You read five Lessons hogan second book, he has three pages in there on
the waggle, and in one page talking about it, he says it's the
most important part of the swing, or one of the most important parts the
old Scottish phrases as you waggle, so shall ye swing? In fact that
he does today. What's the most common type of waggle where you hinge back
your trail wrists back and forth like that an audio podcast. You use your
words, so hinging your wrist beans, you flex your wrist backward the back
of your trail hands well, right hand if you're right hand. A golfer
goes back toward your forearm, not up towards the sky. That's called cocky.
So when you hinge back and then forth a little bit, that's the
Hogan waggle. And what it does is it reduces the tendency for your mind
and body to get frozen from stress or from pressure. So when you're waggling,
you're keeping some sense of athletic fluid motion in your body. One all
right, this is Rob Mulligan from Lake Orian Michiguet and I play West Room
Golfward in Rochester, Missigain. This is Golf Smarter Number nine? Telling to
waggle or not to waggle? Is that the question? Let's find out with
Jim Waldron. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights from
great golf mines to help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ.
Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter podcast.
Jimmy, Hey man, how's it going, Fred, glad to be here.
It's glad to have you here. You uh, you're getting around,
man. I'm I'm seeing your name on more podcasts than mine, and I'm
starting to get my feelings hurt a little bit. You've been making around guy
for podcasts. You haven't lost a loyal follower. Okay, yeah, I
know that. I think it's our twenty ninth or thirty podcast something crazy like
that. I lost count and I even keep a spread cheat and I lost
count. But you know when when I started doing this, when you and
I first started talking back in the early two thousands, and everyone was talking
about swing mechant Everyone's still talking about swing mechanics, and I came across here,
I'm going I need more than swing mechanics because I'm not going to work
on that because I really believe in in that the mental game approach and strategic
approach to golf, And you were like, yeah, absolutely. It seems
like over the last twenty years of doing this there's more and more people talking
about the mental game. Do you see that being true too or is that
just my oego? No, it's definitely true. And I saw the stiff
tappen right around the time COVID hit three or four years ago. I was
getting more and more new students who had been to some of the top what
I would call body only highly technical, mechanical approach type teachers and not only
not got any improvement from it, but but some of these guys and gals
got the yips from it from an overly technical approach, right, And that
used to be a thing that would only happen to like the occasional tour pro
like Savy by Astero's got the yips full swing y app store Devendi's career.
But when he went to mack O'Grady, who was a very highly technical teacher
and Ian Baker, Finch got driver hips after trying to work with David Ledbetter
to improve his distance off the tea. Right after he right after he had
won the British Open, And there are multiple examples of people on tour who
got worse when they tried to change their swing. And yet even in spite
of that, it became the dominant paradigm, especially once the Internet really took
hold, you know, thirty years ago, and especially when Instagram really hit
about what twelve fifteen years ago. So I'm getting contacted by people all the
time who have gotten worse from this highly technical body only approach, and they're
starting to embrace a mind body connection approach, which means how you use your
mental focus ability and the emotional side of your personality has a direct effect on
your swing mechanics, meaning the mechanics don't exist in a vacuum. And the
greatest example of this is someone who has severe YIPS. Someone who has severe
yips is an extreme example of the power of the mind body connection, but
on the negative side of it, meaning when you're not using your emotions properly,
and when you're not using your mental focus ability properly, you can end
up with a full blown case of the hips. And of course the cure
for that that malady is embracing the idea of the mind body connection. Wow.
You know, there's so much conversation about, like we said, mechanics.
I mean, like, we just had an episode a couple of weeks
ago about the physics of the golf swing. We had a gentleman who's a
mechanical engineer, Jewisheng Wang, and just wanting to go over the the physics
of how it is to hit a golf swing. Honestly, I was a
little bit lost because I'm just like, I can't make those adjustments, even
if I do understand what the heck he was talking about. Those are adjustments
that are difficult to do. But I can get myself into a better headspace,
but I can't. Yeah, I mean, I think any type of
any type of scientific research, that type of sort of road to trying to
understand the golf swing better. To me, that only makes sense if you're
trying to convince a teacher to change his or her paradigm for how they teach
the golf swing, or you're trying to convince a student that a swing change
is necessary. Because what you're doing right now, Bob, for example,
would be you're you know, you're violating this law of physics. This is
what the research says the best players in the world are doing and you're doing
something very different, So it has a role as a convincer type of evidence
that a change might be necessary. But I don't think you can be thinking
about your body, particularly highly technical swing thoughts. And we've done many PAC
tests on this. They just don't work, and they in fact can trigger
it you and quite often they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I
played with the guy the other day, very chatty fellow. I mean talk
to his puttered the whole time. I mean he was chatting. And we
meet each other on the first tea. It's like this guy's joining it.
Okay, fine, So we meet the other on first tea and he's like,
oh, do you play like I play regularly. It's like he asked
me, do you have a handicap? I said yeah, actually, right
now, I'm down to a nine eight or something like that. And I
said, what about you? You keep your hand He goes, yeah,
I'm a twenty four. I'm like, okay, all right, I know
what I'm getting myself into. Three probably about the I don't know, ten
to eleven twelfth hole. Somewhere in there after he's learned that I do this
podcast and stuff. He's like, listen, if you notice anything, you
want to tell me anything, please go ahead and say it, because I
can change my swing in a drop of a hat. I can make adjustments.
And then he shanks the ball and then he hooks it into the woods
and I'm like and I'm like, no, you can't. I mean,
I like, it's not easy to change your swing on the fly let alone,
ever. And then you just told me you're a twenty four, So
why are you trying to give me advice. I'll tell you a funny story
of acropo of your story, which is my first year teaching thirty three years
ago in Hawaii. I had about the same guy about it. I think
it was a twenty six handicap and I said, well, show me what
you got, show me let me see you hit a few. He goes,
what swing do you want? I go, what are you talking about?
He goes, I have a Jack Nicholas swing, I have a Lee
Trevino swing, and I have a Gary Player swing, which you know those
are very different swings. First of all, you know, quite quite a
bit different. But but I said, well you really play with three different
swings? Will? He goes, well, I only use one swing per
per shot obviously, but yeah, I go, show me your Garant Player's
wing look nothing like Gary player, right, And I said, show me
your your Trevino swing, nothing like Lee. Show me your Nicholas wing look
nothing like Jack. So I took my camera out. This is back in
the day when they were big balty cameras. Yeah, and I think that
I filmed them doing his a version of the three swings, and of course
they were all three were identical, and they were really, really, really
bad golf swings, right, And I said to Michael, you're you're just
living in denial if you think you can change your swing like that and make
it like these three very different styles of swinging. Right. No, people
just they do what they're what their unconscious mind swing map dictates is what is
what your body does, right, So the change has to start with the
mental pictures, the conclusions, the beliefs at the unconscious mind level. That's
the first really major step in the swing change process. And then after that
happens, then you can do reps, right, lots of reps, slow
motion reps in front of a mirror primarily, right. Yeah, does that
makes sense? What's what's called closed loop. In neurophysiology, there's the idea
of open low versus closed closed loop. So when you're moving slowly where you
have real time feedback, meaning you're election in the mirror, you can employ
your feed forward system to make your body do something you want it to do
that's not not currently a habit. Because you're moving slowly, your feed forward
system will listen to your conscious mind, right, but you're also seeing your
reflection. You're making subtle adjustments to what you're seeing in the mirror, and
that's your feedback system, right, And that's that's how that's the fastest way
to learn any movement pattern skill. Think of it as hammering and nail.
If you're hammering and nail and you're especially if you're not a really skilled carpenter.
Typically when you hammer the nail, the first time you hit it again,
if you don't do it for a living, it'll it'll bend a little
bit left or right, maybe right. You don't it doesn't go straight in
because you're not really skilled at it. So then you realize, oh,
that first the first tap of the nail, it bent like a degree left,
So now I got to come in from the left and kind of hit
down and a little to the right to straighten the nail out. That's what
I'm talking about. That's that's the feed forward system, which is the striking
the nail, and the feedback system is making the adjustments bid strike and again
that can only be done the closed loop system. There's been tons of research
on this only works when you're moving slowly. As soon as you're moving fast,
whether you know it or not, your body only listens to the commands
coming from your unconscious mind. Swing map or swing blueprint, right, and
every golfer has foreign beliefs or unconscious visual mental pictures about what the physics of
the swing should be, particularly terms about what should happen during impact, what
makes the ball go far, what makes the ball go straight. So it's
a combination of geometry and physics beliefs about in those two areas. And that's
that's what your body listens to when you're moving at normal tempo. It doesn't
listen to conscious mind swing thoughts. That's the big that's the big mass hallucination
that we have in our sport. And it doesn't happen in any other sport
except golf and golf is the most poorly performed sport at the amateur level by
far compared to all the other sports. I mean, I work at people
all the time who are like They'll tell me I'm a zero hand if you
could handicap downhill ski racing. I'm a zero handicap at alpine skiing. At
downhill skiing, I'm a three handicap at tennis. I'm a five handicap at
shooting a gun at a target. I play once a week in a men's
basketball league. I'm a five handicap basketball player. I've been playing golf for
thirty years and I'm a twenty handicap at golf. Why is that? Wow?
And my answer is part of the reason. The big part of the
reason is the instruction paradigm, the ethos the underlying philosophy about how to coach
the game is incredibly dysfunctional and it's rooted in the era when golf began,
which is in the fourteenth century in Scotland. It's towards the end of the
Dark Ages when golf became a sport and we still have our age is thinking
when it comes to the process of making a swing change and when it comes
to the mental game especially. We have a twenty first version of what should
happen with body and club due to all the recent last thirty forty years,
you know, scientific research on the biomechanics of the golf swing, so that
that's becoming more and more of a consensus among top teachers. But what's what's
holding us back is the application part. Yeah, yeah, all right,
let let's take a time out. I want to come back to the dark
ages when we when we return, we'll be right back. It's fascinating information
that and makes total sense that you can be a crappy golfer or have a
high handicap it you can excel because golf's the hardest sport. I mean,
we've all you know, everybody's listening. It's it's the hardest thing. It's
so hard because the ball is sitting here right, And there's lots of why
it's hard, yea, beyond the coaching paradigm being in the dark, yeah
for sure. And then and then watching it on television it's like, oh,
I can do that, and you go out there and it's like,
no, you can't. And like I had, I had a young man
on recently who knew nothing about the game. Knew nothing about golf, knew
nothing about what goes in his bag. But he was convinced and he was
going to start a YouTube channel that he's gonna like, I'm going to become
a scratch golfer. And he thought he can get this done in a couple
of years, a couple of months. And watching his progress, he's putting
out videos every day and watching his progress, it's like, I'm sorry,
man, I wish all the best in the world, but you don't have
a clue will get your get yourself into I agree, I agree. People
have no idea how hard it is. Even with the right approach in terms
of the application, how to change your swing, how to use your mind
as a tool to play better golf, it still takes time, and a
lot of it in golf is three steps forward, a half to step back,
two steps forward to step back. That's the norm. And that's with
top teachers and you know, and really highly educated students I tend to have.
It's still never, it's almost never. Is it a straight line of
Every once in a while I get one or two people a year who can
make changes really fast, and but that's like way less than one tenth of
one percent of golfers, right, yeah. And then there's random reinforcement,
which was one of the first topics we talked about eighteen years ago, which
people don't talk about still today much, which is that's the primary reason why
the person you mentioned has that delusion, which is people can't distinguish between luck
and skill. Which random reinforcement is a thing in psychology, and it means
when a mammal's brain is confronted with a difficult, challenging task, something that's
by its very nature leads to failure ninety percent of the time and success only
ten percent. When you do achieve the successful outcome, when you're trying to
do the difficult task, your brain gets flooded with neurochemicals like beta endorphins and
dopamine and serotonin. You get a high, You get a natural drug high
that your brain's neurotransmitters produce, and that high produces irrational thinking. In other
words, someone who can't break ninety at a regular basis, when they hit
that one or two really good shots per round, those are mostly, if
not entirely, luck, not skill. But the golfer doesn't the golfer's ego
doesn't want to accept that that was purely luck or mostly luck. They want
to take ownership, and it creates this belief, Oh, my swing's really
not that bad. It's pretty good. And they also and they're also at
that point they're they're saying, oh, yeah, I hit the ball,
you know, like seven iron I hit the ball one five. It's like,
no, I don't If you did it once, that doesn't mean that's
how far you hit it. Yeah. I had a I called me up
about twenty five years ago and said, you worked at my friend Joe last
summer and you took him from a twenty to a twelve and five months,
and so you must be good at this. So I want to take lessons
from you, but I'm not really sure. I need to work on my
swing. Maybe we should work on mental game or short game or pudding.
I said, well, that's that's fine. What's your handicap? He goes,
I'm a thirty but I have a really good swing. I go,
what are you talking about? He goes, Yeah, my swing is really
good. My local pro told me by swings fine. My friends who played
golf told me my swings fine. I go, let me get this straight.
You're a thirty handicap and you think your swing is good. He goes
yeah, I go, no, you don't have a good swing. Those
people were either lying to you or they were playing a cruel joke on you,
because to have a good swing, almost by definition, you have to
be able to break eighty on a consistent basis to have a good swing.
But he had this idea. He goes, well, how if that's true,
how come I can hit that one drive for a round that goes two
hundred and seventy yards right down the middle of the fairway. I go that
was a lucky shot. That was luck skill, right. But you know,
when you're talking to someone who's under the influence of random reinforcement, it's
you know, it's one of the It falls in line with some of the
recent research from neuroscience on why human beings create have a tendency to create suffering
for themselves or other people, which is unfortunately the Enlightenment philosophers their view of
human nature has been proven conclusively by modern neuroscience and neuropsychology to be wrong.
Human beings are not primarily rational creatures. They're primarily irrational animals and human amazing
capacity for self delusion right, and again mainly due to random reinforcement. There
was a galphare at our local force years ago. This is a person who's
never shot better than one hundred and twenty in her life, and oh yeah,
she loves it, and which is fine. You don't have to only
play golf for scores. There's other reasons to play golf other than improved.
Absolutely, But she accidentally hit three good shots in a row on a short
part five at our course here and Enterprise, which is from the women's teeth.
It's about four hundred and sixty yards, I think something like that.
So she topped, and it was a very hot day in the summer,
and they hadn't been watering the fairways as often as they could have, so
the ground was rock hard. So she had a very long drive that probably
never got more than ten feet in the air, so it was sort of
a low hook, so it rolled out like probably seventy yards. She did
the same thing on her neck shot with her three would and somehow it got
close to the green and I forgot how far away she was, but maybe
within fifty yards or so, and she hit a little fifty yard pitch and
it went in the hole, and I happened to be practicing nearby and I
saw this and she started doing this little dance with her hands up in the
air like this, and she said woooooo, And I realized, that's the
sound, and that's the dance DC in Vegas in the casino when someone gets
lucky playing lots and they get three lemons to come up and they win like,
you know, five thousand dollars. That's the sound of being lucky.
And you hear that sound on the golf course all the time, particularly among
mid to high handicaps. Wow. So wait a minute, but I want
to back up to that guy who called you and said you helped my friend,
and then you told him no, actually you sucked. You were just
lucky, you know, in a nice way, and said that, yeah,
yeah, But did he I hire you? Yeah he did. He
did. He actually had, and he was fine. We had. We
we ended up having a good relationship and we worked together and he was very
successful. But he had to have the band aid ripped off. He had
a band aid that said I'm not as bad as I probably believe I am
deep down because other people keep telling him my swing is Okay, well it's
nonsense. I mean, you know, you know we talks about this a
lot. You don't hear it much anymore. But in Barbara tell his early
books, basically in his first book, which was Golf Is Not a Game
Perfect, he talks about this tendency for golfers to not accept how bad really
are. Again, I'm not talking to all, I've got a mind eye
handicaps, right, And he said, the reason why we have one of
the reasons why we have such a dysfunctional coaching culture is because of the wealth
and the power and balance between the original American golf teachers who were actually imported
from Scotland by the DuPonts and the Carnegie and the Rockefellers back in the eighteen
nineties in the guilded age, when it was an oligarchy, even not like
it is now. It's the worst oligarchy today, but back then it was
an oligarchy, and there there were literally almost nope, there was only a
couple of public golf courses in the entire country. They are all places like
Shinnekock, private courses that only the super wealthy could afford to play, and
they would they would import you know, Shamus McIntyre from Edinburgh to come to
be the teaching pro. He wasn't even allowed to change into his spikes in
the clubhouse. He wasn't allowing the clubhouse. He was a second class citizen.
Yeah, so you think he's going to risk his job by telling mister
rock Feller that your swing sucks. It's not gonna happen. He's gonnare was.
He has a financial incentive to lie to the student. And there's a
brilliant chapter in that book where Rotella dissects how this happened, and I contrast
it with the way I think the most effectively taught sport by far in the
history of sports is our Asian martial arts, which I grew up in.
As you know, and the Asian martial arts tradition, there's a there's also
a power and balance, but it's on the healthy side, meaning the teacher
is up here on a pedestal and you're down here at the bottom. And
slowly, as you acquire skill, you climb the stairway too proficiency, say
in Japanese karate, and maybe you know ten years later you're equal to the
to the teacher and you get a different color, which you would never think,
right, exactly, you get different color, right, well, is
that how you get to move back in the tea boxes? Is like getting
different color belts? And thought about that. That's actually right, that's that's
actually quite good. Yeah, it is sort of similar. But the point
is there. It's built in that the teacher knows what the hell he's talking
about, and you would never well if you did question the teacher, Like
when I was learning how to do a rising block, which is which is
this motion? I mean, I can still do it fast and I haven't.
I haven't, you know, I haven't had any instruction in this since
I was a little kid. But I learned how to do this, and
I'll learned to do this and this, so it's all it's innate now.
But can you imagine if I hear I am an eleven year old kid,
if I said to the karate teacher, no, I actually know what you
know. I saw something online of the day some other martial arts teacher says
that that your way of doing is wrong and I should do it this way,
or or you know, I got into if I got to a bar
fight yesterday and I did something different than than what you've been teaching me and
it worked pretty well that that level of dysfunction doesn't exist, so no words,
but in golf it does. And you know, the greatest example of
this is this idea that we're all kind of equal, that even the teachers
and the top players, you know, there's this level playing field which is
again highly dysfunctional. Gary Player was leading back in the day, I think
it was in the late seventies the US Open, and I think it was
at Shinnecock, one of those New York courses, and he's waiting for his
his limousine to pick him up in front of the Plaza hotel in Midtown Manhattan
to go to go to the golf course on Sunday morning, and he's got
like a three shot lead. His doorman says to him, I saw your
swing yesterday on TV, and I know it's this hitch at the top of
your back swing. Maybe if you did this, and Gary Player listened to
the guy and took it seriously. This is I'm not making this up.
Yeah, So this idea that we're all level and that and that everybody's entitled
to an equal, equally valid opinion is BS. It is classic BS and
there are actually people who know more than you do than the average golfer does
about how right. There are actually acts experts in the field. Yeah.
Yeah, And that's when the phrase better than lucky, better lucky than good
comes up, which I hate. I hate that phrase. It's like,
no, I'm sorry, I'd much rather be good. All right, we're
gonna take another time out. We'll be right back. So just recently at
the Open Championship here twenty twenty three Royal Liverpool, Brian Harmon grinded it out.
I mean, this was it really was truly remarkable to watch this guy
grind it out with some of the top names in the sport struggling on this
golf course. I mean, the golf course was clearly in charge here,
which is as a recreational golfer that makes me nuts. But at that level
I get it, go ahead and beat the course, because you don't.
You don't beat the other players who beat the course, right, But what
were what as someone who really specializes and focuses on the yips, what was
your feeling watching this guy with his setup and his waggle going on and on.
I counted thirteen different times he would waggle, and he admits it.
He knows. I saw a video of him today saying, yeah, yeah,
I know it. But I used to play so fast. And this
was from Brian Harmon. He says, I used to play so fast that
I ended up waiting around all the time. And another player said, take
your time, man, you got plenty of time out there. So he
started doing that, waiting till he got ready. But he knows that he's
slow, and it's a conscious effort to slow everything down to play better.
But what is what happened with you on this guy? This guy, Well,
first of all, let me come back to that point. What I
loved is he said in the press conference after he stayed he said, I
stayed with my process, and part of the process, which he did allude
to later in the interview, was staying in the present moment, meaning he
said, I didn't think about winning the tournament until I hit that bunker shot
in eighteen, and then I knew I just had to. You know,
I think it could have liked it could have like eight seven puttet from there
and still one or something, he went by saying, and of course he
ended up making the putty got up and down from the from a pretty difficult
bunker. Lie. But he said, I stayed in my process until that
I didn't. I didn't I didn't get ahead of myself. I didn't go
into the future saying what if, what if? What if I win the
Open? Which is great. That's exactly what I teach people to do,
to stay in the present moment. Paul Eisinker commented about it. He said,
the reason Brian Harmon won the Open is and the reason he basically blew
away the field is he had the ability to quiet his mind. And that's
what I teach people what to do, especially if they have yips. But
back to your original question about how much time he spends over the ball.
We've We've talked about this inn other podcast, but that's one of the two
primary ways you can do the last stage of a pre shot routine in golf.
The two primary ways are the Jack Nicholas non automatic method, which is
what Harmon used, and the Tiger Woods automatic method. Today Jordan's speech,
Patrick Cantlay, they're kind of slow over the ball, ye, Roy McElroy,
they all use the Jack Nicholas method. But I strongly recommend to almost
everybody I work with, particularly amateurs, to not use that method. It
has too many drawbacks to it. In fact, the vast majority of tour
pros and top college players, top amateur players to use the more modern way,
which is to have a step by step routine you go through to trigger
your takeaway, and that doesn't vary, so it's always three wagons, but
it's the very end of the pre shot routines. Basically, how do you
how do you get your swing started? What's going just before you trigger your
take So in this method, you use the same number of waggles. It
could be one waggle, could be six, doesn't matter. But you you
decide, I'm going to practice my what I call an automatic swing trigger ritual,
and I'm going to have three waggles while I look at the target,
come back, stretch my elbows out, and then start my takeaway. So
everything's done. So you memorize a little ritual. And the one I teach
their seven steps, and so you go through a seven step ritual. Whereas
if you watch Roy McIlroy, as great as he is, sometimes you don't
He takes I think the least they've ever seen him takes two waggles. I
think I've seen him take maybe six or seven, so he's somewhere in that
range. But watch Tiger Woods, it's always two waggles, stretches, almost
go. I think I told you I had that debate when I was twelve
years old with Nicholas about this over lunch at the Western Open. I think
we talked about that one in the podcast. You remember our podcast much better
than I do because I keep doing them and they all get mushed together.
One love, yeah for sure. Yeah. Well, I had this debate
with Nicholas because Nicholas got fine for slow play this first two two or three
years on tour back in the early sixties. It was similar to Harmon.
He would spend I mean, he would sometimes spend like a minute and a
half over the ball, waggling, shuffling his feet, look and that's starting.
And he got fined thousands of dollars by the PGA tour board for that.
And I had this conversation which turned into a debate when I was twelve
he was twenty two, and I said, yeah, you know, I
mentioned that you spent a lot of time over the ball, mister Nicholas,
and when I do it that way, I hit the I play worse,
and he said, why would you play worse? I go while I'm waiting,
because I asked him, what's going through your mind? He goes,
well, I'm waggling. This is what these other people are doing. This
is what Jordan's doing, this is Patrick Cantley's doing, this is what Harmon's
doing. They're waiting until they feel comfortable and confident to start. So there's
a there's a slow build up of sort of mental energy kind of like this,
and then you reach a peak where your body decides to start your takeaway.
The problem with that approach is again, unless you're extremely confident golfer,
like world class, while you're waiting to feel confident and comfortable, the demons
can come in the negative thoughts and emotions that can trigger a bad swing or
yep. And I tried to explain this to Nicholas. He said, I
don't understand. He said, you're standing over the shot while you're waggling and
shuffling your feet, looking at the target, and you're seeing the ball not
go to the target successfully. I go, yeah, I see myself shaking
it into the water or like you know, pulling it thirty yards left over
the green or he goes, why would you have negative thoughts like that about
the outcome of the shot? Don't you want to send the ball to the
target successfully? I go, of course I do, but I'm human,
and of course the negative thoughts come in, right, I promise you.
When Rory Mackelway's doing that, he's not thinking about how he's going to miss
it. He's thinking about this is going to be so fff and good.
I can't wait to hit the shot. And that's what Nicholas was feeling.
But that's not really a normal state of consciousness. The pent of golfers out
there, including most tour pros. That doesn't work. Yeah, yeah,
well it takes up much higher level of confidence than the average person has.
So when you're when you're teaching somebody, do you promote a waggle? Do
you let them like because I don't. I don't have a waggle. I
walk up to the ball and I hit it. I try to. I
do all my waggling when I'm standing behind the ball and looking down the fairway.
But do you promote a waggle? And what's the point that's the purpose?
Read Read five Lessons hogan second book. He has three pages in there
on the waggle, and on one page, the first page talking about it,
he says something like it's he it's the most important part of the swing,
or one of the most important parts when you waggle. And he says,
you know the old Scottish phrases, as you waggle, so shall ye
swing? So uh, if you watch Hogan waggle in fact that he does
today, what's the most common type of waggle? Or you hinge back your
trail wrist like this, back and forth like that. This is an audio
use your tim an audio podcast. You use your words. Well you can't.
You can't show me exactly exactly exactly. So so hinging hinging your wrist
means you you you you flex your wrist backward the back of your trail hands,
well right hand if you're right hand golfer goes back toward your forearm,
not up towards the sky. That's called cocking. So when you're when you
hinge back and then forth a little bit, that's the Hogan waggle. And
what it does is it it reduces the tendency for your mind and body to
get frozen from stress or from pressure. So when you're waggling, You're you're
keeping some sense of athletic fluid motion in your body. You're also kind of
shuffling your feet a little bit while your waggle. Yeah, there's only been
a few great players who don't waggle it all through, Like you know the
English guy Lee Westwood. He just sits there. He stands there and doesn't
move. He looks like he's a thirty handicap. He just frozen. So
obviously it works for him. He doesn't waggle. He's a great, incredibly
great player. Right, So then I have to ask, is the first
move in your takeaway the hinging of your wrists or are you taking you you're
bringing the club back with your I don't am I supposed to be hinging my
risks on my first move? How do I waggle with my hinge risting?
And then don't do that? On the swing? It depends on because again
there are there are more than one type of swing method out there. In
the method that I teach, which is what today, starting thirty years ago,
almost all good players do it this, do this type of swing model,
which I call leverage spin. You start your swing multiple, you start
your takeaway with several things happening simultaneously. There's a pivot of your body.
There's there's a slight arm swing, and there's there's risk hinging and cocking,
and they're all they're all happening simultaneously, not sequentially. So there's a risk
component, there's an upper arm component, and there's a pivot component, and
they're all happening at the I can show you, you know, I know
it's it's I know it's audio. I can show you if you want,
well, you show me, but you need to explain what you're doing,
because now I'm really now I'm terrified. Actually, then I'm going to start
thinking about doing that and it's not something I naturally do. Oh well,
then then I shouldn't show you. Then I don't think I want to do
anything that would Yeah, yeah, please, I want I want to learn
that Waldron that I would say that I would answer the question. Yeah,
it's a simultaneous pivot, slight arm arm push away and then risk hinging and
cocking all at the same time. Arm away, arm push away. Wait
a minute, I try to if if I if I go out instead or
turn No, wait, so I'm I'm really struggling here. What about I've
noticed, Yeah, but no, there's no. Is there a turning over
of a less I'm a right hander. Is there a turning over of a
left hand or should the right hand? No, there's no. There's no
forearm rotation at all in the takeaway zero. Oh boy, you've just screwed
my game. Up man, watch watch man. Here's the pivot part.
Okay, so you've got your hands, you've crossed your hands across your chest
now, and you're rotating. I think you've got to explain this. Yeah,
this is what I'm doing. I'm showing. I'm showing fred if I
was going to break it down into the three main components. There's a pivot
aspect, which is rotation of hips, core and torso, along with a
little bit of left side tilt like this, I'm tilting my shoulder girdle about
four inches down, my left shoulders going down, my right shoulders going up.
So so when I blend those two pieces together, it looks like this,
right. This is the takeaway. The arm part is you gently extend
your arms. You can think of it focus on your hands as if I
was going to shake hands to someone standing a little bit to my right like
this, there's a little bit of that. I'm overdoing it. You can
see it in reality. It's it's less. It's it's like it's like it's
just like six inches of movement. There's a little that, and then there's
hinging and cocking combined, which looks like that. So when I when I
combine all those things, it just looks like this. And that's what almost
all great players to do today are doing what I just showed you. Now,
what about the left arm, the left biceps staying attached to your pecks,
to your chest in the Yeah, it's correct. It stays. It
stays on your packs almost till the end of takeaway, and then it starts
to slide off and up. So when you write elbow folds, when you
trail elbow folds at the end, it starts. It starts to happen at
the end of takeaway. When the trail elbow folds, it raises the arms
off of your chest, so the arms go up and down in a V
shape in front of your chest as your chest is rotating. They don't stay
connected throughout the entire swing. Okay, I'm about to burst into tears.
I need to take another break, I'll right back. We get so many
messages about practicing, but are these the messages we remember when we get to
our favorite practice facility. One of my favorites is practice with a purpose,
meaning don't just go out and pound ball after ball after ball, but have
a method to your madness to work on and achieve something specific. The second
is one that we'll hear more about this week on Golf Smart Mulligans with part
two of our conversation with Chris Fry in an episode we call avoiding the errolsts
back nine blow apps. I want my students to do an equal balance of
technique fundamentals, but also practice like you play. And what that means is
pick a target in the distance, hit a driver to it. Grab your
next club, maybe it's an eight iron, Pick another target, go at
it, and be constantly challenging yourself to switch clubs, never letting yourself get
into a groove because we all know you can't get really into that groove of
hitting six drivers in a row on the golf course. Then once you start
to get the hang of that, then challenge yourself to curve shots. I
tell a lot of my students, hey, let's just curve this one left
to right. I want to see you fade one into the pin in the
middle of the range and they look at me like I'm crazy. You know,
they might be a fifteen handicapper and they tell me, I just want
to hit it straight. How often do you hit a straight ball? Pretty
much never. That's the hardest shot in golf. So if you teach yourself
to aim left of a pin and visualize the fade and really just work on
fading that ball left to right into the pin, you surprise yourself more often
than not. That's episode two hundred and twenty six, part two of our
conversation feature Chris Fry on our sister podcast, Golf Smarter Mulligans, being released
this Friday morning. Originally published as a member's only episode in January twenty twelve,
means that this insightful conversation has never been shared with the public before.
So if you're a fan of Golf Smarter's content, then don't miss the chance
to get two episodes every week. That's Golf Smarter, Golf's the longest running
podcast, and Golf Smarter Mulligans episodes from our archives that revisit the best of
Golf Smarter. They're both available for free from wherever you're listening right now.
Ah, people frequently ask me, doesn't your mind get overwhelmed with all these
conversations. Don't you have like information overload? And it's like yeah, all
the time. So I try to be very selective on what I pick out
in a conversation. I'm ready. It's like, I swear this is the
last episode I'm ever going to do, because it's like, now my mind
is really blown and I have no idea what I'm going to do when I
go out there. Now, remember we're just two We're two buddies talking swing
theory. And I'm not saying that you should implement these changes. You just
ask me what the what? What the model is? I told you what
the model is. But yeah, you may not be a candidate for the
model. First of all, if you're not willing to put the time in
to do work, particularly slow motion mirror work, to learn these component parts
I just describe. These are not these are not things to think about over
the ball. Yeah, system, there's no swing thoughts. This is this
is just for practice only. You're still in front of a mirror and you
learn to make a proper, proper pivot motion. Then you learn to make
proper wrist action, and then you learn to make proper arm action, and
then you learn how to combine them together. All right, So let's not
stuff that that would ever recommend. Yeah, all right, let's get back
to unconscious competence. Let's talk about quieting the mind. Because at around recently
that it was so hot outside, I couldn't think at all and played great
goal of I mean it was so hot. Yeah, it was so hot,
and I kept hydrating. I sip and nibble all the way through,
and I'm hydrating and I'm I'm grazing with my you know, nuts and peanut
butter, pretzels and stuff. But I just couldn't. I just couldn't think.
So I just go up and I made some incredible shots and I shot
even par on the back nine. And the audience and I'm sure the audience
is getting sick of me talking about this, you know, shooting part that's
every weekend. I'm talking about that around weeks ago. It hasn't happened against
since, and I can't all I can think of. All I can attribute
the whole thing too, was that I just was my mind was blank because
I just was so distracted by the heat. Quiet. Yeah, exactly,
Yeah. How do we quiet the mind? How do we get to the
unconscious competence? That? Wow, that could literally be I mean to answer
that question would take like a hundred podcasts episodes. I what's one hundred more?
Fred? Nothing? Well, I mean the first step I'll give you
the classical Buddhists. I know you're you're kind of a bit of a fan
of the Buddhist approach and the Buddhist system. The first step is acknowledging,
similar to what we talked about, not being in denial about how crappy your
golf swing really is. When you first do sitting meditation. Anybody who does
sitting meditation sitting meditation the Buddhist way, which is about trying to connect your
consciousness with what is happening in the real in the real world. In the
moment, you quickly realize your mind has a mind of its own, it's
out of control. The normal state of consciousness is a mind in a random
chaos. So that's recognizing that, that's the fact. That's the first step.
A lot of people don't want to recognize that their minds in chaos.
And if they don't, if they're not willing to recognize that, just like
if they're not willing recognize how bad their swing is, they're not a candidate
for swing instruction. Right, So when you're when you're willing to acknowledge,
well, the reason my mental game sucks is because my mind has got a
mind of its own and it's thinking all these negative thoughts and taking me out
of the present moment. Then you can do various forms of concentration practice,
which in Buddhism are called samata practice where your mind is very, very small,
we call narrow mode. I have people look at a candle flame for
two minutes, and the goal is, can you look at a candle flame
for two minutes and not have any internal psychological reaction to the candle flame?
Mean not no thoughts about it, no emotional reaction, no thought, just
pure observational awareness using your eyeballs on the candle flame. And then they work
up to five minutes, so eventually you can stare at a candidate for five
minutes and not have anything going on inside your head at all, no reaction
to it. Wow. So that's that I teach people. Yeah, Yeah,
And then there's a classical sitting meditation where you focus your mind in kinesthetic
awareness or feel channel, where you feel your belty move in and out with
your breath and you try to keep it there for twenty minutes without your mind
wandering off. Yeah, that's another way exactly. We all we all tend
to have monkey mind, and that's why we have to me meditation. Mindfulness
practice is like weightlifting for the mind, or it's like hygiene for the mind.
It's psychological hygiene, just like you brushing your teeth is dental hygiene.
You should beat. Everybody should be doing some type of mindfulness practice as a
regular part of their lifestyle every day. And there's walking meditation where you pick
an object for three seconds and you look at it, you notice the size,
color in the shape. Then switch your gaze to a second object,
notice it's size, color, and shape again. It's similar to the candle
exercise stuff. You're walking and you're changing your focal point every three seconds.
Well, that's what I have my students do when they're walking between shots,
so they stay in the present moment. You. Yeah, that's the quickest
way to stay in the present moment is to pay attention to the physical environment.
Don't go internal. And we talked about a year ago about internal external.
That's not just during the golf point when you're walking between shots, you
want to stay external too, right, because if you're internal walking between the
golf in between shots, you're going to still be internal over the ball probably,
which is not good. Yeah, interesting, fascinating. So there's there's
other methods, but these are some of the main ones that I work with
people on. Wow, wow, Okay, getting there, get it,
queiding the mind, slowing the mind, getting it to the alpha state as
opposed to the m state for the monkey mind state or the beta state where
it's like it look really active. Yeah, I've tried to figure out ways
of doing that, but I it's it's it's hard work. It is.
It takes work. But when you're when you have a reasonable level of mastery
over that skill of what we call focused attention, it not that hard.
When once you have a reasonable level of mastery, it's matter or just there's
a choice. There's well power involved. Like I can do it really well
because I started doing it when I was ten. I'm seventy two now I've
got sixty two years of mindfilness practice behind under my belt, so to speak,
So I could put my mind anywhere I want and keep it there for
as long as I want, pretty much. So it's not so to me.
It isn't. It isn't. It isn't hard to do. I mean,
oh no, it only takes sixty years to get there, just saying
that's right, that's right. But for me, once you're there, it's
not hard. It's it's a choice. And you know, that's what was
cool about watching Harmon talk about how he's not even that you know, he's
only been doing it for a few years apparently. But but it is possible
to have a better to have a measure of control over your consciousness. Yeah,
And it's simply a bout of putting your mind where you want to put
it and holding there. You know. Oftentimes people can do it when they're
in potentially life threatening environments like my son. I think we talked about my
son Kai for fun. He climbs rock walls three thousand feet up in the
summer, and he climbs frozen waterfalls in the winter. And the reason likes
to do that, yeah, for fun, Because she said, is it
fun for his parents? No? It's it's very stressful. It's like,
okay, and you know we've got We've got my five year old grandsons.
He climbed a fifty at high Rock Wall last Labor Day when he was four
and a half years old, straight up and didn't all, yeah, well,
I mean we want to, you know me, And you know,
my daughter and her husband encouraged her because we you know, I raised my
kids to no you know, no fear. That was part of our parenting
style. And I taught my kids how to focus their mind, how to
meditate when they were both three years old. But in Kai's case, he
told me the reason I like it, I feel so alive because you know,
if you make a mistake, you could die. So the fact that
death is always there, ready behind you, waiting to tap you on the
shoulder, so to speak, it makes it easier to focus so you don't
make a mistake and die because of the mistakes. So so that environment forces
you to be in the present moment and pay attention to what you're doing right.
And you know, one thing we've never talked about, and I have
talked about it another podcast recently is this came up. I had a student
a YIP student asked me five years ago. We were talking about confidence,
and he's to me. I got to say, Jim, you're one of
the more confident people they've ever met. And why is that? I go,
I don't know. I've always I've always felt I put my mind to
something I could be reasonably good at. It's not really good at. He
goes, so you're probably most confident in your golf teaching ability. I go,
now, not even close. He goes, oh, so you have
something else you do really well, like a hobby. I go, now,
it's not really a hobby, it's a skill. I go, it's
kind of weird. I don't feel that comfortable talking about it. He goes,
well, what is it? I go, I'm really good at street
fighting. He goes street fighting. I go, yeah, I go.
I gotten lots of fights when I was a kid growing up, and every
time I got into a fight, without a single exception, I went into
that altered state where my mind was extremely quiet, in that meta aware of
state. He goes, well, how many fights did you get in?
And it took me a few minutes to figure it out, like, well,
I say, I started with my first fight when I was six.
My last flight was when two guys tried to mug me when I was page
twenty two in San Francisco, right right by Zen center Hayton Ashburt right by
Hayton Alguna as present centers and I said, probably about three hundred fights.
He goes three hundred fights. Yeah. I grew up in a rough neighborhood.
They were gangs. It was a working class neighborhood, a lot of
gangs, and my parents taught me never to give into bullies, and even
today I still hate bullies. Right. So I was usually fighting a bully
who was picking on some younger kids, right, And I knew before the
fight started that I had already won the fight. I was in this even
before the actual blows were thrown, you know, before punches were thrown,
I already had concluded. I had a strong belief that it was impossible for
me to lose the fight. And when the fight started, my opponent appeared
to me to be trying to punch me or kick me in slow motion,
and I'm punching like literally that fast, right, really fast. Even today,
I can punch pretty fast. So it's how could you possibly lose a
fight if you're punching really fast and the other guy's punching you like a slow
motion And I got fascinated by that state, which is one of the things,
it's one of the origin stories for how I got really fascinated with psychology
and consciousness, which eventually allowed me to become a well known mental game coach
and YIPS coach, because I understand what that being in the zone is all
about, because I never left the zone in any of those three hundred fights
I was in, and I won four fights against two opponents. Oh my
god, you have no idea. And for me it was like people some
say, say, well, how how why was it easy for you?
I go, well, there's a great line if you'll As you know,
I'm a film buff. In the movie with uh Matt Damon where he plays
the math genius what was it called again Love You know won a bunch of
mini driver character. Yeah, Robin Williams played the drivers. Yeah. I
like yeah. She asked, well, what's it like to be this Einstein
level genius about math and physics? And he said, you know, it's
it's really hard to explain, but you know, I just think about it
and the stuff just comes to me, and that's how fighting was for me.
I can vividly remember all of those fights and how I understood intuitively what
it was all about. It was something easy. It was like falling off
a log. It was I enjoyed it. It was fun. My mind
was crystal clear. It was fun to win, but it was but I
was so involved in the process. I wasn't thinking about what's going to happen
ten seconds from now, completely complete immersion in the present moment. And then,
of course my focal point was the entire body of my opponent, from
the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, and what I
call medium wide mode. So there's three sizes. There's super wide consciousness,
there's medium wide kind of semi circle, and then there's a dot. So
when you're fighting, you want to be medium wide. You want to look
at the whole body equally, because you know he could he could throw upon
with one hand and kick you with his left foot, So you have to
see everything equally and then react to it. And then once I would decide
where I was going to wear my blow, was going to land, my
punch or my kick, then I would focus narrow, like if I was
going to punch him in the nose. Eventually I had focused on his tip
of his nose, and then my fist would go there and it would easily
be it would most commonly. The fight was over in three to five seconds.
It was really short. So it got me fascinated about what's this stone
and peak performance? All about why can't I do this on the golf course?
Right? It was always harder for me to do it on the golf
course compared to in a street fight. How old were you when you got
married? Well, it depends how you define marriage. I mean I made
a spiritual commitment to my wife, and she made one to me when I
was twenty three, I think twenty four. We've been for almost fifty years.
Yeah, so that so you haven't been in a fight since exact marriage?
But fight. I've a couple of close ones where the person backed down,
But yeah, have been an actual fight. Then? Does your wife
know your pugilistic history? Oh of course she does. Yeah. Yeah,
Well my friends know what my family knows it honestly, and now we do.
I am I am so flipped out about this story. I cannot believe
it. Well, I thought you'd like this one. Oh, I gotta
love it. I'm blown away. Well again, the reason I didn't bring
it up before was it's kind of a weird thing to think this is the
best thing I do, and it literally literally is the best thing. I'm
better at fighting than anything else. There's not even a close second. I
mean even today. Well, there's a funny ass. I'll tell you a
funny story about this. I was talking about this where a yip stood the
other day about the power of belief and how the as If principle which William
James, the great American philosopher and founder of American psychology, came up with
this principle, you know, back in eighteen ninety something called the as If
principle, which is the foundation of modern psychotherapy, mainly cognitive behavioral therapy.
And I was explaining about when you believe something to be true, and you
really believe it, your conscious mind and your unconscious mind and your body will
react as if it was true, even if from a rational perspective it's not
true. Right, Does that make sense? So that's why if you're get
a formal belief about what you're capable of doing, you want to always err
on the side of being positive, not negative. And I brought the fighting
thing up, and he said, and a friend of mine's when I first
was telling him, a friend of mine fifty years ago about this, forty
years ago. He said, So you think you're like one of the best
fighters in the world. I go, of course I am. He goes,
so you think you could beat Muhammad Ali in a fight. I go,
yeah, absolutely, I could beat Muhammad Ali. He goes, Jim,
do you realize how irrational that is. I know it's irrational. I'm
not saying it's irrational belief. He goes, you probably believe you can beat
Bruce Lee. TO go, of course, I could beat Bruce Lee in
a fight. He goes, that's crazy. I go, I know,
rationally, how would get my ass kicked if I actually tried to fight Muhammad
I'll lead Bruce Lee. But the fact that I believe that I could beat
them, I'll last longer in the fight because of that belief, because my
mind body connection is so strong, because I've already formed that belief that I
can't lose, I'm going to perform much better under the pressure of fighting these
two great fighters. I'll do better. Yeah, Well, here's the advantage
that you have. You're alive when you're fighting two dead guys, it's not
going to be a hard fight. Group. All right, we're gonna start
a whole new podcast, Jim. It's Quick Fights with Jim Waldron the new
podcast here on your favorite podcast, Jim, this was unbelievable. I am.
I can't wait to what happens the next time we have a conversation because
I never know, we never know what we're gonna say, and we never
know where it's gonna go. You're always should be a video podcast. It'll
be a video podcast if I can get my damn computer to work, and
it'll be you and me fighting will be it'll be an actual match between you
and me. Oh that great, But that's going to be about an eight
second past. Yeah, one hand time, and I'll have a blindfold on
good and I'll have my hand and and eight seconds is about as far as
I can run two and then I'll clocks out exhausted. Thank you, Jimmy.
It was great. Thank you so much. Man. That see you
next time. So you know, being a good golf citizen is really an
important thing, at least it is for me, and that includes spending more
time fixing divots on the green and focusing on the pace of play based on
the group in front of you, not feeling pressured from behind. But it
also means that there should be at least what two people probably three looking for
one of your group's lost ball. If you've got to forceom, just make
sure that someone is hitting while others are looking. And mostly it means that
no one in your group is spending additional time searching through the woods or obi
just looking for lost or free balls. Do that on your own time,
please. But here's an example of being a good golf citizen that happened to
me last weekend. They wasn't usually discussed. There were two couples playing behind
us, and one of the women hold out from one hundred and twenty five
yards for an eagle. You can imagine that their celebration was loud and joyous.
Everyone on at least six holes heard them screaming about it. Well,
we were on the tea box at the time, and the tea box was
just not far from where she just nailed that eagle. I had already teed
off, so as she was walking up to the green, I ran over
and celebrated with a high five and a hearty congratulations and then run back to
my group. Look, if there's any joy on the golf course, don't
you want to be part of it? I need to provide this public service
update to anyone who listens to Golf Smarter or any podcast using Stitcher. As
of August twenty nine, twenty three, Stitcher is gone. They've ceased operations,
So if you need any help migrating to a new podcast app, just
write to me and I'll do what I can to help you out. Now,
a couple of things about today's show opening. I hope you got my
joke as to why I added a taste of the Beatles with the song one
after nine o nine, as this is episode nine hundred ten to Corny too
much to add humor, I didn't need to explain it, sorry, but
I do want to welcome this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador, Ron Mulligan. Really,
Ron, is that your real name? I love that Ron Mulligan of
Lake O'Rion, Michigan. Ron chose to receive a link for Tony Manzoni's Lost
Fundamental video as his thank you gift, and what about you? We'd all
like to hear where you live, play and listen to golf Smarter. So
send me an email and you two can receive a free gift of your choice
just for participating now. The gifts include Tony Manzoni's video The Loss Fundamental It's
a private link, or a box of Odin X one balls with a golf
Smarter logo. Or how about a glove and glove storage compartment from Red Rooster
golf dot com, the unique subscription service that allows you to get a new
glove every month. And once you get hooked on that one, I'm telling
you you'll get addicted. Now. I'm going to leave a link in the
show notes in today's blog post for all of those things so you can learn
more. But right to me and I'll get back to you with some instructions
of what to do and what to say. Send your request to golf Smarter
podcast at gmail dot com, or just click on the hay Fred button when
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