start to cock a little bit while you're doing that and hinge, and then the second half of backswing, your trail elbow folds, which raises your lead arm about eight or ten inches,
maybe a bit more if you're very flexible. So that's it. That's all. That's all the independent our motion there is on the backswing, right, but there's also dependent our motion, which basically means when you pivot the pivot motion of your body also move your arms kind of in a spiral shape. So we call that pivot dependent our motion as opposed to the first example, which is independent our motion or our muscles moving the arms versus pivot moving
the arms. Right. But the again, the average person who plays golf is super super armsy. They got way they got four times as much independent our motion as a tour and that absolutely causes poor club at speed, particularly with the driver. So that's a big one. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I and I personally want to just say one more time and probably pound this way too much. But yeah, there's this program that we advertised a couple of years ago on podcasts called Dynamic Golfers, and I
still use it every day. It's only like fifteen to eighteen minutes of flexibility, mobility, you know, work, and as we get older and we spend more time sitting around and doing a lot less activity, we lose a lot of that mobility. And I really can't emphasize enough how important that all is. If you want to improve your golf, no question, Yeah I
do. And then yeah, I said, you probably do yoga on the days I'm not teaching in person because as you know, I'm doing a ton of webcam lessons, but they don't start till about noon my time on the West Coast. So from I wake up at seven, and in that five hour period of time, almost four hour I do a three hour and forty five minute workout, and about almost two hours of that is mobility and flexibility exercises every day. Wow, yeah, and I'm pretty How far do you
drive the ball? What's that? How far do you drive the ball? You know, as you know, because we've been together, I've had chronic low back issues off and on for my whole career. So when I'm healthy, which is sure not as often I was, Like at age seventy three, my average carry is two thirty five to two fifty five carry with twenty yards a roll in the summer, so two fifty five to two seventy five.
And you know, we talk about changing clubs, putting on different shafts, getting a bigger head, you know, getting fit, owning the right ball and using a ball and the right tea. All these different things. But really, if you want to increase your distance, don't you have to increase your muscles. Don't you have to become stronger? I mean, and because it's all about swing speed, Yes and no. Yes, because obviously
the Shambo is the perfect modern example. The guy who was you know, he was a long driver before he changed his body, but he took it. He basically took almost a year off and just worked on strength training and came back. Yeah, he talks now, he talks now about that he overdid it and he went back. That's right, overnight, That's right. Yeah. But the point is his driving distance went up, like I think by some insane them out like thirty or forty yards total distance in less than
a year. Yeah, But so that is one way, don't get me wrong, being stronger. But then I always counter with you know, I've spent a lot of time because not anymore, but up until about three or four years ago, where I teach in the winter at Coalina Golf Club on the island of Oahu, they had the I think it was the first or second LPGA event of the of the of the of the season was there.
So I got to spend a lot of time in the range watching these gals hit balls, right, And some of these LPGA pros are tiny, they're not big, they're not tall, they don't have long arms long, and they're not they're not muscular, and they're carrying driver out there, you know, in anywhere from two thirty to two sixty, like Suzanne Peterson, right, she's pretty long, or Lexi Thompson, right. But they do this ten hours a day. Yeah, so that's but that's the technique part.
Their technique is great. They don't have it was If your technique is sound, you don't have to be strong with muscles. Yeah, but how do you increase swing speed? Is my question? Well, that's kind of what we're talking about. Other than the strengths you brought up, you have to have better technique. The greatest example is a non golf example. I think you know, I got involved in Asian martial arts at a very young age and I was at a famous now famous you can even you could go online
and find it on YouTube. I think this was this in nineteen sixty four sixty five in Chicago. There was a couple kind of like a like a global summit of It was one of the first martial arts kind of summits or it was a tournament, but it was also like people demonstrating their art and their skill. Bruce Lee was I got to see Bruce Lee when I was eleven years old perform, which was unbelievable. Yeah, you've talked about that.
Yeah, and so they had I forgot who it was, but some Japanese you know, like seventh degree black belt, and he's got a stack of roofing tiles. The roofing tiles are like ceramic tiles that are about maybe a half inch thick or a little bit more. And I think there was something like fifteen of them stacked from the ground up right, and he had to stand like a box or something because he wasn't He was only like five
foot four or five five, little guy, not muscular. Right, he does a knife fan strike but people colloquially call karate chop right with the edge of your hand, and he broke I think it was fifteen or twenty roofing tiles with one knife fan strike. I mean not if you can't you can't explain it and muscle because he wasn't a big guy. It's technique. So in karate it's all about speed, not about brute force. In boxing, it's a combination of speed in brute force because in boxing, partly because of
the gloves you wear, but also the nature of the strike. In boxing, particularly if you're doing a body blow, you want you want a lot of time. You want the contact time between your boxing glove and the guy solar plexus to be fairly long, so there could be an energy transfer. So the more energy you transfer from your fist into the opponent's body, the more punishing the blow. But in Asian martial arts it's exactly the opposite.
You make a quick strike, almost like a snake that strikes and then recoils back. So it's not mass. It's speed. It's velocity, not mass. It's always a blend of both, obviously, but in the Asian martial arts tradition, it's more about if you have a fist and an arm. That ways, say I think the average adult male's arm, each arm weighs around ten or eleven pounds, So let's say you have a ten pound arm. So that's the mass along with some of the mass of your body,
because obviously they're connected. But let's just say, let's just as a thought experiment. Keep it to the weight of the arm, and that arm is moving at fifty miles an hour, it's going to do some damage, right. But if the same arm is moving at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, it's going to do a lot more damage, right. And that so golf, the golf swing is more like Asian martial arts than Western boxing in terms of application of force. It's more about speed, it's not about
application of mass. So there's a great thought experiment I use in all my coach I don't think we've ever talked about this before because a common flaw and again this is a reason one reason why amaters don't hit the ball far enough, especially with the driver. I came up with this twenty years ago. I asked people. Back then I used I think I used Who was I
using at the time. Whoever the longest driver was twenty years ago, that probably would have been Tiger Tiger. Yeah, But now I say Roy McLaury because pound for pound, Roy McElroy is the longest driver on the planet, pound for pound. Right, So I say, okay, there's the thought experiment. You got Roy McElroy hitting his driver. You got exactly the same driver with the same shaft, right, and well, let's see you make
it easier. Les. Let's suppose you've got you're namateur golfer, but your swing speed is ninety five miles an hour or more, because if it's less than ninety five years going to have to use a regular cheft, not a stiff flex like he's using. So you have the same flex, the same length of driver, let's call it forty six inches, same driver head,
same total waight, same grip, everything's the same with the driver. And the thought experiment was, there's Roy McElroy and I think his average carry when he goes after it tries to rip it is about three twenty ish in the air, right. I was going to say something like that, and let's call it. I think pretty I think he's averaging when he goes after it around one hundred and twenty five miles an hour clubbed speed. Right, Okay, so I tell people, I go, all right, So he's hitting
a golf ball. There's a locomotive with twenty box cars trailing it, so way more mass than the mass and Roy McElroy's driver, same driver is bolted to the side of the locomotive, right, and they're both going to be traveling one hundred and twenty five miles an hour. When the ball is contacted, which ball goes further? Nine out of ten people will tell me the locomotive will hit the ball further, And I ask him, why do you
think that? And they go because they goes because the locomotive weighs more than Rory McIlroy. Because it weighs more, it is going to transfer some of its mass down the shaft into the clubed into the ball. And I go, not true. Why isn't it true? Because the ball bounces off the club face, it only stays on the club face for one half of one thousandth of a second. There's not enough time for that mass of the locomotive
to go down the shaft into the ball. Does that make sense? In other words, the only thing, the only thing that makes the ball go is the clubbed speed. Good. Of course, I'm assuming center face contact obviously proper anger as there's no mass transfer. You don't transfer the mass of your body. But one of the flaws that that I see mid to the high handicapped do is we call it a body lunch. I often call it
sacking the quarterback. People will actually transfer their upper body weight laterally, like you know slots for the listends, I'm sliding my my chest about eight inches forward toward the target. They think if I go like that and lunge toward the toward the target, that that energy of me lunging will transfer down the shaft into the club end of the ball. And that does not happen at all at all. Yeah, the ball bounces off instantly. The only thing
that matters is how fast the clubbed's moving. There is there is no mass transfer in golf like there is wow in boxing. Where you're where your where your fist days, it doesn't you know, the fist is penetrating the body of staying in contact longer. So the only thing that matters, again, assuming you have center face contact, is how fast the club bed's moving.
And the analogy, the better analogy would be if you understand how a whip master makes a bullwik that the very tip the last quarter inch of the of us, say like a twenty foot long bull whip ghosts over eight hundred miles an hour, cracks the sound barrier, which is makes that loud sound right right, That's what happens in golf. It's much more like cracking a whip. And so that's why the technique is more important than how strong you are.
This is all way too interesting and a lot to absorb. That's what I love about podcasts. You get to go back and listen to it again and go, oh, that's what he meant. Okay, can you hear it again and again and again? It's good. I want to I want to make a little bit of a pivot here on content and talk about your specialty, the yips. As we're recording this tomorrow morning, I'm driving to you Gene, Oregon to go play two rounds of golf hopefully too with Sam
hun CEO of Lab Golf, and we're going to record our conversations. But also we're going to record He's gonna hopefully give me a tutorial on this putter that they just sent to me. Again. It's the DF three, which I've been playing. I don't want to get into too much detail because we'll do in the next episode or maybe the last, but I went with a
broomstick. I've been fascinated by the broomstick because what I've noticed, and you know, we've seen Lucas Glover who had the yips for years, couldn't putt, but was able to maintain his card and stay on tour because he was a great ball striker, but his putting was horrendous. Switched over to a lab Golf putter broomstick and won two weeks in a row. And now lab Golf has exploded. In every video that you see online that talks about they're
just yeah, they're going nuts. And I just couldn't be happier for Sam And I can't wait to just give him a big hug and say congratulations, dude, even did it. But one of the things that I've noticed, and the putter arrived day before yesterday, and I've been able to put an hour or so into getting in practice with it and get the feel of it.
One of the things that I've noticed about my putting, missus, is too much it controls from the left hand, whether I'm pushing it or I'm pulling it or on my takeaway, if it's if it's not sold under the ground, if it's you know, if I'm just dragging it off the ground, it'll it'll turn and stuff. And immediately I've noticed that taking my left hand out of the putting motion with the broomstick has allowed me to stay on
the line that I'm pointing down much. But I know the lab putter will do that too, but I'm able to stay on the line that I want it yep. So I'm curious to ask you about the impact of broomstick putters on the yips. Well, that's a great question, Fred. I'll just tell you that the generic answer is if someone has moderate because if you have mild putting ifts, most people can kind of figure it out by maybe just changing their grip go from standard reverse overlap pomps neutral to say left hand low.
If it's a mild case, that usually fix it. But if it's a moderate to severe case, anything you do to change your technique from mechanics to grip, to set up, to grip pressure to putter or even the style of grip. You know, the actual grip you put on the end
of the putter has a proven track record for helping. Generally, one of one of one or more of those things isn't enough to completely eliminate the yips, because once you have the yips, it's in terms of how the yips work, it's it's one hundred percent psychological, not mechanical, not physical, right once you have them, but but changing how the mechanics work will impact the psychology part in kind of a backdoor kin kind of an indirect way.
Yeah, so yeah, I mean change, going changing from what a standard length putter, say, like a standard like a you know, like a Scottie camera a blade putter, and going to a bigger head like a like a tailor made spider or or like the lab putter, particularly the lab putter, because clearly it's a superior technology because it's it's it's not impossible, it's more difficult to rotate the face open or shut during the forward stroke, and
I think that's the main advantage. So again anything Yeah, and if you're hitting it off the tower, off the heel, it's going to go right on the intended lane, which is exactly it's so basically the face is more stable just before, during, and after impact compared to a typical putter like a face balance putter or heel toe putter or you know that's the traditional type of blade putter. So yeah, I think I think it's great technology.
It makes absolute perfect sense to me. So yes, it would definitely help someone with yips and not and not just the you know, not just the lab putter technology itself, but going to a different style, like like you're doing where it's completely radically different, which is the broomstick is. It's about as radically different as you can make it. Yeah, then that will help with the yips, because the yips are dependent on what is called a neuromuscular
pathway between brain and muscles. That's to some degree a dominant habit, and you have a memory of you have an associated memory with doing that style of putting with yipping. But when you use a radically different type of putter, or a radically different grip on the like for example, a thicker grip on the end right, or or how you position your hands on the putter radically different, like say left hand low, split hand, left hand low,
would be a radical change. You've never yipped, in the case of the of the theoretical golfer with yips. You've never yipped a putt ever with this strange feeling grip, or with this strange putter in your hands, or this strange technique, And so in the short term it will absolutely inhibit any tendency to yip. Hmm. Okay. And you know one of the things they change the rules about broomstick putters a couple of years ago, right about anchoring.
Can't You can't anchor it anymore. Some anchoring basically means you cannot have your hand I guess, your left hand, your lead hand touching your but you can't. You used to anchor it to the top of your sternum, and you can't now you have to have at least a little bit of space there, right, Okay, but it still gives you I mean, you could still hold your left hand your lead hand steady and get a really good pendulum motion with just one hand. Sure, but Easiert's let's not quibble about
it. Anchoring is a superior way of doing it for all kinds of reasons. But we can't do it that way anymore. So it's a non starter, right right, yeah, right, because what happens, I mean, the USGA and the RNA they kind of have a history of this. But if somebody starts winning with something, okay, that's now illegal. Well you know, supreme example, they did that with the wedges. No, there's one that came back even further, which is in fact a friend of mine
was involved in this. A guy named Don Iverson, who was my fellow assistant coach at Portland State University on the golf team. He went to University of Portland when he was in college and he invented the first cro que putter where you putted between your legs, and he was making almost he rarely missed inside fifteen feet putting croquet style. This is back in the early sixties. He's he won a college tournament at Riverside Golf Club in Portland, and at
that time, you know that eras version of today's Peter. Peter Jacobson's the famous pro from Portland, right, So Peter Jacobson. Back then in the late fifties early sixties, was a guy named Bob Doudan, and he happened to be there attending this college tournament and he sees Don putting and making everything, and he had the yips. Bob had the yips at the time, and he was hurting his career. He wasn't making and he cuts on tour. So he tried it out and he starts making everything. So Don makes
him a putter for himself. He goes out on tour and starts I don't think he won with it, but he did. You know, he had a lot of top ten finishes. He was pretty good friends with Sam Snead. Sneid had the putting yips a sort of toward kind of like to the middle ist, not quite at the end of his career, but sort of like the last you know, between the middle and the end of his career, and that last part of his career he started suffering off and on with
a pretty bad case of the yips. So he tries it, he starts making everything. He won the first tournament he used it, He won it on the PGA Tour, and I started putting because if it works for Sammy Steen, I'll try I put it with it. Six months later, the tour board made it illegal, and then the USGA followed. So you're right. They have a tendency when people find something that works really well, they
ban it. Yeah. So I'm just so concerned about the technology that Lab has developed, that Bill Pressey developed on the DF, the Directed Force two point one, that god, it would just be terrible if they go, Okay, if you're the only one making this putter and it's working for so many people, we're not going to allow that anymore. Yeah, I'm just
terrified that. I don't think they'll do it because as long as the putting stroke itself is considered traditional, because golf's very tradition bound sport, right, that's what a lot of the rules are based on tradition. I think you're still using a normal grip and you're doing a normal putting stroke more or less. I don't see how they could possibly justify banning it. I really don't.
Oh, they don't need justification and they just do it. I mean, why did they They changed it with the wedges right, the groove, that's true, Yeah, what was so you know different about those that they were like, yeah, no, you can't help giving you because those you grows when they first came out in the mark I think and Ping was the
first company to make it. It was that was the edges of the U grooves were so sharp compared to the traditional V shape grooves that tour pros who used to hit flyers out of the rough right like out of the light rough where they would get the grass juice forming a film, a liquid film between the face and the cover of the ball, so the ball would fly ten ten fifteen yards further in the air, right, and they would you know,
they at least sometimes doubling the hole because they'd hit it twenty yards over the green right, all of a sudden, they're not doing that, they're getting spin on it. And so that was the main justification that it was changing the game at that level too radically for the players. So that kind of you can kind of see the argument there on that one, but I just I think it's random. Oh well, all right, Jimmy, Well listen. As always, I love these conversations and how many different directions they
can go in just forty five minutes. But it's always an education, it's always entertaining, and I can't wait till we do it again for your two hundred and fortyeth You know, we should do one on the incoming impact of the AI revolution on the game of golf, because it's I think twenty years from now, we'll have AI brained robots that will be carrying the ball four hundred yards in the air with the driver, and the game will be you.
You designed your own robot, you and you're the caddy and you tell the robot you know what club to pick and where to aim, and the robot does the game for you. I can see that happening. That's a
little yeah, right right now. There's actually this incredible tech reviewer named Marquis Brownlee and who just kind of came out that he's also been a lifelong golfer, but he's an incredible tech reviewer and really popular, and he just did a whole thing on the impact that AI is already having on professional golf. Interesting. It's a great video. I'll put a link to that. It's
really interesting. And that's because when we're watching on television, how we can see the ballflight and it's not a random you know, red streak going where the ball is. It's actually what's going on. And there are people and technology all throughout the course with track man of course giving them up to the you know, like within seconds, the details of exactly what the ball is doing and where it's going to land, and they can predict where it's going
to land before it does it. It's really remarkable. And if you have, you know, the Apple Vision Pro, you can watch a tournament with multiple screens going on and feel like you're right anyway, Tech geek stuff, love it. Find it. Marquise Brownie on AI, could I do two quick plugs. I would love that, even though you know I hate marketing. This is me. This is my simple thing. But I you're on my podcast, man, and it's all about the marketing. Go. I
want to hear more about two things. I'll start with it with back to the topic of today's podcast, which is one of the topics, which is how to hit the ball longer off the tea. I have a video. I've had it on my website for I don't know five years. It's called Explosive Power. It's long, it's about I think it's two and a half hours. It's a long one, but I go through every single element of how to increase clubhead speed, make more center face contact, to hit the
ball further with the driver. And it's one of our best sellers on the videos. So that's one plug. The second plug is if you have the yips. Anybody listening who has yips, yourself or you know somebody who has yips, there is hope. I work with more golfers with yips than anybody else on the planet. That's a certainty, and I have a very high success rate and it's only getting better as I'm learning more and more about what
works and what doesn't work and helping people overcome the yips. And I've got this my biggest success so far. I worked with a guy a year and a half ago in Hawaii who when he was in high school was the number one ranked junior in the country and he was playing. At the time, he was playing with people like Scottie Scheffler and beating them right, but very slowly, starting in senior year he started getting full swing yips, and then he got a full ride to an IVY League school. Was the number one
player in the Ivy League school's golf team. The yips slowly got worse over time, and he got so bad by the end of his junior year he had to quit the team. He couldn't he couldn't play, and he eventually quit golf. And he contacted me about a little over a year and a half ago, and he came out to Hawaii and worked with me at Colina
Golf Club for three days. And he is now by the way, At the time, he would only yip on the golf course, not ever on the range, and he was hitting the ball so solid and so far was such a great looking swing that everybody on the range would stop and just stare at him. Even then when he still had the yips, although again not on the range, he would have been ranked one of the top ten ball strikers in the world. That's how good the guy was. And he shared
with me that he played. He played he played at the you know, fred the Presidio in San Francisco from the tips a week before he came out, and the yips were so bad. I think he shot one hundred and ten. So imagine being one of the top ten ball strikers in the world and shooting one hundred and ten. That's how That's how devis stating the yips can be to someone's golf game. So it didn't happen right away. It took them a few months. He had to go home and do a lot
of practice. But he started seeing some significant improvement in the reduction of the yips by the end of the third month after he returned home. And he contacted me about six months ago, he's back then it's actually trending down. He was a zero handicap. He'll be probably a plus three by the end of the end of the year. That's amazing. There is hope even for a severe case like that, it's possible to overcome the yips. Amazing,
incredible story. Yeah, and you can find that all at balancepoint golf dot com. Correct awesome, Jimmy, thanks so much, man, it's always great to talk to Thanks Red having me on again, and we'll do we'll do episode three ninety five. So, as I mentioned during our conversation, I'm headed up to Creswell, Oregon tomorrow to get a tour of the Lab Golf factory. Then I'll have Sam hand give me a tutorial on the best way to take advantage of my new broomstick putter and play a round or two
with Sam at his home course, Emerald Valley Golf Club. It's in Creswell, Oregon, just outside of Eugene, and if everything works properly, I'll record an episode while we're playing and hopefully create some video of that tutorials. Stay tuned for that one and I will personally keep my fingers crossed. I hope your golf season is in full swing and you're playing better than ever.
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