You are listening to the gulf 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 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. Hey everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode.
We are coming off of a really fun little mini series you did last week on practice, in the launch of our new training here, golf science lab called practice Secrets. Taking a look at the Core Concepts and strategies.
That you need to know if you want to get more efficient with your practice really fun, we've had a couple hundred people go through that already heard some really awesome stories of people, their eyes being open of, you know, hey I need to start doing this and kind of go this route or You know, actually, I'm on the right path or wow, you know, like I can really see where I've been wasting some time and can get more efficient. So it's been super fun.
I'm just blown away by the response and so excited to keep getting this message out there. It's really the mission around here is to help people learn and practice, more efficiently, more been better and getting that out. The door is a huge step in the right direction towards accomplishing that mission. So thank you, thank you to everyone. If you got my emails, if you joined thank So much really appreciate it. Today on the podcast though we are having a fascinating
conversation. I love talking about long drive and power and speed and distance. It's I honestly just find it personally really enjoyable because I love trying to gain speed. So this is a fun conversation with Bobby, Peterson and Ryan riess, BEC, both long drive, competitors themselves. Bobby is now a coach who specializes in this was the coach of Kyle Berkshire. Who's just? At this year's World Long Drive champ. And so, we sat down and said, they're just a great
conversation. And the beginning here, we're going to talk about Ryan's kind of Journey going from someone that just played golf for fun and try it out long drive and found that he was good at it and loved it. And what he did to become really, really good at it and then, you know, get some advice on, what are some of the things that you can do you and I can do to get better from these guys that are just experts at World Lon. And drive, and hitting the ball. Just a super long way.
So really unique opportunity, really fun stories. This is just a great conversation. We recorded for probably an hour and just had a good time. I enjoyed it. Hopefully will have them on again to talk but we're going to dive in here to this conversation. You're going to enjoy it. Let's get to it. Today's episode is brought to you by whoop, whoop is a fitness tracker that provides daily
insight into your recovery. Your strain in your sleep, you might have seen it on the wrist of Rory has he won the Tour Championship or other to our players? I had to find out more so I reached out got my own band talk to some of the folks at whoop and I was blown away and then lucky enough, they wanted to support and sponsor the podcast and let more folks know about it as well. Here are the three things you need to know there's three metrics, strain recovery and sleep.
Strain is for those that are looking to track more than just steps track Australia today, as from start to finish. And this is key, get insight into how much you exert yourself during training. Second one is recovery that is so you can get daily inside into how ready your body is to perform by looking at some bio metrics such as heart rate, variability resting, heart rate and sleep, formance last one is sleep. It's all about optimizing the way you sleep by getting Target sleep times.
Based on how strenuous your day was and your performance goals. Can monitor your sleep stages Cycles, time in bed actual sleep, sleep efficiency, and so much more. And you know, the best players in the world are paying attention to this as we found out from the group CEO will I'm a you know Justin Thomas was telling me how obsessed he is with sleep. This is a guy who will just get up in the middle of dinner to go to bed.
If he feels like he's not going to bed at the appropriate time because He knows that he has to get a certain number of hours of sleep in order to feel that recovered in order to feel, you know, Peak on the day of the tournament or, you know, even on the weekends, right? He was saying that he actually had a green recovery on the Sunday of leading the BMW tournament. I think that's pretty cool,
right? You know, normally, when you're leading the tournament, you're going to feel an additional level of stress and his case of the opposite because he's figured out ways to train his body. And To use whoop, definitely check this out and learn more about whoop it's who oh p.com use the code GSL, 15% off your membership. That is GSL. Definitely go check out whoop.com. Bobby Peterson. I am a long drive coach and focus on teaching people how to hit a golf ball, a long ways.
I started in golf and in 90, when I got out of the military and competed in a long drive events, almost immediately up until 2009. I competed in the open Division and realizes age of 42. I needed find a different line of work, and the knowledge that I've gained over two years, I thought I'd pass it on. So, I actually started with landed gentry Hurry and James Eastland 2010 trying to share my knowledge as far as club building and taking and stuff
like that. And since 2010, we've amassed 73, professional long drive wins, including a senior Champion, ladies world champion and open Champion. Kyle Berkshire this year, my name is Ryan Reese back, and I'm from Layton Utah. And I started long drive in August 2010. And I basically, Doubt because my friend who had been to the Remax World, Long Drive championship and watched it, he said that I should try it out
after. He saw me hit on a whole during a scramble turn them on. So my first event, I drove the the following week after that Scrabble tournament. I drove to Albuquerque New Mexico where I finished second in a qualifier and I just kept going ever since so just love love. I mean I love playing golf but to me hitting the ball four Ours as fun as it gets in golf.
So I've loved it and I just kept at I started doing after I qualified for the world championships in 2011, I started competing in professional events and I think, I think I have 10 or 11 for wins and just keep doing it every year. I think my swing when I first started was it was very typical of the normal amateur golfer where I came over the top and get a big slice and I could swing fast.
But I wouldn't, you know, I always hit the sin on the club face and I would always joke about you know, being able to count the total distance, the ball traveled rather than you know the distance down the Fairway because it moved a lot from left to right. So took a long time to kind of figure out some of the things I was doing. Wrong. And at first, I just thought, I just needed a swing as hard as I could because I actually had a little bit of success just trying to hit the ball as hard
as I could. And then I kind of hit a plateau where I felt like I needed some some more information or training or another pair of eyes to look at me and that's when I had hooked up with Bobby Peterson and and started working with him, started training with one, stop our shop. There's actually two different types of people that I run into most of the time. And that's golfers that want to get faster or fast people to want to be able to find their golf ball and Ryan was the ladder.
He he was pretty fast when I met him, he was when he first came in the sport, I was actually scouting him. I paid attention everybody and and he was hitting some what I call heavy balls when they hit the ground, they would just run forever but they were real flat and I noticed it anytime that a grid was not fast and running so This is a South Korean, if it rained or anything like that, he was in and out of a tournament pretty quick. But in tournaments that it's
fast. I mean, he would go all the way to the end if not win it. He, I mean, he was pretty close and I got the opportunity in Florida, we had a tournament and I actually worked the Grid at that tournament and I remember him hitting a golf ball, down the right side that I was on. And when it hit the ground, it looked like a rifle shot, it just took off, and it run like, 80 90 yards and And Justin
moves, hit one that flew. Probably I'm going to say 35 40 yards past Ryan and rolled a yard, and I was like, man, this guy hits a really good Ball but his ball flight skills and ball flight characteristics are are just awful. Yeah, so I thought, man if I ever got a chance to work with him, that's what we worked on. Is learning how to flight the golf ball and getting that thing to carry further and then
release. Because then on soft grids, he would actually do a lot better, you know, and then Have other people. Like Paul howhow was a great ball Striker, really good golfer and he was fast and I thought he was that type of person that if he trained for what could become faster and and if he was hitting the grid as much as he's in the Fairway, playing a golf, he was gonna have a lot of success and he did within one year, we were able to get him to the top 10
and world you know. So and he's won a couple of events in the last few years as well. So those two type of people are what we typically see. What do you mean by his his ball flight wasn't wasn't good. He was hitting it too flat. Can you dive dive a bit more into that and what you worked on and that kind of stuff. When I first met Ryan, he was hitting like, Forex shafts just
a stiff as shafts. You can find and low loss, but but he was hitting - Attack angle so striking down on the ball, he was actually spinning it more. But since he was hitting, such a stiff club and lo la, his Dynamic life was still Coming out at like 6 to 8 degrees. I mean it was really low and so the ball doesn't never, never really flies, never gets up in the air.
So as far as he can hit it on a straight line, that's where we go. And when it hit the ground, it had so much energy, that's why he was getting a rollout of, you know, so but he needed to learn how to get his attack, angle up and use the loft of the club, to actually get the ball up in the air with lower spin numbers and and flight that. And then after we started, Getting on that. We started learning how to shake the ball and use them path and face angle to actually hit drawers.
And and hit Fades, you know, where we're trying to go to, a four degree, right path with a closed face and still keep a positive attack angle, those types of things. That's what I mean, being able to shot shape just like you would in golf, you got to be able to hit the nine shots. You need to be able to hit something, close to those nine shots in Long Drive, depending on Greer conditions, environmental conditions, things like that. So, that's where we went. Two.
I didn't realize this and it's one of the things that Bobby explain to me, but the tournaments and competitions that I had one previous to that. We're like he said they the driving or the grid was was flat and would run to might be dry for. It was from an elevated, Tee Box and I have never done well, when we were hitting into the wind because the ball would spend too much or if the ground was wet. I Carry it far enough because I wasn't going to get any roll
out. So I was always, you know, 10 to 15 yards short when the grid was wet. So these are things that he observed that I didn't observe. So what we tried to do, there's a few things. We try to do, we try to add a little spine tilt, we try to get my hands higher at the top of the backswing and position for. And then I do a little move where I kind of do kind of a partial squat when I drop down. So in the backswing, I would raise up and then I would drop Noun.
And as long as I could counter balance my weight, my upper body behind the ball, all of a sudden instead of being like a - to attack angle, I'm somewhere between like three and five pretty consistently and I know which doesn't seem like, you know, a huge difference five or six degrees on the attack angle but when it comes to carrying the ball and getting you know, optimal ball flight, you know, it's 15 or 20 yards, a lot of time and sometimes more depending on conditions.
So So, those little tweaks like that really helped will also increase. My loft went to a softer shaft. And before I like, you had mentioned earlier, I was, I was basically trying to swing a just about as depth of the shaft as I can possibly swing because that would help me to straighten the ball. A little bit more straight.
It would straighten the ball, flight out a little bit more, but some of the two weeks that we've made it a swing, I can swing just as fast without trying to swing as hard so I can get Better ball flight, you know, swinging a good smooth swing and produce the same speed as well. So things like that. And then that allows you to practice longer. I used to get so worn out. I get, you know, a lot of knots in my shoulders and in my neck
from swinging so hard. And now I can I can swing for hours and still not have those same problems so but from a health standpoint that was a one of the big changes that we made as well. And What kind of results? What is the difference like? Well it's your I guess. What metrics do you care about? Do you monitor like and what were some of the differences that you that you saw? I'll give you a good example. I think it was back in 2014 before I started working with Bobby.
I had an average attack angle of like -1.2 and my vertical launch was like 8.9 in now. I would be somewhere around probably average of three tacking. My vertical launch is more like 12 12 and a half. So just swipe slight tweaks to what we're doing in that circumstance. That makes me a much better competitor in all conditions, so I still spin the ball a little bit, but, you know, the equipment plays an important
part of the competition. A lot of times people will think that you can't hit the ball as far with a little bit more Spin. And I think we saw at the World Championships that some of the longer balls had a little bit more spin than were optimal. A lot of times people want to be somewhere around, you know, sixteen to eighteen, hundred Spin.
And some of the longest balls we saw were between 26 and 28 hundred spin RPM, so you can hit the ball far with little extra spin to. So there's a lot that goes into the equipment. That's the other thing that Bobby is an expert at is the club building and making changes to the equipment to fit the current environment that you're hitting in soon. Let me speak to some of the things. We look at with Ryan as well. We had a we had a very hard time with him for almost a year with
alignment. And we actually had a language barrier with alignment because I might would be saying something like, you need to square up to the Target, and I was talking about his shoulders and he was probably thinking about lining up his feet. So and it actually costs us an event and Denver mile-high shoot out. One year we struggled all day with trying to get his Upper
body aligned. And for some reason or another, we kind of got focused on the feet been aligned in a different direction which which kind of cross things up at that tournament but alignment was a big issue with them and obviously she would like you touched on with the attack angle
and stuff like that. But the metrics I always looked at was path face angle and then attack angle but then looking at his body motion or what he was doing once we got his alignment correct it was the spine tilt away. Getting high hands at the Top of the swing and then actually counter rotation or separation. We want the lower body going toward the target, as the upper body is finished in the take
away. That little bit of separation is a huge jump and Ryan's ball speed and if he's Center punching it if he's if he's hitting it in the middle of the club face, he's one of the top competitors in the world when he does that. That's what I look at when I'm watching him. It truly is a fascinating Journey that Ryan and Bobby talked about here of optimizing, what you have and finding these little ways that you can improve and constantly getting a little bit better.
It's really cool to hear that story. One of the other students that Bobby works with at the One. Stop power shop is Kyle Berkshire, who just won the world long drive championship and I asked Bobby, what? Some of the keys that they worked on the changes, they made things that they did that helped Kyle make some speed jumps to win this past year. And I was blown away by some of
these answers. There's some really cool insights the heart rate thing is just, I love that there's got to be something there that we should dive into more here and some future content, but let's get into that. Some of the ways that Bobby helped Kyle Berkshire. The first thing I look for is what golfers trigger is how they start their swing and using Force plates. You can actually tell that most people put a little more pressure on their front foot when they initiate their swing
and transition to the back foot. But what I know is real quick with Kyle, is he had a little bit of a stutter step with his back foot when you did that, which made him Flinch and when he's trying to go super fast, it threw off his rhythm. And the gherkin motion actually was causing a little bit of a back problem, spasms, things as he practiced. So he wasn't able to practice his hard and push himself because of that little bit of jerking motion.
So we started talking about it and experiment with things. And that's where we came up with the rock motion. And then what after we kind of were massaging that to get to what we wanted. It wasn't necessary that we wanted it stepping up in the air. Anything. We just wanted the trigger those spots to get it a little A smooth, you know, take away and be able to accelerate into the swing versus going from 0 to 150 miles an hour close to be. You know, that quick the golf
swing is less than a second. So he's still going to get to 150 miles an hour in under a second. But how he started was more important than anything else? Is sort of like anything else? If you don't start with the right step, how you want to end correctly. So one along that line is what we did was Urine test and he came in averaging, 115 miles. I mean 215 miles an hour on his
sets? And my goal was to push him average wise, at least one mile an hour every few weeks and obviously would Kyle and every other long drive in the world they want that top boss. T what is the best policy right? And and obviously for him he wanted to 30 which that's a great number to go after the my thing. Was, can we averaged 216 in a workout? Can we average to sex 17 next? Well, in December. We were to 15 my worlds. We were almost 200, 24 miles an
hour average on the 32 ball set. So pushing that average, if your average is faster than most of your competitors, top speed, you're going to have more success. And that's all there is to it now and he did reach the 230 miles an hour peek here. Oh SPS. But on TV. In compensation, he was able to go 228 miles an hour, instead of all speed record this year.
Well, talking back to the rocking kind of pre-shot thing for one, it's a trigger right to help him, start seeing better, but also, it's kind of imitating what he's trying to do in the golf swing as well with his with his pressure, right? Yeah, transition of pressure gets them into the motion of moving but again, the biggest thing for me was we didn't have the jerk in motion which was causing problems in his body,
he's told me multiple times. Over the last few months, he is totally pain-free, we're in December. When he came to me, he was actually having a little bit of back problems, neck problems, things like that. And that comes from jerking motions, right? I mean, that's, that's usually, when we get hurt is in a sudden start or certain stop and that was the main thing to get out of it. And most of us have triggers. I mean, either a forward bump at a hands or hips or, or something
that gets us going. So I kind of like the idea of being in motion and continuing to be Motion verses from a static point and then trying to accelerate as fast as you possibly can. So, but it gives him a good Rhythm. And, and I've seen a lot of people around the world trying to imitate it now, and it's probably going to help them. Now, he's not the first one to ever do this. I mean, the stepping motion, there's been plenty of people in the past that have had a little
step here there. I mean, dominant massive several years ago used to step in store like a stride baseball swing. But with stride golf swing it Jason as Langer, did it? For a little while and others. I mean, golf swing in motion is not new to the sport. This just kind of coming to light. Now, I guess when you talk with someone who's trying to get better to train train gain speed, what is your advice? What are the things you have people? Go experiment with that.
You've seen work the best. So, a couple things I find that most average golfers are playing to stiffen the There's no reason in the world that you can't get a little longer clip if especially if you're a little older move up to a 46-inch Club, get away from those 44, 45 inch drivers, the USGA allows you to go to 48. So there's no difference and hitting a three iron and hit a 6-iron, you know, it's just a longer Club. That's the way I look at it. So a driver. It is 46 inches.
Versus a driver is 44 inches. Just a couple inches or do that. As far as training, there's no substitute for hitting golf balls. Don't be afraid to in your practice on an eight ball set. Hit them just as hard as you can hit them and eventually when you hit them as hard as you can hit them in, they're going straight. That should transfer over to your average ball speed on the golf course when you're playing golf as being a little bit faster.
So push yourself as far as that there's a couple of things that are training AIDs that I really love orange. Whip is one that I really love. I'll try to swing trainers.
Another one I love but there's there's devices out there that can help you Increase your Club speed that they put your look at and if they can get it in their budget or you know time I think that should get those things but you got to get a training program that works with your schedule that will allow you to have some consistency and that if you want to increase your speed, that's that's the only way you got to work without work yours. No, reward Ryan. You have anything to add to that.
So, Bobby mentioned earlier about flow path and base angle. And if play Layers. For example, then go to the video. Instructional video, driving smart, and smarter they go to that video. We explain how to use that, that your path based angle to make the correction off. Like some people just don't know how to fix their ball fly. I was one of those people and just, just by simply observing ball pipe fitting consistently. What change you need to make to improve the Vault, I get you a
lot of yardage. We do a lot of corporate outings long drivers where we put in the charity fundraisers, or some sort of hitting exhibition, and I see a lot of of amateur amateur golfers come through on my hole and a lot of them just don't know, you know, if they don't recognize what the ball flies doings and if they're hitting a too low or too high or what is too low and what is too high. So if they were to spend a little bit of time, observing
the polyp right? Usually, like what Bobby's talk about measuring During, you know, the launch angle packing or things like that. They could a lot of Club nowadays, you can adjust the clubface, and the law didn't just by unscrewing the head and screw it back on, you know, with a with a little different change in the in the set up, a lot of people don't even understand, they can do that. So my opinion one of the best things. The amateur golfer can do is learn about path and face angle
and how to read the ball play. And what changes need to do to this thing. Make that that bar fight. The other thing too is I just I think that other people just they don't ever try to swing 100%. We saw a Tony P. Now few weeks back get 200 mph ball speed and it took him several swings to build up to
that speed boat. A lot of times when you play golf you take one or two practice swings and then you hit a ball and then you're off in irons and a Putter and then you don't hit another driver for minutes. So being on the driving range and hitting, you know, seven or eight balls in a row, trying to build up your speed and do another set of seven or eight balls to try and build up your speed. That type of work will pay off
in my observation. What I've seen, is that usually takes a new longtime competitor, about six months to make some significant speed improvements. But once they have trained for about six months, I mean, I've seen people had 10, 15 miles per hour Club lights, No matter of six months and that's just from swinging. I will give you a tip. This is from personal experience. So one year, I determined that I was going to get faster.
So I was swinging a club inside my house all winter long and I just trained and trained and trained in it, help me swing faster, but the very first competition, I went to, I couldn't even hardly hit the grid because I wasn't hitting a ball when I was training. I was just swinging. So So I accidentally developed these swing habits that were not good for my swing for actually hitting a ball. So I would say the more that you can swing our file hitting a
golf ball the better off. You'll be fasting, you know, it's funny as is I think there's so many people out there that never try to swing hard. They want to hit it farther, but they never actually try to swing harder and I just find it fascinating. I had this like kind of personal breakthrough, probably two years ago now where Finally understood that to hit the ball farther, you have to try to hit it farther. It was groundbreaking.
I know. But like, I know so many people that haven't had that moment and it's just like, it's weird, but I'm sure you guys have probably seen that happen before with with folks. That's a great point because we kind of take it a little bit for granted, I guess because we do swing hard all the time. We assume everybody else's swinging hard. Yeah, but so many golfers have had lessons where everything's about control control control.
And it doesn't matter what person I work with, you know, just say, look, when you're done hitting your driver, your practice or whatever on the Range in your set or in your practice with a set of about eight balls and hit them as hard as you can and then go home, but have fun with it. And just just in a hard if you it's like anything else, you don't try to Sprint, you're not going to run fast. All right? You can't walk yourself into being fast. That's all there is to it.
Don't you strain? That's one thing. Straining is good. For you, it's no different lifting weights. You got to try to lift more than you're capable of to get stronger. In training and practice. What we want to do is mix it up. You want to have a certain amount of your practice devoted to mechanics and the fundamental practice as far as ball-striking even using impact tape and control and where you're hitting
it in the club face. And then you want to step back and then do four to eight ball sets of nothing. But speed with the intention of. I like to hit great shots here but if I miss one, it's okay. All right, so but you got to push that speed and push the envelope as far as raising your heart rate and something that Kyle. And I've done this year was We started measuring his heart rate and we know this real quick, when he got to 160 beats per minute, his boss feed was in the mid to 20s.
So, in Tennessee, when he set the ball, speed record at 228 miles an hour, immediately after he hit it, he looked at me. And I said, what's your heart rate? Checked it, his heart rate was 208 beats on his Fitbit and I look at mine and I was 140 sitting in the bleachers. I was pumping pretty hard to and he did it on his eight balls.
That was pretty, pretty amazing but your heart rate actually has that because your body, obviously you get in that fight or flight mode when your heart rate gets that high, right? It's just like in any other kind of physical exertion, you're the one running or anything else, your body starts pumping and pumping Open, adrenaline and endorphins, and all of that stuff going on. So it allows you to get superhuman strength in my opinion at that point.
And that's what we're looking for in long drive. That's interesting, though. To, like, most people would probably be like, I need to breathe and like, Laura my heart rate and calm down and, you know, etcetera etcetera. You know, like that would I think that'd be the common like thought, though? You know, oh yeah, well in practice, we push him that. We push him to understand what is going to happen. To you, same thing with right?
I mean not just Kyle but all the guys I'll push them to the point that you know, the breakpoint almost and you still got to hit a ball and you still got hit in a grid. That's why we had to build a training facility here. We want to do this and hit two agreed, not to a driving range, we're hitting not only to the grid, but to specific points in the grid when were shot shape and you're trying to do it with your heart pumping like that, you're almost out of breath.
You're about to collapse because we're trying. To pressure the person, almost into the Breaking Point again. Because when you're on TV and you're on live TV, especially and the cameras are on you and you're starting to think about that little thought of a man, I'm about to win a tournament. That's when that pressure is because I always say everybody can hit a free throw, but can you do it with two seconds on the clock? And you down by one?
And that's kind of the feeling of being on that stage. When you got a competitor's, got about there at 400 yards and you got a best em on your next ball or you lose. See how your blood pressure and nerves, are it in and try to calm yourself and just hit, put one in play. That doesn't work in the sport, a long drive. You got to dig down deep and come up with some superhuman strength and just put one out there to can't be touched and you can't go either. That's a little lot of people
don't. Realize with the law drive, there is a clock running, so young, you can't stop and take a break for a minute, you know, stay behind your ball and you do too much of that. I mean, you're going to run out of time. Time. And that is all for this episode. Thank you guys for coming and hanging out, is really fun to talk long drive with you all. Hopefully we can do this again.
Sometime if you're interested in learning more, they have a new program out called driving smarter, driving farther, we have a link on the post along with this episode. I make sure to check that out. It's a really cool series. I was watching some of these videos before we before I chatted with them and they put together some really cool stuff. It's fun to watch them in action and kind of see everything that's going on tour. Has their unique approach.
So driving smarter driving a farther, check that out. Link in along with the post here. Thank you so much for listening this episode. Make sure to subscribe. ITunes, Apple podcast Spotify, wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with another new episode. This episode was hosted by me. Corey Walker. Follow me on Twitter at corty Walker and is edited mixed and produced by just hit publish Productions.