After the clinic was over, I introduced myself. I said, I'm Jim
Waldren. I'm twelve years old. I want to be a teaching pro when
I get older. I've been studying the game, particularly the golf swing,
and I said, I'm really impressed with your ball striker, mister hun you
have to be one of the best ball strikers in the world. How come
we aren't playing on tour, we're living, he goes, kid, I
was on tour for ten years, but I got the putting gifts so bad.
I had four or five put every green, couldn't make a cut,
so I had to turn the trick shot artist try to make a living.
He said, what's the secret of the golf swing? He goes, I'll
tell you something. I've been a student of mister Hogan's for the last fifteen
years, and Ben Hogan shared with me a lot of his so called secrets,
he goes. The number one fundamental and golf coming with Ben Hogan was
to set up and rock solid balance. Swing to the top and rock solid
balance. Swing to the finish and rock solid balance and especially during the strike
from when your hands are about hippide on the right side of your body to
hippide on the left side during the strike. He said, you want to
feel like your feet are rooted into the ground, like your spikes are twelve
inches long. All right. This is Michael Bidhead from Meford, Ontario,
Canada, and I play at Film three Golf Course. This is Golf Smarter
Episode number eight pound two for a mechanics versus self sabotage. You may be
surprised which is hurting you more With Jim Waldron. This is Golf Smarter sharing
stories, tips and insights from great golf minds 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, thank you man. Wonderful. We'll
be back with you as always. It's good to have you back on.
You know, I was looking through my records here and I could tell that
you've been on a lot. This is your thirty second Golf Smarter appearance.
You're blow in my mind. I can't believe it's been that many. Yeah,
and it's been how many years has it been? We've done been doing
this set, right, I started O five. The first time you were
on was December of seven. So when I discovered Balance Point golf schools.
Yeah, that's right, I remember. No, yeah, that was my
birthday. It was right after my birthday. I think, oh, it's
my birthday. Oh, happy birthday. I gotta write that. Oh yeah,
I got everybody knows you were born with a day that lives in infamy
day. Listen. Yeah, I'm writing it down. You are now on
my calendar of December seventh, and everyone else is marking it down to make
sure you're write to Jim and wish him a happy birthday. Um. Oh,
I didn't get to show you. Okay, I'll show you the club
later. Remind me to show you this club. I'll tell you about it
though. I'll tell you about it because a listener wrote to me and said,
boy Tony Manzoni, I remember when he you know, he was one
of the founders of Callaway. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah,
and he had come out with a putter called the Purest and it's got
his signature on it. Oh that is so cool. I found this on
eBay and it's nice and clean, and it's got a wooden hickory shaft on
it. It even says even says hickory stick right there with an old callaway
grip. So I need to apologize to the audience. You can't see this
Jim. Jim has some sort of disease that prevents him from using technology.
We have not figured out why. But here we are a thirty second time
that Jim's been on and I this is just for the audience. Here,
I swear to you, Jim, and I spend thirty to forty five minutes
just trying to get him on so we can have a conversation every single time.
This is how much I love you, Jim Waldron. I spend more
time getting you on show than just recording your conversations. That's true. Yeah,
I mean you were telling, didn't you tell me something? You have
a friend that won't let you near his office. Yeah. Yeah, he
has this theory that I have like this this magical like voodoo power with computers.
It's not magic, man, it's I can be hired by the National
Security Agency as a cyber warrior. I just have to go to Moscow and
hang out near the Kremlin. All the computers would shut down. I'm sure
that's exactly what you want to do in your spare time. Exactly, yeah,
exactly. But we're here to talk about golf instruction and the Balance Point
golf schools. Um. You you're so prolific in your teaching, and of
course we've been for years. We've called you the yips whisper. You you
have another name for it. I like yips Whisper. Yeah, that's fine,
I like it. Yeah, okay, I sometimes call myself the yip
doctor, the yip doctor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um. But
you know, recently, Retelling, I was reading something that you were talking
about the most important physical fundamental is balance. Is balanced a story about That's
one reason, not the only, why I call my company balance Point,
because that was my next question, right, Every teacher has a hierarchy of
fundamentals that they believe are important in a certain order, and mine is on
the physical side of the game, because there's always a mental aspect. Obviously,
the most important fundamental if your mechanics are good enough to break ninety five
regularly, is balance. And I learned that from Ben Hogan via a student
of his named Paul Hans Senior. Have you ever heard of Paul Han,
the famous trick shot artist? No? Okay, his son Paul Han Junior,
does it today at least, how do you spell his last name?
H h n? Okay him up artiste. Back when I was a young,
up and coming junior golfer in Chicago, my mentor was a guy named
Charles Evans, also known as Chick Evans, who found He's actually more famous
for founding the Evans County Scholarship Fund. But he was the number one player
in the world from around nineteen ten to around nineteen eighteen. Okay, And
like Bobby Jones, he never turned pro. He retained his amateur status,
but he won all the major events back. Yeah, in those years,
that's what you did. You you stayed amateury there was no money and playing
profotional golf until sponsorship started to happen exactly. And you would know having I
viewed Bobby Jones's grandson, right right, Yeah, he was. But anyhow,
so he would take myself and a couple of the top junior golfers in
Chicago to the Western Open, and I had lunch with mister Evans. I
think it was in sixty four, if my memory serves, I had lunch
with mister Evans. The great Tony Lima who actually died tragically a few months
later, or in a plane crash. He was a private pilot flying to
a tour event and assessmic crashed. He would have been a multiple major winner
if that hadn't happened, if he had lived. And the young Jack Nicholas,
So I'm twelve, Nicholas is twenty two. We had lunch, and
this is a story I tell all my yip students and all my mental name
students. When it comes to an aspect of the pre shot routine, which
is how to start your takeaway. We called the trigger the swing trigger ritual.
And I had noticed as a young student of the game, thinking it
maybe at some point, as an adult, I would become a teaching professional,
which, lucky for me, turned out to be the case. I
was really studying what the tour pros did, both in terms of their swing,
their putting strokes, their short game strokes, and the mental side.
And I noticed that Nicholas would spend varying amounts of time over the ball.
On a fast shot, he might spend fifteen twenty seconds over the ball,
which by today's standards is really slow, and he sometimes stood over the ball
for over a minute, link shut looking at the target. He got fine
thousands of dollars by the PGA Tour Board for slow play. Wow. So
I brought this up when I said, mister Nicholas, could I ask you
a question about your mental game, specifically about the pre shot? Routini said,
sure, kid, what do you want to know? I say,
Hey, how old were you when you did this? I was twelve,
he was twenty two And okay, and how did you get face to face
with him? Because of mister Evans. Ok he would check myself and couple
of junior golfers out there and introduce us to the tour pros. And it
was kind of a nice one. Yeah, it was kind of a cool
thing on his part to do that for us. But so anyhow, I
said, I'm a serious student of the game and want to be a professional.
I get older and I'm noticing all the other players that I'm checking with
the sweet pand on my watch are spending almost to the second, the same
amount of time over the ball before they pull their trigger and start to take
away. But the amount of time you spend over the ball varies dramatically,
but it's definitely on the long end. What was his face when you said
that to him? What was his face? What was his real physical reaction.
Let's just say he wasn't too happy. Remember me to tell you the
story when I brought this up a long time twenty five years later in Hawaii
at the Senior Skins Can he remembered the story. But I said, well,
I mentioned the PGA tour board, thousands of dollars of fines. That's
what really good. I'm kind of a little po but he said. And
I can't tell you what he exactly said because it's a little bit. Uh
say, if I have to bleep it, I will. Oh he said,
f the PGA tour board in their thousand dollars fines. I'm not going
to start my takeaway till i'm I'm good and ready. Who That was his
response, Okay, and I said, which I thought was pretty good for
a twelve year old. Okay, how do you know when it's time to
start? Which is a big deal in sports psychology in general, in any
sport, How do you know when it's time to start the mote? The
athletic motion? He said, My body tells me. I said, I
don't understand, mister Nicholas. What do you mean your body tells me?
He said, I wait, and I waggle and I shuffle my feet and
I look at the target, and when my body wants to start, it
starts. And I said, I've tried that, and I play worse when
I do that way. He goes, why I go, while I'm waiting
to feel comfortable and confident for my body to want to start, negative thoughts
enter my mind about was like the twenty different ways I'm going to screw up
the shot. And he looked at me, he said, why would you
let your mind think that way? Don't you want to hit a good shot?
I go, of course I do. He goes, well, why
would you ever picture the ball going anywhere other than the target? He goes,
I only picture the ball going to the target. And of course I'm
thinking in my head that's because you're an alien and I'm a human being,
right, which, just guys, yeah, Nikola, So he would never
occur to him to hit a bad shot. And seriously, this is what
he said. I never thought. I never think about a bad shot happening,
which of course is insane, right, I mean, what a genius
the guy is for golf. So but I met him at the senior Skins
game at Manilani in nineteen ninety five when I opened my school's there because I
was a sponsor of the program. I have inside the rope's access in general
with him and Pomp Palmer and Chichi Rodriguez and Lee Trevino. Wow, And
I asked him if he remembered the conversation that he did. It was at
Tamil Shanner Golf Club in nineteen sixty four, sixty thirty one of those two
years. But anyhow, but more all of the story is that's actually the
worst way you can do it, even though it works for him obviously.
Sure, And today Rory mackelroy does the Nicklas method and Jordan Spieth does the
Nicklas method, which we call waiting for a for you to feel comfortable to
pull the trigger. And again for average golfers especially, that's death to do
it that way. You don't want to do it that way. Now,
you want to You want to have a little step by step routine that never
varies and you start when it's time to start. It takes almost all the
stress out of the equation. Fascinating, right, because there's no time to
bet for bad thoughts to happen. You know, I played at a pro
am in Arizona a number of years ago, and there were a bunch of
former NBA players, and I think I got a chance. It's it's a
blur to me now, but I think I got a chance to talk to
Doctor Jay who was on the driving range, and I asked him about his
mental game and his response was, that's for amateurs. I said, what
do you mean professional golfers. Professional athletes don't think about it. We just
do it. There you go, there you go exactly. And he says,
you know, people who think about the mental game or the mental approach
to it. He says, he that's just because you have doubt. We
don't. We're gonna go. We're gonna go for it every single time because
we know that we can. It's like, yeah, okay, well it's
kind of end of our conversation. Well I've got I've got a great response
to that, because one of my first professional athlete students was a guy who
has the third thing I think still today has the third worst record from free
throws in the NBA. Chris Dudley, who played with the Portland Trail Blazers
in the last six years of his career. He played with the Knicks before
that, and he signed up from my golf schools, like almost twenty years
ago, as it never played before. He was about three years from retiring
from the Blazers and from the NBA general and he said to me, do
you know about my record from the line? I go, yeah, dude,
I'm a big basketball fan. He said, was it free throwing yips?
Of course I'd seen him multiple times on TV. I go, yeah,
Chris, it was. He goes, if I take your golf instruction,
am I going to end up with golf hips? I go, you
have no idea who you're talking to. Even back then, I was kind
of known in the golf world for helping people with yips. I go,
no, if you follow my instruction, you'll never have the yips and golf
ever, don't worry about it. Yeah and yeah, but he's fine.
She's a good golfer. He doesn't have the hips. At that point,
he was thinking over the line. Shack had the yips at the line as
well. They weren't. They weren't trusting their natural athleticism like doctor J was
talking about. Yeah, yeah, which is interesting. He didn't have the
yips all. There's only in free throws to both Chris Dudley and Check have
the yips only only from the free throwing and never in the flow of the
game, because in the flow of the game, there's no time to think.
Right, The problem with golf is there's plenty of time to think.
Although when Nicholas is the only positive thoughts, he never he said, why
would you think negative thoughts, which is like, again, it's human nature
unless you're a genius to think negative thoughts, right, right, right,
all right, We're gonna take a time out. We'll be back talk more
about the yips and negative thoughts after this. Doubt we all, we all
play with it, we all all recreational, all amateur players. And I'm
sure that well after watching the Netflix show Full Swing Um and and watching what
What What Brooks Capico was going through. Yeah, doubt enters every golf for
his mind. And you know, you play we play out of fear.
Pros play out of confidence most of the times. Yeah, mostly, So
let's let's talk about eliminating doubt, just blocking it out, even for those
few seconds when you're standing over the ball. You may have it as you're
walking up to your ball, and after you hit it, but how do
we eliminate that doubt in the few seconds that we have when we're over the
ball. Well, the overarching answer is you need a tour pro quality preshot
routine. That's the overall framework or structure from within which the mental game actually
happens. Right, So, and I mean it's a step by step procedure
that well, the first the first step, the first stage I should say,
of five and my preshot routine is called the plan. So there's innate
variation in that because you have to analyze all the shot elements, the lie
of the golf ball to win where's the trouble, So that's going to vary.
That might take you five seconds at your own course that you've played a
thousand times, and it might take you thirty seconds or a little bit less
than that on a new course. But once you're done with that first stage,
the plan, the other four stages, second stage is called positive mindset,
third stages aim in alignment. Four stages you're set up checklist, and
then the fifth stages the trigger ritual, which which is what the Nicholas conversation
was about. So you have to have that that overall structure to be in
what sports psychologists call a flow state, or step one leads to step two,
which leads to three without any effort. Now, that can only happen
if you've done enough reps to deeply memorize all the steps, and in my
experience, it takes about two thousand reps off the golf course before you have
memorized it deeply to get the benefit of it on the golf course. Right,
so you can you know, you don't say the golf ball. You
can do the reps in your living room. You don't need a golf you
don't you need a driving ridge and do it inside, right. So that's
the first step. The second step is you have to analyze is causing me
to self sabotage my performance. It always comes down to basically two things,
which are your overall psychological mindset and how you use your ability to what psychologists
call focused attention or awareness. And the psychological mindset has two main aspects,
which are the emotional side of your personality and the thinking side. So in
that sense, you have to learn how to switch off negative emotions and switch
on a positive emotion or at least a new state of no emotions even better,
and you have to learn how to switch from negative thoughts to positive thoughts,
right, And then the second part is learning where to focus your mind,
which is what I call the focal point, and how to focus your
mind there with enough strength, enough clarity to block any negative thoughts or emotions
that may want to come in. And that's basically this is a very overly
simplistic explanation or answer to your question, but that's basically what it comes down
to. So I guess you could think of those things I just mentioned as
skill sets under themselves, just like learning how to cock your risk properly as
a skill in golf, learning how to switch off negative thoughts and replace them
with positive thoughts can be seen as a skill. Learning how to transmute fear
into courage can be seen as a separate, discrete skill, And that's what
I teach people how to do, particularly if they have yips. And the
YIPS is just the extreme example of someone who has a really bad mental game,
right right, I mean, people who have really bad mental games will
eventually end up with some form of the YIPS if they believe play golf for
a long enough time. Right, Generally speaking, it may not be severe
yips, but they'll have some form of it. And it's possible to play
golf with no fear. I teach people how to do it right. It's
possible to believe that I can do this, pull the shot off, and
stay in that positive mindset throughout the entire five hour round the golf. There's
listeners all over the world right now shaking their head. They're going, yeah,
I can't, I can't go there, I can't do that. But
what about And we've had this conversation and I love having again because I learned
something new every time about just um turning your focus away from the mechanics of
getting a golf ball, of pushing your putting, your your your focus externally
focus you know, because listen, you've made no matter what skill level you're
at, no matter what your handicap or your average score is when you're playing
golf, you've made good enough shots that brings you back to the golf course.
You've made shots that you go it's like, ahh, that's why I'm
here. So you know it's in you, You know it's there, but
doubt enters in and then you stand over the ball, going, oh,
I better not do this. Oh I got to make sure I don't do
that. And you're saying what I don't do, what I don't do as
opposed to just let your body do your thing. Correct. Yeah, No,
that's that's exactly right. I mean, it's somewhat what we're talking about.
Now. The ultimate answer comes down to is it mostly a mechanical skill
answer or is it mostly in the moment better mental game? And my answer
to that is, if your average score is around ninety five or lower,
it's almost entirely a mental issue, and if it's ninety six or higher,
it's mostly of physical issues. That means, if you're shooting one hundred and
ten, the mental game stuff isn't going to really help you that much because
your mechanics suck, or your balance is terrible, or your tempo's too slower
too fast for your own good. So that guy or gal should spend time
off the golf course under the tutelage of a good teaching pro and learn to
have better physical skills. Then he or she will find the mental game approach
much more, you know, much more effective. Right, But if you're
below ninety five, it's particularly if you blow eighty five, it's almost entirely
mental the question you're posing because that means your physical skill is good enough to
at worst achieve what tour pros call a decent miss. If that's your goal,
is to have no worse than than a decent not even a good,
but like a fair miss right where you can still say, like you might,
you might miss the green, but only by five feet where you put
your next putter chip. If you're decent at those two shots, you're still
gonna make part likely, right, But if your miss is forty fifty yards
left or bide the green, and that's your that's your average shot. The
metal game isn't going to really help that much, right, It'll help,
for sure, but it won't help as much as working on the physical side.
Right. Can we get back to Paul Han for a second. I
oh, I'm sorry, yeah, right, Please tell me more, Paul.
This is at the same tournament Tamma Shanter Golf Club. It went like
three years in a row with mister Evan. It was either sixty three,
sixty four, sixty five. Anyhow, at the end of the that day's
round, he put on a trick shot of incredible trick shot artistry standing on
a step letter a feet high with a driver twelve feet long. We had
out of a fiber glass pole because there were no fibre glass hitting three hundred
and fifty yard drives in the air straight, no, yes, yes,
oh my god, right folded standing on one leg with only his right hand
on the club, hitting perfect hundred and fifty yard seven yards one after another.
Just incredible stuff. I can go on and on, but I'll just
save time. I'll tell you to justin story. So after the clinic was
over, I introduced myself. I said, I'm Jim Waldren. I'm twelve
years old. I want to be a teaching pro when I get older.
I've been studying the game, particularly the golf swing, and I said,
I'm really impressed with your ball striker, mister hun. You have to be
one of the best ball strikers in the world. How come we aren't playing
on tour for a living, He goes, kid, I was on tour
for ten years, but I got the putting hips so bad. I had
four or five put every green, couldn't make a cut, so I had
to turn the trip shot artist try to make a living. Wow, I
said, what's the secret of the golf swing. I've been I want to
know, he goes, I'll tell you something. I've been a student of
mister Hogans for the last fifteen years and Ben Hogan shared with me a lot
of his so called secrets or well you also call laws or rules about the
golf swing. And he goes, the number one thing on the physical side,
because Hogan also was a huge dude in the metal game. The number
one fundamental and golf coding that Ben Hogan was to set up in rock solid
balance. Hogan's term swing to the top and rock solid balance, swing to
the finish and rock solid balance, and especially during the stripe from when your
hands are about hippide on the right side of your body to hip pide on
the left side during the strike, during the so called release segment of the
swing. He said, you want to feel like your feet are rooted into
the ground, like your spikes are twelve inches long. And that's the thing
he worked on more than anything else. He worked on other stuff, obviously,
but Hogan believed that if you were a little bit off balance biomechanics that's
called the writing or the rebalancing instinct, then the attempt to regain balance will
prevent you from falling down on your face hurting yourself, but it will ruin
your golf swim mechanics. So you never want to have to trigger the writing
or rebalancing instinct, because that means you'll use your arms and legs as counterweights,
or you'll jump up out of your spine angle to not fall over.
It all takes place unconsciously, the tiny fraction of a second. Sure,
So that's one of the reason I call my company Balance Points. So yeah,
so learning how to swing and balance is the quickest way for people who
are basically eighty five or higher shooters to see significant improvement and equality of the
buls record. Definitely, And that's what he told me he worked on all
the time so he could do those trick shots, was to swing and balance.
Incredible. Take another time out, we'll be right back. You mentioned
balance and tempo. Now there's I can talk about balance with you all day
long. And you know, we've talked so much on the show, and
we had Tony Manzonion and his single pivot swing and his study of Hogan,
and he's convinced that Hogan was doing the same. Where do you fall in
all of the single pivot swing that he that his lost fundamental. Yeah,
I've never actually read anything a little bit. I saw the podcast you did
with my buddy Justin Tang from about three weeks ago. But if you look
at the video from face on, what is clearly obvious is that Hogan did
a fundamental that all good ball streckers do, which is the technical turn today
is separation, which means while your shoulder girdle, your reppert torso is finishing
the last ten to fifteen degrees of coiling away from the target, your lower
spine, your tailbone, and your hip girdle is shifting laterally towards the target.
Now, he Hogan started that move much earlier than his contemporaries or even
anybody today playing golf. So when his left arm was parallel to the ground,
or even just below parallel to the ground, he was already starting his
lateral hip shift, the so called separation move. But yeah, so what
but on the forward swing, Yeah, his left hip was over his left
knee vertically staffed on top of his left knee, and his left knee was
vertically staffed over his stable left foot and ankles, So he can called that
the gate post and he taught several people we mentored some of who we've talked
about, Chris Chutter or Julie Millerer in Portland, some other people Carter Dickinson,
Conventuri, a few others I can think of that you rotated mostly Obviously
you're because your hips are one one thing. But you're rotating mostly over your
left hip, meaning you're letting your pelvic girdle is rotating over a stable left
upper thigh bone or femur. And that's obviously what almost all good ball strikers
do. I mean some do it more than others. Some have a slight
angle of their leg bone away from the target. Most have their their left
leg thigh bone ninety degrees to the ground. And hardly any amateurs do that.
Amateurs are hanging back. If they're not, they're not getting their weight
shifted over. And though well, also a lot of amateurs I notice on
their back swing their their front knee. Let's say you're a right handed golfer,
so your left knee on your back swing is pointing way behind you.
Correct and I and I remember Tony when I met with Tony once he had
he was making sure that my knee is pointing at the ball on my back.
Correct, that's correct. Absolutely, You want your knee left knee has
to flex inward toward the toward the ball, or you can say toward the
center of your stands more accurately right, and that allows your hip girdle to
rotate what today's parliaments is called a centered hip turn, which reads, even
though it's rot you've gotta think in three D. It is rotating in three
dimensional space, but from a face on view, which is two D on
a camera for video computer screen, it looks like it's just rotating in a
circle right without sliding a lot either direction. It might slide an inch or
two to the right, which is what most good well strekers do. Hogan
actually slid an inch to the left a little bit, I think again,
because he was getting a headstart on his lateral hip shifts operacial move. But
you don't want a lot of shifting either laterally left or right. So that's
what the famous teacher Percy Boomer called turning your hips in a barrel. That's
the center hip turn. That's for backswing, not not forward forward swing,
and have to shift or slide a little bit toward the target Yeah, it's
a pretty big fundamental and you've got to do that. By the way,
doing it right is how you stay in balance. If you're doing a hip
rotation incorrectly, you're gonna lose your balance pretty quickly. I used to have
that issue with my driver. I would completely fall out of out of my
position, my stance after I hit the ball. Yeah, yeah, and
that's that's what I'm saying. If you can get if you can get to
hips over so that you're basically rotating mainly over your left leg and that sort
of fifty fifty, then you're already in balance, and then you're going to
finish with your weight already on your left leg. So to finish about nine,
your total body weight should be over a stable left foot and a straight,
vertical to the ground left leg. And it's just easier to do that
if you're already there in the halfway down position, when your hands are about
hiphide on the down swing on the right side of your body for a right
and a golfer. If you look at Hogan, any good ball striker today,
even if mode's there as well, they've already got their hip over their
knee and their knee over their foot, so they're mostly rotating over their left
leg again what he called the left leg gate post. What Hogan called it
the gate post, which is a good and kind of a good visual metaphor.
So I consider myself a mostly centered pivot teacher. I want a mostly
centered pivot on the backswing and a mostly centered pivot on the forward swing.
But realizing mostly means there has to be a little bit of later emotion,
especially on the backswing. It's it's a very tiny one to two inches later
emotion on the backswing, and with the driver with a wider stands, it's
like, you know, four to eight inches of later emotion by the time
you strike the ball on the forward swing. But that's what the lower body.
The upper body stays relatively centered, right, so it's almost like your
hips are are shifting underneath a steady head and steady upper spine. Upper sternum,
Yeah, because that's the hub. That's where your shoulder gill rotates around
your spine. It's the top of your sternum, and that point needs to
be relatively fixed, ideally super fixed in free d space. Once you start,
you once you get to the early stages of the doubt, of the
transition move over with so when you're when your left arm is parallel, that's
the earliest stage of transitions done. And you look at tour pros from that
point of left arm parallel to the ground to left arm parallel to the ground
and the left side of the body. Their head doesn't move sideways, their
sternham doesn't move sideways. Right, it's from a two D perspective, it'll
stay fixed in space, right. Yeah. And that's that's a secret to
having solid contact with the ball because if you can do that, you're going
to have better control over the club bottoms out the low point, which is
always hard. Like finding getting that low point and having it in front of
the ball, right. It was the key except for driver, right,
because you want to be coming up on your correct so the driver should be
about an inch behind the ball ideal it right, but like a three wood
would be directly underneath the ball off the ground, okay, And every other
shot it's it's somewhat target side of the ball, yeah, and into the
ground like it was all like a typical short iron or wedge, you want
to be like a quarter inch into the dirt, yeah, and three or
four inches in front of the ball. That's where the low point should be,
like on a wedge or like a nine ern. Yeah, so it's
different for every club correctly. So wow, So then you get into a
ball position. Now, interestingly enough, I've been holding this email that I
got from a listener rich Um, and he says, the most difficult thing
to do correctly shot after shot is find the precise proper ball position, and
the difference between correct and ink can be such a slight fraction of an inch.
And I'm editing here. He says, as ken Venturi said, who
you brought up? Good golfers don't get out of swing, they get out
of position. So his question is, when a swing produces a poor shot,
why do we always blame the swing? Isn't the ball that is,
its position relative to the swing path at least equally at fault. No,
because that's one of those The conclusion he reaches sort of an example of all
or nothing thinking or assigning responsibility to one causal factor. If you know what
I know, after being the full time feature for this is my thirty second
year, I think there's many many other factors other than ball position that can
cause a bad shot. But yes, it is an important factor, but
it's not the only one. Lows. I work with guys all the time
who are twenty five handicaps who have perfect ball position, and they still don't
They still can't make their low point when they first come to see you were
supposed to be. But that can be part of it, for sure,
And then it can effect the starting line direction. If the falls the balls
too far back in your stands and you're right handed golfer, you could have
a you could have Rory McElroy's golf swing, and your driver will go fifty
yards or more dead right because it's too far back in your stands, which
means the club that is coming too far from the inside when it strikes the
back of the ball right. So part of it what he's saying is and
he's right about this, you have you know, but the term tangent of
the arc in geometry means nopetry. Okay, Well, its if you have
a straight line, which is the target line in the ground, our imaginary
line, and then you have another another object that moves in an arc.
There's a point in time where the arc intersects with the straight line. That's
called the tangent. Okay, right, So like the club that kind of
makes a little shallow arc like this, And you've got to make sure the
ball is right where it should be on the ground so that you achieve a
neutral clubhead path at the moment of impact. Right. And so if the
ball is too far forward in your stance and your and your swing was perfect,
you're going to hit a pole to the left. And if it's too
far back in your stats, you're going to get a push to the right.
I just had a student yesterday I was doing the webcam lesson with and
that's what that's what his issue was. In fact, he's a regular listener
of your show. He's actually written you about how much he likes your podcast.
Oh sweet, I don't want to say. His name is a confident
yellow. But he's from Pennsylvania. Let's just let's just say that. And
he was on the range. I'm doing it here, I am in Hawaii.
He's in Pennsylvania on the range thanks to the magic of the internet.
And you didn't get it disconnected? When how could you do with him?
And no, because his name was printed so hey, So he says he
hits three balls in a row and the way he had the camera said if
I could, because it was there was this this team mark or separator like
on the driver engine the way, I couldn't quite see his clubhead. So
I was looking at a swing and he had three pushes that went thirty forty
yards right and the swing looked good. I know what a push looks like
watching the body right now, where I right shoulder goes really low on the
on the down swing, that usually means it's a push, right, okay,
because how your spine tilts affects the path. If you tilt too much
to the right and you're riding at golfer and the pass going to be into
out causing the push. He didn't show that, and I said, you
gotta I said, man, you gotta adjust the camera so I can see,
so then I can see where the ball was. And this ball was
like five inches too far back in the stands and we immediately corrected it,
and that was it. He started straight drive after straight drive fixed it immediately,
So it is. It is one of those easy things to fix.
And I said to him, I said, you need to put alignment stick
down on the ground for your ball position. You'll almost never see a tour
pro without two strips in the ground, one for the target line and one
for the ball position, because they even they get it wrong and sometimes the
caddy has to say, dude, your ball positions at half a ball with
too far forward and too far back in your stands on the tour prole,
No, it's not, and then he'll get the camera out and show them.
They'll go, holy crap, you're right. Wow, you know it's
really common. Yeah wow, So that's an easy thing to check your ball
position support? Great, yeah, great, all right. Check what's happening
on Golf Smarter Mulligans this week we'll bright back. This week on Golf Smarter
Mulligans is our final episode in our annual Tony Manzoni series to help you launch
your new golf season. This episode, called There's No Pressure in Golf,
It's All Perception, covers topics like choosing the right club off the tea balance
and how we may be putting too much emphasis on distance over accuracy. Lee
Trevino once was talking about playing with Nicholas and how far and Nicholas hit it
compared to everybody else, and he says, so when I played with Nicholas
I would try to hit the ball two hundred and thirty yards off the tea,
and when I did that, I hit it about two seventy's. When
I tried to hit a two seventy, I hit a two thirty. That's
just such great wisdom, because that's so much the truth. How many times
have we get up on a par five and it's a long one, so
we're gonna give it that extra and when you throw it from the top and
we get a little steep with it, we pop it straight up in the
air like a wedge, or we hit a way right or way left.
There's a speed that you have to get used to with the driver, and
a lot of it has to do with the focusing on any thought of hitting
and swinging from point eight to point being in a rhythm that you can keep
your balance. If you do that with the driver, are you going to
keep the ball and play most of the time? That's Golf Smarter. Mulligan's
episode two hundred eight, the final episode in our series featuring our friend and
mentor Tony Manzoni. Once again, your ongoing feedback has been confirmation that this
series is worth sharing. To launch the new Golf season, every year,
so thanks again for your participation. Check the show notes to learn how to
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Every time we do this, you get better. Thank you. Curiously.
Think about it, if your golf swing was as good as your podcasting skill,
you'd be like a plus three hindicap. Wouldn't that be cool? You
know, I don't know what to do with that line? But how does
all this what we talk about? Because this comes up a lot stack and
tilt versus this single pivot. Where are you with stack and tilt? What
does it mean to you? And yeah, I'm not a fan of stack
Untilt. I think I know a little about the background because I was working
with Mac O'Grady in the same golf school that the two founders of Stack untiltre
and I know enough about the more A system, Machelgrady system to know that
he has nine trajectority teaches and the ninth. The ninth trajectory is a low
low. So there's a low trajectory, a mid trajectory high, and with
each of those three there's a low low, a mid low, and high
Love for example. And it's basically it's a punch shot. And so they
took what was designed to be a more or less a specialty shot or maybe
if you played in a super windy environment like you know, like Scotland or
something, and they turn it into a straight a swing instruction system. I
think because it for high handicappers it produces almost immediate improvement in every club from
like a wedge too, maybe a six hundred where you have to hit down
and then as the clubs get longer, you have to hit less down.
It didn't work well, and it didn't work really well at all, especially
with the driver. So for a really high handicap, it kind of made
sense that that would help them in the short term. But you know,
it's like I believe that golf instructors should take a hypocritic oath, like doctors
should take first do no harm. The goals should be to help that person
play better golf, not just for the next day, six months, but
for maybe the rest of their life. So you want you always want to
think, as an instructor, what can I do help this person be headed
in the right direction long term as well as short term. It's a balancing
act, and I think they emphasize too much the short term results for high
handicaps, And of course that's what happened. They worked with one of the
instruction editors at Golf Digests who was a twenty eight handicap at the time,
and it really helped them a lot. So they did two cover stories in
a row, and that's how they got famous. Interesting, Yeah, but
now I think it's an extreme example of binary thinking. It's most of the
example most swing corrective drills, which is another way of saying when you're working
on a swing flow not the only way, but the primary way is It's
like the old joke people say, how do you teach a high handicap wher
to stop slicing? And the answers, you teach them to hook, right,
you teach them to way you teach them to hook it. Okay,
The opposite and most most swing corrective instruction is based on that opposite principle,
move the needle in the opposite direction. I think is I want you to
know what the middle is on the spectrum. So if one is a flaw,
let's say one is increasing your spine angle right closer to the ground,
and ten is the opposite flaw standing up, and the model the idea would
be in the middle, that would be five. Right. But if you're
standing up, which would almost all amateurs do for a variety of reasons,
And if I say to you, stay down, stay level, you might
go from a ten to nine. But if I say, try to try
to lower your chest eight inches to the ground, which would be a flaw,
if you did it, you might stay level. But you might say,
wait, I you said I stayed You know I dipped eight inches,
and I show the guy in the video you didn't dip at all. Right.
We call that brain boundary learning, or moving the needle right. And
so you have to know when you're working on swing flaws when to back off
and stop taking the medicine basically because otherwise it could create the opposite flaw.
Right, And I see this, even though I warn't against this. I
still see it a lot, a lot in my teaching. People go from
one experien or the other and they do that during a round of golf sometimes.
Yeah yeah, yeah, Oh it's not working today, so I'm going
to do something completely opposite. Really, yeah, exactly. Yeah. You
might think you don't try to change your swinging the golf course. Play play
with the flaws. You have fixed them. All the fixing has to be
done off the golf course, right. Absolutely, easy to say, hard
to do, no question, but it is the right thing to do.
H. You mentioned Mac O'Grady a minute ago. Um, and you must
know Kevin Robolski, who who we had on the show just recently, because
he's in Hawaii right now, you're in Hawaii. Um, yeah, I
think he still I could be wrong, but he might be stole in Coali.
He was the teaching public course for Yeah, he's he's running the course
now. Oh is he really interesting? Yeah? And he was assistant pro
under under our buddy Greg nichols who's the director of Golf where I teach Colina.
Right, Greg the opener, and I wanted to thank you for introducing
me to Greg. He introduced me to Kevin and I've asked Greg multiple times
to be on the show and he will not. I'm gonna keep working on
he is, Seriously, he is one of the greatest resources on golf that
I know of. He knows so many top people in the industry. Yeah,
Oh he's good. He's the people, but he won't talk to Yeah.
He's a really good teacher. He really understands the game. He's really
good on the mental side. He's good PUDs with with Paul Azinger and Scott
Simpson. He talks to them about like what it's like playing in mad and
winning majors. I mean Paul on one and I think Scott one two US
opens if I remember right. So he's his knowledge of the game is amazing.
He Ke'd be great to help on. Yeah. Should I talk about
the yips we had. We got a couple of were inutes on the YIPS
shift. I'm calling it. Sure, I was gonna, I was gonna
ask you about I had two more things on my list, but let's let's
do yips because that's your than the interesting thing that I'm this will blow your
mind. There's been a big change, and I called the yips cultures for
one of a better term, which is we get a podcast three years ago
and the title of the podcast was you never yips, You never experienced a
yip without a ball. And now I've had five people in the last year
who have and not mild hips, but almost as severe on a practice swing
as with the ball. Multiple So I'm seeing an increase in the overall incidence
of people contacting me for yips. And I don't think it's just because of
my reputation is getting better, that's a little bit. I think it's it's
it's becoming more common in the game, right and the severity has gone up,
way up. This used to get normally at ninety percent of my hip
students would have one year. At some point this wing might be a back
swing, yet more typically a forward swing or forward stroke yep. Now I'm
getting people with three or four or five yips per swing. It's like it
really is amazing. And to the point where I've had these five people.
Now, one of them came to see me at Quail Valley where you and
I were about twelve years ago. Swing. He gets a lefty and his
first few swings were done without a ball, and they were so bad.
He had like about five or six yips per practice swing. I mean you
remember what Charles Barkley looked like with the ball? Yeah, like ten times
worse than that. Oh ouch. And I said to myself in my mind,
I said, oh, I'm good at this, but I'm not an
f and miracle work. There is no way. And then I heard him
watch my head say James switched him over to being a writer because I got
my bag at club sitting there and I said, dude, would you be
open at switching signs and playing right? Here's my seven iron? Wait he
took. He was a left handed golfer, and I switched him over to
righting and fixed his chips instantly. But wait, wait, wait, wait
zo like when he was a kid, did he play baseball? And he
was a switch hitter, because if you handed me a left handed club,
I'd like I'd look like a you know, a two year old. He
was dominant. He was a dominant left employer. He's from Canada. He
played, he played hockey left hand. He was a lefty his whole life,
whole life. He also a good athlete, which helps. It definitely
helps. But you suggested try this right handed? And he had a good
swing, and he had it was it was if you saw him swing his
very first swing, writing without a ball, you would think he was maybe
a ten handicap or better. He took about half a dozen swings. I
teed up a ball short on a short tea. His first shot when one
hundred and forty five yards dead straight in the air with a seven yard get
this. Six weeks later he shot seventy eight as a writing, oh my
god, he still puts lefty, but everything else he does right, So
he's got it. He had to get obviously, homing bang clubs. He
could be a care I'm sure he didn't care. It's like, oh yeah,
he said no, it would take us. It might take you two
years to get over the yips because you had so many mechanical flaws on top
of the yip. And he had five different hips. Because what most people
do, which is wrong, is when they get the yips, they go
to traditional golf teachers who diagnose it incorrectly as a mechanical flaws, and so
they filled their had with swing thoughts. And now they're not going you know,
they're not going external. They're going internal in the worst possible way.
The worst time. They know they can't. They don't know what to do
with body and club. They're completely confused, right. So so in this
case, he was completely open to it. And I had one of the
actually can't tell you the guy's name, but okay, let's just say that
he's one of the top high school players in the country and now playing college
golf, and he had a pretty severe case of putting hips. He went
through my online program. He was about ninety percent cured, but every once
in a while he was still of a mild Yep. He said to me
one day, what if I just switched over. It's just the final cure,
that last little step she's putting lefty. And he did, and that
was it. That that final change from going from righty to lefty, that
was it. That put the nail in the coffin for his chips. Wow,
it's pretty interesting. Yeah, So at some point, will either of
these guys go back. I don't and think like, okay, good,
I've got that. That's the way in my past. Now, well,
I know what people have tried to do that. If people I've worked with
the hips, they've tried doing that, they always come back. It's pretty
amazing how the yips can stick around in the unconscious memory. Yeah, yeah,
And a lot of that has to do with one of the main what
I call the main fuels. There's about five main fuel tanks, and one
of them is called fear of yipping. So when someone has yips, they
reach a point maybe six months into it, a year into it, five
years into it, where they're not even that concerned about hitting the bad shot
anymore. They have fear of actually yipping, So they're more afraid of the
yip happening than they are the bad shot that the standard yip would produce.
Interesting and I call that fear of yipping, which then fuels it. So
one of the obviously one of the cures is you have to yip on purpose
to get over to break the cycle. And of course if you're hipping on
purpose, it's not truly a yip, because yips are one hundred percent in
voluntary. There's a saying, and I think we've talked about this in the
past, there's a saying in this speech pathology community that stud or one form
of stuttering happens when the stutterer tries not to stutter. Sure it triggers you.
So when you try not to yip with emotion not mentally. That's different.
But when you try not to yip with almost if you have fear of
yipping, it's like you're telling your subconscious time to yip, and you and
your body does. I remember when I used to ride bicycles, and this
was all the way up into my forties. I mean, I haven't ridden
a bicycle in a long time because I just have too many friends that are
falling off their bicycles. So but I remember when I used to ride bicycles
and I had to go through a narrow spot. All of a sudden,
I was shaky on the bike. I mean, like I'm you know,
I was confident as a kid. I was riding with no hands, no
problem or anything. But then all of a sudden, no, I'm thinking,
I'm don't don't mess this up and bang exactly. Yeah. Or like
driving a car, if you if you're not experienced, if you go skiing
and you live in the stay like Portland's where it doesn't hardly ever snows in
the winter and it melts off within a day, and you go to Mount
Hood where it's I see rhoads, and you're not experienced driving, people tighten
up so they get driving you have sort of speak, right yep, yeah,
so that that's one. That's another one of the main fuels. A
little zero confidence is there's another one of the main fuel tanks that drives the
yips. Unbelievable. Um, always entertaining, always educational. Are we done
another question? Well, no, no, we're wrapping it up here.
Um, tell people again how to get in touch with you. But let's
point golf dot com. That's the easiest way, easiest way, and Jim
will have no technical issues with you. It's just me. There's just you.
Yeah, okay, man, all right, thank you Fred, thanks
for having me on again. And um, well if this is the thirty
second year of you teaching and this is your thirty second appearance, right,
next year we'll have to do only one appear No, we're going to do
more than one. We always do more than one. All right, Well,
we'll talk to you soon, all right, thanks to take care.
So back in January of this year, we met up with Brinson Paolini of
Sharp Focus Nutrition and they were even generous enough to sponsor the show for a
couple of months. This isn't an ad, but I did want to share
with you a couple of updates that I received recently from Brinson One. They've
put together some short videos regarding on course eating and hydration which now live on
their website sharp Focus nutrition dot com and they can also be found on their
YouTube channel. But more importantly, at least for me, is that they
now offer a variety that I was hoping for. These include dried mangoes versus
dried apricots, and you can choose. I leaned toward the mangoes, roasted
cashows versus roasted almonds. Definitely a cashew guy, And the big one for
me plant based jerky versus beef jerkey. And even though I've never been a
fan of beef jerky itself, the plant based jerky is pretty darn good.
I've tried it now and I'm really impressed. So to avoid crashing at the
end of your next round or have the wheels fall off, don't eat a
big meal at the turn, graze through your round, remember sip and nibble,
and do it with the healthy, scientifically developed, golfer focused Sharp Focus
Nutrition. I want to give a shout out to Michael Goodhand of Meaford,
Ontario, Canada for opening up today's episode as our newest Golf Smarter Ambassador,
Michael will have a choice of receiving Tony Manzoni's video of the Lost Fundamental or
a glove and glove storage compartment from his fellow Canadians at Red Rooster golf dot
com, a unique glove subscription service that offers many styles of gloves twenty six
sizes for both men and women. Now, you too are invited to join
our exclusive global community of Golf Smarter Ambassadors by introducing an upcoming episode. Just
send an email and I'll get back to you with some simple instructions of what
to do and what to say. Right to Golf Smarter Podcast at gmail dot
com or visit Goolfsmarter dot com and click on the Hey Fred button. Hey
Fred button, Hey Fred button, Hey Fred button. All right enough,
We're in the countdown for episode nine hundred coming in June, and we've got
some interesting new guests and some of our old favorites returning to help you become
a better smarter golfer. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions
for upcoming episodes, please click on the Hey Fred button. Yeah we just
discussed Hey Fred, didn't we. When you visit golfsmarter dot com,