Never Seen the GEARS in Action Like This Before - Pretty Cool

[nevets88]

If you skip to the last half of this vid, where you see the actual app, it is pretty cool. The head bubble, the super-imposing of two swings.

[Mr. Desmond]

Thanks. Yes, it is cool. My instructor has used "gears" and superimposed it for my ... um ... education.

[iacas]

This isn't really an instructional thread, so I'll keep my comments in a spoiler.

I don't know that I agree with the premise of the video.

Overall, I disagree with the amount of lateral bend. He exaggerates but he shows 90° or so of lateral bend. Even 30° is about 3x too much. The amount of lateral bend throughout the entire spine is not what I would call very much at all, so I don't know that talking about changing a few degrees of neck motion is going to have a huge effect on the golf swing.

At about 1:30 in he's talking about how tilting your head left is conducive to turning while tilting your head right is not. I can go to my A4 position and tilt my head both directions.

At about 2:15 he points out that Jack's right eye is higher than his left, and says that the left eye is thus clearly closer to the shoulder than the right eye. I would suggest that has more to do with a few things, but one thing in particular:

• Predominantly, the fact that his head doesn't rotate very much, while his shoulders rotate about 90°. That alone is responsible for perhaps 95% of the "closeness" of the left shoulder to the left eye. In fact, you could make a swing where the RIGHT eye is closer to the LEFT shoulder than it is to the RIGHT shoulder.
• If Jack rotated his head 90° such that his eyes were at an angle of 20°, and his shoulders turned 90° at a pitch of 30°, his right eye and shoulder would be closer to each other than his left eye and shoulder.

At 3:10, the difference in hip turn is 8° and the knee linkage "turn" is about 9° higher. Those don't have a lot to do with the cervical neck.

From the Face-On view, it's relevant to note that because of how GEARS and other things "measure" shoulder turn, you could add a few degrees of shoulder turn with right shoulder retraction. That doesn't mean your shoulder sockets have necessarily rotated more, but that you could eke out some measurements because the shoulder "dot" in the GEARS system is on the top/outside of your shoulder joint, and retracting your right shoulder will make it move a bit more.

Zoomed out, at 3:20 or so, I'm not sure I love this position:

The spine is tilting toward the target (even if you allow for some margin of error given the subtle S-shape of the spine and/or error based on using external markers to measure something internal as with the right shoulder above), and yes if you "over-stretch" the right side this can be common. It's become a hallmark of S&T; instructors to not only allow this but to encourage it, and many here can attest to the negative effects extending so much can have on your swing - namely that from this forward head position you either have to send your hips WAY forward or, more commonly, you have to back up out of the shot to create necessary secondary axis tilt to hit the ball properly. You can see the hips sway subtly away from the target, too, which only adds to this reverse secondary axis tilt.

62 to 75 MPH is impressive. No denying that. I don't know that I've seen distance increases like that just from increasing the turn 10° or so, and I'm curious if swing 2 was really the second swing the guy took, or very early on, as we have seen swings increase in speed a fair amount as students loosen up and warm up.

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All that said…

• I agree that neck tilts "matter."
• I probably disagree with how much they matter. As I said, I can go to the top of the backswing and, moving nothing else, tilt my head right or left. I don't know that I'd have made a video on this and attributed everything in that video to just the neck tilts.
• We have had many students with weird neck tilts, and we've worked on them with them.
• In general, I prefer not to have ANY neck tilt - I prefer for the neck to simply stay "inline" with the spine. People whose neck tilts to the right tends to stay in flexion, and people who tilt their neck left tend to over-extend and have reverse secondary axis tilt.

As I believe these images show, neck tilts are mildly important (the positions seen below are pretty extreme!), but I don't necessarily agree that their first most important thing is because they affect the amount of torso turn you can achieve. Consider two things in the pictures below: Can I see the golf ball? What's my secondary axis tilt look like in each of these?

In other words:

• I disagree with a few of the points in the video, or feel that they're not given their true full discussion (i.e. the left eye or ear closer to the left shoulder bit).
• I prefer an "inline" neck condition. Both the rightward and leftward ones come with their own problems.

[mvmac]

Good post @iacas , I was thinking the same thing with the golfer being more warmed up. I would bet his stock 7 iron isn't 125 yards.