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By 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. -
By 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. -
By ChetlovesMer ·
Thanks for posting this. I enjoyed watching. The putt from the sand on number 8 was so cool. It rolled way farther past the hole than I expected. -
By ChetlovesMer ·
I would. I 100% love the zero drop. It puts my feet in a more natural position. To my feeling it makes me "feel" like I'm in a more athletic position. I'm not sure you'll get the same benefit, but I also love the large toe-box offered in the OG styles. Like a lot of the older guys on this forum, I've had my share of foot issues. (Plantar Fasciitis, Morton's Neuroma, etc...) The OG's seem to help all of these issues. I have been playing golf since we wore metal spikes. I've tried lots of shoes. I can tell you without hesitation that the True Linkswear OG's are the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn. I now only wear the True Linkswear OG styles. One of the very few golf products I rave about to the point where somebody may assume I'm biased and/or being paid a commission or something. But I like them that much. I'm a raving fan. -
By iacas ·
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…
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