This episode is sponsored by TG w.com Golf. Warehouse is an online store. That's an awesome place to snag some new gear whenever you need it. I know that over the years, I've picked up a bunch of good stuff from T. GW always feels like I'm at a shortage of, who knows. Shirts, shoes gloves, extra hats. Maybe a new putter after the last one, got thrown in the lake.
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is doing. It TG, w.com /, G SL and you can use the coupon code GSL for an additional percentage off. Make sure to go over to t.g. w.com GSL and make sure to use that coupon code to let them know that you're listening to the podcast and that you headed over to their site and purchase something. You are listening to the golf Science Lab podcast. My name is Corey Walker, and I'm on a mission to figure out how to improve the way that we learn
and get better at golf. I've been able to travel all over the world talking to the leaders in the industry from instructors, to researchers, to Golfers themselves learning how they're getting better at golf and what that means for you. So as you can, probably guess from the name of this podcast, the gulf science lab, we appreciate study, that is happening in this field. Today's episode is centered around some study and Analysis by Chris thin.
He's been doing some research here with his clients in Raleigh, North Carolina trying to figure out why we can generate the clubhead speed that we do looking at questions like is my club head speed. Good for my age, my gender my fitness level, Do I have more distance available to me? What if I improve my fitness and Chris has been on a mission to figure that out and today we're going to hear what he's been learning the sponsor. For today's episode is gravity
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Check out how it works. The best thing that you can do is watch a video. We have one over on our site golf signs live.com gravity fit so we have a bunch of videos there you know, where to gravity fit.com to learn more. They have an article on there so you can see how Kim incorporates gravity fit into his prep. Before we hear what Chris has been working on quick file on who he is.
Yes I'm a physical therapist in North Carolina started out as a strength coach and basically in a year into my career realized I was a terrible employee had a passion for golf and wanting to do things on my own. So I went out and started my own business far for Success from the back of my car.
And really since then, just been driven with the mission of trying to be the best in the world at understanding golfers and how we can train them to be as or High of a level as possible throughout the entire range of their life and help them to when they stop playing golf that. It's because they decided they want to stop playing and not because their body told them they can't play anymore. They can't hit the ball far enough, or it's enjoyable.
So that's where really everything has come from my desire to be better myself to help other people achieve whatever their better. Maybe that's really driven everything that we've done at par for Success, everything that I've done in my career personally. So the problem that we want to figure out is, why are we able to swing the club faster or not? And look at what's holding us back. And to illustrate this example, Chris has a great story of how this is implemented.
So I think any golfer, you can take any golfer out there, let's say that it's a 50 year old golfer who came to me and he basically said, hey, I'd like to increase my club head speed. I'm now the shortest guy in the, in my group. My back hurts. It is a Litany of issues. So basically with our testing that we did is whenever we meet with somebody, we have a bait, we do Baseline testing, where we look at Movement, we look at you know their arm actually
swinging. A lot of our research is actually based around a part, a component of that assessment around how well they produce power. So there's three main areas we look at in power so we would saw by the golfer jumped we saw. Hi, he threw a medicine ball from a seated position, just kind of a chest pass. Then we saw how far he could throw it. From a shop up position bumps on his right and left side. So they won, we have all of the Baseline numbers.
We see how fast he's swinging the golf club. It was probably somewhere between 6 to 10 weeks where we worked with them. Both Mobility, kind of every, he needed a little bit of everything, so, you know, rehab Mobility, some strength, training, some power and speed work and then we came back and retest them. He basically, first thing we did was Club head speed and he was
really upset as Club head. Speed actually had dropped two miles an hour, It's not what you're looking for when at the end of a six-week period, or when you're trying to get somebody to keep training with you. So luckily that point we had done our initial data. So we said well, let's see, you know what else happened, physically. So when we went and looked at all of those power numbers again, I was Mobility. It improved, we went and looked at all those power numbers.
Every single one of his power numbers was up and because of our research, we know that each of those power markers is very highly correlated with Club head speed. So in layman's, Owens turns. If any of those, if those three power tests go up that person or that golfer has more than you have more horsepower. You have, you should you physically have the ability to move faster.
And so, because we also known as mobility and improved, their really, we had done our job and so, we were able to show him. Hey, physically, everything is up, you know, it's either going to be an equipment issue or it's a technique issue, so he went the next day. It just happened. You had a lesson on his golf instructor. We called her called rap. We told her, what I was going on. She saw him into swings.
He for some reason, technically wise was, he was just early releasing casting a club just worked on getting him to have a little bit more lag again and he was 10 miles an hour up above where he had started. So no overall 12 miles an hour faster than he was the day before when he had tested with us. It was because of a technique issue. That was masking the physical gains he had made, so it allowed us to really be laser focused with that golfer and say to him. Look physically, everything
you're doing here is working. You should be able to swing the golf club faster. And then we were able to identify, is it an equipment problem, or is it technique problem and 24 hours later? Now, he used up 10 miles an hour and he's a client for life, you know, and he is now the longest
guy in his group. So by understanding from the information that we had in in our assessment you know, pre and and then retest and having that information from our research, we were able to do from a business standpoint. Save somebody from leaving NG to becoming a lifelong client.
So his client was improving. He did some tests and showed that he gotten more mobile, you gotten stronger and had the results to prove it but his Club head speed was down in this is, you know, a common situation like the question that everyone asks is if I get stronger, if I hit the gym, if I get more mobile, will I swing faster and kind of this data collection process in the way that Chris is approaching, this is going to give more clarity to that question.
And in this situation, when he's able to find the solution, he is able to find that Missing Link. And so kind of The Next Step, you're asking is what are these tasks? What are these assessments that Chris has been talking out about to see what is actually linked to Club head speed.
Now the tests themselves, you know, we were taught in all of our certification say, these are the types of tests you should look at. But there was nobody ever really said, hey, this is the scientific can relationship between these tests and that, you know, and Club head speed, which is a big marker, the lot of golfers are looking at and so, For me to be able to confidently, you know, and with a sense of Integrity, tell somebody that hey you got better
here, you should be getting better and then also to check myself in our training methods and our coaches and say, are you actually improving your got your golfers. We needed something objective that we could measure and
reference. I think that was the first part of actually collecting and seeing if they're actually truly was a relationship between those tests and clubhead speed and at the second question was anybody who's worked with a golfer and they get up and they swing NG 90 miles an hour and they're gonna look at you and say, is that good?
And really the only numbers that we had is for Club head speed, you know the LPGA average that PGA average but those are the one percent we didn't have what's average for a 50 year old if they swing 50 miles an hour or 90 miles an hour, what percentile are they in among their peers? And now we have that for Club not only Club head speed but each of those tests to you know you have somebody with throw a ball and hey that was 20 feet. Was that good?
And we look at them count. Well, it was first. Then Bob with her before you, but he's six years older. So I'm not really sure. But now we can actually pull out the information and say, look, you fall on the 25th percentile for chest pass and you're at the 25th percentile from Club head speed. Like if all of your physical tests, think it's no surprise that you're also at the low end spectrum of your Club head speed.
So now we actually have objective information and you know every every month we're getting more and more data points where it's making it even easier to extract. Appellate Out Among age sex you know it's just getting more and more accurate in terms of how well you can vary, how confident you can be in the numbers and where your golfer your client would stand. It would you mind dive in and explain exactly what you did the specific data that you're
Gathering? And then how you organize that and what kind of Revelations you made? Yes I think if we if we start from the general overall relationship. So we looked at where the three power test So how high somebody jumps so the vertical jump seated best past basically they sit in a chair their back is on the back of the chair feet are flat on the ground. They throw the ball out. It said we could use a 6 pound
medicine ball. Let's see how far they can throw it and then we do a standing shot. Put the, they have the ball in the right hand, they would kind of squat and rotate a little bit, throw it as far as they could, and then they did the same thing with their left. So basically what we do in our facilities, we test all of our clients three times a year. And then we've been compiling that based on age weight height, and you can, you name it, we have the that information on them.
What for this study? What we looked at was the relationship of vertical jump, seated, chest, pass shot. Put both the sides. And those had correlations for shot, put of .82, which for stats guys out there the closer to one that that is the stronger of a relationship that is. So we had pointing to for shot, put right and left. If we looked across all ages That had the strongest relationship to Club head speed. C to just pass was second and .79 and vertical. Jump was third at Point 6 3.
So obviously the further away from one, it's not quite as strong. But those you know all over .5 are very strong and very relevant data points to look at in terms of vertical, jump. How well somebody produces vertical thrust seated chest, pass how well, somebody produces upper body power and then chop put right and left. How somebody prove how well somebody produces kind of a rotary power out. Element, basically, from there. We also were messing around with an anti rotational test.
So, everybody in golf talks about how strong anti rotation is in terms of, if we talk about X Factor as your hips start to go down through impact accelerating towards the target. How well can you keep your trunk separated or, you know, or behind weed? Nobody really had a test to measure how strong somebody was in that in that actual type of
core stability. So we created a test for we have A delay on their back flat on the ground feet together, knees together, almost like you were going to do a bridge, pick your butt up off the ground and then they hold a handle that's attached to a cable machine. And then basically we start to ramp up the weight on that cable machine. We start at 5 pounds and then that but that handle is connected by a string to basically there's a pole, a little wooden pole on a on a water bottle.
So when that weight gets too heavy and the person, it pulls the person over, it'll knock the water bottle over there. Who we actually are able to enter inter-rater reliability from that standpoint were able to establish what that reliability was when there actually was a pretty reliable test. And the cool thing was that that actually had close to a point seven relationship to shotput.
Didn't have a great relationship to clubhead speed, which we expected because it's a strength test, and clubhead speed is a power measure. But it was interesting to see that there definitely was a relationship that the stronger. Somebody's anti rotational strength was the further, they would be able to throw Ball in the shot, put which that definitely correlated to Club head speed.
So it's very interesting to see the way that the test was valid, but then be that they're at actually entire rotational strength, theoretically make sense. And now we can say objectively, it's something that definitely is important. How does this impact? How you work with students? And I guess how, you know, how
can other people utilize this? Yeah, so, I think, I mean, in so many ways, I think, the first thing is that if you're training golfers, or if you're a golfer, And you maybe don't have a trainer, but I think when you look at you, whatever type of core strength, you're going to be doing, you need to be doing some form of anti rotational core strength.
So, you know, simple examples, would be if you're in a push-up position just tapping the opposite should be tapping, your left shoulder with your right hand, put it down, and then do the other with the other side and trying to limit any shifting or rotating of your hips as you do that. So I have some of Chris's data here in front of me, one great thing is, he's breaking this down by gender and age. So let's say a male 21 to 40, I fit in here we have a vertical
jump. See the chest past shotput. Right shotput, left Kaiser, right Kaiser left, height and weight. And the things with the highest correlation on this list were at a point four nine, seated chest pass in a .47 of vertical jump pass. And just for instance, let's compare that to a 41 to 50 year
old male of correlation. Is point 6 2 vertical jump and seated chest pass .16 so that it changed the seated chest pass went down and correlation for the older male and, you know, as we look at this, there's some really fascinating things that the one thing that when Chris and I were talking is they don't have as much data as he'd like for instance, that 40 and 50 year old male group. There are 39 samples in there, he's hoping with that, you know, everyone in the industry.
If we can kind of get this to take off to get 10,000 entries in this data set to really We make it something as useful as possible for everyone. And I love that kind of call to action to Rally the industry here, to Rally, folks, to help build this database. So that as an industry, there's
something that can be utilized. I think when we looked at the at the numbers and part of it is understanding to, for instance, like, with vertical leap vertical is a very, very strong has a very, very strong relationship with Club, head speed and 16 to In 20 to 30 year old some more of your Elite athletes. It's actually a terrible predictor with younger kids, to 10 to 15 or prepubescent and I'd say it's kind of middle-of-the-road in your 50
plus or your older golfer. So you know when we say I said those initial overall correlations they do vary between age groups, that's the would encourage people to before you're going to know if you listen to this and then you're going to go by this to your clients at least, get all the data so that you can date dig in and figure out where your client Falls and just how important In that test, maybe.
But in the instance of the gentleman with the equipment issue, he was over 50 years old vertical had gone up some but the bigger marker of shotput, which in that age group has the strongest correlation to Club head speed. That it would like skyrocketed. So we actually, you know, it didn't make any sense that this club head speed was down and we usually test what the driver. So, just out of curiosity, I had
them, grab is 7-iron. We had recorded a 7-iron speed earlier and a 7-iron actually was up 10 miles an hour. So then you start kind of putting together the All right where you're saying okay, I love his physical markers. Are up, his iron is up, 10 miles an hour. Why is this driver down? So then we hug we actually did is we filmed it in slow motion and Court of you can imagine this the curve in his shaft of this golf club.
And when he was at you know, P5 it was it looked like one of the long drive guys after they finish in the club's wrapping around them and it's about to snap. I mean, he just, he was putting say it so much speed and, and just force through At shaft, it was just totally overpowering the shaft. He was losing any energy that he had put in there. So, you know, it came down to. Once we actually filmed it, we don't usually film. Usually use more 3D and that sort of stuff.
But once we actually filmed it, it was like, oh, duh. Well, that makes a heck of a lot of sense. So that's when from the equipment side of the he went and got a, you got fitted for a different shaft and, you know, he was up to equivalent 10 miles an hour with his driver, as he was with his irons because his Iron Chef just happened to be a little bit heavier, and he did couldn't overpower that. You know compared to the guy who equipment really wasn't the
issue. It was more just a technique, he was just flailing and losing the he was losing energy at the top of his downswing because of poor technique and corrected that and he was good to go in terms of a huge speed gain. So really in both instances, what we were able to do is rule out the physical elements, as a potential reason for a, a less
than desirable result. We were able to say that, hey, physically, if we look at my mind, when I look at Swim Club, High-speed. I think I've kind of four main areas to a pie, I think of a, you got equipment. I think you have technical, I think of mobility. And then I think of an ability to generate power, which is more your strengths and how fast you can accelerate. And so, basically, that I think of the physicals come the bottom
half of that pie with this data. And this testing, you're able to eliminate that hog. 50% of the equation in terms of, hey, I know that 50% got better. So something else has to be going on outside of you. Fitness for medical professionals outside of my realm of expertise and I need to refer to whoever it is in that whether it's Club Fit or whether it's a pjl PGA professional, they're going to be able to give this person the best result possible.
So that's really the cool. Functional aspect of This research and I don't know about you, but I hate research that you would go through a reading, all research, study more like, okay, great. That told me nothing I could actually use. So, the goal of this is that, you know, the reason why we're making it public to everybody is so that you can actually take the information.
See who your most of us work with is the average golfer and say, Hey, you know, as I look at this and I look at other people around the world, you know, I think it's a mobility issue for you. It's something physical or, you know what, your physical numbers are 75th and 90th percentile, but your Club is speeds away, Lau, that doesn't match up. There's something going on. So maybe that's not in the while month of physical, maybe that's in the realm of technical or
equipment. So, so that's really the, that's how those stories happen. And I think, the more that people are using Information. And looking at those things, there's going to hear more and more and more of those stories and that's going to help golfers play, better quicker with a lot less frustration frustration. Yeah, so different tests are more important for different age demographics, different genders. How do you figure out like where to start?
Like so you said for elite golfers 16 to 30 or something like that. That the vertical jump is really important, so is it all right? Hey, Cordy. You It into that demographic, you need to work on your vertical jump and if we can improve that we can improve your speed or how does that work. So I think at the end of the day it all comes down to the golfer in front of you or some people say and of one. And yes, let's say you're in that 16 to 30. Yes.
The data says the vertical leap correlates as a group most strongly with Club head speed. But I think then you start talking about, you know, some ground reaction forces and, you know, are you more of a horizontal driver, vertical driver tour No driver. If you're a player that is definitely vertical. Drive is a huge part of how you generate speed and your vertical is not very good then. Yeah. That's definitely going to be a
huge of huge value to you. You know, if you're more of a horizontal driver and verticals not much in the picture to the degree that it's going to improve it. You know, that's a whole other conversation. At least I think the information starts that conversation of where might the biggest bang for your buck come from. But I think even before you get into the this Stayed in terms of how to create power. It doesn't matter the age, I
think. If you can't rotate from any from the four main rotary centers, in my opinion, nothing else really matters you. Everything else, how you generate power everything is going to be a compensation. So you know do you have good enough hip wrote to internal rotation? Do you have enough, drastic spine, rotation shoulder, rotation and neck?
Rotation? I think if you check those four boxes then the the power stuff becomes a way more, fruitful that becomes more of the low-hanging fruit I think if anybody Fails any of those four areas. We actually have a free on our website. It's a free home, golf fitness assessment that looks at just those four things and you can look at, do you pass or do you fail? And if you fail those for, that's the low-hanging fruit right there.
I mean, I've seen huge speed can't just Pike, somebody being able to actually rotate more. So that's that's the low-hanging fruit. If you check that box and you don't have any issues there, then I think we can a conversation like what you said if hey, if you're 16 to 30 then has the strongest relationship The club head speed, that's
definitely narrow. We want to look at and if you're at it, you know, if you have the technology to look at 3D Force plates and you do create a ton of speed by vertical thrust. Well, then heck yeah, that's definitely where we want to focus. Yes, I think there's so many
layers, right? When you start talking about the science of it, but at a very superficial level, if you can't rotate, don't even worry about the power yet, you know, at least improve your rotation as much as you're able to and then when you start looking at the power basis. Yeah. 450 Plus, you're looking more your total rotary power for 16 to 30 or more that Elite athlete post, post puberty. You're looking a lot of how you're using the ground. The interesting that the 15 year old males.
For instance the Cedar Chest pass your upper body power was the most related to Club head speed. So I think when you think of younger kids to from an instructional level, now over the top or chopping down or very upper body, dominant swing, it kind of starts to make sense that that's how that Dividual is going to swing or that's where they're going to go for for their power if that's why they create most of their power and they may not necessarily understand how to use the ground yet.
So I think, you know, going back to the original question of, where do you start based on where you are? I think you understand where your age group tends to derive the most power, but at the end of the day, you're an N of 1, and I think you need to, everybody needs to make sure they can have that Mobility. If you have that, then I think you start digging deeper into your age group where people tend
to derive the Was power. But honestly, what I would look at is look at where you stand on the percentile for each of the tests. So if your 75th percentile for chest pass your 75th percentile for vertical, put your 25th percentile for total rotational, there's your low-hanging fruit in the lower rotate in the rotational. So that's where you can look at yourself across all of those spectrums and see, how do you match up across all of them? Are you pretty evenly distributed?
Are you off the charts on a couple and off the chart in the wrong way? Another then you can start to get a better picture, blueprint of you as a human, another golfer and how you move and create speed. Let's take a look here real quick at a couple different types of training as well. And the final piece of course, is study that actually goes into the final piece of what we found was that we looked at two types of training.
So we looked at conventional Based training, which would be traditional you go higher reps, low weight. When you start you progress to a little bit higher weight kind of medium reps and then you'd go to Or wraps and high load, we did that for a year. And then the next year we went and we did was called triphasic training more, your training, The Eccentric phase, which would, if you're talking about a squat what would be the lowering part of the squat? So you do five to seven S 2 cents.
Then we moved after that for four weeks we moved into isometric. Where if we use the squad as an example you pause at the bottom of the squat for 3 to 5 seconds. And then we went to the concentric phase of movement which would be the pushing up of the squat so forth.
Thinking about the golf swing your backswing, to a degree is kind of an eccentric, move recreating, a little bit of a stretch, your transition is a little bit of an isometric pause basically where there's not a lot of movement in the, not any movement in the joints but there's still tension through the tissue and then the concentric is the shortening and explosion of that expression of that power out.
And what we found was that was that 50-plus year olds or the older individual, the elite individual had if they did traditional training, they actually saw it. 10% under performance across the average of all of the people in their group. But if they did triphasic training, they over performed by 50% in terms of swing speed gains. So I think when we're talking about, you know, as a whole. What can we do?
I think if you're in, let's say over 20 and you have some form of training experience, even a little bit, I think triphasic training is something that's a type of training that across the board is going to benefit pretty much every golfer. The Only Exception would be juniors. Then we saw a flip of that so triphasic training actually caught them to underperform. The average Club has became by 12% as a parasitic compared to traditional training.
Would you saw basically a 60 percent or 50 percent Improvement where they actually over performed by 37 percent if they just did more of that conventional training?
So I think the generalizations you can take from that or your kind of younger golfers or somebody who's really new to the gym, kind of going with that traditional or conventional training model is going to Ooh, very valuable for them in the beginning after they have a little bit of experience or or post-pubescent then I think going to a more triphasic type training at least during some part of the year is going to give somebody you know, huge value.
And you know and I think you can look certainly at those three power tests across everybody. And you can certainly use the relationships to clubhead speed across everybody. I think if you just generally, pay attention to that and you try to improve Early, your vertical, your ability to jump your ability to create rotational power in your ability
to create upper body power. Everybody's going to get better to some, you know, basically, when we start talking about vertical leap wasn't as valuable as total rotation on the 50-plus golfer, that doesn't mean if you improve somebody's vertical that it's going to, they're going to get better, I think that's when you start talking people Geeks like me, you start talking about okay. Well how can we get an extra 5%? How can we get an extra 10% and for the Average golfer.
If you're just focusing on, make sure you can rotate in the four main rotary centers. And look to make sure you're at least somewhat consistent in your percentile in terms of how you create power. If you do those two things, those simply those two things and then you look at, if your prepubescent are younger, you know, just to traditional training. If you're older certainly I think it's worth looking into triphasic training.
Those three things are going to help 90% 95% of golfers out there if you're paying attention. To that and just kind of starting to actually not just go to the gym just to do what you saw.
I'm Golf Channel yesterday but actually look at you and understand that where you are in life, you know, being able to move from a Mobility stamping Point, doing a certain type of training is more beneficial for you and then also understanding that hey I can actually very simply look at how well I generate power from these three areas and if one's really bad,
the other two are pretty good. That's probably an area I can work on incorporating into my Work out to be a little bit more specific to me, and how I can get better to, you know, hit the ball. A little bit further, be more consistent and enjoy the game on. Thank you so much to Our Guest, Chris Finn. If you are listening to this, make sure to check out his website. Check out the research. You can download the PDF with all of the data and get in touch
with Chris to ask him. Any questions, we will link that on the post that goes along with this episode. That is on our website golf's. Slap.com, while you are. There we released a short free training series with dr. Greg carton to help you gain some mental Clarity and understand some foundational Concepts to help you perform better. A few free training videos. You will see a link on the home page to check that out. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
Make sure to subscribe and stay tuned. We have amazing stuff coming at you on a weekly basis this episode of hosted and written by me. Corey Walker. You can follow me on her at korte Walker, was edited mixed and produced by just hit publish Productions.