Hi, This is Dave Kern from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I play at Diamond Run Golf Club.
Golf Smarter number four hundred and seventy three, published on January twenty seven, twenty fifteen.
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I get a lot of these people to shoot between like ninety one hundred and five. That's probably two thirds of my new students are in that range. And I say, do you want to lower your scores as quickly as possible by any means necessary? And you'd be surprised most people say no. They go no, I don't care about the short term. I just want to want to hit the ball culture to how it pro hits. But for the guys who say yes, I do, I'll go to that guy's golf bag and I'll start throwing clubs out
of the bag on the ground. Throw the drive, run the ground, throw the three on the ground. Throw the three hybrid are on the ground, and maybe leave everything else in. There's a four or five r and I'll throw those on the ground too. I go play with that set and the guy go, well, I can't play without a driver. I go, well, that's the club that's
costing you a lot of strokes. To score well from a strategic standpoint, you have to know what your limitations are as a player, what your actual ability level is in terms of striking a golf ball, and don't try to hit any hero shots that are mostly based on luck.
Three critical elements for a great golf swing with Jim Waldron. This is Golf Smarter. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast.
Jim, thanks Fred. Great to be here again.
And you know, last time we spoke, I think you were up in Portland and where you spend most of your year teaching at the Balance Point Golf School. But not now.
Now I'm on the north shore of Oahu.
This is my twenty first year where I get to spend most of the winter time in Hawai.
A little little better than Portland weather.
Yeah, it's it's much better. So and you know, and I spend my my actual home is actually east of Portland, seven hours up in the Willawa Mountains, and so right now at my house it's probably you know, ten degrees above zero with a couple of feet of snow in the ground.
So this is quite the contrast.
Yeah, nice, nice, All right, we're all we all hate you. Now, let's get on with the show.
I get that a lot.
Yeah, I bet, I bet. I guess right now, you and I are the only two people in the industry who are not at the PGA show.
Yeah, I mean I've I've been a couple of times, but you have. Oh yeah, it's good. It's a cool thing. It's a it's a fun show. It's it's geared more toward the club professional, uh, director of golf general manager than teaching pros. I mean, it's it's more of a merchant that's what they call it, the merchandise show.
Well, isn't it more for buyers than it?
Well, it's basically a trade show for the golf industry that's put on by the PGA of America. But it's it's mainly it's mainly the equipment company. That's pretty much. Yeah, right, do.
You anticipate hearing anything new and exciting this year.
You know, I think we were pretty close to have reached the point of no return on the technology front. I mean, you know, there's only so much tweaking they can do given the rules, the RNA and the USG limits to what, you know, how much better technology can get. So unless they change the rules draft dramatically, we're not going to see I don't think significant technological improvements.
So that means that people are going to have to keep their driver for more than a year. Yeah, yeah, how are we going to survive if we can't buy new drivers thinking it's going to add ten yards every single year?
You know, it's funny because that's I think that is part of the reason we're hearing about declining participation rate. I think that kind of marketing strategy is sort of boomerang. I think people are a lot of golfers are getting are feeling a bit ripped off by the equipment company marketing hype.
Really, I mean you're getting sense from your from your students, you hear that.
Kind of feedback, Yeah, because you know, if you're if you're a company that puts out a new driver every six months, and the driver is supposed to be seventeen yards or whatever it is, twelve yards further. You know, you totaled it up in five years. You should be hitting it like you should be hitting your driver, like six hundred yards, right, I mean, it just doesn't make
any sense. So you know, at some point the logical line of the golfer kicks in and goes, wait a minute, this doesn't seem right.
So I don't know, they're still not getting fitted for the club anyway. They're just buying what their friend has.
Well some are some are getting fitted but which definitely helps. But and don't get me wrong, I mean some of the newer stuff in the last few years.
Oh, there's there was a huge change in the in the equipment. But now, like you said, they kind of reached the limit.
Yeah, yeah, I mean the lower spin. If you're a decent player with relatively high clubhead speed, those low spin drivers really do help you hit the ball further. There's no question, no question about it. So even though I'm getting up in age, I'm sixty three now, I still have fair amount of clubbed speed, and I've always struggled with hitting these, especially in the wind and Hawaii, hitting the driver high or it hits the If you have too much spin, it'll just carry on that wind in
balloon and you lose a lot of distance. So I've been playing around with the SLDR. Haven't quite got it figured out yet as far as where I want to put the setting, I'm still I'm still testing it, but it definitely hits it further because it does spin less.
Wow, does it? Shouldn't the average golfer, the you know, the recreational golfer who mid to higher handicap, shouldn't they avoid those adjustable clubs. Shouldn't they get it set once and just leave it be.
Well, I think that's what they mostly do. It's it just sort of makes it easier to do a little bit of testing on your own, because you know, you really don't have time and a fitting to totally nail it down, and the fitting is designed to kind of gets you in the ballpark and then you've got to got to tweak it by going to the range and taking to the course and playing in real world conditions and figuring out you know, most people generally play one to maybe five courses that are on the kind of
the ROTA for for golf courses, they play frequently, and so they kind of know you know what, because you know so much. It depends on how firm the fairways are and what the wind is like those two things, and also how long the golf course is, and and you've got to you've got to dial in the trajectory that will produce the overall maximum amount of carry and roll. Right. So like in Hawaii, we're oftentime you're hitting into a wind. Uh. Generally speaking, the good Hawaii players hit a low draw.
That's the shot you see good players here all the time off the team, I mean really low by mainland standards, right. And the only time they don't do that is if it's been raining a lot, then they might. If it's if the fairies are really soft, which isn't that often, they'll they'll they'll bump up the loft on the setting and then you want to get most of your distance
from carry. But typically in Hawaii the fairways are pretty firm, particularly in the side of the island that I live on, which is the driver side, and you can get I've seen people all of the time get thirty forty fifty yards a role here all the time. Wow. And so if you couple a low spin driver that hits it low to begin with, lowish, so it'll bore through the
wind better. With relatively low backspin, you might carry it out there and say a two club wind, you might hit it out there two thirty two fifty in the air and then get thirty to fifty yards a roll on it.
For those of us who get to play golf in the winter, and I apologize to all of those who were confined for four to five to eight months and don't get to play, But for those who do get to play twelve months a year, why is winter golf so much more difficult? I've noticed that, you know, when I look back at my score as year to year to year, they balloon in, you know, October, November, December, January, things just go up. It's like, what is so different about the game.
Well, you don't get the runoff, like we said, you don't get the roll on the driver typically, so the ball just sort of sits and even might even plug. It won't roll at all.
And it doesn't fly as far.
Doesn't fly as far. The ball's colder. You're colder, so you're not moving, your muscles aren't warm enough, and so you're you're not you know, you're not contracting the muscles efficiently, you're not loose enough, you're tighter. That would all those things reduce your clubhead speed. And you got to deal
with the mud and the bad lies. And you know, if you hit it, if it's a summertime line and you hit it, say like a sixteenth of an inch fat, it's still going to go out there close to the normal distance, right, might be five yards short or something. If your normal carry you the sixteenth of an inch fat in the ground, so wet, the ball's going nowhere. So it's just harder for all those all those reasons.
And how do we remedy that? What do we do to.
Don't play in the winter time?
Moved to the east coast or into the northern part, or moved to your place in Portland or east of Portland and just hide yourself from the snow. Okay, so, but those of us who are weather whimps and won't move to the cold weather.
Well, you're asking the wrong guy. And I'm like the worst. I'm the worst cold weather rain. I don't even play in the I just don't do it. I just don't enjoy it.
Yeah, I don't either. I mean, I definitely like drizzle maybe, but if it's rain, I'm not interested in playing.
Yeah, I got. I don't mean I play in the rain here because it's warm rain, but but I don't like what it's cold and raining and I don't find it fun at all.
Last time I was in Hawaii, I was on Kauwhai and I played in Poipu and the pro there and he's been on the show. I can't remember his name, I'm sorry, but he was saying that that's what the locals know about slowing your swing speed in the big wins.
Yeah, I mean. The idea is if you swing, see, the more club at speed you have, everything else being equal, the more backspin you produce.
You know, on the cover of the wall, when.
The back third of the ball gets squished between the against the club face, that creates friction, which which which creates backspin. So if you have a lot of club at speed and you're hitting into a win, you get that ballooning ball effect like I mentioned where go. It might start out at normal trajectory, then it quickly balloons straight up and then fall straight down. You get literally no role. So the idea and the wind. This has
been known for years for generations. Early you take one or two more clubs and then cut your tempo down by may maybe ten or twenty percent. So instead of between like a number ten speed, swing it like a number eight speed, and that that produces, you know, like a baseball and knuckleball. It produces almost knuckleball effect on the golf ball, so it'll bore through the wind with very little spin.
Do you think there's any chance that you know, we talked about the clubs having reaching their limit in development. What do you think about the golf balls. Do you think there's any change in the future for golf balls maybe be smaller or I mean, well, you.
Know there used to be.
Are you aware there used to be a smaller ball.
Yeah, I read that recently. I was blown away by it.
And they travel farther, they go further. Yeah, they're a little harder to make solid contact because they're smaller. Obviously, so it's a little harder to get the sweet spot on the back of the ball because it is smaller.
Well, but when those balls were around, the club faces weren't as large as they are now either, right.
That's true, Yeah, yeah, but that was the British ball. That's the ball they played in Ireland in the UK, and I forgot when it went out.
I think it was be twenty something years ago.
Twenty five years ago made the switch to the American ball, and I don't even recall exactly what the American ball is one point six eight inches. I'm thinking the British ball was maybe one point three five or one point something like that.
It was very small.
But that's pretty small.
So where is where is the innovation in golf going to come from?
It has to come from the instruction side, which is what I'm trying to do, as you know, have been for twenty five years.
AND's why we've talked so frequently, because of your instruction and your insides.
Well, you know, we have this quit rate. It's pretty high. We have the highest quit rate of any amateur sport and have had for a long time, but it's gotten worse in the last I don't know, ten, ten twelve years. The peak was I think in two thousand. I think we had something like thirty five million regular golfers in America.
And what years do you think that was? I mean, how closely did that coincide with Tigers.
Yeah it was okay, it was at the peak. Yeah, it was right around two thousand and two thousand and one, if I believe, And then we've had fining participation rates. So we had that little bump from Tiger, you know. And I think the Tiger thing, people who normally wouldn't have any interest in taking a golf took up the game,
particularly the millennial generation started taking up the game. And then it kind of fell off pretty sharply, and then after the economy collapsed in two thousand and eight, really the participation really went down. The only place where it's significantly growing in participation rates right now is in a lot of the Asian countries China, especially India, and it's no secret that those two countries have the fastest growing middle class of any countries on the planet. Southeast Asia, Thailand,
it's middle class has grown fairly, fairly significantly. It's pretty popular there. Singapore, it's popular mostly among the wealthy elite. It's growing. Even Vietnam it's starting to grow. So there's Asia sort of booming, but it's declining here for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is it's it's always been a hard game to be reasonably you know, at least reasonably good, which would be I guess what'd
you call that? Maybe fifteen handicap or better. But you know, a lot most people are not a fifteen handicap or better. As you know, they're higher than that. And some folks don't mind being a twenty five handicap and never getting any better. But I say, by the end of their fifth year, they get down to a twenty five or twenty somewhere in there, and they never see any improvement.
But they're playing for social reasons, right primarily. But for the people who enjoy the challenge of getting better, they general, a lot of those folks hit a wall even if they take what I would call traditional instruction, and then they get some improvement, well, i'm you will get significant improvement, but the majority get little or no improvement. Uh, they get frustrated and they quit. So it's a big topic right now in the golf instruction world. How do we
find a way to solve this dilemma? And I think the big mistake has been This is going to sound strange coming from me because because in early on in my career I was I was known for the opposite of what I'm about to say. But I think I think there's been way too much sort of onus put on a quick fix in terms of science and technology, in terms of instruction, and we're starting to see the backlash.
In the last i'd say a year or two. People are taking track man lessons, they're taking three dimensional you know, three D swing capture, motion capture technology lessons, and again there will always be a minority will improve no matter what type of lesson you give them. But for the vast majority of people, they're walking. This is This is the I'm hearing from students who go this route and then come to see me, and they're saying, yeah, I
understand now why I suck, but I can't. But I'm not any better from knowing how badly how bad I am at this right and from seeing myself compared to Tiger in sixteen different ways. I see the Tiger's doing these sixteen things right, and I'm doing the sixteen things totally the opposite. But how does that help me be better? If it's purely intellectual knowledge, which most of this sort
of high tech science oriented instruction is geared toward. If it doesn't translate into the subconscious mind, which is the part of your brain that controls your body motion in every sport. Right, then what good is it? Then?
The answer is.
Not very much.
I think that what I personally have experienced is the course management, more than swing mechanics, helped me lower my score.
Yeah.
Well, that's a cool thing about golf.
I mean, the good teachers know this, that there is more than one way to lower your score.
But the thing about.
A lot of golfers is they're not like you. They don't really, at least is what they've claimed. I mean, I'm not sure it's one hundred percent true.
But is that a phone or is that really a Rooster's at rooster?
Yeah, roosters are all over the island. I see how bad is it three in the morning when they're doing that.
Oh, that's really funny.
A lot of people it's not so much about score. I'm in one of these, I'm in one of this. I'm in this camp. Actually, it's about how you make the score. And you know most people though who I interview, you know, potential new students. I ask you, would you rather lower your score by any means necessary?
Or is there a precise way you.
Want to play golf, And nine out of ten people will tell you they want to They want to be good in the long game, right, and so they don't care about course management. Right. It's just because it doesn't matter if they're on the range or on the golf course. When you mishit a golf shot badly, you get a bad feeling in your mind and your body. Right, it doesn't feel good. It feels kind of embarrassing or humiliating or depressing, or you get angry. You want to learn
how to find that sweet spot more often. Right, That's that's the big to me, that's the big challenge to golf. I mean anybody, If anybody spends enough time on a putting green without any professional instruction, they'll figure out a way to be at least a decent putter, if not a great putter. Same with maybe chip shots, little short chip shots around there. You can if you spend enough time, you're going to figure out a way to be halfway
decent at those two skills. If someone like a three iron off a tight line in a fair way.
Good luck, lon's a three iron, Well, that's.
Traditionally at least to be a two iron even a one iron when I was a kid.
But yeah, right, but when we're talking about these fifteen handicap and above, they don't known three irons.
But I'm saying that that would be the challenge if they have a good swing.
I mean, if you have a really good swing, you should be a hit a one iron off the fairway, right, I mean, it shouldn't matter. The point is that is a hard shot that even a hybrid is going to be, even a three hybrid off the tight line. If you're an average golfer with not not a very good golf swing, is something you could you know, you're not gonna hit it that well that often. So it comes down to how do you master a golf swing that will allow you to play good golf for you know, a lot
of years into the future. That's that's the thing that trust me, almost every teaching pro that's what we hear all the time is how do I hit the ball more consistently, you know better, more consistently.
Now we all know there's no perfect in golf. It doesn't exist. It can't, So how do you master a golf swing?
Why? That's that's like a podcast that would have to be like like a thousand hours long. You know, it's it's such a huge topic, but I mean it's it starts with the obvious, the basic stuff, which would be a you have to be reasonably healthy and fit. You can't have any kind of major injury like low back or wrist or shoulder. You got to be reasonably healthy. You have to have a reasonably strong core. You have to be reasonably flexible right in order to do the
proper motion. So I would start there with you have to be somewhat fit. You have to have golf clubs that are somewhat close to fitting you perfectly. They don't have to be perfect, but they have to be in the ballpark. Can't. You can't play good golf with the instrument that doesn't fit your body right. So you know, it's club's the right length, the right overall weight, things like that. And then it's it's grip stance, grip set up.
And by grip, I don't mean just hand position, I mean overall grip pressure and some other stuff having to do with your hands. You're set up, your starting position is really really that's that's probably the most important mechanical fundamental is to set up and there's no reason not to set up as well as a tour pro. It takes zero athletic ability. All it takes is standing in front of a mirror for you know, a few minutes a day for about maybe six weeks, and you can
master a tour pro setup and then aim. You have to be able to aim the club face exactly at your target. That's often not discussed, but I would guess that in our go out we do these three day boot camp golf schools called Great Shot, and I would estimate it at least ninety five percent of our students are badly mis aiming the club face, sometimes by as much as thirty to forty yards off at the driver. Typically it's to the if they're a right hand at
golfers to the right. So I'll say, aim at that telephone pole holding up the driving range net on the far left pole, and they'll aim at the middle pole, which is, you know, forty yards to the right of the far left pole, and I'll go, are you aiming at the far left pole and I'll point at it, go yeah, I go no, No, you're aiming at.
That one that's three poles over.
And then he does and believe me. So I put my alignment stick down in align with his club face so it's perpendicular the club face and hold it real still, and he walks behind me and sees it. And you should see the look on people's faces. They're like, well, no wonder, I can't play be cause I'm not even aiming it close to where I think I am. So those those have traditionally been called the three pre swing
fundamentals pre motion fundamentals, you know. And to be honest, if you're about a twelve handicap or higher, the odds of you being.
Spot on on.
Grip, grip, pressure, set up, and aim are close to zero percent. That's how rare it is if you're a twelve or higher. So if you're like a you know, twelve handicapped to thirty five handicap, there's a really strong chance that.
You're somewhere between a little bit off.
And more likely way off in those three really really important fundamentals. So it starts with those three, and then, you know, the really hard part is once your three pre swing fundamentals are spot on, then you've got to get these the motion parts, you know, the body, the moving body part, fundamentals to be correct, and that's where it's it's I would say traditional instruction has fallen down for lots of reasons. But in the motion itself, there's
three basic categories. There's mechanics, which is which is basically how the body parts move. You know, the range of motion that they move on, the angles relative to the ground, relative to each other, you know, the so called swing planear swing geometry stuff. That's the mechanics. And then there's balance, which is a really important I call it the supreme fundamental.
You call that the name of your You call that the name of your school, don't you.
Yeah, name of my school is called balance point because of the three which are which are coordination, balance and mechanics. Balance Trump's mechanics and coordination you could have. You could have the best swing in the world right now. Actually, I just saw a guy at the Sony Open last week who I'm now putting up.
Tied with Justin Rose.
His best golf swing in the world is twenty one year old kid who shot sixty one on Friday at while I Justin Thomas, I didn't even know he shot sixty one. I happened to be there early Friday afternoon and I had a meeting and at lunch, and then after that I went to the range and it was about one o'clock and he's out. He had just just shot sixty one, unbeknownst to me. But I want to I always go watch was whoever has the best swing in the range. So I happened to just watch him,
and I was like, well, who's this kid? Justin Thomas. Never heard of him before, But for your listeners, go check out go YouTube Justin thomas golf swing. You're going to see it literally a technically perfect golf swing anyhow. So yeah, so you could have Justin Thomas or Justin Rose's golf swing mechanically and their tempo and their rhythm, which is the coordination part, so the timing part, right,
the sequencing part. But if you lose your balance at any point in the swing, you're going to hit a terrible shot. Right. So so those are the three things you got to learn to You got you have to learn e motion a golf swing motion where you start out in rock solid balance, you swing in rock solid balance. Rock solid balance was Ben Hogan's turn, by the way,
and you finish in rock solid balance. Uh, and then you've got to do the timing part, which is basically for mid to high handicap that's mainly swinging at the proper speed, the proper tempo with good rhythm. Right. So that's sort of a that's sort of a very big picture overview, Fred, what what it would take to get your get your mind wrapped on how do I learn to hit the ball better?
I want to back up to aim for just a moment. Are you talking about in your preshot routine a lot of aiming? What where are we aiming? Are we aiming the ball? Are we aiming our feet?
One thing the only thing that matters, not the only thing, but the main thing that matters by far, is only one thing, and that's the club face. So that means the leading edge, which is the bottom edge on an iron, and the top line, which which applies on a wood or a hybrid. You want to have the leading edge or the top line, as the case may be, exactly
ninety degrees to your target line. So your target line is that imagining line on the ground that runs from your feet when you stand at the beginning of your routine, when you stand behind the ball about ten feet behind your ball, and you look look down on the ground, and you got to put a line there, imagining line between between you know, where your feet are through the ball, all the way out to your target.
That's your target line. It's imagining line.
On the ground. And then when you walk in and aim your club face, when you start to set up to the ball, you got to put that club face exactly ninety degrees to that line on the ground, so the club face is aiming exactly at your target. Now, of course we're this is this is if you're trying it a straight ball. You're not trying to curve it on purpose. Right. It's a little different if you're trying to slice it or hook it, but that's what. Yeah.
And then all you're doing with your body, with your feet, your knees, your hips, your shoulders, your eyes, your head, is you're aligning your body on a second line on the ground, which is called the body line, which is roughly three feet parallel left of your target line. Right, So you've got like a railroad track. You got the
two tracks of a railroad. Right. There's the inner track where you're where you're standing, where your feet are, and there's the outer outer rail, which is where the which is where the target line is. So you got these two parallel tracks, right, And so what you have to realize is most almost everybody who comes to see me doesn't understand this.
This is one of the reasons.
Why I'm always talking about I always use the word illusions a lot in my teaching, and one of the big ones is called the paralax solution, which is if you and I were in Kansas in a cornfield with a railroad track running through it, flat flat, flat all the way to the horizon looking but cornfields, and we're standing on the railroad tracks looking out to the horizon, it's going to look like the rails get closer together the further out they go, right. Yep, that's the parallax solution.
And so the reason why people mid to high handicaps especially struggle with aim is a lot of them don't even know you're supposed to really aim the club face precisely at the target, at the target alone.
Now we focus on our stants on our feet, yeah, and your.
Body is not.
I hit shots all the time in the school where my feet, even my shoulder girdle is thirty degrees left or right where my club face is pointing, and I still hit the ball exactly where the target is. The body has almost I won't say none, but it has very little influence on where the ball goes. But matters is where the club face is pointing. It's like aiming the sight line on a gun. You've got to aim the club face precisely at your intended target.
Now, when you talk about the club face aiming at the target, we're talking about at address or contact.
Well, well contact too if you're trying to hit a straight ball. Yeah, but it starts with setups. So when you're setting up to the ball. Part of setup is this aim in alignment procedure. You're aiming the club face. You're aligning your body parallel left of the target line right and so those two lines never get further away and they never get closer together. So I get people all the time. I had a mechanical engineer out well never forget, from Mexico years ago, at fifteen years ago,
come up to port and take the school. He was about a eighteen handicap if I remember something like fifteen handicap maybe, and we always explaining this. He goes, no, no, that's not right, He goes, If I don't aim my body at the target, how is the ball going to go there? I go, Really, I go, why would you have to aim your body at the target? I go, Are you going to shoot yourself out of a cannon? Are you going to the target? No, you're standing to the side of the In golf, we stand to the
side of the ball. We stand to the side of the target line, which connects the ball to the target.
We don't.
We're not straddling it like in croquet, where you're you know, you're running a croque out, you know, through your legs, right.
But the issue is most.
Other sports, with a few exceptions, your body line and your target line are the same line. So when you when you serve a tennis ball, same the two lines are the same. You're standing on the target line. Right when you shoot an arrow or shoot a rifle. You're standing on the target.
Line shooting a basket throwing a.
Ball in basketball, same lines.
But imagine if if rifle shooting was like golf, and I actually do this in the school, I take my golf club and turn it into a rifle, hold it like a rifle against my shoulder, and then I stick my arms out to full extension in front of me, and then I pulled the trick, and I pulled the trigger. In golf, you're standing to the side, about three feet or so to the side of the actual target. You're not. You're not You're not standing on top of the target line, right.
So so the only thing that really.
Matters is though not the only thing again, but the main thing that really matters is are you aiming the club face exactly at the target or not? And because of that illusion I mentioned, people, either consciously or unconsciously or both, they aim particularly the right, the left side of their shoulder girdle, they aim that at the target.
So they you watch high handicapped golfers, they look over there, they like they side along their left shoulder and try to get their left shoulder in line with what they perceive their target to be out there. And good players don't do that because they know that their left shoulders should never aim at the target. Ever. No part of your body ever aims at the target ever. Not your feet, not your knees, not nothing. You're standing to the side of the target line, right. But if you aim your
if you aim your your left shoulder to target. Even even if you did start out by aiming the club face correctly, if you then rotate your chest so your left shoulder is aiming at the target, and you look down at your club face, which is actually aiming at the target, it'll look like it's aiming to the left of the target, and you'll either consciously or unconsciously or both, you will rotate the face open to the right, and now it'll look in your mind like it's pointing at
the target. It's not. It's pointing to the right of the target. That's the most common mistake we see in aim in alignment, people missing the club face way way right at where they think they are.
So now we have let's just pretend that our feet are aligned just to the side of the target, not at the target. Man, our club face is pointing directly at the target. We're in alignment there and I'm still hooking the ball.
Oh there could be. But so you're asking why, Well, first, first of all, this is one of the first things I tell on my new students. You have to realize that the game of golf, particularly the long game, the ball striking part we're talking about, it's so complex that when you fix one area and make it more how a pro does it. It doesn't. It's not. It's in no way, shape or form a guarantee you're going to
hit a good shot. It's just it just increases the probability you'll hit a good shot right, So you can you could hit every you could hit. You could have the perfect aim in alignment, and you can still hit it fifty yards left or right of your target because the things things that are going to happen incorrectly in your body and club motion right.
And we wonder why people are leaving the game.
You see, That's what I'm saying people. I think a lot of people take up the game. They watch it on TV and they think, oh it's I can do that.
It looks simple, or they play a video game and think I can do this exactly.
Yeah, yeah, because you know your club face can your club face not just the club fate. The entire club head is rotating in a huge five hundred and forty degree arc from the beginning of the swing to the end in three spatial dimensions, is going up toward the sky and the back swing and then down toward the
ground on the forwards and then up toward the sky again. Right, it's going away from the target line on the back swing, and then it's going toward the target line and on the downswing, and then away from the target line to the finish, and it's going in a big circle. We call that the horizontal dimension away you know, to the right of the target on the back swing, and then toward the target to the left on the forward swing. So the club ad is moving in three spatial dimensions, right,
the vertical dimension, the fifth dimension, the horizontal dimension. And you have the ability because of the way, because of human anatomy, you have the ability to rotate the face way open relative to that five hundred and forty degrees of path the club that's moving in or way shut, which people do I mean typically you know, average golfers do that. So the challenge is to learn something about the basic sort of physics in the basic geometry of what the club is supposed to do, and then how
your body motion affects that. And we basically call that there's there's six laws of club motion that people should know about it. They want to learn to masterball striking, and there's there's thirty laws of body motion. Now some of those are much more important than others. But other thirty laws, there's about ten that are really important. Twenty
not so much. But if you violate one of those ten laws of body motion badly, right, then you're going to automatically violate at least one, probably all six laws of club motion. And that's why people again, that's why people find it difficult when I first think up the game as beginners, because they are violating those those you know, those really important ten laws of body motion.
All right, So if we had and it's hard to say everything being equal, but if somebody has excellent swing mechanics and a lousy mental game playing with somebody that has not such great mechanics but an excellent mental game and attitude, and they're they're basically the same, you know, a handicapped I think, I mean, like, who's going to be the better player? I mean, what what? What falls to be more important?
Do you think it's real? A lot of it depends on what they're if. It depends on what their handicap is, I think.
But let say they're equal, they're about fifteens or twelves.
Yeah, well yeah, I mean I mean literally, even if they're equally depends what what what their skill is in terms of scoring. But if they were like if there were two high handicaps, one with uh with with Let's say let's say there's there's uh uh two two twenty handicaps playing together, but one of the twenty handicaps is actually a ten handicap ball striker, right, uh. And the other guy and he and he's a thirty handicap at
the mental game. If you could, if you could handicap the skills like that, So he's a thirty handicap at the mind stuff, ten handicap at the mechanical stuff, right, And then it's the opposite one the other guys he's a thirty handicap ball striker, but he's a ten handicap in mental game. I would say it would be a toss up. I would say they both would probably play pretty close to the same score. But where it gets where the mental game becomes more important, is when you
get down around ten handicap or lower. Then I would give the edge for sure to the mental hand the guy with the better mind game. And if they were thirty five handicaps, I would give I would give the edge to the guy with the better golf swing mechanics.
And I've always been under the impressioner. I actually my whole basis on starting the show is I always felt that if you had a good mental game and understood course management or I like to call that strategy, you can lower your score faster than if you just focus on your mechanics.
Well, there's no question about it. Okay, yeah, from a speed, from a speed of lowering your score. I tell this to my students all the time. I get a lot of these people to shoot between like ninety one hundred and five. That's probably two thirds of my new students are in that range. And I say to them, do you want to do you want to lower your scores as quickly as possible by any means necessary, And you'd be surprised most people say no. Like I mentioned earlier,
they go, no, I don't. I don't care about the short term. I just want to want to hit the ball closer to how it pro hits it right. But for the guys who say yes, I do, I go I walked. I'll go to that guy's golf bag and I'll start throwing clubs out of the bag on the ground, throw the driver on the ground. Throw the three wood on the ground, right, throw the three hybrid are on the ground, and maybe leave everything else in right. Well, if there's a four or five iron, I'll throw those
on the ground too. I go, okay, let's go play with that set. And the guy go, well, I can't play without a driver. I go, well, that's that's that's the club that's cost you a lot of strokes, right, So you got it to score well. From a strategic standpoint, you have to know what your limitations are as a player, what your actual ability level is in terms of striking a.
Golf ball, and don't try to hit any shots.
Don't try to hit any hero shots that are mostly based on luck.
Right. Well, that's my number one edict, which is never follow a bad shot with a stupid shot exactly.
And know how far you actually hit the clubs. We've talked about that before. Know what your actual real world the yardages are, not the one out of ten good ones you hit in the range. That one doesn't count because you're only going to hit a ten percent of the time. You've got to know what your actual yardages are.
And then I go do playing lessons with people where they only have maybe six or seven clubs in the bag, and I tell them where to aim and what club to hit and how far they should try to hit it. And the guy who shoots one hundred and five shoots like ninety two the first time. We do this right, and they can't believe it. They're like in shock. I go, they go, that's really fast improvement. I go, well, yeah, because you.
Think of all the lost balls.
All the penalty strokes from lost balls or you know, or poor shots because you hit a ball in the rough or in the sand. You know. So strategy is certainly a very fast way. But then on the other hand, you've got a guy who's got a good strategy, has good clubs, thoses yardages and the shooting say mid to high eighties. And then a year goes by no improvement, another year goes by no improvement. Strategy it can only
take you so far. Then you got to ask yourself, Okay, how am I going to get better at this game? And it really comes down to is do you want to work on your mental game? Do you want to work on your on your ball striking, do you want to work on your putting, or do you want to work on your short game. Those are the four main skill areas. And I always tell people, look, especially if you're working for a living, you don't have time to
change all four areas. Just pick one area of the four for the next year and try to get much try to try to get significantly better in that one area, and practice just enough in the other three areas so
you don't lose ground there. Right. So, if you're working on ball striking and you take a lesson from someone like me, and I say to you, Okay, we're going to work on your swing for the next year, and for the first six weeks, you're going to work on improving the mechanics of your takeaway by doing this drill every day in the mirror for fifteen minutes. Right, But
you still got to practice. You're putting a little bit, your short game a little bit, and you got to work on your mental focus skills a little bit, just so you don't go backwards in those three areas, right, Right. And then by the end of the year, that guy will be significantly better because they'll be hitting a lot more fairways and greens in regulation than he was at the start of the year because the mechanics are better.
Yeah, twenty fourteen for me was a big, big year for dropping my scores down. And it was really for me. I focused a lot at what I found to be the biggest hole in my game, which my short game and the concept of turning three shots into two when you're inside one hundred yards. My problem is I still can't put from four feet.
See, that's part of it. That's why you can't like you know, it's I'm always reluctant to make really ironclad statements about how to improve because so much of it depends on the person, So much of it's an individual, case by case basis. So I always usually try to like sort of temper my remarks with like in general or for most people, or with a certain name and within a certain handicap range. This is this, this statement
is likely to be true. But it really comes down to if you study your game, and there are there are applications now you can put in your smartphone for basically when you finish the whole you can quickly, you know, type in you know how many pots did you get up and down? Uh, even track the length of your drive, whether you get the fare away. You want to figure out what is what is the weak area, what's the what's the number one weakest area that's costing you the
most strokes? And then you want to you want to fix that area. You want to fix that that issue. That's how you do right. But again, we talked about this. I think the last time I was on your show, we talked about sort of the new burgeoning field of golf statistics, and I think Mark Brody's book was brought You brought up his book and some other people.
Mark was on the show.
Yeah, And to me, that's Iron Klett.
And I've been teaching this for over twenty five years now. I always tell people, look, you know, I know you hate to I know what defies conventional wisdom that putting is really important and then short game is really important, and it's just not true. What what what costs specially especially mid to high handicapped golfers where they lose strokes.
You know, again, there could be one out of one hundred people where this doesn't apply, but nine to ninet of one hundred people who are right around fifteen handicaps or higher, if they could improve their long gain by say twenty five percent, they would score so much better because they're they are losing golf balls, they are hitting balls out of bounds, they are hitting balls in the deep rough you know, behind trees, in the fairway, bunkers,
they're missing they're typically missing the green in their next shot. So now they have to rely on a really, really good short game thin get up and down for par right.
So I don't mean an average I mean like a tour pro quality.
If you get in a really bad situation and your second shot on a part four where you're short sighted yourself right, or you've got a really bad lie in a bunker, or you're in the long grass, you'd have to have a tour pro quality short game to get up and down right, which one of the odds of the average golfer is going to have it. Even if you practiced a lot, it's going to get to a tour pro quality short games not not very practical. So so you know, I think we talked about how last time.
My belief is that you need to need to learn a good enough golf swing where you can hit the driver long and straight, because if you can hit a driver long and straight, you should be able to hit your irons and your hybrids in the green also, you know the right distance straight.
Let's talk about tour players who are playing every day all day and have phenomenal mechanics and hopefully have a decent enough mental game to get or maybe they have none whatsoever because they've just always been a good golfer. How much help is a coach at that point?
Well, that's interesting you bring there, because that's the big thing that's being talked to in the golf industry because a tiger, right, yeah, yeah, I got is what his fifth coach since he turned pro? I think it's his eighth coach in his in his lifetime. Chris Como's his new coach. Yeah, well, I can tell you this. There's only a handful of people on tour right now, on the regular tours, European Tour, PGA Tour, who do not have a swing coach, very very few do not.
But should they be tweaking these mechanics that they've gotten them to this level?
Yeah, that's the big That's the big argument, isn't it. I would say say, if you look at the track record overall, it's more positive than negative. And more words, when when a tour pro works with a coach, most of the time, they see somewhere between a minor level improvement and a dramatic level of improvement. But there's there's always that sort of maybe twenty percent of the time where they can get worse. There's that that there's sort of like that level of risk. Right.
My philosophy is.
You have to do a really really close statistical analysis of what their ball striking stats are to see would it ever justify making a radical In general, if a tour pro came to me and wanted to work on a golf swing, I can't imagine that would make a radical change to their like Tiger's gone through with his teachings.
I would I would be inclined. I'd be more as a coach, more along the lines and making like minor to moderately changes to their golf swing, but also work on their mental gain, their mental focus, their routine, controlling their emotions and the short game and their putting kind of a mixture. But to do what Tiger does, Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty radical, isn't it.
Yeah? Well, what would you do if if Tiger called? What would you tell Tiger if he called you and said, I need some help.
I like a lot of the stuff that Sean Foley did with him in his golf swing. Obviously, Tiger like me, I'm in the I've been in the bad, bad back camp and golf for two decades now, so I've been through the ring around. I've pretty much tried everything, so I know how that can affect your game. I wouldn't make I would only make one major change. I actually believe Tiger Woods only has what I would call one
major swing flaw. Right now, you know that the swing we've seen since he came back from his back what two months ago, He's already made some changes that are better. He has less forwards athleen than he had had the last two years. There were some There were some driver swings. You can find him on YouTube if you positive impact. His hands were like eight inches ahead of the ball that impact with the driver, which is way too much shaffleen, right, and not just the driver, all the clubs in the bag.
He was getting too much shaffleing and that that could creates all kinds of problems with solidness of contact and also accuracy. Right. So he seems to kind of fix that for the most part. So assuming that fixes is permanent, he still has one really big flaw. That is something you would see like in a twenty five handicap. You know what I'm talking about it? No, well, well he dips. He and I don't mean dip a little bit. Most good players dip about one to three inches, so they
increased their forward tilted. The torso spine angle toward the ground increases a little bit most good most pros do like an inch or so on the transmission. He dips down like eight to ten inches, so his chest gets too close.
To the ground on a down swing.
As soon as he starts his downcing.
Yeah, he dips. Yeah. Yeah, So that means he's gonna hit He's gonna hit really really fat unless he stands up, which of course he does most of the time. He has to stand up by almost the same amount he hit the ball solid, So talk about a compensation move. He's got to totally stand up as he's striking the ball by several inches. And you know, he's been doing this since he was a kid, so it's a really strong habit. But I think it's good. I think it's
really holding him back. And if it were me, I'd say, Tiger, I know you don't want to fix this. Probably because it's something it's so natural to you, so deeply ingrained with, you know, probably a million golf swings in your life. But I think it could be fixed. I would fix that, and I wouldn't fix much else. Uh. Mechanically he has he has a known tempo flaw, which is if you look at his driving range swing, it's noticeably slower and
smoother tempo, particularly with the drive. And he's talked about this where he gets the driver on the range like really long and really straight with a much slower, smoother tempo, and he walks to the first tee and he gets short and he gets fast. Wow, I mean really fast. So he has again a flaw you would see in a mid to high handicap amateur, right.
Yeah, I mean, like I can't tell you how many shows that we've done, and and just on taking your game from the range to the course, knowing that amateurs, it's one of the biggest complaints. I'm a scratch golfer on the driving range, right, but even for that level, I'm shocked.
Oh yeah, although I have to say I would say he probably suffers from that more than any other well known pro. And again his credit he talks about it. He says.
He says, I'm ranger Rick, meaning on the driving range, Ranger Rick.
He goes. But the longest walk, that's the old saying, is from the range to the first te he goes. He says, he's always struggled, apparently his whole life with taking his range swing to the golf course. It's surprising, isn't it.
Yeah, I really is. I'm kind of stunned here.
Yeah, let me tell you else.
I would tell Tiger, so other than those two physical one being temple, the other would being the dipping too much. I would say I would have him do extreme exaggeration drills. I'd have him open the club face on his driver, like, you know, twenty degrees and aim way way left. I'll say, Tiger, let's see if you hit one hundred and fifty yard slice and have it end up at that tree in the right side of the range. Then have him do
the opposite hundred and twenty five yard hook. Show me, show me a driver that never gets higher than fifteen
feet off the ground. Then show me a driver that's sky high right, And then I just I would have him do major changes to his normal golf swing in other words, I have n't I have him do bizarre exaggerated body mechanics and therefore club motion mechanics to produce unusual shots like super high shots, super low shots, shots the curve a lot, right, you know, hit shots like put a put a styrofoam coffee cup upside down and
put a golf ball on top of it. Try to hit a golf ball off of that, or go out in the golf.
Course to extreme side.
He'll lie where the mall's way above its feet, right, because because what I know is that because he used to practice like this with his dad, right, And that is a proven way of speeding up the mastery process in any sport of learning new movement patterns. I think a lot of the golfing public thinks you learn what the model golf swing is and then you just try to match the model. And that certainly is a big
part of it, for sure. But one of the ways we teach here at balance Point is the opposite way, where we have people do these sensory awareness exercises with a club in their hand, right, and it does two things. It expands your mind so you can start to feel more what your body and club are actually doing. Anytime you can increase your level of feel awareness for body
and club motion, that's a good thing, right. And because you're hitting shots that by their very nature are very difficult to hit well, and you're actually hitting them well, which you will for most people will you know within a few minutes, it helps your confidence. Right. Like one that I do a lot is we actually do it as part of the segment we do this. We do like a half a day on swing plane swing geometry in our three day boot camp golf school, and at the end of that, this is a segment of that.
For people who have this typical high handicap over the top golf swing, you know, where they hit a lot of polls to the left, we do about I don't know ninety minutes of drills on that. And the last drill for people who have a severe over the top move, we call it the backwards drill. And it's sort of like it's an actual drill that I've known about for over thirty years. But it's also a little bit of comic relief because what I do is I actually hit
the ball backwards. I stand so my back is facing the target, my club face is in the normal position, right, So my club face is directly aiming at the target, but my back is to the target. And everybody starts laughing because they think, oh, yeah, of course nobody could hit it, and I hit it really usually hit it really good, like I usually hit a hybrid about two hundred yards or about a ten yard draw on it,
and it looks impossible. So people are thinking, holy, how can he possibly hit a I mean, how can he hit a ball backwards? It doesn't even you think it's impossible. But you know what, it's not that hard to do. So I have the students try it, and yeah, the first maybe three to five they hit really bad, and then by the fifth or sixth or seventh one they're hitting it as good as their normal setup. Right from a starting position that should be impossible to do. And
so that really helps your confidence. And what Tiger needs right now is a huge, huge jolt of confidence, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely, because when you look at his body language, he doesn't have the com he doesn't walk around on the golf course with that like that Tiger King of the Jungle type of body language he used to have.
Well, he intimidated the competition, right didn't Tiger at that point or at any point, or hasn't he exhibited the most creative use of shots and the widest range of different types of shots that you've ever seen.
Yeah, that's that's what I'm saying. He was known for that, and he kind of got because he not so much into Butch, because Butcher knows about what. I'm sure Butch used a similar drills with his tour pros, but he got to Haney. Haney was a much more technical teacher than than Butch Harmon.
Was, and Sean Foley was like orders.
Of magnitude more technical teacher than even Hani was. So the problem with it with I think too much of a technical approach is if you don't mix in equal parts of the creative part of golf the artistic part. If it's all technique, technique, look at video. Put you on track man, try to try to get the try to try to get better numbers, like Tiger was always saying, on track man, try to hit better positions, replaying the
video and slow motion. If you start getting too much down that road, it inhibits the artistic and the creative side of golf. And one reason I called my company balance point is, I don't see those things as antithetical at all.
I see them as complementary.
But they can become antithetical if one becomes too dominant relative to the other, Do you know what I mean. So here's Tiger Wood's one from being probably if you wanted to put it in percentage, I would say he was a ninety percent field player as a junior, only ten percent technical. Right. Then he's when he was seventeen years old senior in high school, started working with Butch,
and Butch is sort of closer to called. I would say, Butch is probably more you know, maybe seventy percent feel, thirty percent technical and rough approximation.
And then he went to Haini, who was.
Probably sixty forty sixty percent technical, forty percent field. Then he went to Sean Foley, who was like technical, ten percent more creative oriented. And I think I think Tiger just got off track, and I would have him go back toward maybe you know, for six months or maybe a year, just just get don't look at any video, don't don't go on track, man, literally right, just take a vacation from that stuff.
Learned to play golf by feel.
Again. I think that would be the most important advice I would give him for sure.
Wow. Wow, Well, let's talk for a moment so people can get in touch with you about Balance Point Golf School. I know that I got an email the other day from from one of the women that was on our prog trip years ago, who's still a listener, and she said that she's on her way to Hawaii and she wanted to reach out to you in March. She was on the East coast.
She said, so yesterday I'm going to try calling her tomorrow and go over some options for her.
She's awesome.
Yeah, BJ right, yeah, yeah, J. Well, you know, I guess what can I tell you? I've been doing this. This is my twenty sixth, sorry, the twenty first year I've had the schools. I started in nineteen ninety five in the winter time over here in Hawaii. Actually that was over in the Big Island. I'm pretty proud of the company. I've got four assistant pros that work with me in the busy summer season in Portland, and in fact, one guy's been with me. This will be his eighteenth year.
I won one eighteen year old veteran eighteen years with me, A fifteen year old and a thirteen year old and a seven year old, so they've all got a lot of experience.
That's great.
They're all good players, good golf swings. I usually I consider myself a holistic instructor, and I teach all phases of the game, all parts of the game, mental game, short game, putting game, golf swing mechanics. Although I spent about eighty percent of my time teaching golf swing mechanics. That's that's that's what the marketplace demands. People want want
to have that type of instruction. And I call it balance Point because I use a mind body connection model, which is basically it's a model based on neuroscience, which is how does how does.
The brain mind slash body?
How does that system work in terms of learning new movement patterns and in terms of performing to your highest potential when you play?
And the website is balance balancepointolf dot com.
Correct balancepointgolf dot com. And we have schools from May through October and Portland, uh spring and fall in Palm Springs and wintertime in Onawahu. Teach at Coalina Golf Club, which is about twenty minutes west of Waikikiwa.
And you were telling me that you have an ebook now for us all to take advantage of.
I have our Great Shot, our most popular golf school is called Great Shot exclamation Point, and it's a three day boot camp, eight hours a day, really intensive total immersion training on the range on those thirty laws of body motion, six laws of club motion. But again mainly it's the ten really important ones, ten important loves of
body motion. And that school has a two hundred and five page training manual that I've spent most of the summer rewriting and updating, and we've turned it into an ebook, and it'll be up on our website. I'm hoping by the end of next week, which would be what around the eight twenty ninth of January something like that.
Okay, so by February first it should be ready.
It'll be downloadable.
And this is twenty fifteen that we're talking about.
Yeah, we have a PDF version right now, but you have to call the office to get that one. But this will be epub. Epub will play on any device from a tablet to a smartphone to a desktop computer. And I'm also while I'm here in Hawaii, I'm working on updating the short game, putting game and mental game training manuals. So those will be available as ebooks. I'm hoping by middle to end of the summer. And I've involved in reshooting our Great Shot golf Swing training program
which I did. It's been twenty years ago, which was back in the VHS tape days. Yeah.
Time to reshoot that one.
Yeah, with a brand new Panasonic twenty fourteen high def camera with a really good audio system.
I'll tell you the video that you shot it with. Then you could shoot with your phone now and it would look better.
Well, I know it was, there's no question amazing. So we're about a third through the shooting. We've got module one, Module two almost done. We're going to sell them as individual modules. It's going to be five modules total. It'll
be almost exactly twenty four hours of viewing time. It's everything I know about the golf swing, and it's designed to be a self directed sort of training program, so you can you can download the whole thing and you can take one year, two year, four years, five years, whatever long you want to learn the golf swing and
its sequential order. Where there were certain things are more important are the things like I mentioned at the start of the conversation, and a beginner golfer could take this program and by the end of the first year have a really good golf swing, and professional golfer could go
to the parts where they apply more to them. So it's going to go from the real simple, basic, sort of introductory fundamentals all the way through when you get closer to the twenty hour mark to the really advanced stuff. So I'm pretty proud of It's everything I know about the golf swing awesome.
And you do know a lot. I mean, it's amazing to me how fast an hour can go by when we get on the phone together.
It's been an hour.
Yeah, Yeah, we've been recording for over an hour.
Incredible.
All right, Well, Jim, as always, I just love having you on this podcast. I love to listen to you. I learned so much. I really appreciate that you share so much time with us.
Problem.
It's always a pleasure chatting with you. As you know, we got to do the time meal again this summer.
Okay, we got to go out for somewhere food and that was episode number four hundred, and we're approaching this summer we're going to be coming up to number five hundred, So maybe this summer we'll get together.
I'm honored. I got to I think this is my tenth time. I think right ninth or tenth.
I I haven't looked, but yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least ten times. Jim, let's wrap this up with your closing tip.
Well, I think the main tip is you need to understand that in golf, you never aim your body at the target. That is, aiming the body at the target is one of the most common golf swing misconceptions that the new students bring to the table when I work with them in schools and lessons. I mean to the point where people will actually take a club and put it across their shoulders and kind of look at their target and go like that aim their should People do
that usually almost always high handicapped to do that. Your body has no relationship to the target involve The only relationship to the target is with the golf ball hopefully going to the target when you're done hitting it, and your club face. So the key is to aim your club face exactly at your intended target and never try to aim your body to the target. Your body does not aim to the target. Your body positions itself parallel left.
Of a three foot long chunk.
Of target line, with the ball sitting in the middle of that three foot long chunk. So once you're done aiming your club face precisely at the target, you simply look down at the ball and you see an imaginary line eighteen inches either side of the ball. Right, that's
your three foot long chunk of target line. And you position your toe line, your feet, your knees, your hips, your shoulder girdle, even your eye line parallel to that three foot long chunk of line, like you're standing on the inner rail of a railroad track and the ball is and that three foot long chunk of target line is the outer rail. Right, You want to keep those two rails parallel to each other. Never aim your body out to the target. Only the bug base