Ready to elevate your golf game to unimaginable heights? This episode promises to transform how you approach the sport, thanks to the enlightening insights of our guest, Dr Tony Luczak. A former professional golfer with a PhD in biomechanics, Dr Tony opens up about his innovative perspectives on the golf swing, unraveling its biomechanics and underlining the importance of mental and emotional control on the golf course.
Ever wondered how the principles of systems engineering could be applied to golf? Or how the upper torso pelvis rotation affects driving performance? This deep-dive into golf strategy is not just enlightening but also practical, offering actionable tips that can help you improve your game. We unravel complex topics like the impact of 2D on image interpretation and discuss the neuroscience behind the golf swing techniques. We venture into golf patterns, the importance of club fitting, and how a pre-mortem can help control your emotions on the field.
The episode draws to a close with a focus on optimizing clubhead speed and training techniques, highlighting the vital roles of the trail pectoral muscle and the serratus anterior. We challenge traditional perspectives and discuss how an uncluttered mind can be your best ally. Hear the inspiring story of how Jeff Flag became a long-drive champion with Dr Tony's guidance. There's something in this episode for every golfer, irrespective of their skill level. So join our conversation with Dr Tony Luczak and Justin Tang, and get ready for a game-changing perspective on golf!
Ready to elevate your golf game to unimaginable heights? This episode promises to transform how you approach the sport, thanks to the enlightening insights of our guest, Dr Tony Luczak. A former professional golfer with a PhD in biomechanics, Dr Tony opens up about his innovative perspectives on the golf swing, unraveling its biomechanics and underlining the importance of mental and emotional control on the golf course.
Ever wondered how the principles of systems engineering could be applied to golf? Or how the upper torso pelvis rotation affects driving performance? This deep-dive into golf strategy is not just enlightening but also practical, offering actionable tips that can help you improve your game. We unravel complex topics like the impact of 2D on image interpretation and discuss the neuroscience behind the golf swing techniques. We venture into golf patterns, the importance of club fitting, and how a pre-mortem can help control your emotions on the field.
The episode draws to a close with a focus on optimizing clubhead speed and training techniques, highlighting the vital roles of the trail pectoral muscle and the serratus anterior. We challenge traditional perspectives and discuss how an uncluttered mind can be your best ally. Hear the inspiring story of how Jeff Flag became a long-drive champion with Dr Tony's guidance. There's something in this episode for every golfer, irrespective of their skill level. So join our conversation with Dr Tony Luczak and Justin Tang, and get ready for a game-changing perspective on golf!
Hello and welcome to another great addition of the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast. I am your host, jesse Perryman, along with Justin Tang, the instructor, director of instruction at the Canterbury Golf Club in Singapore. So if you're ever in Singapore, you have to find Justin. It'll be a very enlightening hour. Our guest this conversation was recorded in late spring and dumb door of me. I lost the file for a while until Justin reminded me and I found it, but I'm sure glad I did.
Speaker 1:Our guest is a man by the name of Dr Tony Luchak. He has a nominal golf background. He played, he tried to play on the mini tours. He tried to make it out there. He played in junior college. He transferred to Mississippi State Division of the College Golf Team, played, tried to play on the tour, didn't quite make it, wanted to be a teacher, got versed, went into the biomechanics study of the golf swing and, as it turned, he garnered his PhD in engineering biomechanics.
Speaker 1:I think, if I'm not mistaken, even along those lines. Forgive me, doc, if I mucked that one up, but this conversation is one that just blew my mind. You've got Justin and Tony riffing off each other and I'm chiming in a little bit along the topics of how to build a great golf swing. What does it take to get it imprinted into your nervous system? We talk about the biomechanics of the golf swing. We talk about patterns. We talk about the mental game, the emotional side, all of it. We talk about every single facet that I can think of, aside from pushing weights and getting into the gym, on how to get better. This is such a holistic conversation where I'm going to say that it's kind of mechanically agnostic, if you will. These two gentlemen have put the time in to educate themselves, to learn how to decipher proper patterns for individuals. They certainly aren't cookie cutters. They're not a one size fits all approach, which I don't agree with personally, but we cover all of these topics in this conversation.
Speaker 1:It's wonderful, one of my favorite episodes that I've ever done, that we've ever done. There's pearls of wisdom all over the place. It's worth listening to more than once. There's a lot of wisdom in it. There's a lot of dives that are just being dropped left and right between Justin and Tony and Dr Tony and myself toward the end. Sit back and relax and listen to this.
Speaker 1:I would strongly encourage all of you to check out what Tony has going on, what Dr Tony Luchak has going on. He helps people hit the ball great. He helps to educate teachers to get this game going properly into the new generation, into the new era of teaching, of learning, of playing golf to the best of our abilities. You can find Dr Luchak at wwwhumo golf. That is wwwhumogolf. You can find Justin Easiest on Instagram at elite golf swing and send him a message telling that you heard this and you'd like to inquire a little bit more. These two gentlemen are willing to talk to people to help satisfy their curiosity. Perhaps, if you want to work with them to get you going on the right path that's customized for you, not according to a swing doctrine of any particular style, but a tangible, understandable pathway to get better. You can also find me Easiest on Instagram at flag hunters golf pod. All one word. Feel free to send me a message If there's anybody that you would like to hear, any topic in the golf improvement genre that you would like me to research and perhaps get the proper individual on to discuss what it is that's possibly ailing, you hit me up.
Speaker 1:Feel free to shoot me a note on there. I'm happy to help. I'm here for that, justin is here for that and Dr Tune Luchak is also here for that. I got to send out an apology to the doc for misplacing this file and Justin just kind of reminded me. Hey look, you got this, this wonderful conversation that we did. And me being somewhat technologically at a disadvantage, I'm learning on the fly and this one I've learned the hard way, so I apologize for the delay.
Speaker 1:Sit back and enjoy this conversation, listen to it more than once, I'm proud to be a part of it and I'm also humbled by the information that these two gentlemen have at their disposal, and that comes from a lot of years of research, a lot of years of development, a lot of years of proving disproving things and looking at things neutrally, from a very higher observational perspective, so that we, the students you myself can benefit from these great coaches, these great teachers that have done the requisite work, and the game of golf is better for us. So hats off to you guys. Thank you very, very much for enlightening all of us and helping to streamline and simplify the process of getting better. It's a joyful process, folks, and when you have these two individuals out there and multitudes of others that are teaching from a holistic way, we are just so much better for it. I appreciate it everybody and thank you for listening in advance. And please do not forget to rate, review and subscribe. I always forget to say that, but I'm not forgetting it now.
Speaker 1:Cheers everyone. Have a great week. We'll see you next Wednesday or Tuesday. Thanks, tuesday, wednesday. Hello, and thank you for joining us here on the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast with my sometimes co-host, mr Justin Tang. He teaches at Tanah Merah Golf Club in Singapore, joining us, always from Singapore. We keep trying to encourage him to come over here, so eventually he will, and our guest today is Dr Tony Luchak. Doc, thanks for joining us. Give us a quick background on what you got going on.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Jesse. Jesse, I appreciate the time. So we've started up a technology company called Humo, Humamotion Technologies, and our first application of these technologies is in golf. I've spent 30-some years in the golf industry so it only made sense to take these for us, and we'll talk about the wearable technology that you can. It's as easy as putting on a pair of socks, put on a watch. We can start taking all that information that Justin has developed into a lab and now being able to capture that on the golf course. So we're looking to hopefully launch that in the fall. And so that's HumoGolf, and I can go further into it. But I don't want to put people to sleep about my 30 years of golf instruction and philosophy just yet.
Speaker 3:You're not going to put me to sleep for one. Thanks for responding and coming on the channel on Dr Luchak. I'd like to understand and for all listeners to know how you came into golf, how you spent time playing professional golf and tours and how you ended up as a PhD in human factors engineering one of the rare PGA professionals who also has a PhD behind their name.
Speaker 2:Well, I appreciate that. I mean there's a lot of good ones out there. So it's you know, phd is about knowing how to do research. So I actually grew up in Michigan and played a lot of golf there. I was played junior college golf. We had one state championship. I went down to nationals, went down to Florida and got on Bermuda grass and the ball went sideways and didn't make sense to me.
Speaker 2:But I always been infatuated with golf and then had an opportunity to go play down at Mississippi State and was down there and really I was down there for two days. My back went out and it's like whoa, whoa, what's going on? And that's what really kind of got me into teaching is because I still love the game. So was rehab in my back and I grew four inches. I'm growing four inches after high school is nothing good In junior college, I should say. And so that was a back. That kind of led into my teaching about how the body works. So I was a big interest there.
Speaker 2:But when we first started looking at golf swings, we used to just record them on video tapes and sit there with markers on a TV set drawing lines, and it's something that I've always been. And then once I finished up with school here, headed down to Florida and started playing the mini tours, and that's where I just kind of just, you know, I still wanted to play and the weird thing is is I would rehab, feel great, go out and play, take lessons. Things just kept breaking down. And what was interesting in this, I had an opportunity to hang out with some great players gentlemen by the name of John Daly at the time, and now this was John Daly before anyone knew John Daly, this is before he won the PJ championship and his athletic ability was just phenomenal. He did things with the golf ball I had just never seen before. And what was interesting about John I didn't realize at the time is his brilliance was in his simplicity. So when he says rip it and rip it, yeah, that's about as deep as it gets, but his ability to control the hands and create shots was phenomenal, along with the speed.
Speaker 2:So I've always was kind of always digesting as much information as possible. I tried to take the lessons, took lessons from Mike Bender, who was at the time part of Maca Grady's circle, and I tried to know more. But the more I knew, or I thought, the more I knew about the golf swing, the worse I got. So my playing career on the mini tours just was plummeting, even though I was taking more lessons and more information. And I was fortunate to be around technology at the time with these video systems. Sony had a system and this is really dating myself we wheel out these batteries and a TV screen and a VCR camera at time, but that was high tech.
Speaker 2:When I first started looking at computers it was a $10,000 software package by Neat Systems, but everyone loved it. I had Dean Beaman on there who was the PJ Tour Commissioner at the time, paul A Zinger, steve Rintool a bunch of senior tour players and I really kind of got into the whole teaching and technology aspect and that kind of just really infused all my interest, started getting into the forest plates and stuff like that and then basically once playing realized it just wasn't going to happen, I started working for Mispy State University and developed the Institute of Golf in 2007. And that's when it just really really took off. I had an opportunity to jump into the academic world and we started doing research there.
Speaker 2:I got to do EMG electromyography to look at muscle activation during the golf swing and we presented some preliminary findings at the 2014 World Scientific Congress of Golf down in the Gold Coast of Australia. So that's when I realized being myself and one other golf pro there Everybody that was PhDs at Master's degree it was time to go back to school. And so that's kind of the quick long but quick version of kind of where I'm at right now and going back to school, get my master's in exercise science, kinesiology, neuro-mechanics, and then my PhD in the human factors engineering.
Speaker 3:The PGA Master Professional, gary Wyronson, those who dare to teach must never see students, and you're just a shining example of that.
Speaker 2:Well, I appreciate that it's still learning because you know, as being an instructor yourself, how people interpret information and filter information is something that it's an art. It's an art as much as it is the science. So for me, I was looking at how we could validate some of my approaches, which is more of a neuromuscular approach, because you can't see that We'd actually, you know. That's the reason why I was interested in EMG, because we can peel away the skin without literally doing that, we can measure muscle electrical activity, and it was allowing us to see things at a different timing pattern than what we saw in video. And so that was really the big opportunities. You kind of start, you know. So that's where the science. But when you get to teaching golfers, less is generally more. You know, if you want to be a great player, don't go out and get a PhD. You don't need it.
Speaker 3:So let's talk a little bit about video technology when you were up and coming teacher. So I've always find it ironic that we use 2D analysis to study essentially a 3D motion. So how detrimental is that when it comes to the brain interpreting images on a screen?
Speaker 2:Well, what's interesting? I'm going to kind of give you two sides of the coin. I'll show you how. I'll tell you about how I also use mirror, television mirroring, which was very effective, you know, because taking a mirror out in the golf course they did have some plastic mirrors, but you know, dancers will watch themselves in a studio to move. So I used video to do that and I would just flip the video around so this way the golfer could do it.
Speaker 2:The downside to how some videos used is if I place up my camera at one position relative to the golfer, well what I see with my eyes, what the camera sees from its position, is different. So that's called parallax. It's an observation from two different perspectives. Well, all of a sudden you know you could be swinging inside out too much or outside in too much, just based on camera position. So a lot of that, you know it was done by trial and error. What did I like to see? Now? I'm six foot five, so I placed the camera up a little bit higher. I placed the camera right on the handpath. So for me I had to build my system around how I saw things in order for video to make sense.
Speaker 3:So you talked a little bit about your body breaking down while you were playing the mini tours. Was it something that you were taught?
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, great, Great point. So you know, I didn't grow up with a lot of money, so I really had no golf lessons, just played and it was. We didn't even have a range of golf course where we played at, so it was just play, play, play as much as you can. Well, playing in junior college, I was, you know, wanting to get better. We had won the state championship year before I went to nationals, didn't play well on the grass we're really grass and so let's take some lessons.
Speaker 2:The following year he was a good player, but he told me to say okay, I want you to push off a pitching mound, I want you to open up your hips as fast as possible and keep your head back and down. Well, not to just think about what's happening there. Ted's going back and down, hips are going forward. What is that torque that we're getting on that spine? And now do that 10,000 times over the course of a summer and just keep overdoing it, overdoing it and finally it just it broke down. You know, then it's, it's.
Speaker 2:You know you get those bulge disc anywhere from, you know, s1 up to about L3 and there's your injury right there because that asymmetrical aspect of the golf swing. What do we do If we're trying to play? We hit more golf balls, we practice more, but it's the same motion. So there was, at the time, zero training. That was obviously before Tiger Woods. You know Johnny Miller's out there proclaiming don't lift weights, it's going to ruin your swing, even though Gary Player was big on it. But you know you had. There was no golf fitness. There was no training for golf that we knew about. So yeah, it was just, it was a mess.
Speaker 3:I want to bring you back to John Day. You talked a little bit about this simple philosophy. What was his philosophy when it came to practicing, and how did he get good?
Speaker 2:I mean, when I met him he was already good, so he was playing the South African tour, playing all overseas. For him it was playing golf and creating shots. He would say, okay, here, watch this, you know, and he would step on a ball and we kind of had a sandy range. He'd take a driver out, hit it about 270 with a cut shot. He goes here, watch this, hit this ball flight, hit that ball flight around the greens. We would practice and the ball would just be rolling into the hole at the right speed. And there was also the mindset was, there was no fear, there wasn't, there was no fear of making a mistake. He just played golf, every shot he played in the moment. So for him it was just a matter of shooting the lowest score possible, how far I can hit it, what type of shot I want to hit, and let's go make it happen.
Speaker 2:Why overthink about this? Because you know now that I know is if we're processing information. So the brain is a human, can be thought of as a single processing computer unit, type analogy. But it's single processor. And if I load this processor with with 1000 lines of code to process the swing and golf club, it's got to go through all of that in order to hit a ball. There's no way we can move fast. So the less he thought, the faster he could go, and he just played by field.
Speaker 3:So basically, john Daly was reacting to the golf ball, and this sounds quite the opposite of what most of amateur golfers do. They go over the ball, they start giving themselves a golf swing sermon now their brain is frozen and then they expect to play a good golf. So could you share a little bit with our listeners? What should they be doing over the ball in order to play their best? From a neuro science perspective?
Speaker 2:So there's, there's let's take a look at first kind of organize. Where are they in their skill set? Are they a beginner? Are they an advanced player that has some to some, some kind of, some automatic cabbage built up so to see into it. But there's a, there's a component, what is called a mental model. And if, if you just wrinkle up a piece of paper and throw it into a basket, you have built in your mental model on how fast to accelerate your arm when the let that paper go, based on what you see, that distance from where you are to the basket, so that mental model needs to be more of an external focus, meaning what am I doing? I'm looking at the target, you know. So if I'm, you know, shooting a basketball or throwing a football, throwing a ball, whatever, I'm looking at my target. So I actually have people do that with their putting, have them look at the hole to get a feel for it. We want to get them into. They're more focused on what is the club, what is the club?
Speaker 2:Swing feel, golf swing, feel like in order to hit a fade, to hit a draw and having some practice swing, very minimal practice swing, but actually becoming knowing within of what that feels like. Now, those are your advanced players. They can do that, you know, because they practice that. So if I want to hit a draw, okay, I can tell you approximately between one to three degrees, yeah, that's an inside out. About a four to five degree inside out, that's going to be a draw.
Speaker 2:I know what that feels like and we have technology that measures that force. I use force to help me measure that and so we quantify, feel a beginning golfers not going to be able to do that. So we need to kind of simplify that, that feedback loop for that individual. So we have to make sure that information matches up the skill set of each golfer. So you know, a new golfer, hey, let's just get a feel of how the arms swing feet together. Okay, what does that feel like? Can you ask them the question? We're an advanced golfer, we can work off that ball play. Okay, hit me a draw, hit me a fade. And creating variability actually creates consistency, which a lot of golfers are looking for.
Speaker 3:Great answer. You mentioned something about knowing what kind of golfer we're addressing, and the irony is this, right, dr Lu-Chi, I see a lot of 24 to 36 handicappers being thought of, visualized when they don't have the technical ability to produce a draw. And then, on the other hand, the good players, the guys with five handicaps and below, instead of working on the mind, they go I need to have a steeper flatten back, swing plane down, swing plane. That's the irony, right. What do you think this is? So why do good golfers tend to lapse in the? I play a 78 today. It's my swing technique. Throughout the course of a four day tournament, they pull up one shot and that's enough for them to reject their golf swing or go through a renovation of their technique just because they pull one shot over 72 holes. The risk reward does not make sense.
Speaker 2:Now, and I think that really gets down into the information that we'll say us golf instructors are delivering. And I want to be real careful, because you don't necessarily need advanced degrees to be smart, to be a great coach. I did it because I wanted to get more of the background of how the neuromuscular system works and how the brain works in moving the body and stuff like that. So I think what it goes back down into is really what has been published in magazines. I guess now YouTube, instagram, tiktok, all this information is there. But I guess let me and I'm saying this is to prove a point, justin, and not to embarrass you or anything but how many times have golf instructors gone to Scholar Google to do research on how to swing golf club? And I would like to know have you done it? I never did it before I went back to school. So I was. I had didn't know about Scholar Google till I got to school. Now again, I don't know when it came out, but you know. So there was all this research that I don't think we knew and we were just approaching it from the wrong perspective. I mean, I could.
Speaker 2:Some of the people that I studied golf research from no one has ever heard these people Christopher Knight, dr Ferdinand's out of Australia, you know, I think people know about Stephen Nesbitt now because of Michael Jacobs and stuff like that. So I think there's just some. You know, matthew Sweeney's out of Australia, some, there's just some people that just we've never heard of. So we only know what we know and unfortunately, instructors have gone down the wrong path and you know, I applaud you because you stood outside the box and and realize that, hey, you know, I mean your, your, your interview with Mark Imelman playing from a state of rest, I mean it was brilliant, but it's like that's so non-positional. You know perspective. So I think that's where it starts from. Is you know how are we taught and what's always presented to us? And I think, because we started off on the wrong foot, that's at what everybody knows and it's led into golfers doing completely doing the wrong approach. I'd like to get your take on that too.
Speaker 3:No, thank you for your very kind words, man. I really appreciate that coming from you, someone that I've watched a lot of reactionary golf. I think it's I'll just our culture, right. I think our culture just bleeds into the game of golf. Not just golf, but any other sport golf, tennis, hockey, yeah but for me, my first love was the social sciences and I and you heard, you heard me say this- to.
Speaker 3:Mark Imelman. I always wanted to be a lecturer in social psychology but for the global financial sciences I always love this theory called the theory of falsification. There is an old Jewish saying that goes like this see things as they are, not as you are. And that has always stuck with me ever since I heard that saying in early 2000 when I was in college, and I always sought to disprove whatever was taught to me, because if I can disprove it once, then it's no longer valid and if I can't disprove it, then it basically has stood the test of time and it's can be validated with hard numbers. And I think I think it's a rare person. Because of the ego, it's very hard to say, hey, I'm not sure whether what I'm teaching is correct, let me try to disprove it. And I think a lot of people not just golf instructors in general they go like they associate being wrong with themselves and it becomes very difficult to progress as a person.
Speaker 3:I always, I always believe if what I'm teaching is wrong, please tell me as soon as possible. I don't want to spend 20 years doing the same thing before knowing it's wrong. I mean how sad it is to go through life knowing believing. One plus one is 11, you're going to have lots of problems after 20 years. But all it takes is hey, here's one apple, here's two apple. One plus one, that's two. Your life will change immediately if you get the correct concept. But if you get the wrong concept, life's going to be really miserable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean that's very wise, but I will challenge you Once you start getting in the engineering side of things. One plus one can equal three.
Speaker 3:You guys lost me there.
Speaker 2:You have to look at, it's a value, it's a value proposition. It's kind of a value when you start looking at when you put certain systems together. You can have two systems. You put two systems together and, because of how the systems interact, you actually have much more value of the two systems together versus if you had them apart. So hence, one plus one can equal three. So that's the whole systems engineering perspective.
Speaker 3:We're going to get to that when I get to my Jeff flag question, but first let's talk about automaticity. How long does it take for new movements to transit from our short term memory to?
Speaker 2:the long term. I'm going to give you the engineering perspective. It depends. What does that mean? That means that everyone's a little bit different. So when Erickson mentioned 10,000 hours for deliberate practice, those are rough guidelines. Everyone's a little bit different.
Speaker 2:But it's how you learn is actually more important than what you learn, and you were referencing that earlier. So if we were to learn discrete positions, which is the traditional P1, p2, p2, maco Grady stuff, I think that's good, but there has to be some motion there and then really creating variability, those positions can get created as a result instead of trying to create the positions intentionally. So I think that's where a lot of it is. If you were taught a certain way, it may take you a lot longer to get better. If you were taught more to play, hey, what is? And we'll just say John Daley's that would be the perfect opposite of, like the macro grading. John can create those same alignments but approach it with a lot less mental processing power, so he can go faster. Mac was in phenomenal shape, great athlete, so I don't know how he learned it. I never had that conversation with him. I did speak with him a couple of times and him and Grant Wade, and we were super, super nice people to me. So I think a lot of it is how you learn that really determines how well it is. But do you have all the pieces together? So how is your cognitive processing and your mindset? I can tell you right now I've had some junior golfers that play D1 golf and I thought they were gonna be the next Tiger Woods, or even a precedent before Tiger Woods, preceding Tiger Woods, and their parents got divorced. Mind shot was gone. I took a junior, a great athlete, took him to the USGA Junior Championship the same year. Jordan Spieth won it. This kid I had him dialed in went up to Washington. I mean practice rounds going great, everything is going well. His dad decided to show up and mentally his dad walked off after nine holes and I loved the family to death. This is, but it was one of those. You have a father-son relationship. He was pertinent. There was that baseball coaching mindset versus how his son was, which was more of the golfer and so trying to figure out on the plane ride home how does the mental side affect golfing performance? So that's what makes it difficult being around some great athletes.
Speaker 2:I had an opportunity to play with Michael Jordan in his prime when he was playing baseball with the White Sox organization. Michael and I are same height. After that it completely changes Arm length, hand size, leg length, all different. But what made him good was not his ball striking he can get up and down from anywhere. When he put his mind to it, his ability to dial, get focused in and make things happen was why I was not able to play. My mind was weak, his mind was strong and plus, he's good at negotiating the bet. That's one thing I will say with MJ. He'd come up to me and said man, you look good. Who dressed you today? Did your wife dress you? I need more strokes today, I'm having a bad day. And next thing, you know, it's here's six times NBA champion Michael Jordan. Ah, so fanboy stuff. So, yeah, he just was strong. Mentally was so strong. That made him good.
Speaker 2:So it's really hard to say how do you become automatic with your golf swing? I can stay on the range now and hit any shot you want, but this is one reason why we're working on technology to take it to the golf course, and this has to do with situational awareness, which we're working on is golf course is not like the range. Your center of mass is different, your center of pressure within your feet, and so we can measure that with some of our sensors in our socks and we see that. Hey, if so, if you're trying to swing the same swing on the golf, on the range, and take that to the golf course, well you got topography. Angles don't work, flat out don't work. So you actually upset the flow of what happens on the golf course.
Speaker 2:So I know this is kind of a long draganswer when you become it, I don't think you ever do. I mean, look at Tiger Woods. He had numbers that were far exceeded everyone else. You know, and I don't know if you get a chance, watch that interview with Curtis Strange, who went back to back US Open, tiger Woods going on playing his first tour event, and there was two different mindsets there. So it's me, it's years of working, so I don't know if that answers your question. I know that's the whole thing. It depends.
Speaker 3:Lots of food for thought. So perhaps, instead of asking the question how the human brain or body actually learns movement patterns, let's go, let's turn it on its head and ask the question how is it wrongly taught? So, for example, a lot of cultures talk about string positions. In my mind, a position is static, so there are only two positions in golf your address and your finish. However, the golf swing is taught positionally, so that kind of goes counter to the actual movement, which is a dynamic motion. So what are some of the areas you see teaching professionals make, or even golfers as they're learning this wonderful game?
Speaker 2:And let's do this, let's make sure we realize it's not the individual, it's what they've been taught to do. So that's where a lot of it is. I mean, you've taken steps beyond some basic how to become a golf instructor and that's allowed you to succeed. So what I call kind of the monthly golf tip or the golf tip of the month, club type approach. What did golf digest golf magazine say this week? What did Butch Harman say this week? What did some other guys? That's one thing that causes some problems. I think there's also some misinformation about people trying to use science. A lot of that I'm seeing of we do not get energy and power from the ground. Now it works. You're laughing, justin, justin, you guys are laughing.
Speaker 3:It's called GRF for a reason, right, Dr? So what's causing the reaction? Everyone focuses on the skid marks of the Formula 1 car and then they think, hey, there's an engine that's causing the skid marks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's where a lot of this is going wrong. I'm going to jump into something real, real, specific. And again, this is not I'm going to say this only because I know this story well enough and I know it firsthand in a sense, or second hand. Well, it's firsthand, from the. Let's talk about X Factor Met Jim McClain several times. One of my friends, one of my students that I had taught with here, that I taught when he was going through school here at Mississippi State, now works for Jim McClain. I think the world, jim McClain X Factor comes up.
Speaker 2:X Factor was a marketing piece by Golf Magazine. Myers did the research in 2008. The role of the upper torso pelvis rotation driving performance during the golf swing. He says in his abstract hey, torso pelvic separation contributes to greater upper torso rotation velocity. So that's the first sentence. Jesus, upper body's moving faster and torso pelvic separation during the down swing may can contribute to greater ball velocity Can. But that was in the abstract. Now if you go down and read all the rest of the pages and you get down to the discussion and he mentions cause and effect, there is no cause and effect in torso pelvic separation. X Factor club had velocity to increase ball velocity. But no one read that. And so we have all these decades of X Factor marketing, x Factor stretching Again. What they're saying is right If I coil up my body, that gives my body a chance to move faster. But that doesn't mean any correlation, doesn't mean it's causation that produces a club head speed. It could be just the body movement.
Speaker 2:In school I learned really quick about correlation. As ice cream sales increased in the summer, so did shark attacks, so let's start selling ice cream, so this way we don't have any more shark attacks. Well, they had nothing. Ice cream sales and shark attacks have nothing to do with each other. They correlated. It's a fact. There's paper out there that did that, but what it was? More people were in the water that's really what it was and they happened to buy more ice cream because it was hot outside. So we have to get down to causation and I think that's missing.
Speaker 2:Juan and Como also knocked the X Factor off a little bit, but again, does the X Factor work to increase upper body rotation? Yes, is upper body rotation more important than lower body rotation to produce club head speed? Absolutely 100%. Yes, heav speed does not create extra club head speed. You look at an LPGA tour. You look at all the numbers higher hip speed than men. They don't hit the ball as far. Why? Because it's our upper body. You look at your Tiger Woods, your Greg Darman, you look at Brooks Kepka. You look at the long ball. John Daley had long swing Guys that can move their upper body fast. The gear system is measured it. The research says it. It's all right there. So I think that's where part of it's also gone.
Speaker 2:Australia's golf instructors started going towards the science, and not having the education background like you do had led them astray. Because how do you infer ground reaction forces? How do you actually measure that? Well, what creates ground reaction forces? It's force plate that measures it, or a pressure sensor. So we have some of that that we use all the time. But throwing a ball, I can create more force throwing a ball Using my arms. My arms have mass. Now we have momentum and we have velocity, angular velocity and all this stuff. So I don't know, did that answer your question? I just go off on a tangent on that one.
Speaker 3:No it did it did, and not understanding correlation and causation has led to a lot of superstitions in the golf swing. Obviously some of these guys have not seen the legend Bob Toskey hitting shots from a chair. X-factor, probably not 1945. And Bob Toskey was fond of doing that demonstration and show hey, speed comes from the arms. But it's tied in with the proper pivot motion. So with that I like to go into the golfing machine. So Homer Kelly, the author, used to say there was two distinct moves. Generally hands control the pivot, or you could take the view that the pivot controls the hands. Let's talk a little bit about how difficult it is to go through daily living when your pivot controls the arms.
Speaker 2:Where I see it's a problem is if we look at measuring and that's why I do love the gear system because we can measure, we have an optical motion capture system too but if we look at how the body, the planar movements of the upper torso, and look at those alignments, they're much flatter or above the ball compared to where the golf club is relative to the ball. So I don't swing my shoulders tilting them down at the ball. They work much flatter. So if the body influences the arms more, the arms are actually going to work up to get in line with that plane of rotation of the upper body and the lower body. So that to me has always been a problem. But I can tell you there are some golfers that feel that and that's where feel and reality kind of have mighty the waters. Because you know, I've worked with tour players that felt, man, if I got a, really rotate through and hold it off to get my best shots and I said, did you hit the ball? Well, yeah, go do it. Perfect, you know.
Speaker 2:And I worked with a senior tour player once and we're talking about this right arm which was this kind of I'll show you where this leads into. You know he goes. You know I'm hammering, throwing a ball he goes. I don't know. You know I'm hitting good now, but let me work on this for a little bit. So I go run back up to the shop and he's a senior tour player. He comes up there about half an hour later. He goes, I got it and he kind of points to this muscle right here and says I said great, keep doing that. And he played well for the next three weeks. So that's where it kind of gets confusing. But when you start looking at the body control and the motion and these don't, you don't know what these are doing. That means you don't know where the club is and Balki go anywhere.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and from a neuroscience, neuromuscular approach, a large percentage of the nerve endings below the neck, I in the hands and the genitals. But the irony is golfers want to use the quote, unquote big muscles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a homogilist man is showcases the big hands, big lips, big face and everything you know I this is what I tell golfers when they, when I ask some questions, I always want to know what the students doing. God, I need to be more consistent. I need to be more dependable with my swing. I need to let the big muscles do the work. I said, okay, when you go to the dentist and have some work done cleaning your teeth, and the dental hygienists is cleaning your teeth, is that person using their big muscles or small muscles? Now, maybe they can try using their big muscles and kind of glued it around and hip it or something. But no, we don't want that. It's fine to I go to. If you have surgery, man, I want that surgeon just being dialed in. You know, it's our sensation.
Speaker 2:Appropriate reception is here, you know, and where I think a lot of people misinterpret is and here's another analogy to kind of give you a perspective on it is how a door is built. So if you think about, we got the hinges on the door and again, for most doors, where's the door handle? Is the door knob next to the hinges or further away from the hinges?
Speaker 3:Further away. You're getting in the moment on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have more eccentric force is easier to move the whole system. So if this is moved in the system, that doesn't mean this gets rigid and that's where people are saying oh, you got to. You know what Tony says is wrong. You're not using the arms and the hips reacting, so sometimes that's not the case. I've had to teach people to rotate more with their upper body but really when we look at it, it's the lower body is more about movement to prep movement to get into a position to prepare for the strike, and it actually works more eccentrically loading through impact. It's not a concentric motion at all.
Speaker 3:And that's where teaching is really an art form that must be balanced and it really takes a wisdom and an experience to know when to say what.
Speaker 2:Amen. I mean it's perfect because saying too much I think you know. Early on, I know, as an instructor, I said way too much, and that's part of my reason to kind of come back in the golf and realize that that I think you know people like you and some other individuals that are studying the golf swing from a different perspective can really have a positive effect on the future golf and future golfers To come out with better information, and it's not that again, unfortunately, though, the personalities have take that as a slap in the face and everyone gets defensive and the egos get in the way, which is too bad, but it creates these divide. There's so many great teachers and scientists that I've met around the world now and I've asked them. I said why is there such a divide?
Speaker 2:Well, because we said something wrong about their system, and it's like well, you know, they get all upset. So we need to get over that. We need to have better open discussions like this. Discussion right here is great. I would love. I would love to for us to find something that says yeah, let's pick that apart a little bit more, just so we could do it. If there is anything, we may be on the same page with everything which is cool to me.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of people, when they talk about picking things apart, they feel like they're being picked apart and that's the problem. In any endeavor, I don't let the ego get in the way, because it's not a personal attack, it's an observation. It's not about you. You're not as important as you think you are.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, that is so well said. Yeah, yeah, everyone is. It's all about me and it's like hold on it's. You know this. This world's been around for how many years? Thousands and millions of years and not going to get into all that. You know it's going to be here after I'm gone. It's going to be here after we're gone, for 100 years from now. So let's, let's, let's, make it better. I don't, I don't see why this, all this buses is. There's enough room out there for all of us to make a good living and have a nice impact on on humanity.
Speaker 3:Amen to that we don't have to run another instructor down just so that we can get more students. If both instructors are teaching the correct thing and improving their teaching skills, then golf benefits. The pie becomes bigger. But a lot of instructors are so insular they think that the pie is of a limited size.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, you're right, 100% right with that, and I think that's where we're hoping to use some of our technology.
Speaker 2:We can't wait to share it with with y'all, because we we feel that technology can help accelerate the learning experience and make instructors have to do less work but actually have a better communication line with the and we get more stuff on the golf course. So imagine taking the studio that you have, that I'm I don't have one right now, so I'm very, very jealous that you have a nice studio and I don't. But it's one of those is that if we can make golfers better and everyone's playing more golf, I mean that just raises all of our abilities and and raises our, our incomes and everything else like that. So can we use systems to make golfers better on the golf course? And then, because everyone's going to need help inside the studio, everyone's going to need help. It's sometimes you get in certain positions that you know you got to get some personal help and some hands on help with it. So I look forward to where it's going to go.
Speaker 3:You mentioned systems thinking. There's another friend of ours by the name of James Ragone is also a PJ professional and a PhD, so he uses this very, very interesting and logical analogy. He goes if you own a dairy farm and then suddenly you decide to feed the cows low quality feet and expect the same quality of milk, then you are deluded. So with that analogy I like to segue into a term you use earlier, use the term algorithm, which is a process. So a lot of swing changes are made without considering the entire system and then they mess up the lines of the code and then you've got this very complex motion of the golf swing and then one of these lines in line in a million lines of codes corrupted. The entire code won't be able to execute. Can you talk a little bit of how our listeners should approach swing changes in the scientifically correct manner?
Speaker 2:I would say one of the biggest things that I think needs to be revisited, and I know we're going to work on, is club fitting, and I'll get to why club fitting is so important. You know especially, I'm six foot five and so I don't fit into the standard of anything in the world. So club fitting, I don't think we know right now to say, hey, we should be at this forward degree of forward done, based on our arm length and things like that. So so what I want to do and what we see happening work Christopher Knight was great with this is in order for us to be consistent, and this goes back this actually goes back to the 1960s with Nikolai Bernstein in Russia doing motor control and learning, where he's showing the hammering motion and it was never consistent, but the strike was very precise.
Speaker 2:So the body figures out how to move synergistically in order to achieve the goal. So there's more muscle patterns that could be firing to move a joint and move a whole special. And now we got a whole system, all of us, 600, and some odd muscles moving and everything else. How do we coordinate that? So how I get people to make changes is by creating variability or shop patterns.
Speaker 2:So let's say you have a tendency to hook the ball. That was my mistake, man. My face was open on the way back and I could flip it like you couldn't believe. Now, in the old days we had persimmon woods which had a lot of bulging roll. Guess what got away with that? We got to more flatter face drivers and there's less bulging roll. And now all of a sudden you had that face rotation, that shaft rotation, into it. Fall is going left really quick.
Speaker 2:So I can make swing changes by hitting fades. Do I want to hit fades from inside or do I want to hit fades from outside? And now we have the technology to measure that. So now we can say let's create this which is opposite of that. Okay, well, now let's hit a high draw. So I like to use shop making to make swing changes and I'm making it extremely.
Speaker 2:Someone comes in. I'm six degrees outside in, okay, well, what does it feel like to hit a big inside out, five degree in the in the out drop? Well, they've never done it. So that's the challenge. But how do we? You know we use some avoidance obstacles, some noodles or whatever it may be. But you know it could be a simple toss and a ball and enhance something to give them a feel. But I like to use that is that the body positions are the byproducts byproducts of the swing path is really what I go by. What are we doing with the club? And so if we can control swing path, we can control what our body is doing. And now we can start working on velocity and angle of attack.
Speaker 2:I made a swing change in my swing just the other day by changing angle of attack. I was very fortunate because I have a foresight and I got. You know what? Why am I hit my chip shots? Just not right. Well, I looked at a seven degrees and angle of attack path was fine, three degrees in the out. I changed my okay, what does it feel like to hit three degrees angle of attack, felt like I was sweeping it. I video my swing totally different swing Because I changed my path. I changed what the club's doing. So it's that that that's the systems perspective that we can, that I love to get golfers to do. What is the golf club doing? Let's move the golf club and then you have to get the ball and then you have to follow the golf club and make it work. I'd like to hear your thoughts. What do you do to make swing changes?
Speaker 3:No, I love that you and I are singing from the same song sheet. So I saw one of the biggest influences on my philosophy is John Jacobs. So when I started teaching in five I knew nothing right and then I saw this is that you want to get rid of a slice, making it a hook. But if it sounds easy enough so there's so much wisdom just pack in that one sentence, do the opposite. And you spoke a little bit about the body's ability to self organize a perception, action, coupling and constraints. That approach I kind of like a distill all of that down into three alphabets. You know this Intentions create forces on the golf club expressed in the motion of the swing. And for certain golfers certain level of golfers, I believe, if I can climb into their head and change their intention, the golfing changes quite automatically. But if I try to change the motion without influencing their concept or intention, then that change is only fleeting.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yeah, because that's that's that intention is a mental model. That's a little bit more the engineering description of it and that intention. You know, if you don't have the right model on how to make the club do what you want, yeah, I mean, that's it's. It's like a coin. You know, one heads and tails on a coin. Mental model, intention, the same thing, but there's just two ways to describe it. So, yeah, I mean, I think what you say is is brilliant. I love it. That was the other thing I liked about what you had to say on the Evelyn show. How'd you get on the internet show? I haven't even pursued that, but that was awesome to see on there.
Speaker 3:No, let me speak to you. I don't. I can't really remember how it came about, but that changed my life. That's really.
Speaker 2:Wow, I mean, it was a great segment. I don't I don't listen to podcasts much Because a lot of times I don't know the people who are going to be on it. I've been, you know, for the last. I just finished up PhD a couple years ago. So I've been, you know, had buried into paper Research and everything else like that. So I'm just kind of getting out into the real world to see what's going on. That's reason I'm so excited to meet with you and and Jesse and to do this is because now this is like I'm back in the golf right now, but from a different perspective. So this is it's been awesome.
Speaker 3:So how I came to do podcast was due to this guy, jesse Perriman. So I was helping another golf professional manager, ig, because, let's say, is a technologically challenged. So low and behold Jesse, who also knows this, the friend of ours that's texting me and like hey, dude, hang on, I'm not John, I'm Justin from Singapore. I'm just helping him manage, okay. And then we have this conversation going and then, out of the blue, jesse says you got to have you on. I'm like dude, do you know, do you get the wrong person? Like like I'm way over in Singapore, 16 hours ahead of you, like did you message the wrong guy? I was like oh no, no, we want to get you on. I think our first interview, jesse thought it was like what, two hours or something.
Speaker 2:Something crazy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wow. After that I had the request from other podcast and it just took us from there and what I really find was it challenged me. I saw it as a challenge because I didn't know who Jesse was and what he was going to ask me and I said to myself, if I can answer all of Jesse's question and other interviewers questions, maybe what I'm teaching is valid. If I could explain it in a way that they could understand without me demonstrating a video, then maybe I understand it to the point where I could explain it simply yes, well said, well said.
Speaker 2:I know we're doing that on some some business development stuff and that explanation is it's so much harder. It's easier to do with the golf club when I'm on a golf, on a range with the student, but it is to explain things. So, yeah, I agree 100% with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what my mentor Calvin Meirira said, is this teach complexity simply. But a lot of teaching professionals teach simplicity in a very complicated manner.
Speaker 2:Well, you know it was. They love to spouse all the words that they know. But, as we know from a playing perspective, more than you process, the slower you're going to swing or you're going to play.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I was guilty of that in 2005 when I started teaching. I thought all of my students would appreciate a Homer Kelly sermon as they were trying to make their swing, so I used to be able to memorize the golfing machine. I'm like, okay, you're doing this tend to be a lot of. They go like how are you talking about? But I thought that was impressive. I thought it would impress them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, we all did that. We all did that at the beginning and now look where we are now. It's just part of the learning process that you have to. It's experienced to learn it. You have to go through that process to learn how to do things. You know, we learn how to.
Speaker 2:You know, ride a bike, not by reading a book. I've never seen, actually I did see people are selling a book and how to ride a bike, which I thought was just hilarious. I didn't think there ever was one. But you know how many thousands and thousands of golf books are there. But you know, you get on a bike and you ride it. Let's swing a golf club, get a feel for it. You know, get some guidance is good, but a lot of this detail and you know how do you take what we do from a different perspective and put that in a book? I think there's. I now have a different perspective on what books are. Books can be entertaining for people, which is different than being informative. It's still informative, but it's not a scientific book. It's not a how to book. It's like let's, let's have. Let me have. You think of it this way. So I might write something one of these days.
Speaker 1:I'll pose a question. I'll pose a question with a, with a, with a seed planting for both of you brilliant guys that are way smarter than me from a, from a student's perspective. Okay, think about this for a second. If I come to you, I'm a pretty good player, I want to play well, I want to play better and I say all right, doc, justin, can you help me create a motion that helps me to express my personality, helps me to play the best golf I can, that would help me to have to hold up on Sundays.
Speaker 2:We're jumping in a golf cart and headed to the golf course. I want to see you how you perform on the golf course in different shot and I just want to play and we do this protocol called talking out loud. It's like, okay, jsc, you got this, you're on the first two here. Start with country club. It's a dog leg left, part five. What are you? What are you going to do? You know you don't know the golf course well enough, but I played some of my best golf not knowing where the where the trouble is. I just know where to hit it, from point A to point B, and actually played very well doing that. So that's what I would want to see you is how you perform and have that conversation out there and put you in situations that may be challenging and find out you know what is it and what are the thoughts that you can't get. You know and what is your expectation. You may be creating those expectations so high. That takes you out of and I actually I love this from Justin. I purely still this from Justin time travel. I'm not in the moment and he said that it's like that is brilliant. I'm taking that, but I'm gonna give you credit. I'll set you, justin. I said time travel, we call it. You know, when you're processing mental models about processing in the now, you know there is no faster is no future. It's processing that when you're hitting that shock.
Speaker 2:So that's where, if you're that good of a player, I want to see what happens on the golf course and I want to get you in some situations that you know I got a really funny story. I don't know if we can talk about it, but we'll put I'm going to try to bring it down to rated G. So he was a period honest in Florida I was given lessons to and was playing still a little bit, and we were talking about you know, here's dental surgery that he'd have to go into, very serious about how he got ready and prepared for it. So hopefully this will answer your question to Jesse and then it will let Justin talk is and we're talking about how that related to playing golf and for me, playing golf and he said to me he goes, you have to play your best, knowing that your wife is having a fair with somebody else Well, in a during tournament and it can't bother you because you just committed to shot after shot after shot.
Speaker 2:I also think there's something wrong there, but because I don't, I know for a fact you don't need to process it for four and a half hours, five hours. Can we teach you how to process it for two minutes? Right, relax, let's think of it. There's a lot of different techniques you can clear the mind, but that's what I would want to know from you. Just, I'd want to have that conversation with you on the golf course. So that's, that's my answer, justin, great answer.
Speaker 3:My answer basically starts with a pre mortem. So a lot of golfers engage in post mortems after the fact, and then they get surprised on the golf course when the first shot goes over. So with a pre mortem, you go like, okay, anything is possible, if X happens, then I'm going to do one. And then it basically lowers the load on the brain when those things actually happen, because I already got a plan and, as we know, right the philosophical Mike Tyson used to say everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And then the other strategy I'll let you to engage in with treat this particular round as though it's your last round of golf. What that means is this after you put out on 18th, I'm going to come, take a set of clubs, throw it away. I'm going to put you in a place where you no longer can play golf. How would you view this particular round of golf? Are you going to let your your missed?
Speaker 3:approach on hold one bother you, or are you going to stay present and savor the moment just like you would if you were going to eat your last fried chicken? And I find that that having my players view rounds like that they go hey, that shot wasn't that bad after all. And that lowers the brain wave frequencies to a point where it's green, yellow, where they can still play, rather than at high heat all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say Jesse, let me, and Jesse, let me ask you guys this Do you feel that you should control your emotions, or should your emotions control you?
Speaker 3:It really depends on your personality. Some guys are able to let it out and then regroup. Some guys, once they let the demon out, there is no way of basically opening Pandora's. There is no way of getting regaining control of their minds after that. So it's important to know what kind of personality you are. I feel I just ended off by saying that you are not your emotions. You feel angry, but you are not angry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good answer. I mean, that's a great question, doc. You know I mean for me personally, playing competitively. Well, I mean, I'm a meditator, so I'm going to choose the. I'm not going to let my emotions control me, I'm going to know that they're there also to. I think it's important. I'm going to this is important for me and I'm going to express this generally that if you go into a competitive round, I think that you have to have an intention, something that the mind has to grab on to. So, for example, I've got you as senior open qualifying coming up here in a couple of weeks and my intention for the round from is just to be in the moment and to accept whatever happens. So that gets my brain waves down from the red into the green and and I might even write that down on a piece of paper Am I right down in my yardage book hey, be here now, be where your feet are Is a really good directive for me in control, and recognize that if, if I get pissed off after missing a three footer and I feel it, it's okay to feel it, but it's all. But it's also okay to. Basically what Justin said is not to identify with it. This is.
Speaker 1:Justin said something that that really resonates with me. He referenced it in in regards to professional golf, but I'm going to reference it for my play and that is making bogies or making mistakes is a business expense. That's just a part of it. It's a part of the game. You know, making mistakes is a part of the game and I think that if if I need personally, can can really identify with that I'm an imperfect person playing a perfect game. The range is always a half lie. You got perfect conditions on the range but you go on the golf course, everything is, you know, frickin, crooked and if I'm accepting a mishitting a shot and say, hey, this is a business expense, this comes with the experience. You know that. That's why I work on my wedges, that's why I work on my mental approach, that's why I work on meditation, that's why I get up early and stretch and get any tension out of my body that I possibly can. So any tension that I do have on the golf course can be directed toward focus.
Speaker 1:So I think it's a little bit of a long winded answer to your question and those, those phenomenon, seem to work for me the best and no matter what, and it's also important to know that, not to identify yourself with how you play. I mean, it's just if you have a bad round doesn't mean that you're a shitty person, you know. It just means that you had a bad round. And hey, you know, I go back to thinking about I can't remember which British open it was, it may have been God, it wasn't Turnberry but Jack Nicholas shot 82 in the first round. Okay, jack Nicholas in the early 80s was the number one player in the world. I mean, he was by far the best player in the world. He shot 82. And I think that if he would have had a different mindset, he would have just packed it in. He may have withdrawn or cited man my back was messed up that day or whatever, but he lost the tournament by shot.
Speaker 1:So if the best player of all time arguably shoots 82 in a major in the first round and loses by a shot, I mean there's got to be something there, something that we can all take. So it's, you know we're we're trying to put this big beautiful puzzle piece together of, you know, creating a swing motion that's going to be good for you doesn't have to be good for me or anyone else. Just good for you Finding an instructor that's going to help facilitate that and then taking the necessary mental, emotional development pathways to, to to be able to go out on the golf course, assuming that an individual wants to play at a high level. Most people that listen to this podcast want to play at a high level. So, you know, once you get to a certain point in your journey, it doesn't become about your golf swing, it's how you prepare, it's how you, how you view yourself, how you, how you perceive mistakes on the golf course.
Speaker 1:You know, I think that we wouldn't have really known or fallen in love, I think, with Seve Bias Deadows the way that we did, if he didn't hit it all over the map at times and get it up and down from everywhere. You know, no one talks about that. I mean, you know, one of the greatest players of all time is Phil Mickelson. Does he play like an idiot sometimes? I think he does, but he's got some of the greatest set of hands God ever gave somebody. The guy can get it up and down from everywhere and he has some balls.
Speaker 1:So, yes, arl Palmer had balls. Did he get shots that were ill advised? Sure, absolutely, you know. I mean, I think that you know, for me personally, I would love to be a technician, like like a Ben Hogan or a Jack Nicholas or or Tiger, but that's just not me, you know, and I think that as we ascend, as we get better in this journey, we start to know thyself a little bit more, and I think that's important, important part of the process as well. I mean, this is a whole big, beautiful, you know thing that we're all trying to put together here and I don't know. I just went off on a rant, sorry.
Speaker 2:I love it. Sorry about that. No, no, I will. From a physics standpoint, every shot we make was executed perfectly. You know why do we? I'll let me one other question, if we, if you have time for this in this realm is why do we have emotions on the golf course? Let's just stay with the golf course. Why do we experience emotions? Why do we even have them? I have some, there's some obviously planning to see. I have some other engineering perspectives on this cognitive engineering.
Speaker 1:That is one hell of a question, Justin. You want to go ahead and shift?
Speaker 3:that one first. For me, it always starts with the the self right. You have certain expectations on the golf course. If you're, if the outcome doesn't match your expectation, you're going to experience emotions. That's my simple answer.
Speaker 2:That's right out of the text book. So, jesse, I don't know how you can beat that, but that was right out of the text.
Speaker 1:I was going to say it's, it's, it's third in a foot or fourth in a foot. Should I go for this one or punt? Well, I, you know, I can only speak from my own experience and I think I'll echo what Justin said is expectations Also, too. I think that, you know, for me having emotions on the golf course. I'm a very, very competitive person by nature. I was always competitive, so when things don't go my way out of the golf course, I might get a little bit upset.
Speaker 1:Also, too, a big one is, you know, I think people have emotions on the golf course, myself included, because we don't want to be looked down upon. Oh, he shot, you know, 77, these socks, or something like that. You know, we, we, we want to look good in other people's eyes, we want to be accepted. I think that might be something that's underlying, whether folks are aware of it or not. We don't want to be embarrassed if we play bad. So I think that those, those are a part of it.
Speaker 1:I think the Justin said it perfectly, though, with the expectations, if you go and, and you and you prepare, and you and you, you practice, and you, you, you try to get ready for an event or a series of events in a row and they don't go your way. You know that's pretty disappointing. I think that's human nature. But I also think that if somebody were to be observant, the solution, at least on a mental side, is hey well, what you know, what can you do differently, moving forward? You know those, those are the solutions there, that that you know not all is lost.
Speaker 1:You know, just because you shot 75 or 80 or whatever, not all is lost. You don't need to hit the panic button and fire your coach and try to find another one and or threaten to quit the you know effing game. And you don't have to have a meltdown if you shoot 80, you know something's a mess and you try to. Hopefully you get with your teacher and you try to figure it out. But I think most of the time you know, most of the time it's when you get to the level of a five or better. I think most of the time it's something inside, inside your head.
Speaker 2:Guys, those are great answers. Honorary advanced degrees I'll just award you right now.
Speaker 3:So Dr Tain, very mindful of your your time, dr Lu-Czech. Let's talk about Jeff Flag. I want to know what you did with him to transform him from a baseball player to long drive champion. And, as we discussed that, can you talk a little bit about faster back swings, the role of the hips, trill back and what your research has shown to be the key component in increasing club hit speed? Let's go.
Speaker 2:Okay. So now you got to realize with Jeff, he's 6'6", a great athlete, he could throw. He threw a golf ball like I want to say like 90 yards, 100 yards it was. He was on the, we were. He's helping me do a junior clinic and he's on this part three and he's throwing balls back and forth and it's like that's like a hundred yards shot he's throwing golf balls. So we had a great bi-mechanical machine. We had an athlete.
Speaker 2:So when I first met Jeff, he was coaching baseball and my son was taking back in lessons from him and we started talking about golf and my question to him is do you want a gorilla swing is what we termed it or do you want a golf swing? A gorilla swing produces more club head speed than a golf swing, but it's not as consistent. Okay, so he wanted to go. He goes, teach me the golf swing. So I said, okay, we are hitting ball speed together, let's maximize your width of length of your arms and create the biggest swing possible so we can create higher angular velocities. And so he kind of gave me just the perfect tool to do it and the his first year of trying. So we bought some, bought a driver from Art Salinger, and he goes out and tries it and I think he ends up hitting the ball like 398, 400, doesn't quite make it to the to the event, but but did really well. So a lot of it. We had to just get the technique down. So he still had the baseball technique. Let's take a look at the difference between a baseball batting technique and the golf swing, and that was probably the biggest thing he had to struggle with. So in baseball batting you don't have a big arm swing because that's too slow. There's everything's in tight, you know, and then there's extension through them and and they won't let me play softball anymore because of my golf swing. So I apologize for how bad that swing looked, but I'm also sitting down. So we had to change the timing pattern, his acceleration patterns, to be more arm based, because he had plenty of upper body rotation, plenty of hip rotation and actually his hips were too fast. We had to slow him down because he would leave the club way behind him and so then at the bottom he'd flash it with his hands and all of a sudden, you know, 120, 130, 140 mile or clubhead speed ball going left. It can hurt somebody really, really bad. So we had to kind of get that calm down. So we did a lot of the flamingo drill and this is when I knew he would win.
Speaker 2:So we're out in Vegas. So the following year he doesn't make it the first year. Following year he hits one I mean like 463 and qualifying he's good to go, and then we're working off us pretty much a straight type of off-light. If he gets a little out of whack he'll start pulling it. He gets underneath it and pulls it real quick. So well, there's a process where if he's doing that we get to push draws and then we pull everything back.
Speaker 2:And so equipment. We just found we got lucky with equipment. It was like a six degree driver, six and a half degree Callaway driver. The shaft was just the right flex. It was some triple X thing. I use it as a putter. He's swinging 140, some miles an hour and I have video of him.
Speaker 2:We're down in Vegas doing the flamingo drill, hitting the ball dead straight, 400 yards. I got it on a flight scope and it's like dude, you got this, just got to just go. So a lot of, and we got to take a look. Also he worked for a fitness company called Pure Motion and that's one thing to also that I really do like is all his rotation, all his weight training was movement based, not isolation based. So the training he's pushing and pulling things and twisting and moving things. It's all about movement and then obviously starting to speed that up. So you had great genetics. We put the club in the right position because we know I know from the Callaway and the robotic engineers that plus minus three degrees of path perpendicular club face hits ball straight. That's all you need. Anything other than that is boss curving too much on you. So it's a hammer nail analogy. So all we do is just keep on tracking. This is what it needs to feel like. Here's the club position, whatever it's, it feel like great, let's keep going. And then we kept going faster and faster and faster. And so, yeah, I mean he 463, 400 yards. Now the story he doesn't want me to tell, but I am going to tell because this just shows how important the mind is in the game. So we're there, the finals.
Speaker 2:He's in the final eight, starting the night and unfortunately the coaches were not allowed to be up with the golfer practices. They always kept them back and so he's doing okay, but he's nervous. We all are nervous. Everyone should be everyone. Tiger Woods nervous, anyone gets nervous. But can we handle it? And he's doing okay. But like in the mid round I forgot he's playing against somebody that was another baseball guy that had that pure baseball type motion. The ball is going all over the place. Well, he comes back down. After that he's hitting snap hooks to war. I mean like like 100 yards this way, 300 yards that way, snap hook.
Speaker 2:So getting him to reorganize himself mentally was probably the thing that we were able to do. We found a shot pattern that worked, which was a little bit of a cut shot, and he was able to go on and win. So a lot of it is just the technique. How I would teach you guys to swing a golf club is exactly what I taught him. It was a golf swing. Now, did that produce the 150 miles an hour? No, but that's what we were trying to go to. And so then you know that's when things we tried equipment and just everything kind of fell apart after that because he moved and everything else.
Speaker 2:But my approach, a neuromuscular approach to timing, is probably about a 95% velocity, max velocity, but delivery is about as good as you can get, if you want that other 5%. Yeah, you're going to be torquing things and be really whipping things around like Joe Miller, you know, and Jason I don't even know who it is nowadays but just really crazy long swings and these guys are just throwing their bodies around everywhere. That's that gorilla type swing. Yeah, that swing will always be fast, but you know, at the time it was, you had to get the ball in play, you know, when you only needed. We wanted to be consistent. So it kind of changed that up a little bit, but we wanted consistency. I always wish he wanted to go play tour professional golf. He would have been the Bryson DeChambeau before Bryson. He just didn't want to do it.
Speaker 3:So at this point in time, a lot of our listeners are busy googling the flamingo drill, so why don't you save them all the trouble and describe the drill?
Speaker 2:Drill came from one of my students, hannah Grace Nahl. She was just probably about eight years old at the time and I was putting the feet together and then all you do is slide your trail foot back and kind of put it up on the toe, so you're balancing on both feet. But it's a narrow base of sport. So then at the top of the backswing, if that body gets really quick and jerky, you're losing your balance. So it's not a drill to improve your balance, it's a drill to use balance and speed back. So how fast can you move your arms and upper body to do that?
Speaker 2:Sorry, I wanted to know about the flamingo drill, but yeah, so it was. How fast we can get the arms moving, get that eccentric force to direct the system, instead of this muscling with the body and then having the arms try to catch up, which is that's the reason why people misinterpret what I teach, because they say, well, well, you're being too handsy, it's like. No, the reason why you feel handsy is because your body goes. First it has to stop, and now your hands are doing whatever it can to try to catch up. If we keep these in sync now, we got maximum blast, or optimal, what I call optimal velocity, because it's not maximum, but it's optimal.
Speaker 3:So I may have remembered this wrongly, but I believe your research has shown that 80% of clubhead speed comes from the trail pectoral muscle. So are there any simple drills for our listeners to do so that they can ramp up their clubhead speed?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love throwing things, throwing balls, throwing, swinging one handed. And I would say you know, that's some of the research where the 80% came from. That wasn't my research per se, that was other people's research. But that arm swing produces 80 to 85% of the velocity. It wins both arms because you can't just do it one handed, because you can swing lead hand and right hand and there'll be different speeds. But when we start looking at the arm swing, that does produce 85% of the clubhead speed. So swinging fast is what you have to do. But one thing is if you swing fast but you flip it with your hands, that's not going to produce speed. So that's the reason why I like the throwing motion, because now when you go and stride through that you get everything to go.
Speaker 2:So, like if I have some golfers, let's say they're dominant hands, the lead side. So if you were right handed golf, their dominant hand would be their left hand. I actually have them throw things right handed To kind of build that up and build up the pack. Serratus anterior, our two muscles, punching I love to punch. I don't punch people, I don't have my golfers punch people, but I get them to punch, you know, and it's very much a martial arts type of perspective, you know which I'm a big fan of is because it's the quickness and acceleration which is critical for the golf swing, which is a ballistic motion, and so acceleration of muscle forces is what creates a great golf swing.
Speaker 3:Last question from me how can a faster back swing need to a faster overall swing?
Speaker 2:So the better we wind up, the better we can unload. So it's kind of a loading and exploding. So the better this chess gets back here and those hands feel like they're really set. I feel that little bit of stretch cycling going on and then I can kind of explode into it but realize that if the arms aren't accelerating in the right direction and the body over dominates that, then the hand path gets thrown off and it's out of position. So we have to coordinate all of that. But yeah, it's, you know, bigger radius and faster angular velocity we can create from there.
Speaker 3:Such a wonderful discussion with you, Dr Lu Chen. Can you tell our listeners how they can get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Well, right now we've converted everything over to umogov. So, yeah, so reactionary golf and everything inside the lab that I did was was kind of like my personal research, and then what we're able to do now is we're actually developing tools and systems. We can't wait to put it in your guys hands, to get your feedback, get guidance how you would use it, what's missing, what's not working, what is working, because we want to be able to do more stuff on the golf course and really have a good line of communication with all of golfers around the world. So humogov is the current website. We're still developing it and we still have a long way to go, but we'll have all of our products on there that we're developing ourselves. That's a nice thing. So we have some IMU sensors, some wearables coming out, socks and different things like that. So everything is being pushed right up to humogov.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Dr Lu Chen.
Speaker 2:Anything to add, jesse?
Speaker 3:before we let Dr Lu Chen go.
Speaker 1:No, thank you, Doc, for coming on and it's been a wonderful discussion.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you, jesse. It's been great. Justin, my hat's off to both of you guys. Great job, thank you. I really love what I'm big fans. It's good to be back in the golf business and to meet people like you guys that have just such an open mind and great personalities to have discussions like this. So thank you.
Speaker 3:Awesome. I'm sure our listeners are more than happy to have you back in golf and we look forward to a future conversation with you.
Speaker 2:I can't wait. I can't wait. I appreciate it. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, honor having you on Doc. Thank you too, justin. Thanks, jesse, okay, cheers.
Speaker 2:Thank you guys.