Episode 13: Temperature, Humidity & Altitude

air density. So the same causal physics reason occurs when you have higher temperature and higher altitude, So you're gonna you're gonna carry the ball further. But the thing that's not as obvious to most players is that you also hit the ball lower. Okay, so when you go to high altitude, you're gonna hit the ball lower in the air. That's it. This kind of a weird thing, like your brain might be struggling with that, like if I'm hitting it further or I heard I should launch it high

or something when you go to high altitude. But naturally speaking, this is why runways are longer in Denver and they're very short in San Diego. Right, you can you can stop the plane quicker because you have higher air density. Okay, so you're gonna hit it further and lower. But the other good news Shane, for you is going to Colorado, is that the ball also goes straighter when you're playing high altitude. Yes, it also goes straighter for the same

reason that it goes lower. It also flies straighter. So your little cut you hit down there off the tee is gonna be cutting a little bit less. But the fairways that maybe a cherry that are forty yards wide, they'll pay as if they're fifty yards wide. So that is the very good news. You can get out on one of those tea's. They're grown rough in fairways, look a little bit tighter maybe than you've been used to because you're in a championship. Now, that's right, I know

how the USGA does it. Uh, don't be intimidated. They're gonna play wider than they appear up at altitude.

X ball. I'm asson you're gonna continue to play that next week when you go to Cherry Hills, right, And this says, okay, these are your normal numbers that you've been playing your golf at sea level about seventy five degrees. We're gonna transfer that to Denver at eighty five degrees. And how are you going to use that number you normally hearr nine iron, one sixty. You're gonna go up here, and you can do this very quickly. If you print this out, we'll send it to you in a format

that they go write in your book. And you're gonna go right here to between one fifty and one seventy five. If you hit your stock nine iron and it's eighty five degrees, it's gonna play sixteen yards shorter there.

it here, I need a land to here. I'm gonna aim it a little bit over here. It's the plays like's gonna be this. Some of those Colorado Open shehades I've played has been really hot, and you can see that we actually have numbers here if you're looking at the laser pointer, if it's nearing one hundred degrees. I'mn't looked at the forecast for next week, but it can get that hot occasionally it could actually play up to

twenty yards or twenty one, twenty two yards. Further, I've actually loved calculating this and then having that number in my head, Okay, I'm gonna try to hit the one eighty two seven iron right, and that actually can give you a lot of comfort instead as at one club or is it two right? It's a lot less kind of precise from a psychology standpoint in my experience.

gonna keep going up further. One of the big reasons for that, especially when you look at that two hundred to two fifty range, which is your long irons, is because the ball is also flying lower, so you get, yes, it's gonna go further, but then it's also gonna fly a little bit lower, so the aerodynamics is kind of

doing its thing in that part. So you know, one way you could use this, Shane, if you didn't want to look up these exact numbers, you could be, Okay, hey, my lob wedge sand wedge is going to be ten yards. You know, maybe my short irons are gonna be fifteen. If you want to average thirteen and sixteen here in that one thirty to one seventy five range, and then anything from you know, one seventy five and up is

gonna be that twenty yard range. So if you wanted to simplify it, you could I personally like going to the sub yard accuracy here and kind of leaning into that, But it's gonna be up to you. This is gonna be fun to kind of practice with in your practice rounds, Marty.

That's what we've done here. We had your driver numbers, we had your seven iron stock numbers from when you were fitted the proving ground, just like you could get any of our accounts. Plug it in, plug in a few key pieces of information like your stock yardages, which you knew where you typically play golf, and that's where you can generate that plays like So we hope to make this available. I think there's a couple cool use

cases to this one. At the top part, which is gonna be your primary use case is Okay, you know how much shorter is the ball going to carry in the air? Then down at the bottom this is more handy. This will will definitely be handy for you in Denver, and we could talk about that, but for your daily play is also how much is the wind going to

affect my ballflight? One of the very interesting things about playing golf in Denver, because the air is not as dense, is the wind is going to affect your ball less than at sea level. Okay, so if we if we compare these numbers, and for those of you that aren't watching visually here, you're gonna want to go back and tune into it. But we have a chart that shows for Shane five ten, fifteen, twenty twenty five miles an hour of herting wind versus that same amount of helping wind.

What is the impact on his carry distance for hurting and helping winds? And I'm gonna show an interesting comparison here. Let's zoom into a number. Let's say you're one hundred and eighty yards out, so we're gonna zoom into this range and you have fifteen miles an hour of herding wind that's gonna hurt you twenty two yards. I'm gonna toggle to a sea level chart we made for you, okay, and now that number went to twenty eight so you

can see at higher altitude, you can see. I'm gonna toggle back and forth, and you can see all of those numbers really scale down in Denver as compared to sea level. So the wind's gonna affect your ball roughly fifty percent less. Kind of depends on the specific club

and conditions and things of that nature. But that's something else to keep in mind, and you can kind of you can either know that and put that in your golf i Q Shane, or you can get really down the nitty gritty and throw an actual number at it next week if you want to.

the helping wind helps you. And you're a high speed tour maybe above tour average speed, you generate ample amount of spin, so your numbers are even closer to equal for hurting wind and helping win. If we look at some of our slower swing speed players, which would be your typical golfer out there, there's a lot of scenarios where that helping wind can actually hurt their carry distance.

And we've made some of these sheets here Shane, for a few of our LPGA tour players, and we get down into that two hundred to two fifty range or even that one seventy five to two hundred range that we're looking at here, and the helping wind actually hurts their carry distance, and then they think back in their brain they go, oh, yeah, I remember when I was between clubs, needed to carry a bunker switch to the five iron instead of the six. The ball kind of

looked like it fell out of there. I thought I was taking the more conservative play to carry the trouble, but I hit it way shorter with that down wind scenario. So I think that's one of them. Is that hurting and helping wind? Marty?

that's different for different players, including me. My delivery conditions and my spin range is a in a window such that I actually did when I go play the call Red Open, or if I go play golf in Flagstaff, I do have to change my driver loft. Okay, And I'm gonna run your numbers here. So we got a driver measure on track, man, So we have radar here. Let's call it moderate fairway conditions one seventy seven balls, eight and a half degrees of launch, twenty nine to

fifty spin. Now, a lot of listeners out there might be thinking, why can't you get Shane more dialed in with this spin that seems high? Well, guess what your stock little chip cut down there. You're hitting down about three degrees. Three three and a half degrees is what we measured you at. Okay. So the more you hit down on the ball, the higher your optimal backspin. So

that is totally fine. So we're gonna run this through this tool that we have launch efficiency, and I'm gonna run this Shane first at sea level, So I'm gonna put in eighty five degrees in sea level. I get launch efficiency. This is doing all kinds of compute on the back end, all kinds of virtual simulations, kind of like AI, to tell you what you should do in your launch conditions to get totally dialed. And as we did, we use this tool. When you're at the proven grounds,

you were pretty much perfect. This is saying this is a great fit. This is what co pilot is saying. You're within a half a degree of absolutely perfect and one hundred degrees of our one hundred RPMs of spin of absolute perfection from a fitting standpoint, So you can't really eke out at any more distance there because we got you dialed in. Now, let's say you hit that same shot in Denver. So I'm gonna pump the altitude up to fifty seven fifty and say get launch efficiency.

And now you've moved down a little on that optimal window. Gotcha, you're gonna be living right at the bottom threshold of optimal. And you know this might seem crazy to some folks out there. The spin rate recommendation it says for you is three three hundred RPMs. So here we are ping. We're saying your optimal spin. At altitude, your optimal launch is nine to five and your optimal spin is thirty three hundred. That may sound pretty wild to people, but

that's because of how you're angle of attack. And then at altitude, because the ball is gonna fly lower, we need a little more launch and a little more spin to keep that ball in the air. That being said, Shane, I think because you generate ample spin, it's gonna be warm next week in Denver. Most likely your driver as is is still gonna be really good for you there at altitude.

like that pitch shot. You're like the wind affected the pitch shot more than my approach shot. You know why is that? It's pretty interesting? So I think the phenomena that's happening, and my callague doctor Eric Hendrickson, we got to have them on to talk about the exact microphysics

of what's going on here. But there's a in aerodynamics sometimes there's like these we call them binary They're like switches that go off and on effects from an aerodynamic standpoint, So let's say you're hitting a lobwey a fifty yard loguage sixty yard lobguage, where that ball speed is only going to be like fifty sixty seventy miles an hour. So you got fifty sixty seventy miles an hour, it's call it sixty miles an hour. Then you got let's say,

twenty miles an hour of down windy. So the net that the golf ball is seeing when it's spinning is only forty So there's a speed threshold where the speed is so low you're not getting that kind of turbulence around the ball that gives it its lift force. And the lift force is kind of like what keeps the plane in the air. Okay, So if you're not getting that lift force because the net speed the ball speed of the ball minus the helping wind speed of the wind gets too low, then you lose the lift and

the ball falls out of the air. It's like a knuckleball. It loses its upward pushing force, which is called the lift force. There's some more little nuance that goes into the why. But does that kind of help make a little bit of sense of that painful shot?

hits one twenty five. Do I just hit gap weedge and try to swing smooth at it and just see what kind of occurs with the wind. What's your approach when you're let's say you're one hundred and ten yards, what's your sandwich? One fifteen stock?

And then trying to hit it lower also keeps the ball speed up, so you're getting more ball speed, so you don't have that scenario where you like, like you know that differential between the ball speed and the wind speed, and then try to generate as much spin as you can. And so for those two reasons, I think that is an actionable thing to do. But that is such a painful shot, Shane, because the situation doesn't always allow you to do it. I mean a lot of times you

have those shots. You got trouble short in trouble long, and so you're here, you're living on a razor's edge there. I also have some demons from some shots that I've had. The ball fall out there on a wedgshot or d c Ranch here has a hole way up on top of the hill and it's in this canyon and it's like one hundred and thirty yards one hundred and forty yards. The wind's always swirling. The other thing that happens, Shanes is sometimes the wind can actually blow down. This is

like a crazy thing to think about. Is the wind doesn't always blow just left or right in front to back. The wind can also blow down. So there's a hole up there. I swear the wind's helping, but quite often you'll get some phenomenon in the mountain where the wind blows down, that ball falls down, hits into this rock wall and you're reteeing and you can't go along either. That's not good either.

all the way up to one hundred percent. You actually lower the air density by increasing humidity, which we talked about temperature and altitude earlier. You lower the density, the ball goes further. So in theory, if you but it's a very very teeny tiny effect. If you take a three hundred yard drive, you'd say your your driver launch conditions, the ball's dry, and we could somehow change the humidity from zero percent to one hundred percent, you would carry

that driver one yard further when it's humid. But Shane, let's go back to man. We got all these golfers and I heard Justin Thomas online on Twitter kind of talk about it over when it's humid, the ball goes shorter. They're saying that, but yet in theory the ball should go further. Well, what's happening when it's humid out we most of the time you'll have little water droplets accumulating, even under a microscopic level on the golf ball itself,

so you really have a wet golf ball. Now, what happens when the golf ball alone is wet, It flies shorter, so that humidity in the air makes it go slightly slightly further. But if you have water on the golf ball. If you have water on the ball, this is why if you if it's raining and you got a caddy there, keep the ball dry as the number one priority. The ball will go shorter. So uh, let's this is something

you can anyone could test, Shane. You could go to your range if you had a track man, tee a ball up with your driver, sprits it with bringing a little spray bottle, sprints it with water, hit a dry ball and then hit a few where you spritz the ball wet in the wet golf ball with the driver for you will go like fifteen shorter. Okay, So having

the ball dry is a very big deal. So then there's another compounding effect, which is when the ball's wet and you hit a low lofted club, you actually because the friction between the ball and the face, you'll actually generate more spin. We call that the reverse flyer. So you could actually get a scenario where let's say you're hitting a five iron, the ball's a little wet and

it's it's humid out. The ball's a little bit wet, you generate a little more spin between the ball and the face, then the ball has a little moistureize, so it flies shorter through the air. So even though it's more humid air and it should go further, and actually goes shorter in practice, I think, and we think it pinging it from the proving grounds research, that's probably actually

what happens out there in practice. So the golfers aren't necessarily wrong, but it's not the humidity that's making it go further. It's a wet golf ball, Marty.

your thing. If you're Steph Curry and basketball Hugh shoot threes. In golf, you've got to do all of these things well to have a solid round of golf. It's not just the plane, it's not just the hitting. It's the

saying and it's the thinking, Marty. And this is part of that thinking that makes golf so tough because you can have some of the best players in the world, Justin Thomas, one of the best golfers in the world, not totally understanding humidity in the game, and that he's not the only player that deals with that.

picked up all that speed was the wind. He became very kind of perplexed by how much the is the wind gonna affect my ballflight, where if you have other other players with slower swing speed, it doesn't affect it as much. Right, So I think it depends on your peak high, your trajectory, your ball speed, and it's gonna affect your wedges less. Okay. Again, they're in the air, they're you're not as far out and they're in the air.

For a shorter period of time. So I think kind of like green reading, where one way, one kind of good way I think the aim pointers and I've kind of learned about of reading greens is to think about the longer the putt from a time standpoint. So if you had a very fast downhill putt, that putt could be rolling for maybe eight seconds, right, But if you had an uphill putt on slow greens, that same distance

of putt might only be rolling for four seconds. So which one is going to break more the one where gravity can act on it for a longer period of time. So one way to think about wind is very similar. Think about the time that the wind can act on the golf ball. So one major way to counter that in playing golf is to reduce that time. Is to

lower your peak height and lower your trajectory. Is a really good technique for a player like you, Shane, and that's why you see the very creative high speed golfers and Bubba's of the world being able to manipulate their vertical trajectory a lot when they're playing golf.

with some skills that you need. You're gonna have more consequence on things like the wind affecting your irons more and so being able to manipulate that vertical trajectory is very important. I think you, Shane. You also brought up

Rory and manipulating and choosing different shots. One of the funnest things to watch was him hitting his final two iron when he won the Scottish Open earlier this summer, where it was a scenario where if he would have hit his stock draw, everyone says, Rory always hits a draw,

go back and look at that shot. We actually at Balnama simulated if he would have hit the draw with that same scenario, his two iron would have gone like thirty yards over the green on the back edge, and his make percentage probability back there would have been like one in one hundred and he would be more likely

to three putt and not even make a playoff. So he had to cut it into the wind, and by cutting it into the wind, he reduced the distance because he was between four iron and two iron and four iron wouldn't have worked because the geometry of the hole like it was, it was geometrically impossible for him to get it close to the hole. His only way to pull that shot off and win the tournament was to cut the two iron with a lot of spin axes right back up into the wind, take the distance off,

create the angle, and capture the victory. A beautiful example of a high speed player using shot making to control distance and and clutch.

all fired up to get to Colorado. Is there anything else, weather wise or variable wise that I should be thinking about?

It's bag perfect. So that might be a very important club for you because again that peak height the the the height's gonna be lower, You're gonna land it shallower. This might be a little bit non obvious to the rest of the players there. So definitely bring that seven wood. Definitely be mindful if the greens get firm that you might be landing it a little bit shallower. That's where your high cut can give you a major advantage over those young kids that only hit hit one one shot shape in there.

Majors with two drivers in his bag. You know, I remember Adam Scott years ago chasing that PGA Championship had two putters in the bag, having five wedges sixty two

sixty four degree wedges. Like you see these pros willingness to try different clubs at big time events, and the seven wood is something I've been very excited about bringing with me because again not just in terms of shots, in terms of how they're laying on the green, but out of some of this nasty championship rough is you'd be able to galluge it out of some of these spots that you couldn't do with the crossover.

That place is super fun. It holds its own for not being super long on the card. You will end up hitting some shots in there, like, hey, how am I hitting all these long irons? It's it's sneaky in how that place you end up hitting some long irons to some very small greens. You're absolutely gonna love it. Both those tracks are unbelievable.

not a guaranteed layup either. That's the other factor. So if you do lay up, you know, really focus on that shot. You got to get that ball in the short grass there, because that green is complex. That being said, maybe in match play they can move the tea up into the right a little bit to the original tee.

Then it's send all day long. Okay, it's quite fun, and I would hypothesize they would do that in match play because you don't have to worry about the pace of play and all the other things with getting all those golfers through thirty six holes. Up there with me some afternoon storms, Marty.

and play and see what happens. But to actually get through this and to play in this championship, you know, this was this was the first event I ever broadcasted on national television, was the US Ader back at twenty sixteen. So to kind of full circle it and get to finally get a chance to play in it, I am very excited about it.