Speaker 1: Hi, This is Kelton Kramer from San Marcos, California, and
I play at Twin Oaks Golf Course.
Speaker 2: This is golf Smarter number nine hundred sixty eight. Shoulders
are kind of all I say, pet peeve, but kind
of a sticking point in some respects. If you look
at the larger parts of the body, the bigger muscles,
the bigger area, so talking shoulders, chess back, so on
most of the upper body, they're bigger muscles, they're stronger muscles.
They tend to often overpower what the arms and the
club do in certain situations. A little bit of an
issue when you like if you watch some golf on TV,
it's often something referred to by commentators that a certain
golfer has a huge shoulder turn. You hear this a lot,
and there seems to be this attempt to tie shoulder
turn to distance, and I don't know that it's really
correct because you can see beginner golfers who just have
the most enormous turn you've ever seen, to the point
where they can't even see the ball in their backsweet
because the head gets pulled out of the way. So
they might have an enormous shoulder turn and they kin'd
had a drive a more than one hundred hundred and
fifty yards, So I don't think there's a direct correlation
with how far someone turns their shoulders and how far
the bull goes. So I think this is where the
problem starts.
Speaker 3: Laying the Lie a hard hitting look at the ridiculous
theories ruining your golf game with instructor Gareth Winslow. 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 to
Golf Smarter podcast. Gareth.
Speaker 2: Hi, Fred, how are you today?
Speaker 3: I'm doing well. It's early in the morning for you
in New Zealand.
Speaker 2: It's just off to ten yep.
Speaker 3: Oh, well, good morning.
Speaker 2: What time is it for you, Fred?
Speaker 3: It's for me it's three pm, probably a different day, Tuesday,
on Tuesday, Tuesday on Wednesday, and you're on Wednesday. The
game and that's what we're trying to do with our
golf games, right, just get ahead of it. I've been
reading your book called Playing the Lie, and I think
that you had a mixed meaning, a double entendre on
the word lie.
Speaker 2: Here precisely.
Speaker 4: Usually we think.
Speaker 3: Of playing the lie as playing it as it is
where the ball sits. But that's not your approach in
this book, and I've really been entertained by it. This
subtitle is a hard hitting look at the ridiculous theories
ruining your golf game.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was a double ententra as you said, because
from having coach golf for well being a professional golf
almost trying to think how old I am now almost
thirty years Yeah, wow, makes me feel old just seeing
so many things that I've misconceptions, misunderstandings, myths, and a
lot of just sort of garbage stuff. I felt that
playing the Lie was quite a kind of a tongue
in cheek way to title the book. But yeah, there's
definitely a lot of stuff out there that I feel
is it sends golfers down the wrong path. Something I
noticed with a lot of golfers is, which is quite
sad in a way, is that you see these golfers
working hard on their games, but they're working on stuff
that just makes them worse because they've been either given
bad advice or things that they're following really just don't
don't apply.
Speaker 3: And they're getting advice mostly from the people they play with,
who should not be giving instruction at all.
Speaker 2: It's just one of those sports, isn't it, where everyone
is an expert, well a little bit, yeah. And you
see friends take take their other friends to the driving
range and say, right, this is how you do it,
and so on, and you know that they're well intentioned.
But I feel like, unfortunately, a lot of these sort
of cliches or old wives tales, if you will, that
that people might have picked up when they were they
were younger, Like I certainly picked up a lot of
things which I mentioned in the book. They mean well,
but they really don't get people sort of on the
right track or working on the right things. And as
I said, so many golfers I feel work hard on
their games. You know, they had a lot of balls,
they do a lot of practice, but the stuff they're
working on really just doesn't doesn't correlate to them hitting
better golf shots.
Speaker 3: Right. I was the driving range warming up for around
last week and there was a there that had one
of the ugliest golf swings I've ever seen. I mean,
it was from the grip on everything and then his
swing was like, where are you going? With this, and
of course somebody walked up to him and started giving
him directions. Yeah, and it's like I was watching, I
couldn't hear, but I'm thinking, dude, you just got to
start with where he positions himself and his grip and
his alignment. I mean, his body everything is wrong from
the start, and you're trying to get him to hit
the ball straight. He can't even get the ball off
the ground. What are you doing?
Speaker 2: Well? I think something though with golf, as you mentioned,
the AFREID is working on setup, working on fundamentals as boring.
It's time consuming. And this is probably where a lot
of people struggle is that you know, you go to
a range, you see people beating balls. You know it's
like maybe every Saturday or something, I go and hit
one hundred balls, two hundred balls, right, that's my practice
done for the week. And so it's all about how
many balls you can get through. So just hitting balls
and then looking okay, that wasn't a bad shot or
how far did it go or did that feel okay?
That's what the majority of people tend to do. But yeah,
the problem is if you know, you look at professional
golfers hitting balls and you see, there's like a routine
they go through every shot. You know, the grip, I
get the grip right, set up alignment sticks on the ground.
It could be thirty seconds or one minute just to
hit one one ball, whereas you know a lot of
people they might get two or three balls in the
air at once if they're lucky. So you have to
you have to kind of embrace the boringness or the yeah,
the not so exciting aspects of golf if you want
to be better at it, which really is it's preparation.
I mean, there's something I talk about with my students
all the time is you could say seventy or eighty
percent of what you need to do to hit good
golf shots occurs before you start your swing.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: But you know, a lot of a lot of golfers,
for various reasons, don't have the patience, can't be bothered,
they just want to hit. So I've found with students too,
if somebody's personality tends to be kind of anxious, a
little bit edgy, and they're just you know, really fast
at everything, they do not very suitable suitable for golf
because you all the all the preparation is is you know,
you have to do it obviously before the shot, unlike
other sports like tennis or soccer or something like that,
where the ball is in motion and you just react
to it the ball, you know, golf, obviously the balls
are sitting there on the ground. You have to do
all the preparation. You have to get everything ready. It's
not just instinct. So it's yeah, it's definitely poses some
different challenges to other sports.
Speaker 3: U about it, and I think that a lot of
people when they're at the range either warming up or
luckily if they do get some practice in. You're right,
they're basically I think the two things that they will
use to assess how well that last shot went was
feel at contact and ball flight.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, they don't even know why the ball flight is
what it is, but if it's generally straight, they're comfortable
with it.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, I think the same. It's it's feel what
did it feel like? Way did the bull go? That's it.
That's all you can go by and feels, as a
lot of us will know, is not very accurate. What
we think is going on in our golf swing is
often very different to what it actually looks like in reality,
and I think an important thing for practicing is if
your goal is to get better at something, then just
watching where the ball goes doesn't really help you in
any way because it's just like, Okay, that one went left,
all right, next one, that one went right, Okay, that
one I topped it, that one I hit it fat.
It's like, how is that helping you to get better?
I really encourage people to try and have a clear
set goal for what they're trying to achieve when they
go to the range or whatever it is that they're
working on. And it's difficult, I know, because we all
want to we all want to hit good shots, we
all want to see good shots. But I think really,
when you're practicing, you've got to say, right, okay, this
is just the outcome. I need to put that to
one side and focus on I mean that's a little
bit of a cliche as well, but focus on the process.
Because the thing is if you hit a bad shot,
for example, and then you're like, okay, let me hit
another ball, what are you thinking about on the next shot.
You know, a lot of golfers it's just like, well,
I hope I hit the ball better on the next one.
It's like how far does hope get you? And golf, now,
I would take good technique out of the hope.
Speaker 3: Oh well, hope we'll get you through eighteen holes.
Speaker 2: At my day, it might get you to the bar
at the end, and you know, a few beers might
help as well.
Speaker 3: But yeah, right, well, I mean I consider the tea
box as the meeting place of uncertainty and the green
as the meeting place of hope.
Speaker 4: Yeah right.
Speaker 3: It's like you just feel a little more confident when
you get things like, well, I hope I make this,
But when you get up to the tea box, like
I hope I hit this one where I'm aiming. If
in fact you're aiming.
Speaker 2: I guess a bad put is less embarrassing than a
completely def drive as well.
Speaker 3: Right, And then of course the people who get to
the driving range and the first thing they do is
pull out their.
Speaker 4: Driver without a wom up, without a war It's like.
Speaker 3: What are you doing? And then you're judging yourself on
this and they'll hit twenty thirty driver shots and it's like,
how many times are you going to use that in around?
Speaker 2: That's something that amazes me how many people I see
turn up at the driving range without any warm up whatsoever.
And as you said, driver straight away, first ball, full speed,
and like you you know you're asking for an injury
by doing that. And not only that, but as you said,
you're not really using the driver you know, ten twelve
times maybe in a round the golf, it's almost well
it's not maybe not the least used club, but it's
one of the lesser used clubs. But okay, it's more entertaining.
You know, you see a lot of people, you know.
More and more driving ranges have got technology where you
can see where the ball goes on a screen, you
can see how far it goes, you can see some data.
It's just right, I'm going to hit an hour of
drivers and see if i can beat my previous personal
best of however far it was. But then, you know
that kind of approach, your distance is probably going to
get shorter and shorter as the time goes by, because
you're going to get tired. You might be a bit long,
you might be reasonably long at the start, but then
as your body gets more tired, i mean after half
an hour an hour, your distance is going to be
going down. So yeah, probably not a very successful way
to work on your game.
Speaker 3: One of the beautiful things about driving ranges these days
now I'm not I have a feeling that's happening also
in New Zealand. I know what happens here in the States,
but more and more ranges are getting these top tracer
technology so that you can get a sense of your
distance with each club, which is for most people, they
should be aware of how far they hit each club.
I mean, when someone says what club should I hit here,
it's like, well, how far do you hit? You're five iron?
You know, they just don't get it. So having that
that technology available to you is really helpful. But again,
you shouldn't be starting You should really be focusing on
your short game, and start with your short game, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And this is something I mentioned earlier in the
book as well, is about the order of learning, which
I feel is like a key component of the way
I approach the game with my students is that most
golfers learn, in my opinion, anyway, learn the learn the
game backwards. So the way I explain it is, and
again talk about this in the book, is if essentially
anything we learn, we will start with the most basic,
simplest technique. If we're talking about a sport or any
other activity. You know, you want to learn a language,
if it's English, for example, you got to learn with
you got start with the alphabet. So I look at
golf and think, okay, if we were to put in
order easiest to most difficult aspects of golf techniques, the
most difficult technique is a full swing. So for the
average Joe golfer, who perhaps either because it's the coach,
starts with that, or they just go to the range
with friends and it's like, right, here's a seven nine
and see if you can hit it one hundred and
something yards, they're starting with the most difficult technique. So
to me, this is completely backwards. And I know there's
other coaches out there who probably share the same same idea.
And I've read that Tiger has when he started playing,
his dad also started him off with putting and chipping.
I mean he was only like six months or a
year old, so he probably couldn't do much else at
that stage. But it makes complete sense to me anyway,
and it's I feel like it's the most logical thing
to do, is if or learning golf, you start with
putting because it's the most simple, fundamental basic technique and
if you can learn a reasonably good putting stroke and
then move on to chipping and then pitching and then
lastly full swing. And I've done this with lots and
lots of students, is that by the time you get
to working on a full swing, they're almost there already.
And you say, okay, let's do some full swings now,
and it's right, all right, let's just make a little
bit bigger backswing, and it's all there because they've been
building on this step by step from the first lesson
where they did putting. The other thing I find two
in terms of like a sense of achievement, is if
you start somebody off with a three foot part and
they can knock it in the hole, it's like, oh, well, cool,
I did something, did something good. Instead of here's your
seven nine and I want you to hit one hundred
and fifty yards and they hit it ten yards, you're
kind of turning people off to turning people off golf
a little bit from the start because they just look
at it and think, my gosh, this game is difficult.
Whereas a part and then a chip, you know, hit
a ten yard shot, fifteen yard shot, chip it up
near the whole straight away. It's like, oh, you know,
I can actually do reasonably well at this game. And
it's always step by step building their technique up to
a full swing instead of, as I said, starting with
the full swing. And the coach's like, a friend, that
could be right. This is how your swing, grip set up,
swing back, swing down, hit the ball. There's a there's
a million things going on in a full swing that
you're you're asking somebody to to kind of master, all
within the space of a couple of minutes. So, yeah,
you're mad. You're making the game very tough for people
starting with the full swing. I think. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you have a young daughter, for anybody who's seen
the video of us conversation with at that note, had
a birthday recently, and she's also damaged your face a
bit little sorry back there, you've gotten interested in golf
at all.
Speaker 2: She's she's had a few goes. Yeah, driving range.
Speaker 3: How did you start with her? Did you start with putting?
Speaker 2: Ye at home when she was probably three, got a
little putter plastic, got some plastic golf clubs for her,
which she mostly just hit me in the head with. Actually,
other that she did two things with the plastic golf clubs,
none of them were golf related. One was to hit
me in the head and the other one was to
chew on them, so they became her chew toys. So
I thought, okay, so we might have to wait until
she's a little bit older. So it wasn't super successful
the first try. It was just me getting smacked in
the head and then chewing on the plastic golf clubs,
which she enjoyed.
Speaker 3: So which part.
Speaker 2: The chewing in the and the smacking daddy in the head.
So that was her first taste of golf. But yeah,
she's still she loves drawing, absolutely loves drawing, so not
drawing the golf ball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was thinking, it's like I would love to
be drawing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if she wants to have another guy, I'm not
going to push her into it. If she sees, can
can we go and do a bit of golf again,
it's coming into el Samma now Yeah, so yeah, might
let her have another have another crack at it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. When my granddaughter was visiting, she was about four,
she woke up in the morning, goes, Grandpa, can we
go play golf?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 3: It's like I'm gonna started crying. I have a pudding
green in my backyard, and so that's what I do
with them. You know, it's like let them drop the
ball on the whole. And you know, it's interesting because
early on, and with many conversations that I had with
instructors about getting kids started with golf, everyone agrees it's like,
if you can get them to fall in love with
putting and they get good at putting, the rest of
the game will be easy after that. And because you
you know, when you ask someone how do you get
good at golf and they say start when you're six,
you know, where do you start? You start on the
short game, and once you can get comfortable with that,
it just grows with you.
Speaker 2: I think too. The other advantage to starting with putting
or with the short game obviously, I mean statistically around
the golf is sixty something percent. I mean I've seen
different numbers, but it's it's in the two thirds range
of putting and short game. Just getting out of shots right.
Speaker 3: Right in the scorecard, they give you half of your strokes,
they give it to you on the putting.
Speaker 2: Green, that's right. Yeah, the regulation to putts. Yeah, so
for those golfers who are one hundred percent of their
practice times on the range, then yeah, you're missing out
on quite a bit. So the chances are your scores
are not going to drop any great deal just by
baiting balls on the range.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So when you're giving instruction, you like to get
people started. Let's start with the short game. Let's go
with what twenty twenty five yard shots or just the
shorter swing. I coach shorter club too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I coach at an indoor place, so accumulators. So
generally with a lot of the kids when they arrive,
it's like, okay, let's set a couple of parts. We'll
have a quick look at your your putting technique. See
what's going on. I can see whether the ball's going
left or right, see what the cloud face is doing.
Maybe five minutes, ten minutes, depends. It's a warm up
as well to some extent, and then I can set
the you know, set the set it to approach shots.
I mean we meters here, but so ten meters. Let
them start off with a small chip and then maybe
go on to twenty, maybe go on to thirty forty,
it depends. I mean, better players, more advanced players, we
might not do a huge amount of that, but that's
generally the way I approach it. Because if a student
comes in and it's like what we were talking about,
so the first shot is like a full swing and
they've done no walm up, well I'll say, well, hold on,
we need to at least do some kind of a
warm up first. But also look at it in terms
of you want to have an idea of where they're
at with every aspect of their game and not just okay,
how are you hitting it with your seven eight? And
I feel like a lot of golfers maybe when they're
receiving instruction, and maybe he could say this is the
kind of traditional golf lesson approach. It's just full swing,
full swing, full swing all the time. And so if
I've got someone who comes in and says I want
to hit it further with my driver, and that's their
first lesson, there's probably a reasonably good chance that I'm
going to say, well, I want to see your putt first,
because you can there's so many I mean to me,
I look at the goal swing. There's a lot of patents,
there's a lot of things that if you see what
somebody tends to do in their putting, and then there's
some things going on and they're chipping and pitching, it's
going to go right through the back. And if it's
somebody who's never really had any short game instruction and
they say I want to hit my I'm not hitting
my driver very well, I would say, okay, yep, that's fine.
I'm happy to have a look at your driver, but
give me five minutes to have a look at what
you do with your other shots. And then you realize
that you know, eight out of ten chip shots a
hit fat or something like that. It's like, well, okay,
we can work on your driver, but your short game
is probably not that great. And then you ask some
questions about how much how much have you done with
your short game in the past with lessons and so on?
Is never done that just seven nights. So you see
quite early on with with a lot of golfers that
if they if there's somebody who's had golf lessons, they
don't tend to have worked a lot on putting, short
game and so on.
Speaker 3: I'd love to discuss what you how you would instruct
somebody about the warm up. Let's start with the warm up.
When when you get a student who comes to you,
and then we'll get to the set up position. Because
you had a really outrageous comment about that in the
book that I want to go into. But let's talk
about what the warm up process is before you start
taking swings. What do you advise it.
Speaker 2: Depends? I mean, if you talking again, I think i'd
look at what level of golf for they are, what
are we likely to what are we likely to do
in the lesson? If if we're talking also okay, if
it's are we going on the golf course or are
we are we indoors? What we're what we're going to
do during during the space of the lesson. Ideally, which
unfortunately don't see that often, is you know, if you're
talking about what would a professional golfer do before they
hit some balls on the range, it could be fifteen
minutes thirty minutes of a quick run to warm your
body up and going through various stretches and then starting
off with some hit a few chips and a few
pictures slowly work up. I mean, that might be sort
of more along the lines of what they would do
before they were playing. But then obviously there'd be that
kind of a process before just hitting balls or something.
But I feel like, you know, if you've got six
minutes with somebody and they they are turning up like
two minutes before the lesson starts, then you know that
they're not going to have done any kind of a
warm up. So this is why I think, excuse me,
the bare minimum that I can do is say, right,
take that driver out of your hands, put it back
on your golf bag and grab your potterer or grab
your sandwich, and let's let's do kind of a basic
warm up where we go through some smaller shots and
then build up to some bigger shots. I mean, it's
not perfect, but it's better than just starting with a
full swing where you've got more chance of straining something.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure that you can just eyeball the person
as they're walking up if you've not given them a
lesson before, and get a sense of what their conditioning is,
whether they you know, and do you ask them, do
you stretch? Do you exercise? I mean, what is it
that you do to keep your body in tune for golf?
Is that relevant or is like, yeah, they're just drinking
on the golf course and they just playing a charity tournament.
They just want to be able to not embarrass themselves
next week.
Speaker 2: You know, I would say majority of my students are kids.
I do coach adults, So yeah, I mean you do
see some that come in and that's straight to like
smashing the ball at full speed from ball one, And
that's when I want to say, you know, just hold
on a set, because I don't want them to get
injured either. I think as a as a responsible coach,
you don't want to see your students pull a muscle
because they've just gone full out from ball number one.
I feel with some people it's there's kind of a
little bit of a learning curve there that they need
to think a little bit more about what a practice
session might entail as opposed to just grab a seven
hit some balls. Then five minutes later it's driver because
it goes back to what are you what are you
trying to achieve from this practice that you're doing, and
is there a better way to do it so that
you actually get some kind of a warm up before
you start getting into full speed hitting drivers.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So one of the things in the book that really
intrigued me that you said that when someone that you've
not worked with, and they come up for a lesson,
you can even before they take their first swing. You
have this checklist. You said that you have thirty one
checkpoints just from the setup position alone.
Speaker 2: That was for putting. Yeah. Wow, I'd have to say,
I don't have that physically in front of me. But
several years ago when I was like doing some training
with other coaches, and the one thing I created a
I mean, I created a checklist for everything but for putting,
that the thirty one checkpoints was for putting. So that's
thirty one things in the setup that I look at.
Speaker 3: Let's let's talk about that. What things are you eyeballing?
Speaker 2: It's top secret. Oh I don't know if I can
name all thirty one off the top of my head,
but you.
Speaker 3: Don't have to. But I'm curious you're looking for I.
Speaker 2: Get three or four. It's so, it's it's ball position,
it's width of starts, the foot angles, whether they're turned
out or whatever, positioning of the arms, grip shaft, lean,
spine angle, hit position. So, and then that's basically face
on and then down the line you've got all the alignment,
the amount a knee bend, the amount of spine forward,
the angle of the neck, whether everything's lined up, the
amount of bend in the four in the in the elbow,
the angle of the forearm, the angle of the shaft,
how the head of the putter is sitting on the ground,
whether the balls lined up on the sweet spot or not.
That I mentioned face angle, and that's probably at the
start of the list, but yeah, I mean there's that's
probably somewhere around it. Yeah, are there where the eyes
are relative to the ball distance from the ball, So
I just, yeah, pretty much have a look at all
those things. Yeah, interesting before I'd even really look too
closely at what the putter does, because it's a chain reaction.
You're too close to the ball. Stroke looks different too
far away, looks different grip, ball position, alignment, everything. And
if there's you know, thirty one, it might even be
more than that, could throw a few more. But if
there's many little details in the setup position, then that
all adds up to what does the stroke look like.
So if someone's got a horrible looking setup for their
for their putter, even that the putter length, I don't
even talk about equipment, so that part of might not
suit them. Then you're not going to see a particularly
good stroke if you're way off with the setup. And
I think the same thing applies with every shot and golf.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, it's yeah, yeah, I would love to get
deeper into the part about the ridiculous theories that are
ruining everyone's golf game that we hear more and more
and you go through you know, it's really interesting, is
you You talk about it in the book and you say,
but that's not really what I'm trying to say here,
because you know you're doing something. You may be doing that,
but that's not right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I try to. I try to make as many examples
as possible, you know, through some stories in there, because
if I think, if you can, and this I guess
is something I do with coaching too, is if people
I mean, because golfer can be very very confusing for people,
I mean extremely And this is probably one of the
keys behind me wanting to write this book is that
there's so much information. I mean, this is also because
of the Internet. There's there's just so much stuff out there,
and I don't think statistically people are actually getting better
at golf given that there's there's just too much information
out there, and you know, how do you filter it?
You go on a YouTube and look up golf tips
or maybe yeah, just golf golf tips something like that,
and you're talking millions and millions and millions of hats.
I think if you look it up in Google, it's
it's close to a billion. So yeah, just for golf
or golf tips. So where do you start. So it's
and this is like one of the key premises of
the book is that you actually want to try and
delete or get rid of as much of this sort
of inaccurate information as possible and get back to sort
of the bare bones, basic things that will have some
noticeable effect on how you hit the golf ball. And
this is why there's a part in the front of
the book where I'm kind of, you know, I guess
a little being a bit sarcastic, perhaps about joking about
these are the next ten things that I think you
should work on, Like, you know, how to how to
release your right eyebrow, and I don't know how longer
toenails will help you grab the ground. Things like that.
I can't remember them all because it was you know,
it's a bit of a Again, there's a tongue in cheek.
But some people just get into such irrelevant things that
really have very little if any effect on how they
hit the ball, and they just go off on tangents
and they, as I say right at the start, you know,
people can work tirelessly on things that are just they're
just not the right things. They don't have really any
effect on how they hit it. And so people put
in the time, but they don't see any results.
Speaker 3: So I want to get into your pet peeves of
golf instruction that we all get caught up and whether
it is on YouTube or on podcasts, and you know,
after doing this for so many years and talking to
so many people, my head explodes with the amount of
information and it's hard to weed it all out. But
you're saying that there's a lot of theories that are
out there that are being you know, put out, whether
in lessons or on the internet, that are not necessarily
there to help somebody's game. It maybe to set it
up to bring them back to the instructor again, right,
who's got to keep his business going.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's I'm sure there's some element of that, but
I mean it's people. We're all in business, you know,
I'm in business. You're in business. We have to have
some aspect of marketing to what we do.
Speaker 3: So just have to have some credibility.
Speaker 2: I guess. So what something I see, I don't know
if i'd say it's a pet peeve, but you know,
if I could be going through Instagram or Facebook and
you see some videos pop up, and what I find
it might not even be golf, but that people get
on these themes. So you see one video about something
and then the next day you see another person talking
about something much the same, and so there's kind of
this copycat thing that tends to go on. It's like, Okay,
what's the what's the most popular kind of concept or
swing fad that's that's around at the moment, And so
everyone gets on the bandwagon, and then you see one
and two and three and so on, and then before
you know it, everybody is doing videos about you know,
let's say weight transfer or something like that, or shallowing
the club or using the ground or a long time
ago it was X factor lag the club. And so
this is sort of what goes on. But I mean
I get this from a from kind of a coaching
perspective that you need to you need to have something
to attract potential customers or students. I guess so. You
it's like anything, you need to continuously update what you're doing.
You know, if you buy a car two years later,
there's a new there's a new new model of the car,
it's okay, I need that. Or golf clubs right every
couple it's generally every two years or so, there's a
new model of iron, there's a there's a new driver.
You can't just have the same model for twenty thirty
years expect to keep selling it. So it makes sense
that you've got to keep sort of updating and have
new stuff come out. But if it's to the point
where it's it's stuff that in A phrase that I've
coined in my book is random fault spotting. And I
feel like this is quite an issue where whether it
might not be a coach, it could just be the
goal for themselves. You know that they get the phone,
they take a video and they have a look at
it and they think, oh, okay, my my my right
glute is not moving this way as I'm hitting the ball,
and it's just completely random. It's the it's just pulling
something out of thin air and saying, oh, that doesn't
look right, and then say I need to work on that.
And this is where I think a lot of people
get on the wrong track is there's there's not really
any sort of methodology or order in terms of how
they analyze their their goal swing or whether they can
analyze it or not. I mean, that's that's another question.
But there's so much stuff that I see in videos,
you know, people say work on this and that, and
it's just this is popular at the moment. Okay, let's
let's look at doing this stuff. But in reality, a
lot of the time is it's either very very inaccurate
and the the the swing tip that that's being recommended
is not going to help the person at all, or
it's just I just feel like it's completely irrelevant. It's
like saying my left knee moved on one so I'm
going to use inches. Used moved one inch to the
to the right during my backswing, therefore I'm hitting big hooks.
It's just like, well, how can you tie those two
things together? It awesome.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there's parts in the book that that you
dig deep into that I'm just going to throw these
out and let you run on it, and let's start
with holding the golf club. What your eyes just bugged
out of your head when I said that. It's like,
what are the misconceptions of what are people doing wrong?
And they have no idea they're doing it and they've
probably been instructed or the instructor never even covered it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unfortunately. I mean I'm I like details. I kind
of analyze things down to the minutest degree. I guess.
So the grip is actually in the book is I
think the longest section. M h, there's there's. Yeah, there's
more content on the grip than anything else, which I
guess gives you an idea of how much that's an
issue that I think is an issue. Yeah, I say,
I watch, you know, I watch a lot of golf
on TV still, and whenever I see somebody, you know,
doing well on the top, near the top of the
leaderboard with a fairly average grip, I'm like, oh, come on, really,
could could you not do a little bit better job
than that? Yeah? I mean, well, I see a quote
trying to think who it was and if it was,
and I think it was Ben Hagan, but somebody could
have been Harvey Pennett. Like, if you if you don't
learn a good grip, then you you're not planning to
learn a good golf swing. Something along those lines, which
I think is somewhat accurate, because if you've got a
fairly average grip, there's certain things in the gold swing.
And again it's very much a chain reaction. Everything begins
with the setup, So a bad grip is in a
lot of cases going to lead to some fairly poor
positions in the gold swing. One of the one of
the big things I would say, just you know, because
obviously I could talk for grip about sorry, talk about
grip for a while, is one of the key differences
between let's say a good grip and a not so
good grip is where it's positioned in in the hand,
so in the fingers versus in the palm. And if there's,
like say, one kind of quick thing I would try
and get people to look at with their own grips
is if they look at their thumb on the club,
is it sort of long and extended or is it
short and fairly close to the index finger. So if
the thumb is close and near the index finger, then
there's a pretty good chance that the club is more
in the fingers. So anytime you see a long extended thumb,
the club is in the palm, and with a lot
of golfers, and you're going to if you're doing a
video analysis and I see a grip that's not too great,
there's a reasonably high chance that we're going to see
some hinging issues because they correlate. You put your hand
in a position on the club whereby you can't actually
hinge properly, and so you're going to see some hinging problems.
But there is so many things. I mean, something else
I noticed it. You often see golfers gripping the club
extremely tight, and you can see all the tension and
the muscles and veins popping out. This is also again
mentioned in the book that it's not so much that
they are intentionally trying to squeeze it tight. It's that
if you put the club in the palm of your
hand where you have no strength whatever you put. Like,
you know, if you put an egg into the palm
of your hand and you try to you try to
break the egg, you can't because there's there's there's nothing
happening in there. You don't you can't create any any
any any pressure or any power. If you do it
with your fingers, you've got a lot more a lot
more strength. So if you hold the club in your
fingers predominantly, you can secure the club without using a
lot of force because there's more strength there, Whereas if
you hold the club in your palms too much because
of the club, because you can't really create any any
force or pressure with your part arms. To feel like
the club is not going to slip out of your hands,
you have to squeeze it very tightly. So so many
set up and swing issues are results of Paul grips.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because the next thing I had on my
list was to talk about the grip pressure, so you
already beat me to it. Let's talk about another myth
that you bring up there, and that would be left
arm straight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's another good right armbat.
Speaker 3: Elbow, you know those things that a lot of nuanced
elements of the golf swing that people just don't realize.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think this is almost a kind of a
mental thing too with the left arm, because I think
in a good goal sing the left arm does stay
fairly straight. But the problem with this, and perhaps with
a lot of other things, is when you intentionally try
and do something you Let's say the left arm for example,
if your first thought is okay, I need to keep
my left arms straight, then you're going to increase the tension.
You're probably trying to get your left arm as straight
as possible in the setup, so you're going to be
very very tense right throughout that arm. And what you
see with a lot of golfers is start off in again.
This could be a could be a grip problem, could
be other problems. Very very tight arms. They get towards
the top of the swing, they can't maintain that that tension,
that pressure any longer. Arms get a little bit tired bend.
So if you're someone who thinks, okay, I need to
keep my left arm straight, very tense in the setup,
left arm's got to be straight. I can't let it
bend at all. Get to the end of the swing,
arms are tired. Muscles want to relax bends even more. So.
This is sort of one of the issues of you've
got to be a little bit careful about what you
think about or the process you're you're you're using to
make an improvement, and you need to have a bit
clearer picture of about and this is I guess if
there's one thing I I kind of preach on about
with my coaching and the way I look at things
as it's everything is causing effect. There is a reason
for everything. If you look at you if you can
see the big picture of how somebody's golf swing works,
you can pretty much break it down and see everything
that goes on and why it's in there, because it's
all just, you know, I say, beginning with the setup.
The person sets up in this way, maybe the grip's
not so good or the setup's not quite right, and
this causes them to do things in their back swing,
which also causes things in the downswing, and that's this
is why they end up with this kind of kind
of an impact. Not always because some people just have
habits in there for no particular reason, but a lot
of the time, if you can join the pieces together,
you can see fairly accurately why the entire swing works
the way it.
Speaker 3: Does well, since we're talking about elements of the swing
that that are just not understood properly and that you
point out in the book. And again, it's a really
fun book to read, and it's really eye opening on
so many parts. Let's talk about So we were talking
about the grip in the in the left arm straight uh,
and then what about the shoulders and arms competing in
the back swing you talk about there at the same time.
Is a good concept to follow.
Speaker 2: Yes, shoulders are kind of a that's that's a little
bit of pet peeve, but kind of a sticking point
in some respects. I have to say, you know, using
the term shoulder turn in a in my case in
a gold swing, I would say I never never use
I don't think I often even refer to shoulders unless
it's saying, perhaps, okay, we need to get your shoulders
square from an alignment perspective. It's something that I've noticed
through my experience coaching for quite some time is if
you look at the larger parts of the body, the
bigger muscles, the bigger area, so talking shoulders, chest, back,
so on most of the upper body, they're bigger muscles,
they're stronger muscles. They tend to often overpower what the
arms and the club do in certain situations. I think also,
whether I'm still trying to get onto the shoulders point here,
I think there's a little bit of an issue when
you like when you watch if you watch some golf
on TV, and it's often something referred to by commentators
that a certain golfer has a huge shoulder turn. You
hear this a lot, and there seems to be this
attempt to tie shoulder turn to distance, and I don't
think it's really I don't know that it's really correct
because you can see beginner golfers who just have the
most enormous turn you've ever seen, to the point where
they can't even see the ball in their back swing
because their head gets pulled out of the way. So
they might have an enormous shoulder turn and they can't
hit a driver more than one hundred hundred and fifty yards.
So I don't think there's a direct correlation with how
far someone turns their shoulders and how far the bull goes.
So I think this is where the problem starts. So
you see lots and lots of golfers who sort of
pick up on this commentary about shoulder turn, shoulder turn,
shoulder turn, I need to turn my shoulders, so as
soon as they start their swing, it's like, oh, get
that shoulder out. Problem is if that's your only focus,
what happens to your arms and the golf club. If
it's just right, turn my shoulders, then the arms and
the club end up just going around the body like
a like a baseball swing. So I would say, I
don't know that I ever talk about turn your shoulders
or ever mentioned that that term, because it just for
most people just ruins what might otherwise be a reasonable
golf swing. So the amount I don't see that the
amount the shoulders turns as a whole in the in
the back swing, for example, as being a direct producer
of power or distance. And I don't look at the
shoulders turning as being the kind of initiator of of anything. Really.
I again take this back to short game. If you
get somebody putting or chipping and they can keep like
a triangle with their arms, then the shoulders will move
because it's all one piece. So I prefer to take
the focus away from the shoulders because of their ability
to overpower the rest of the gold swing. And if
you can go back again with putting and say right,
we've got a a y shape and we move that
backwards and force in the shoulders move. The only time
the shoulders don't move is when the triangle breaks down.
So if somebody's not turning very well, you look at this,
look at the structure of the arms that if the
triangle's not there, the shoulders don't move. But yeah, I'm
not a big fan of saying right, turn your shoulders
because big shoulder turns. They might be noticeable with some
long hitters, but I don't think that they're the key
reason for them hitting the ball a long way. And
in a lot of cases with let's say beginner to
intermediate level golfers, this big focus on making a big
shoulder turn tends to just mess them up.
Speaker 3: And the ultimate goal would be consistency. Everyone wants to
be consistent, whether it's their score or their swing or
making contact. And a very powerful line that you kind
of just throw in there, but I found it to
be really important. Is simple is easy to repeat. Complicate,
Complicated is difficult, and therefore can be inconsistent.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, I make a difference because I spent quite
a bit. I've spent fifteen years in China, so I
speak Mandarin. I also wrote a book some years ago
in Chinese which are published in China, so I make
a reference in the book to Chinese characters. So you've
got a very basic Chinese character, which is one which
is a single horizontal stroke, and then you've got another
one which is.
Speaker 3: The same in Japanese.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, there's quite a lot of similarities. Yeah, there's
a I think a noodle dish which is I can't
remember how many strokes it could be, might be fifty something.
So there's all kinds of roundabouts strokes all over the place.
And so I look at those and think, Okay, that
the single line, you could draw that fifty times and
it's not going to look very different, whereas the other one,
which has lots and lots of strokes and very complicated
and circular pieces and things like that, each one is
going to look a little bit different because it's far
more complex. And so I try and relate that back
to the golf swing and think, the simpler it is that,
as you just mentioned, the simpler it is it easier,
the easier it is to repeat. And something else I try,
and I think mentioned quite a lot with with students
when I'm talking about some basic concepts, is that if
you hear a golfing tip or somebody gives you some advice,
there's two things I would I would try and think
about when you get advice from somebody you or you're
watching a video or something. The first one is is
this something that you would see in other sports? Because
I think if you just if you're only ever looking
at golf and you think, okay, here's a new tip,
let me try that, you need to take that a
step further and look at how does motion work in
other situations. So, whether it's baseball or a tennis serve,
or throwing a javelin or a or a discuss, even
like boxing throwing a punch, you see lots and lots
of overlap. There's a lot of similarities. So if you're
looking at a golf tip and you think, well, hold on,
is this what you see in other sports where there's
a similar movement going on, and you realize that no,
it's completely different, well, then that's to me, it's a
red flag. There's a pretty good chance it's probably not
going to help you because if it's just something that's hey,
try out this new golf tip, but you look at
sort of motion and how it works in other situations
and other other sports and see that that's not what
happens when somebody does this, or somebody does that then yeah,
there's a pretty good chance it's probably not very useful
to you. The other thing I like to do is
compare the let's say it's a full swing tip. Compare
it with putting, because most people, I think agree putting
tends to be a bit more universally just sorry universal
in terms of what's accepted. You know, there's not many
people who would say, okay, use your risks as much
as possible. When you put the majority of putting strokes,
you see there's very little, if any risk movement. We're
trying to keep triangle with the arms. The path that
the putter head moves on is somewhat straight, maybe it
arcs a little bit, but you don't see too many
like really wild ideas in terms of a putting stroke.
Maybe with the grip you do maybe put a design.
There's a lot of different putters these days out there.
The lab putters have become very popular now, which which
is quite a different design but amazing technology. But you
see some you know, much smaller margins in terms of
what's accepted with with with a putting stroke that you know,
you don't use your wrists, you move the putterhead fairly straight,
back and through. So I look at that and think, okay,
if again, if you've got some kind of tip for
your full swing where it's okay in the downswing you
have to shallow the club and you have to bow
your efforts and you have to do this. I was
like I would, I would look at that and think, okay,
compare that with a putting stroke. Look how simple the
putting stroke movement is. Why do you need all these
complex movements in your full swing to deliver the club
into the ball where your putting stroke is just this.
So putting or even chipping, I would think, would you
do the same thing with a pot or a chip?
Would you do this kind of a swing plane and
then shallow of the club and bow your wrist and
do some other stuff and throw all this stuff in there,
imagine trying to put that into your putting stroke and
see how that would work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: The book again is called Playing the Lie, A hard
hitting look at the ridiculous theories Ruining your Golf Game,
published in twenty twenty four by Gareth Winslow. Wi Slow, Gareth,
it's really been a joy to speak to you, and
I truly enjoyed the book. Thank you so much for
coming on.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 3: So you may have heard Gareth mention that he worked
with the Chinese national team for fifteen years. Towards the end,
he just kind of dropped that in. What you haven't
heard yet though, is that when we were talking earlier on,
when we were talking about working with kids, we were
interrupted by a knock on the door on what.
Speaker 2: Level they're at, and then so is com with somebody
knocking at my door.
Speaker 4: Okay, so just be sick. Uh sorry, Fred, no worries.
Speaker 2: Someone bring me some vegetables and you spoke to them
in Chinese.
Speaker 3: Wow, I'm impressed.
Speaker 2: Uh sort of.
Speaker 3: Remember where you were mm hmmm.
Speaker 2: Mm hm, yes, yes, listens kids coming in.
Speaker 3: I was just really impressed that he speaks fluent Chinese
and that we actually got to hear in action. Yeah,
I thought it was cool. Anyway. Later this week in
Golf Smarter Mulligans is a really interesting conversation with Jacob Bowden,
who's been on the show multiple times over the years,
but this time he shared his experience of speed golf.
Are you familiar with speed golf? Like when you run
through the golf course. Well, this is an episode that
we call shooting par in less than an hour.
Speaker 4: Here's a taste with speed golf.
Speaker 1: Since time is a factor, there's really no time to
walk around the green and read the puff from all
kinds of different angles.
Speaker 4: You just got to get up and hit it.
Speaker 1: It's amazing how often the instincts are correct. It's easy
to overthink things. So the idea of just getting up,
taking a quick instinctive look and then just putting it
and then going on, it's really amazing how well you
can put like that. You know, on the first day
I had four or five birdies, so that's one of
the benefits, I guess. And then since you have to
run with your clubs, most guys play with four to
seven clubs. I played with a driver, a twenty degree hybrid,
a five iron, an eight iron, and a fifty two
deree wodge and.
Speaker 3: Then a putter.
Speaker 1: Really that's all the clubs that you need to be
able to play. It teaches you to play shots. There's
very rarely a time and speak golf where you'll have
a shot that's a perfect distance. And for that matter,
you don't have time to like calculate the distance.
Speaker 3: This episode was originally three hundred and fifty seven from
November of twenty twelve, and there's a lot to learn
from his experience, so you may want to check that
one out, and hopefully you check them all out. Well,
what if this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador Kelton Kramer from
San Marcos, California, who chose to receive Tony Manzoni's Lost
Fundamental video just for opening today's episode and now through
the beginning of next year. You have multiple ways to
become a Golf Smarter Ambassador. You can record a show
opening and choose one of three great gifts like Kelton did,
or if you'd like to get all all three gifts
at once, then write a review for golf Smarter from
wherever you're listening right now, whether it's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon,
or any other podcast app where you can find Golf
Smarter and I think you can find them on all
of them. Just write an honest review, send me what
you wrote and where you posted it, and once we
confirm that your review is public, I will email you
with instructions on how to receive all three of our
great gifts. If you have any questions, comments, want to
open a future episode with where you're from, where you
play in the episode number, or maybe you've submitted a
review on your favorite podcast platform, or you may even
have a suggestion for an upcoming episode. All you need
to do is write to me at golf Smarter podcast
at gmail dot com, or click on the Heyfred button
when you visit golfsmarter dot com.