Speaker 1: Golf Smarter number three hundred and fifty nine, published on
November twenty seven, twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: Welcome to golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets Old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 3: Part of the assessment that I do on golfer is
there is a balance element, and you'd be surprised how
many I would say close to eighty five ninety percent
really have some issues with balance. And when you're moving
your body parts in different directions all at the same time,
I mean, balance becomes a vital component as you're trying
to shift your weight from your trail leg to your
target leg. I mean, if you have a balance issue
and that's going to play havoc with your swing and
your playing performance, you know, we don't practice it. The
second issue is that a lot of us and to
lose strength, especially in the lower body. That correlates to
the inability to maintain balance and such. So it's important
to make sure that you do, get checked for balance,
and even if you don't, I mean just to practice it.
Just try to balance on one leg and see if
you have a tougher time trying to balance on your
right leg versus your left leg. You'd be surprised how
many people are good on one side but terrible on
the other. You just need to work on it to
make sure that you're kind of balancing out. It's your balance,
so to speak.
Speaker 1: Your posture could be the key to fixing your game.
With Bob Forma, this is Golf Smarter.
Speaker 4: Each week we tap the best minds in golf to
help lower your scores with tips, drills, insights and advice
in conversation with course pros, architects, authors, players, teaching gurus
and coaches. Here's your host, Fred Green.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Golf Smarter podcast, Bob Hik.
Speaker 3: Fred, good to be back.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for Green to come on. Why
don't you give us a quick recap of why we're
having you on the show. What is it that you
do well?
Speaker 3: I do golf fitness, programming, assessment and training and education.
I'm an exercise physiologist by trade, which means I study
the effects of exercise on the body. Always had an
interest in combining golf, which I enjoyed playing and exercise,
and went to the two thousand and six World Golf
Fitness Summit in Orlando when the co founders of the
Titlist Performance Institute presented. There then ten years of research
into the physical nature of the golf swing, and the
information they provided was unbelievable, a wow moment which basically
changed the industry, changed the game overnight because prior to that,
I mean, everybody thought that golf and exercise was like
oil and water had just been mixed, right, And since
that time, it's been one hundred and eighty degrees. And
now everybody basically is you know, all the guys on
tours and the gals on tour, and as word is
getting out thanks to shows, you know, podcasts like yours
and Thank You, you know that people are becoming aware
of the fact that this exercise, now specific exercise can
actually help their game and actually help alleviate and prevent
a lot of the golf related injuries.
Speaker 1: Like all the equipment that's out there, all the new
equipment and balls, clothes, whatever, it is, nothing seems to
gain any traction until one player on the tour, at
least one high profile player on the tour starts using it,
and then everyone says me, I want to do that?
Speaker 5: Was there?
Speaker 1: Can this be attributed to any specific player on this
whole revolution of golf fitness?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean the first yeah, I mean Tiger. Tiger
was you know, one of the the highlights in terms
of his workouts and stuff like that. You know, Gary
player has been talking about this.
Speaker 1: For years, Yes he has, you.
Speaker 3: Know, and I think unfortunately with Gary, there was really
no research to back what he was saying. And you know,
it wasn't until back in two thousand and six when
all the research did come out that we finally said, yeah,
Gary's right, you know, the exercise and strength training specifically
can help a golfer. And then you know Tiger and
now basically everybody on the PGA Tour is doing it.
I don't think you're going to get on the PGA
Tour if you're not doing some sort of exercise, because
you know, from what I understand, from what I hear,
a lot of the folks and both the men and
women tours are you know, getting involved in getting trainers
and working out on a regular basis, And.
Speaker 1: What does that do for those folks who just have
a different body type.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think it really depends on body type.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: It's well, some.
Speaker 1: People carry their weight a little bit differently than others
and they you know, and then of course they don't
do anything to stop that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, it's I think there's also a
misconception out there that golf fitness kind of means, you know,
you've got to be in good physical shape, you got
to be able to have good cardiovascular fitness and run
three miles and do all that kind of stuff. But
really what golf fitness is is it's at bringing back
of balance into the muscular skeleton system so that your
body can move efficiently in the skill and activity that
it's participating in. So it really doesn't matter how much weight,
whether or not you're overweight or you're underweight, or you're
at ideal weight. I mean, it's really kind of about
about the muscles and the ligaments and the tendons and
the joints and being able to move freely and to
get into those good hitting positions, you know, being able
to perform those power moves that all the golf publications
talk about each month, and that's going to help you
make better ball contact. That's going to help you get
more distance down the fairway, and that's going to help
you play better healthier golf.
Speaker 1: Uh So you're not necessarily when you talk about fitness,
you're not necessarily speaking of cardiovascular you like we talked
about last time, it's more about flexibility.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really don't do any cardiovascular with my clients.
Speaker 1: That's funny. I don't do any cardiovascular at all.
Speaker 3: So I mean, and don't get me wrong, you know,
you gotta when you're playing golf, you're out there for
four and five hours, so and especially if you walk
the golf course. Yeah, I mean, that can take a
toll on you. So to have a decent amount of
cardiovascular fitness is actually it will work to your advantage.
You know. It's when you start getting a little fatigued,
when you start where your swing starts changing a little
bit and you start hitting the bad shots and all that.
So you definitely want to have a degree of cardiovascular fitness.
But a large part of golf fitness is really, you know,
like you said, the range of motion, the flexibility, and
you know, certain specific strength in parts of the body
so that you know you can help stabilize and swing
a good golf club.
Speaker 1: And as we discussed last time, hydration and nutrition on
that golf course. Like I know personally, like I said,
I really have been very bad this year. I do
not do a lot of cardio. I do know cardiovascular
this year, I've just been it's been awful and and
but I do still prefer to walk on a golf course.
But I make sure that I have a bottle of
water with me at the very least if it's a
hot day, I'll take a Gatorade green thank you. And
and then like either a bag a three ounce bag
of nuts or some peanut butter pretzels, and the wheels
do not fall off my cart or my body late
in the round. And I feel that that has a
tremendous amount to.
Speaker 3: Do with it. Oh yeah, I mean, from a nutritional standpoint,
it's important that you know you start sipping water early
in the realm. You know, you really shouldn't wait till
you're thirsty. You should never wait till you're thirsty to hydrate,
but especially when you're out there, you know, in the
sun and the heat or even on the you know,
on the cooler days, you know, like we're kind of
getting into now. I mean, you know you'd be surprised,
like I say, just being out there and moving the
body and doing all that kind of stuff. I mean,
you're gonna lose your water, not only through sweat, but
through your breathing. And obviously when you're active, you're gonna
your respiratory rate picks up, so you tend to lose
more water. And you know, you do have that that
sweat that you really don't feel, you know, that's not
dripping down your face or anything. So you know, you're
constantly are sweating, whether you realize it or not. So
it is important to make sure that, Yeah, you definitely
stay hydrated throughout the round, and you do snack on
you know, good food choices, you know, like like what
you're saying, fruit or you know some some of these
bars that are out there now, these protein bars and
energy bars are pretty decent. You know, even you know,
peanut butter and jelly familich is good to take out
there with you as well. But yeah, it's definitely important
in a vital component of the game.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of words that you've already mentioned that
I'm making note of an owner bring them back, and
one of them is that you said balance. I know, personally, again,
mainly on my driver, I tend to swing too hard
and fall over backwards after my swing and when I'm
very conscious of it and try to make sure that
at my lower half of my body stays quiet and
there's less movement there. I also, uh, you know, I
stay in position better after you know, on my follow
through my swing, my balance is better, and strangely enough
I get greater distance on those shots and it's usually straighter.
Speaker 3: M Well, balance, yeah, there's two. Really, balance is used
in two different ways here. Balance, in what you were
just talking about, is very essential in golf, and unfortunately
a lot of people don't really think about balance, and
they don't practice or train for balance. And you know,
as we tend to get older, we we tend to
start becoming a little bit more susceptible to being in
balance and to fall a little bit more. But it's
something that and again it's because we don't really work
at it. I mean, did you get up this morning
and then get on one foot and balance on one
foot and see how long you can stay on that foot.
You know, I'm sure a lot of people don't.
Speaker 1: Oh good, that was that was a rhetorical.
Speaker 3: Question, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know when
and part of the assessment that I do on golfer
is there is a balance element. And you'd be surprised,
I mean how many I would say, close to eighty
five ninety percent really, you know, have some issues with balance,
and when you're moving your body part, you know, your
body parts in different directions all at the same time.
I mean, balance becomes a vital component. And as you're
trying to shift your weight, you know, from your trail
leg to your target leg. I mean, if you have
a balance issue, that's gonna kind of play havoc with
your swing in your playing performance. So a lot of
it is, you know, we don't practice it, number one.
And the second issue is that a lot of us
tend to lose strength, especially in the lower body, and
that correlates to, you know, the inability to maintain balance
and such. So it's important to to kind of make
sure that you do get checked for balance, and even
if you don't, I mean, just to practice it. You know,
stand on one leg, just try to balance on one
leg and see if you have a tougher time trying
to balance on your right leg versus your left leg.
You be surprised how many people you know are are
good on one side but terrible on the other. And
you just need to work on it to make sure
that you know you're kind of balancing out your balance
sort of speak. But the other balance that I was
mentioning prior was about balance in the muscular skeletal system them,
because playing golf will actually create imbalances in your body
because of the nature of the sport. It's repetitive and
it's one sided. So you know, if you're a right
handed golfer, you're swinging a club the same way hundreds
of times during a round of golf, So you're working
particular muscles in a certain way and you're neglecting other muscles.
So over time, you know, you develop these deficiencies and
then these imbalances in your body from playing in activity
in addition to maybe your lifestyle for instance, like you
know your work habits. You know, if you tend to
sit a lot during the day, you know that does
a job on creating muscle tightness in your body and
muscle weakness. So really what the golf fitness program and
really any good fitness program, I mean, if you went
to a real good fitness facility, the one thing that
you would want them to do would be to assess you,
to see where your imbalances are, where your deficiencies are,
and to first correct those deficiencies so that you bring
balance back into your system. And we're talking left to right,
front to back, up and down in the body. And
when you do like I say, you're allowing the body
to move more efficiently, more effectively, and that's going to
help the particular skill that you're participating in. And then
once you do that, then you can progress into more
specific sport related strength. And because now you're in balance,
the results that you're going to get will be better
and will be quicker. And it's also the imbalances that
we have that in our systems that lead to all
those nagging aches and pains that we develop, I mean
the lower back gosh, I mean, you know the prevalence
of low backache in society alone, never mind golf, you know,
which always tends to be number one anyway amongst you know,
most golfers, male, female, all levels. It's those imbalances in
the body that lead up to those chronic aches and pains.
And it's not till you really correct those those imbalances,
those mechanisms for injury, that you really correct the problem
and fix the ache and the pain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, well, unfortunately, I know, well, it's time
to bring back Catherine Roberts of yoga for golfers because
I gotta tell you, as I admit that I have
not done a lot of cardiovascular I've done no cardiovascular
this year. I still try to do twenty minutes to
a half hour of yoga every morning, let's call it,
four mornings a week and that and I can really
tell what my balance is like there, because you know,
I either have to stand on my head or I
stand on one foot, and I think that helps me
a lot.
Speaker 3: Oh, definitely, I would say it probably does a lot.
Yoga's great and unfortunately though a lot of guys don't
take yoga, and they should. I mean, going to any
going to any yoga class. I bet you your yoga class,
there's probably more women than men.
Speaker 1: There are both. Yeah, we both have men and women.
And I would say, yes, there's more women. But I
have found a great. Actually it's I don't even do
a class. I found a great website on my iPad
and videos right there, and it's called Yoga Glow. It
is a monthly fee, but it's so worth it for
me to have that and just not have to leave
the house. And there's this one teacher I think is phenomenal.
So yeah, it's been really easy to make a nice
yoga and there's ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty five, ninety,
you know, sixty ninety minute different practices on there, so
it really works for my schedule and I I it's addicting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds like a good deal because, like I say,
more people really need to get into programs like yoga
and pilates to work on flexibility, range of motion, and
for golf, I mean that if you're going to work
on anything to improve your game, flexibility and stretching is
probably the number.
Speaker 1: One interesting you also mentioned earlier when we were talking
about balance and the positions, you talked about the magazines,
and there seems to be you know, we all know
how many golf magazines there are, and the cover every month,
one way or another says greater distance. In this article,
you're going to get greater distance and learn the new
twisted spine swing things, and I avoid them at all costs.
But what is your what's your take on what's going
on in the magazines and what they're promising us and
and how we're going to increase our power by whatever
it is they offer.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Well, I mean, you know they're hit.
They're hitting the buttons, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: No, no question about it. They listen. Is their primary
goal to educate or to sell magazine magazine? Right exactly? Well,
I'm sorry to me. It's all about education. If we
can educate, then we're going to win.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know. And I think the journals and the
publications do a great job at offering tips and telling you,
you know that you need to have a big shoulder
turn for power and you need to maintain a good
risk hinge in the downswing to generate more power and
that's going to get you more distance. But the the
issue I have with the journals, and hopefully that'll change,
you know, as golf fitness becomes more prominent and more
people are you know, buying into it in the industry,
is that they need to tell you how to get
into those positions or what may be your restrictions physical
restrictions for getting into those positions, because you know, for
the average golfer, you know, it picks up a journal
and says, oh, Okay, I just got to make a
bigger shoulder turn, and when they go out there try
to do it, they can't because they got physical weaknesses
or tightnesses that just aren't allow allowing them to do that, right,
And it would be great for these journals to follow
up with, Okay, you've got to make a big shoulder turn,
and here are some possibilities. Here are some scenarios that
you may fall into, and you may have a tight
mid back which is restricting your ability to make a
good turn. And you know, here are some exercises to
help you remedy that situation, you know, kind of get
into some different scenarios and some examples of how to
you know, improve upon those.
Speaker 1: And I think, well, yeah, and the and the photographs
that they're going to show of people doing these big
shoulder turns. They're either tour players, or they're golf instructors
or their fitness instructors or their golfers like Michael Hamill,
which is yeah, right, you and Michael is a golf
smarter listener, but he is a workout fanatic and he's
got this amazing body and he does YouTube videos and
you know, and just come on, what about Joe Schmoe.
What about the you know, the weekend golfer who you
know is not is getting older, doesn't have the flexibility.
What about pictures of those guys and really showcase to
us what can we really do?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and it's funny you bring that up,
because I did write about that in one of my articles.
You know how uh you know, the butch Harmons of
the World and the other you know, famous golf pro teachers.
You know, they tell you how to get into these positions,
and yeah, the pictures they have and there are there
students and they professional golfers who spend two, three, four
hours a day with a personal trainer doing specific exercises
so that they can get into these positions and then
going out you know, on the on the golf course
and practicing for three or four five hours. So yeah, yeah,
I agree with you. You know, for the average golfer
to try to get into a lot of these positions,
you know, it's it's it's a it's a tough it's
an uphill battle.
Speaker 1: Are they really power positions? They? What are they selling
when they say that? I mean obviously what they're pumping,
you know, is you're going to get more distancing. Yeah,
but uh, can they be detrimental these these things they're
trying to show us?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, if for the average golfer, who who?
Because you know, most golfers don't realize that it's their
own bodies that are holding them back from playing better golf.
And so they pick up a magazine and they and
they read about these various positions you need to get into,
and so they go out and try to do this stuff.
And because they're not physically prepared well to do that, yeah,
I mean, it can increase the risk of injury. You know,
there's always compensation going on, and that sets you up
for injury as opposed to you know, let's just kind
of stick to a standard swing and you know, let's
take a look at your body to see where the
restrictions are and let's correct those so that you can
make you know, make those moves and get into those positions.
Speaker 1: So interesting, and so then what I'm curious when when
it talks about these positions, and we've talked about so often.
You know, you've got to start with PGA position, grip
and alignment, or actually posture, grip and alignment. These positions.
Does it address the fact that, and from what I've seen,
most golfers don't have the correct posture when they're addressing
the ball.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, gosh, I mean, you know, the sea posture,
the kind of the bullying of the back when a
golfer stands over the ball. It used to be a
older golfers disease, but nowadays, I tell you, Fred, it's
just unbelievable how many sea postures I'm seeing, even in
the younger golfers. Oh oh, gosha. And the reason is computers.
I mean, the fact that many of us are sitting
at our desks, hunched over our computers all day long.
The body basically adapts to the position that it's placed
in most of the time. So when you're hunched over
a computer, basically your shoulders are around it, right yep,
And so that shortens the muscles in the chest area.
And when you shorten a muscle over time, it basically
tightens and it elongates the muscles in the upper back.
And when you elongate a muscle, you weaken. So what
happens is and you can see this in you know,
when you're in the mall or when you're at the
beach next summer. I mean, look at people's posture, even
the young kids. It's terrible. The amount of rounded shoulders
that are out there are unbelievable. It's like an epidemic.
And so what happens is, you know, you're a golfer,
you're spending eight hours a day hunched over a computer,
and then on the weekends you go out and you
get over the ball and you're taking that rounded shoulder
posture out there with you. So right away you're setting
yourself out. You know, uh, coming out of the gate
of not being able to make an efficient swing because
of rounded seat posture will reduce your back swing by
about thirty percent. So you can't make that good shoulder turn.
You can't get the club back far enough to be
able to generate enough clubhead speed to get power and distance,
so you run into issues. I work with a lot
of dentists and almost every single one of them have
sea posture because they're hunched over their patients all day,
you know, working on their teeth, So you know, stuff
like that. You know, lifestyle that we allude to can
really impact your golf game and a lot of for
a lot of average golfers are just not aware of
the fact that their posture is terrible. And it's unless somebody,
you know, says, hey, do you know you're you're really
hunched over that ball and do you know that it's
going to affect your swing? And YadA YadA YadA. I mean,
the only way to really get the club back when
you're in a sea posture is to stand up while
you're swinging the club back. So what's going to happen
is you're going to change your swing plane. That's gonna mess.
Balance can be an issue, So I mean, there's a
whole host of things that can develop from having bad
posture over the ball.
Speaker 1: Can you expand on YadA YadA YadA? Please? I've been
waiting for somebody to say YadA YadA YadA for years.
It's like, what do you specifically what do you specifically
mean about ya? Sorry for interrupting. What were you about
to say?
Speaker 3: Well, the other thing is, you know, the other pasture
that I'm seeing a lot is the s posture, which
is characterized by an excessive arch in the lower back,
and it's more predominant in women and in younger golfers.
Speaker 1: Give me a visual, because I'm not as looking from
which direction are we talking about like a curvature of
the spine or are we like, yeah, chest out, butt up?
Speaker 3: What do we hear? It's kind of like your lower
back is arched and your butt is sticking out. Okay,
all right? And like I say, it's more predominant in
women and in younger golfers. And the big reason is,
again it's due to a deficiency in the body. Women
tend to have tighter hip flexor muscles, which are the
muscles in the front part of the hip. Women are
from Venus, men are from Mars. It's just a phenomena.
Don't know why it happens. It's all the golfers I test.
You know, women tend to be tighter and the hip flexers.
Men tend to be tighter in the handstrings, which are
in the back of the thigh, and that can lead
up to back issues. But the yes posture, and again,
this seems to be one of the biggest articles that
gets a lot of hits on my website each month,
So there must be a lot of individuals and they're
suffering from back issues and who have s posture, whether
they realize it or not, but the s posture with
that excessive swaying of the back is just going to
kill the back over time. I mean kill the back.
I mean just try standing up and arching your back,
get into your golf stance, arch your back, and then
swing a golf club and you'll know how painful that
can be. So imagine doing that again and again and
again and again and again. A lot of it is
because of the fact that those hip flexers are tight.
And going back to sitting, when you sit, you're going
to put those hip flexers in a shortened position. And
again when you shorten them, you tighten them. And so
over time, you know, your lifestyle can impact your golf game.
And I got an article on the website that just
talk specifically about how sitting can wreck havoc on your
golf swing. I do a workshop I go around the
area here and do the workshop for a lot of
businesses called the Anatomy of a Sitter, And it was
based on you know, what I was seeing in the
sea posture and younger golfers and kind of led me
to do some research on this, and there seems to
be more and more coming out now about the negative
consequences health consequences of sitting. It's really interesting.
Speaker 1: Chairs are sheer hell for me. Yeah, chair. I have
switched and purchased so many chairs it's unbelievable. And it's
always I'm a dusk jockey. I you know, I'm at
my desk many many hours a day in a row,
and I just have a lot of trouble with my
lower back and it's been It wasn't until first I
started sitting on one of those exercise balls for many years.
But then I found a chair that mimics one of
those balls and it forces me to sit up straight
and it's been hugely beneficial for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, we talked about the hamstrings.
I mean the tightness the hamstrings, which is the muscles
in the back of the thigh or one of the
major risks for low back discomfort because of the relationship
the ham strings have on the hip bone and because
what they do to the hip bone, they basically it
usually takes about the third decade for people to start
experiencing back issues from muscle deficiency, and so those tight
hamstrings are going to pull that hip bone down kind
of towards the back. It's going to rotate the hip
towards the back. And so what that does is because
the lower back muscles are attached to the top half
of that hip bone, as it rotates down, it stretches
out the low back muscles and at least them in
a taunt position. So early signs and symptoms are you
sit for a long periods of time, you get up,
your back's a low tight. You play around the golf
your next day or two, your back's a little tight.
The more serious consequence is as that hip bone rotates,
it also will take that normal curve in your lower
spine and the lumbar spine. It'll straighten it out. Now,
you don't want to deviate from that normal curve. It's
there for a reason. If you straighten it out, or
if you increase the curve, you start putting more pressure
on the disks in between the bones and your spine,
and you start to wear out those disks faster. And
that's when you start putting pressure on the nerve roots,
you know, and getting into the sciatica, you just get
back pain and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and
so sitting will also shorten hamstrings as it does hip flexers. Now,
the tight hip flexers pull the hip bone in the
opposite direction. It kind of rotates it down forward, and
that increases that curve in the lower back and creates
that sway back. And that's why a lot of women
tend to have those tight hip flexers, and they tend
to have that s posture, and you know their backs
are killing them. So either way, you know, tightness and
the inflixors, tightness and hamstrings, and you're gonna have issues.
I can't tell you how many times you know. And
I work a lot with low back people who have
even gone through surgeries and have the ruptured discs. The
problem is in many cases is they don't look for
the mechanism of injury. They treat the pain, but they
don't treat the reason, you know, the cause of how
you got to the pain. And in many cases it's
that the imbalances in the muscle that create the misalignment.
I can't tell you how many people that you know,
I've worked with that you identify the deficiency and then
you give them some stretches to do, and it's amazing
how much better they feel.
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised at all. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all.
I have so many more questions for you. I really
like to talk about golf injuries and where they come
from and what we can do about them, and various
things about how the swing can screw up your spine
and things like that. I really have a lot more questions.
Could you stick around and we will record part two
of this conversation?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: Awesome? All right, Well that will be next episode and
it will be a Golf Smarter for members only. So
if you have had any aha moments in the past
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have complete access to our archives of seven years of
Golf Smarter podcasts that all have content that you will have.
You could potentially have an aha moment. So before we leave,
for those who are not Golf Smarter members, Bob, tell
them how to get in touch with you on what
your website is.
Speaker 3: Please, my website is www.
Speaker 1: We did this before. You don't need the www, Bob.
Come on, Bob, you don't need take two.
Speaker 3: Come on golf the golf website. Golf fitness website is
golf fit Carolina dot com. It's g O L F
I T. Carolina dot com.
Speaker 1: Excellent and you have articles on there as well, correct.
Speaker 3: Articles, yep, videos. I post stuff, new stuff every month.
I post a new exercise of the month usually the
middle of the month, and a lot of good information
on there.
Speaker 1: Awesome, All right, stick around Part two coming up. Thanks
so much for joining us.
Speaker 3: Bob, No problem, my pleasure.
Speaker 1: Well, I am so happy to welcome terror Kayler back,
Terry the wedge guy Kaylor And this is our score
Zone Short Game Academy.
Speaker 3: Hey, Terry, how you doing I'm break fret How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing very well?
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: In a brief overview if you're new to our score
Zone Short Game Academy. Terry is the CEO of score Golf,
where they make incredible scoring clubs You probably referred to
him as Wedges in the past, but you will learn
quickly from these that that is not the case. Those
are your scoring clubs, and he's got a whole different
way of approaching it. Check back to our our most
recent members only episode. He'll give you a full explanation
and we answer a bunch of questions if you missed it.
But we're going to tackle one question today, and the
question from Derek Zascow means that Derek is going to
be eligible to receive a customized score forty one sixty
one wedge and you can too. All you have to
do is click on the short Game Academy button at
golfsmarter dot com. It says score Zone, Show Game Academy,
submit your question, and if we use it on the show,
you get to your own customized score forty one sixty
one scoring club and you'll also receive a golf Smarter
Switchblade divid tool, the greatest divid repaired tool in the universe.
I just know this for a fact because I do
all this research and I'm making this up. So Terry,
let's get to the Let's get to the question, and
Derek is probably on the same question for a lot
of people. Derek from Santa Fe, New Mexico, all conditions
being equal, what do you think has more control for
in between distance shots stepping on a gap wedge or
easing up on the pitching wedge.
Speaker 5: Well, my answer is neither one, and let me explain that,
thank you. When we have a short club in our hand,
a wedge or a short term, we're looking for pinpoint
distance control. Da've Pelts has done a lot of research
on this and shown that inside nine iron range people
tend to not miss left and right as badly as
they miss long and short. And there are two parts
of missing long and short. One is just simply missiting
the shot, catching it thin or catching it heavy, laying
the sod over on it as it were. One of
the other problems is that we're trying to step up
or ease up on these different shots to hit our
end between yardages. I think there's two solutions to this.
Two parts of the solution Derek. Here. One is to
go out with your laser rangefinder or even step it
off if you need to, and find out what is
your comfortable full swing distance with each of your scoring
clubs nine, your pitch, your gap your sand, your lob,
whatever you carry there and monitor these gaps. Measure them
out and find out, well, I think a gap which
is one hundred and five, but is it really Go
out and hit five or six balls of your gap.
Speaker 3: Wey, it's.
Speaker 5: Leave your bag there, take your laser rangefinder, walk down,
find the center of that pattern, and shoot back to
your bag and say, okay, I thought it was one
hundred and five, but the center of this pattern is
really ninety eight. And do that for each of your
scoring clubs. Because there is a hard math built into
your set. You may find that you have fourteen yards
between your pitch and your gap, but twelve or sixteen
yards between your gap and your sand. What you're shooting
for is consistent gapping. But to know these yardages, I
wrote a book called the score Method that's available on
our website if you hunt around for it. That is
about then dissecting those gap. It's not by stepping on
it or easing up, but by changing your hand position
gripping down on the club, I can take off about
a third to a half of the distance gap. Gripping
down another half inch, which will take off a little more.
You can build a measure of precision without thinking about
swinging harder or swinging easier, just by changing the link
of the golf club, which produces a little less yards
than that club did it at full swing full length.
You can then dissect that with a very slightly open
club face. Again. This book called score Method dives into that.
But I want to go into the other side of
this question. And you're talking about stepping up on a
gap wedge, a full swing with a with a high
loft golf club, what we call a full sandwich or
a full pitching wedger. A full nine iron is not
anywhere near as heart of a golf swing as a
full five iron or a full free wood. These are
precision golf clubs. And when you back off on them
a little bit and throttle down this little bit and
need to find you can considerate que full swing, you'll
find that your projector comes down, your consistency of impact
will improve dramatically, and your distance control will therefore get
more consistent. It really doesn't matter whether you hit a
pitching wedge one ten or one twenty or one forty.
The key is can you do that consistently? Can you
stand there at one forty going I know this is
a full swing pitching wedge and hit it. Or can
you stand there at one oh five and say, I
know this is a full swing pitching wedge and then
hit it one oh five? So control your gaps. You'll
measure your gaps like going out on the range, and
then dissect your gaps not by stepping on it, not
by easing up, but by changing your hand position on
the grip to shorten the club. I have a three
quarter in and watch what happens. Am wonderful exercise to
go through to learn about your golf clubs.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to, uh, I hope everyone got that.
You know, we had a little bit of a problem
with the Skype signal, but it seemed like we I go.
I was able to follow along even though it's kind
of choppy. I still got the crux of absolutely everything
you said. So I want to, you know, make sure
and if and if anyone's been having trouble with that,
please let me know and and get back to me.
Just email me and we'll we'll work on that and
we can even redo the question if you want. But
I'm pretty sure you got everything. I sure didn't. I
thought it was great advice Terry, thanks so much for
another Square Zone Short game Academy and two more episodes,
and we'll see you then.
Speaker 5: That would be great bread and look forward to it.