Who Pushes Off With Their Trail Leg?

[iacas]

Right around 3:00 "It's a fall rather than a push with the trail foot."

[billchao]

Not this guy:

 

[iacas]

Thanks for adding that.

If you do ever lose or damage a leg, play golf with a good lead leg. And I'm not talking about the metal.

[Bo the Golfer]

This might be the best read ever. It was like a great book you can't put down. 

[billchao]

Another one from AMG. Pushing increases pressure in the trail leg which we’ve discussed in this thread.

[iacas]

59 minutes ago, billchao said:

Another one from AMG. Pushing increases pressure in the trail leg which we’ve discussed in this thread.

It's similar to this, too:

This isn't so much forward as UP very early.

[JetFan1983]

25 minutes ago, iacas said:

It's similar to this, too:

This isn't so much forward as UP very early.

I'm relieved someone finally defined hiking. I was giddy when I saw these new TPI videos a day or so after they dropped. Very easy to understand the problem and solution the way they have presented it. Been working on fixing this for about a year and a half now. It's nice to be able to call it something so communication becomes easy. 

I was working on more lateral and up too, but just having someone define it clearly in video form was so helpful for me to continue confidently with what I thought was wrong and how I had to fix it. 

My conceptual error here was just trying to rotate like a tour pro but without including the necessary forward pressure/weight shift associated with enough lateral and upward motion of the pelvis. 

This video is great too, as is Greg Rose.

[Ty_Webb]

Hi all,

I just read through most of this. I have a couple of questions that I hope can help me understand the points being made here. I'm at work so I can't watch videos - if someone already answered these in a video, then my apologies.

- during the backswing the pressure and the mass move to the trail side (even if only because of the arms moving that way). If the mass is moving to the trail side, then to move back to the target side, you need some form of force acting in that direction. Is the point that this force occurs before the end of the backswing and so by the top of the backswing, your momentum is moving in that direction already and so you are able to "fall" to the left rather than to the right?

- I do wonder too whether there is some semantic argument going on. In my mind, if you are standing tall on the ground and bend your legs, your COM moves downwards, so the force that is being applied to the ground goes down, but it doesn't go to zero. I'd say in that situation you're still pushing up, just not as much as you were. Put another way, if you do a squat, with 200 lbs on your shoulders and you take 5 seconds to do the eccentric phase of that move, you're very much pushing up while your knee flex is increasing. It's also true that if you jump, you'll bend your legs first and on your way down you have to start pushing while moving downwards to stop the downward acceleration. So you're pushing and your knee flex is increasing. I'm not disagreeing with the conclusions, just trying to understand the differences in opinions. I totally get that this is different from pushing off with the trail foot. 

- my coach is trying to get me to move my pressure trace so the line between the COP of each foot is from my right heel to my left ball of the foot. I often end up with it between both balls of the feet. Conceptually it's hard to imagine doing that without pushing with my right foot. Not necessarily forwards, but upwards. 

Lastly, and I post this purely because it's incredibly funny and I can watch it for hours at a time, why does this guy's right food fly backwards on his downswing?

 

[boogielicious]

15 hours ago, JetFan1983 said:

I'm relieved someone finally defined hiking.

Check me if I’m wrong, but I thought it was ‘goat humping’.😜

[billchao]

1 hour ago, Ty_Webb said:

Lastly, and I post this purely because it's incredibly funny and I can watch it for hours at a time, why does this guy's right food fly backwards on his downswing?

Inertia. His right foot wants to keep moving in that direction because he rotated clockwise in the backswing, but once he changes directions to rotate counterclockwise there wasn’t enough friction on the ice to act as a brake. This happens to me sometimes just from having poor traction on the grass.

Incidentally that’s also how you perform a slap shot in hockey 😃

[Ty_Webb]

30 minutes ago, billchao said:

Inertia. His right foot wants to keep moving in that direction because he rotated clockwise in the backswing, but once he changes directions to rotate counterclockwise there wasn’t enough friction on the ice to act as a brake. This happens to me sometimes just from having poor traction on the grass.

Incidentally that’s also how you perform a slap shot in hockey 😃

So normally when you're on solid ground and you don't slip, the friction of the shoe on the grass keeps that foot still by applying a force forwards towards the toes and that force counteracts the force applied by the shoe backwards on the ground?

[JetFan1983]

1 hour ago, boogielicious said:

Check me if I’m wrong, but I thought it was ‘goat humping’.😜

Lol, that's when your butt comes off the wall from DTL and tracks (excessively) towards the golf ball. Sometimes this starts at setup (too much weight in heels) or in the backswing.

[billchao]

26 minutes ago, Ty_Webb said:

So normally when you're on solid ground and you don't slip, the friction of the shoe on the grass keeps that foot still by applying a force forwards towards the toes and that force counteracts the force applied by the shoe backwards on the ground?

Basically, yes. It’s kind of oversimplified though. At a specific moment in time, it’s in that direction (perpendicular to the target line) but in reality it’s constantly changing direction as you rotate. Someone else with a better understanding of physics can explain it better than I can.

It’s a shearing force, as @mvmac talks about in this post:

It’s more or less parallel to the ground and not a push into the ground. I’ve actually used that feel in the past in my downswing, that I’m trying to rotate my right foot clockwise but it’s planted on the ground. It’s rotational and not a push into the ground. I guess to some people it feels like a “push” because they’re actively trying to achieve something with their trail foot but a push into the ground would cause pressure to increase and that’s just not something that happens in high level golf swings.

I also think a lot of people get too caught up on thinking ground forces are so important that they forget that the human body can rotate without actually touching the ground at all.

[iacas]

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

- during the backswing the pressure and the mass move to the trail side (even if only because of the arms moving that way).

And the trail side is moving "up" which it can only do by pushing "down" against an inert platform (the ground).

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

If the mass is moving to the trail side, then to move back to the target side, you need some form of force acting in that direction.

No you don't — you only need a NET force acting in that direction.

If you swung to the top, and your COM moved to a spot just inside your right foot… and I suddenly made your left leg vanish below the knee… you'd begin moving forward because the lack of any force under your (now missing) left foot would result in gravity helping you "fall" in that direction, like a tree falling over.

Or, let's make it simpler… if I have tripod, and I chop out one of the legs… the thing falls over. The tripod is not capable of "pushing."

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

Is the point that this force occurs before the end of the backswing and so by the top of the backswing, your momentum is moving in that direction already and so you are able to "fall" to the left rather than to the right?

Again it's not so much a force as it is a reduction in force on the lead side, which produces a bit more of a net force in that direction. Gravity is ever-present.

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

- I do wonder too whether there is some semantic argument going on. In my mind, if you are standing tall on the ground and bend your legs, your COM moves downwards, so the force that is being applied to the ground goes down, but it doesn't go to zero.

It can if you bend your knees fast enough.

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

I'd say in that situation you're still pushing up, just not as much as you were. Put another way, if you do a squat, with 200 lbs on your shoulders and you take 5 seconds to do the eccentric phase of that move, you're very much pushing up while your knee flex is increasing. It's also true that if you jump, you'll bend your legs first and on your way down you have to start pushing while moving downwards to stop the downward acceleration. So you're pushing and your knee flex is increasing.

Those are a whole lot of examples of pushing up, when this topic is primarily about pushing forward, linearly, laterally.

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

- my coach is trying to get me to move my pressure trace so the line between the COP of each foot is from my right heel to my left ball of the foot. I often end up with it between both balls of the feet. Conceptually it's hard to imagine doing that without pushing with my right foot. Not necessarily forwards, but upwards.

1. Your right hip is already higher than your left at P4… it's only going to work downward a bit from there as it works forward.
2. Your right knee is about as extended as it will be in the early part of the downswing at P4 (or P3.8), so it can't "push" much.
3. You'd be adding pressure to the right foot if you "pushed" with the right foot, which is not what you see from the game's best players.

5 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

Lastly, and I post this purely because it's incredibly funny and I can watch it for hours at a time, why does this guy's right food fly backwards on his downswing?

As Bill said, shear forces. His right hip is trying to rotate forward toward the ball, and so the forces in the foot are the other direction - behind the player.

Conservation of angular momentum (mostly). Hip goes forward, foot kicks back. Notice it never really kicks back away from the target.

[Ty_Webb]

Got it. So the argument here is purely about a push towards the front leg, not any kind of a push at all? It seems to me that your trail foot pushes forwards towards the toe from the heel and the front foot pushes backwards from the toe to the heel. Is that a fair statement? 

[iacas]

24 minutes ago, Ty_Webb said:

Got it. So the argument here is purely about a push towards the front leg, not any kind of a push at all? It seems to me that your trail foot pushes forwards towards the toe from the heel and the front foot pushes backwards from the toe to the heel. Is that a fair statement? 

No, it doesn't really do much of that either. How could it? Your trail LEG doesn't do much of anything in the downswing.

[billchao]

2 hours ago, Ty_Webb said:

Got it. So the argument here is purely about a push towards the front leg, not any kind of a push at all? It seems to me that your trail foot pushes forwards towards the toe from the heel and the front foot pushes backwards from the toe to the heel. Is that a fair statement? 

The shift in pressure in the trail foot is a response to other things going on in the downswing. There's no push. If anything it's kind of dragged along.

[Ty_Webb]

5 minutes ago, billchao said:

The shift in pressure in the trail foot is a response to other things going on in the downswing. There's no push. If anything it's kind of dragged along.

Right - this is what I meant when I said at least some of the misunderstanding is semantic. If your foot is applying a force to the ground, that's pushing (in my opinion anyway), even if the leg itself is not actively doing anything to push there. To go back to the hammer and nail analogy, a nail being banged into a piece of word is pushing into the wood, even if it's really the hammer that's doing the active work.