Instructional Video Critique Topic

[saevel25]

Yea, they are overthinking that golf hole. Maximize fairway, minimize hazards. 

For me, moving to one side of the tee box or other is a confidence thing. It also helps me with aim, and not being influence by the orientation of the tee box. 

[ChetlovesMer]

Okay, he clearly said he'd rather be in the rough on left than on the fairway on the right. Then he hit a shot to the right hand edge of the fairway and said "That is exactly what I wanted to do." 

Huh?

 

1 hour ago, saevel25 said:

For me, moving to one side of the tee box or other is a confidence thing. It also helps me with aim, and not being influence by the orientation of the tee box. 

This

[Ty_Webb]

11 minutes ago, ChetlovesMer said:

Okay, he clearly said he'd rather be in the rough on left than on the fairway on the right. Then he hit a shot to the right hand edge of the fairway and said "That is exactly what I wanted to do." 

Huh?

 

I wondered about that and decided that it looks like the fairway turns right out in the distance. I am not sure how far down his ball ended up, but it might be that it went far enough that it is still in the left side of the fairway. Having said that, it seems like pretty much everything else in the video is bunk, so quite possible that is too.

[iacas]

I'm going to not say anything about this one for awhile. Curious to hear y'all's thoughts on it…

[Ty_Webb]

Well that started off okay - I was with him when he said that the goal is to reduce the gap between your good shots and your bad shots (unspoken, but clearly you want to do that by bringing the bad shots closer to the good shots and not the other way around). And then he lost me. I got as far as "once you've motored the spiral line..." and I just couldn't watch any more of it. So either I'm getting seriously wooshed (not impossible by any stretch), or he's talking a large amount of gibberish. Or I guess some combination of those two things.

[saevel25]

I get the feeling he has come up with a lot of catch phrases to make himself sound competent. He could be right on some things, but it comes out as fake to me. 

It bothered me when he pulled up the graphic of the human body, showing what looked like a muscle that cross the body (hip to opposite shoulder). There are no muscles that actually do that. There is this stretch and pull, but it isn't like a single muscle that is connected like that. 

 

 

Edited October 1 by saevel25

[GolfLug]

I actually really like the video. I feel like it speaks to my own issues of hip movement (lunge towards the ball). I think he also presents a very good and detailed explanation of the why from biomechanical perspective, not forcing the clubs in position and instead let it work a proper planar path by providing it space (hip swivel) the most efficient way.

As far as tech speak/catch phrases etc., that some may not like, it doesn't bother me and even necessary. For eg., the spiral line sounds like it is the same thing as a kinematic chain, but directionally specific along with the set of muscles joints it engages. If the club is not dynamically aligned to the 'spiral line' it will force other compensation like locking joints, etc. That's simple logic, and from my perspective not brought up enough. Good stuff.

[iacas]

2 minutes ago, GolfLug said:

I actually really like the video. I feel like it speaks to my own issues of hip movement (lunge towards the ball). I think he also presents a very good and detailed explanation of the why from biomechanical perspective, not forcing the clubs in position and instead let it work a proper planar path by providing it space (hip swivel) the most efficient way.

Eh. Do your hips back when they swivel like he demonstrates? Or do they tend to go forward as they rotate?

3 minutes ago, GolfLug said:

If the club is not dynamically aligned to the 'spiral line' it will force other compensation like locking joints, etc.

[GolfLug]

2 hours ago, iacas said:

Eh. Do your hips back when they swivel like he demonstrates? Or do they tend to go forward as they rotate?

Mine? Forward. Not like he demonstrates. I didn't think he intended to stay they actually moved backwards in relation to the ground. More a relative move to the rib cage. 

Sorry, Im not sure I understand what the pics demonstrates to counter what I quoted. 

I also want to make sure you understand that I come from a place where I have felt for a while that I have completely misunderstood how the pelvis/torso move globally in the golf swing positionally at some point in my learning so completely open to correction.

[iacas]

11 hours ago, GolfLug said:

Mine? Forward. Not like he demonstrates. I didn't think he intended to stay they actually moved backwards in relation to the ground. More a relative move to the rib cage.

And what axis tilt would that create?

11 hours ago, GolfLug said:

Sorry, Im not sure I understand what the pics demonstrates to counter what I quoted.

They illustrate that the club isn't going around the "spine angle" as he says at one point.

[GolfLug]

3 hours ago, iacas said:

And what axis tilt would that create?

I suppose an angle greater than zero (horizontal) and less than whatever shoulder tilt angle is.

[iacas]

6 minutes ago, GolfLug said:

I suppose an angle greater than zero (horizontal) and less than whatever shoulder tilt angle is.

V, axis tilt is a mostly vertical line. If your spine is pretty vertical from face-on, it's 90°. If the hips are 12° toward the target more than the chest, it's like 102°. But, to the question I asked you, if the chest is forward of the pelvis, it'd be in the 80s, and what we see from the game's best players is…

 

[GolfLug]

Ah, face on, not DL. Anyway, I do not want to hijack the thread, so I will take a bit of time and prolly post further in my swing thread. 

[iacas]

My notes…

0:17 — Joaquin Niemann and Mito Pereira are mentioned as great or beautiful swings. Let's just post this for later.

0:33 — A low "RoR" (rate of rotation) is mentioned. There's been no correlation shown between rate of closure (or rotation) and any of the following: player skill, driving distance, accuracy. There are combos of both with high and low "RoR."

2:10 — As he demonstrates the golf club riding slightly above the plane to slightly under the plane, you'll note how little he's doing this with his rib cage and how much he's doing it with his forearms and maybe up to the shoulder (more as a result, IMO, of how he's using his forearms).

2:17 — "it [the shaft] would simply go around that spine angle," which I guess we can say we see in the above two players… depending on what angle from that huge arc we wish to count as "the spine angle."

2:32 — "Our preferred players" hints at a bit of a model for how you should swing the club. And, in general, I think this is a model I really don't like very much.

2:45 — The "main engine" is the rib complex, spine, and pelvis. Your torso, basically. This ignores your limbs — your legs and arms. Now, it does say the main engine, not the sole engine, and clearly the players above use their limbs… though I'd argue they don't use their arms much, given how bent the right elbow is at impact.

3:22 — Three-step process: 1) ribs rotate, 2) pelvis will drop, 3) ribs rotate. Why do we really need the second part? What does that give us? Besides the heads of JN and MP dropping a foot from where the two small green lines are, which I placed on the top of their hats at early backswing, how does "dropping" the pelvis help us in the golf swing? Don't get me wrong — I teach a small pelvis "fall" (forward and down) as part of the transition in order to get weight/pressure forward and create some axis tilt. They aren't doing that here. They mean almost entirely downward, not forward.

The brief demonstration at 3:34 shows almost no weight or force/pressure shifts. It's demonstrated as he said: rotation, dropping, rotation. This isn't what we see from most of the game's best players.

4:09 — Spiral lines. Fascia is partly a connective tissue, partly a lubricant, partly a mildly elastic component to the body. However, the existence of an actual "spiral line," treated as absolute fact by this video, isn't even necessarily so. I'll quote most of the Conclusion from this paper: https://www.anatomytrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wilke-pdf.pdf

Although the concept of myofascial meridians is widely used in exercise therapy and osteopathic medicine, the scientific basis for the proposed connections is still a matter of debate. The present review provides first systematic evidence based on cadaveric dissection studies. Although there is strong empirical support for the existence of the superficial back line, back functional line, and front functional line, evidence is ambivalent with regard to the spiral line and lateral line [and] respectively poor for the superficial front line.

At 4:38 he says "if we elongate that rubber band, that spiral line," but dude, fascia is least like a rubber band of its three functions, and even then, it's often more for, to quote Wikipedia: "Due to its viscoelastic properties, superficial fascia can stretch to accommodate the deposition of adipose that accompanies both ordinary and prenatal weight gain. After pregnancy and weight loss, the superficial fascia slowly reverts to its original level of tension." In other words, it's not so much a rubber band that can be stretched and quickly snap back into place, it's more what allows our body to stretch and return to shape to accommodate gains in size.

5:45 — I teach people to "spiral" their rib cage very similarly to what he's talking about here, in the backswings. It's an extension of the "stretch/bend" we've been talking about for 15+ years now. The trail side stretches, the lead side bends. Fine. I have no problem with that. And if you want to pretend there's a spiral going around your body, that's cool by me. But your muscles aren't oriented along the mythical "spiral line" and even if they were, stretching the spiral line isn't how muscles work: muscles contract, they "pull," they can't "push" outward. This feels like bad science to back up what is, for now, a decent way to make a backswing.

6:00 — He pitches the rotation of the pelvis as a result of the chest pulling on it. This would or could make sense as a feel, but in truth a good golfer generally uses his legs to do more than he's demonstrating, and the legs will move the pelvis. He calls the pelvis movement "passive," and I don't know that they could really prove that to be true.

To be clear, I don't really have much issue with the way they actually make backswings (light use of the legs aside). I just find their explanation of it to be, at best, murky scientifically.

8:00 — The pelvis drops. Why? Why do we want our heads to drop a foot? If we did drop like this, the vertical GRF would really show something, and we don't see that in many swings from great players, especially in combination with what we would see from the lateral forces.

9:26 — The Joaquin Niemann video I used… his impact picture appears in the video here. He calls it a "beautiful C shape in the spine." "Some amount of side bend is completely healthy, and we don't need to overcook it". He says that in other sports, we see side bend: swimming, baseball, hockey… and we don't hear about back injuries in those (paraphrased).

10:40 — "as long as we have it in the right area of the spine" we can avoid injury. This is starting to get to my single biggest issue with this general model for the swing. "There's no health implications as long as we're in a pretty good general system based on spiral movement mind you." What?

Dude, no.

Will Zalatoris has moved away from this for the health of his back. Tiger has moved away from this for the health of his back (too late). Jason Day has moved away from this. Xander has moved away from this.

I call these types of swings "Right Side Bend" swings, and I think it's obvious as to why:

Comments made when those swings are shown in slow-motion on television all talk about how "ouch, he's not going to be doing that when he's 40" or "that makes my back hurt" or "he must have a jelly spine".

Compare (as best as you can looking at what is a 3D world in 2D) that spine tilt to:

"There's no health implication there from this type of movement." Thanks, doctor! Oh, wait, you're just a golf instructor? At least I have a degree in medicinal chemistry, man. 😀 It gets better.

11:15 — "When we're talking about back injuries with golfers, we're talking about lower spine, L-spine injury." He demonstrates for a bit, and then…

12:50 — The "rotation" of the pelvis (which previously just "dropped" but which is now rotating, too, I guess) is demonstrated as:

Very, very few good players look like that. This has the center of the pelvis moving AWAY from the target, and I don't think I have a single professional golfer, male or female, who does this in GEARS.

13:50 — "This is a way to create the proper trail side bend:" Ummmm…

14:21 — "You'll notice where the bend in my spine appears." The "bad" way of doing right side bend is then demonstrated at 14:30 and… look, I'll be pretty direct here: I don't want the guy to take off his shirt, and get an X-Ray while he's doing these things, but your back moves the way it moves. Sure, if you actively try to move only your cervical spine, you can do it. If you actively try to move only your lumbar spine, you can kinda do it. Your lumbar spine isn't going to move, generally, more than it wants to. Your spine is going to move, when it is concerned about the two end-points (the pelvis and the base of your head or at least the base of your neck) the way it wants to move. You can't definitively say "the left image has no lumbar lateral flexion and the right is a ton more lumbar lateral flexion." I'd guess, adjusting for the amount of actual side bend, they're almost exactly the same.

And I agree that the left image doesn't look like an "extreme" amount of side bend (while stopping short of prognosticating injury potential). But the golfers he likes don't hit the ball with that small amount of side bend. They hit the ball like this:

Are they avoiding any lumbar lateral flexion? I'd guess they are not.

14:37 — In describing a swing where the pelvis travels forward a bit, he says "And that is where players will start to move the pelvis lateral too far and they'll start to bend in this manner, and look at the shape of my spine. See where all the pivot is down in my L spine." I dunno, man, looks like it's not bent too much to me:

"This is like a vital, vital move in the golf swing that will help so many things." "It is a very healthy way of moving your body so it prevents or it moves you into a space where we're in now preventative medicine if you will, where you're helping yourself. You're not gonna hurt yourself."

Dude. No.

16:00 — They talk about Tiger and his injuries, and there's a lot here I can't say owing to some friendships and my general personal view to keep things shared between the parties actually in the conversation, but… gee whiz, man. Yes, Tiger moved his pelvis forward, but there's also a case to be made that he did a little more of this "hip flexion/RSB" swing, too (but does less of it now than in, say, 2000).

16:24 — "This is a preference of ours, and the reason it is a preference of ours is primarily because of health."

17:27 — "If you look at history, there are more injuries in the excessive side bend lateral movers than the opposite." (paraphrased) Okay, two problems with that. First, it's not 50/50 on the PGA Tour. If the lateral movers make up 95% of the Tour swings, but they have two injuries and the 5% have one injury per year, his statement could be true, while being a complete sham as a percentage. Second, how is he classifying all of these things? This reeks of just making shit up, while many of the recent injuries (as this extreme right side bend type swing has come to slightly more prominence) are coming from the Day/Zalatoris type swings.

I generally hate when golf instructors talk about injuries. I injured my left thumb on August 29, and it's still going to be weeks before I swing a club. People have injured their backs bending over to pick up a dropped piece of mail. We're golf instructors — except for a very, very small list of people (one of my friends and a Tour instructor spent thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours traveling and speaking with experts on the spine and athletics) — if we keep people within fairly "normal" ranges, we cannot/should not be in the business of making comments about injury or injury prevention or potential, let alone going so far as to say you're "helping yourself."

18:40 — He demonstrates the drop and swivel, but clearly rotates his forearms to shallow the club. It isn't something just dropping the pelvis (and, consequently, his head) does. "Notice where the golf club moves in space." Well, it doesn't do that because of your hips, it does it because your arms are moving it there.

---

Here's my summary of the video.

Riley Andrews begins with some "unsettled" (to be kind) science about "spiral lines" after talking about how he loves the swings of golfers who, universally, people respond to with the word "ouch" when shown images of their swings. He then describes his idea of the golf swing as being one where your pelvis swivels and backs up during the downswing, before talking about how you're "helping yourself" and avoiding injury by swinging like the "ouch" duo above.

I will note that their golf swings, when they make them on video, are not as extreme as demonstrated. But, there is a group of instructors out there teaching what I'd call this "Right Side Bend" (RSB) type swing: very little lateral movement, very little axis tilt, very little use of the trail arm (the lack of use here necessitates the side bend, because you've gotta get the right shoulder closer to the ground if your right arm isn't gonna widen out). And I'm not a doctor, either, but among those who have done a lot of work… I think their claims are more the opposite of what we see than they are accurate.

[saevel25]

1 hour ago, iacas said:

But your muscles aren't oriented along the mythical "spiral line" and even if they were, stretching the spiral line isn't how muscles work: muscles contract, they "pull," they can't "push" outward. This feels like bad science to back up what is, for now, a decent way to make a backswing.

This is what I thought. 

This came off as someone making up phrases or words to sound impressive than actually speaking correctly about how the body works. Any search for Spiral Lines just seems to come from alternative medicine and not actual good science websites. Like, if I search spiral lines at Cleveland clinic, I get stuff about bone fractures. 

When he started going on spiral lines, I was checking out of the video. 

1 hour ago, iacas said:

"as long as we have it in the right area of the spine" we can avoid injury. This is starting to get to my single biggest issue with this general model for the swing. "There's no health implications as long as we're in a pretty good general system based on spiral movement mind you." What?

Dude, no.

Will Zalatoris has moved away from this for the health of his back. Tiger has moved away from this for the health of his back (too late). Jason Day has moved away from this. Xander has moved away from this.

I call these types of swings "Right Side Bend" swings, and I think it's obvious as to why:

I do not think any sort of motion can 100% get rid of the chance of back injury. We are bending over slightly and torquing the body at a high rate of speed. Over and over again. It is common for golfers to have degenerative discs. Then you are just asking for the moment where a nerve to get pinched and there goes the back. I take it as an acceptable risk to play this sport. This past year has been the best year in terms of back issues for me (zero). I attribute a lot of that with doing more with my arms (shallowing), than using my body. 

1 hour ago, iacas said:

People have injured their backs bending over to pick up a dropped piece of mail.

Opening the lower freezer door of my fridge.
Leaning over to tie a show.
Sneezing.
And a few other ways. 

God getting old sucks 😛 

 

[Ty_Webb]

2 hours ago, saevel25 said:

Opening the lower freezer door of my fridge.
Leaning over to tie a show.
Sneezing.
And a few other ways. 

God getting old sucks 😛 

 

 

Washing my hands in a sink that was a little bit too low for me and my back seized up. Weeks of PT and muscle relaxers later I could get out of bed in less than 10 minutes again.

[saevel25]

I saw this on X and was like, man Ricky's pelvis does not look like what Elite Golf & X-Factor is looking for golfers to do. 

His pelvis looks pretty stable. It doesn't drop, and he his steady stays pretty steady (vertically). Looks pretty good to me. 

[Vinsk]

Oh boy….JV’s explanation as to why ‘modern golf’ teaches to hit up on the ball is a little silly. 
Looks like he’s still preaching how short game is far more important than long as well.

And of course we got no ball flight data from his hits. Just him saying how what the ball did.