Shoulder Turn & Balance

[Hammer 4]

Just my humble opinion, I think you can bend at the knees, and waist, and not stick your dairy aire out. Bending the knees will naturally get your butt out beyond your heels, also bending at the waist along with the knees, creates the same effect. At address, I could stick my butt out, but I choose not to, and the reason is, it's Uncomfortable due to my bad back. So I think pic's may not truly reflect what Ben is, or isn't doing. just my 3 cents....

[iacas]

  natureboy said:

In a nutshell: very baggy old-school golf pants for freedom of movement.

His butt is clearly several inches behind his heels.

I'm going to suggest you and I must have different definitions of "sticking your butt out." Neither of those pictures are what I would call "sticking your butt out." We could talk about pelvic tilts (anterior and posterior tilts), but you can google those if you want. Anterior = sticking your butt out. Posterior tilt = not.

  natureboy said:

@mvmac you are right that his lateral hip movement was tremendous and certainly appears to be more than a bump. However, this is because he loaded right while your preference is about 50/50 at the top. Works for you and many others, but not what he intended or did.

I think that was me, actually, and I disagree that Hogan "loaded right." Before I get to that, though, I'll clarify that our preference is not about 50/50 - our preference is somewhere around 55/45 (and depends a good bit on when the hips go forward) if you're talking about weight , and about 65/35 if you're talking about pressure . This is also pretty much PGA Tour average (which is just under 70% right).

If you consider that Hogan's hips have already started going forward while his head has remained basically in the center of his stance… he's not going to be "loaded right" much at all here. Weight is going to be awfully close to 50/50 (hips are forward, head pretty centered, arms contributing a little bit on the right), pressure is going to be about 60/40. I'm basing this off hundreds of hours recording weight and pressure data.

Now, I will grant you that his hips starting forward while the club continues back creates a look that he's leaning right, but in actuality he is not.

This isn't really what this thread's about. I'm not a big fan of using Hogan for everything. EVERY PGA Tour player has 5SK, and yet ever weird swing "method" or "idea" or whatever that comes along seems to try to use Hogan as their model. I'm not doing that here, just illustrating that what appears to be true may not really be true.

P.S. You may be surprised to know too that the extra spike on Hogan's right shoe was virtually worthless. There's not a lot of pressure on the right foot, and the right leg does virtually no "pushing off" at the start of the downswing. It may be a "feel" but it's not real - not from a pressure standpoint, not from a "leg muscles are firing and pushing" standpoint, etc. Your hips slide forward primarily from your core muscles. Consider how many golfers have their right foot slip out… it slips out because there's not much pressure on it. I can talk about this stuff all day - it's right in my wheelhouse. :)

[boogielicious]

  natureboy said:

Quote:

Originally Posted by iacas

Define "a bit"… :D

I would add that both those photos show him playing a ball above his feet, so the posture could be slightly affect by the side hill lie.

[natureboy]

  iacas said:

I'm going to suggest you and I must have different definitions of "sticking your butt out." Neither of those pictures are what I would call "sticking your butt out." We could talk about pelvic tilts (anterior and posterior tilts), but you can google those if you want. Anterior = sticking your butt out. Posterior tilt = not.

  iacas said:

I think that was me, actually, and I disagree that Hogan "loaded right."

  iacas said:

Before I get to that, though, I'll clarify that our preference is not about 50/50 - our preference is somewhere around 55/45 (and depends a good bit on when the hips go forward) if you're talking about weight, and about 65/35 if you're talking about pressure. This is also pretty much PGA Tour average (which is just under 70% right).

  iacas said:

 

If you consider that Hogan's hips have already started going forward while his head has remained basically in the center of his stance… he's not going to be "loaded right" much at all here. Weight is going to be awfully close to 50/50 (hips are forward, head pretty centered, arms contributing a little bit on the right), pressure is going to be about 60/40. I'm basing this off hundreds of hours recording weight and pressure data.

  iacas said:

 

P.S. You may be surprised to know too that the extra spike on Hogan's right shoe was virtually worthless. There's not a lot of pressure on the right foot, and the right leg does virtually no "pushing off" at the start of the downswing.

you swing. Modern technique may offer significant advantages or improvements over his approach, but it's not the same. If you played around more with what he was doing you'd see how the spikes could have helped.>

  iacas said:

It may be a "feel" but it's not real - not from a pressure standpoint, not from a "leg muscles are firing and pushing" standpoint, etc.

  iacas said:

Your hips slide forward primarily from your core muscles. Consider how many golfers have their right foot slip out… it slips out because there's not much pressure on it. I can talk about this stuff all day - it's right in my wheelhouse. :)

[natureboy]

  boogielicious said:

I would add that both those photos show him playing a ball above his feet, so the posture could be slightly affect by the side hill lie.

Maybe, but it doesn't look like much.

Sidehill - Up (above feet) means standing more vertical / taller so if anything it's most likely his 'tush' cantilever is less than typical.

[iacas]

Last post on the specifics of Hogan in this thread. Start a new thread with a specific topic if you'd like to continue.

  natureboy said:

Most people interpret "stick your butt out" to mean something different than what Hogan did or said. Obviously any forward bending from the back, hips, etc. can move the CG toward the ball (away from his butt). That's so much a given that I didn't think we needed to explicitly discuss it. Who on earth would take it to mean "stand straight up and down"?

Again, per the anatomical stuff re: pelvic tilts and stuff, I disagree that Hogan "stuck his butt out." We see people who are, everyone would agree, "sticking their butts out" and they don't look at all like Hogan.

  natureboy said:

Incorrect. Quite easy to do. Nicklaus sometimes lifted his heel too. This video below pretty old, but still relates to the discussion. Skip to 1:30 for a swing where 90% of my weight moves right (and 2:30 or so for my head to be re-centered), and 2:48 for me to lift my left heel off the ground while keeping my weight centered to slightly forward. At 4:40 I exaggerate that a lot.

I am not saying that either of those swings on the right (where I get 55-90% of my weight FORWARD while lifting my heel) are "good swings." They simply illustrate that you can lift your heel without shifting your weight, or shift it INTO the side that lifted the heel (they also illustrate how weight is not pressure). Your assertion that it's "hard to do" is incorrect. It's relatively easy to do while shifting only 5-10% of your weight back (to 55 or 60%) at the top of the backswing, as I contend Hogan did.

BTW, this is part of the reason I said this is in my wheelhouse… I've been looking at weight, pressure, GRF, etc. for a number of years, and with my background in physics, it's relatively easy to understand stuff.

The left heel coming off the ground doesn't mean anything by itself. You still have to look at where the weight moved, or measure where the pressure moved (or make reasonable estimates based on scientific understanding).

Besides, he didn't lift his heel all the time… I have one video where he lifts his heel, and it was his "Power Golf" swing (with a driver, too). Pictures below.

  natureboy said:

None, when there is no motion.

And of course by "pressure" we've bastardized that to mean "force" because pressure is force per area… so we're kind of "summing" the pressure under the "area" (each foot), which just leads back to… force. We just - not by my choice - seem to use "pressure" more in golf, but we're really talking about force.

  natureboy said:

He loaded pressure there (probably up to about 65-70%; not 80%+). He didn't load a lot of weight there.

The transition, in the way we number things, is ~A3.5 to ~A4.5. It is a period of time.

The top of the backswing is A4. It is a single moment in time.

During transition, Hogan's weight likely shifted from about 55% right to about 55% left. His pressure likely remained toward the right until just after transition, when it flashed forward quite fast, like any good player's does.

We have some good threads on this with some data from SwingCatalyst. For example… .

You're wrong about his right leg holding most of his body weight, unless by "most" you simply mean > 50%, at which point I would agree that he had probably 55-57% of his body weight right of center (and 65-70% of his pressure right… pressure is far easier to move (and imperceptible if you don't quite "grok" the concepts). By A4 pressure approaches weight as the body isn't moving a LOT like it is from A1 to ~A3). A sizable bit of that weight shift is the left arm moving back…

Plus…

Good luck convincing anyone his weight is favoring his right side very much (if at all) there.

  natureboy said:

Disagree all you want: Hogan's extra spike didn't serve him any actual, real purpose on 99%+ of the golf shots he hit (and I'm excluding the obvious like putts and chips). You're buying into a myth rather than looking at this scientifically. Plus, Hogan's technique was not different than "modern technique." I would argue it wasn't really different at all, but I would point out too that there is no "one technique" anyway.

Hogan's extra spike may have made him feel good about his little trick, and it may have helped him once or twice a year, but purely from a physics standpoint, it didn't do much of anything.

Let me put it another way… From A3 to A5 is when we find the most pressure (force) in the right foot in the golf swing. Yet, there's very little shear forces then (consider them horizontal) - most of the force is vertical. The GRF vector tips forward at the end of the transition (and this is where, if a golfer is going to slip, he'll do it) but in the vast majority of cases it's already too late. You see… by the time the forces become "shear enough" that extra traction could be important, the golfer is exerting comparatively little force into the ground under his right foot. That's why many good golfers are still able to hit a relatively solid shot when their rear foot slips. They'll often tend to hook them a bit because the rear foot shooting out backward slows hip rotation, which presents body alignments which are more closed at impact and which sends the path outward a bit more than usual and/or increases rate of closure a little bit (as the arms "fly past" the body's rotation prematurely), but generally the strike is pretty clean.

Hogan's extra spike was irrelevant for 99% of the golf shots he hit - it may have provided extra traction if he was standing on a very slippery surface, like hardpan dirt, a wet piece of wood, etc. Even the small shear forces in transition (when the forces still favor the right foot) can be enough to slip then. But it's still your core that moves your hips forward - you don't push off with your right foot. If you did, you'd see pressure (force) reading spike again beneath the right foot, and you don't. In fact, the right knee is in the process of regaining flexion… which decreases pressure (force).

Also, obviously, people can play pretty good golf in tennis shoes. Snead would play in bare feet. Today, then, it didn't matter. Plus, consider the location of his extra spike: it was right of the "inner-most" row of spikes on the inside (left side) of his right shoe. When you bank your foot (Hogan banked his right foot beautifully), the inner row of spikes applies traction the longest (they remain in the ground the longest). The inner-most spikes, which already existed, apply more force longer during the swing than anything right of them. Hogan's extra spike was right of the inner row of spikes, further reducing its effect. At least he was smart enough to put it as far left as possible.

  natureboy said:

Science doesn't work that way.

  natureboy said:

Mostly backward (away from where the golf ball is).

[ks8829]

A friend show me to swing a golf club with your feet together to help with your balance, you can check your balance and also to see if you hips are turning parallel to the ground and not tilting when you make your swing

[natureboy]

  natureboy said:

Back to golf posture & the 'derriere'. Hogan never said 'stick it out'. He was only saying (paraphrasing) that in a good athletic stance it was the most prominent feature away from the ball when looking down the line. This feature / fact is evident on your own good posture videos. I did not say he meant stand straight up (straw man).

Dude, I never said "stick your butt out." That was you .

  natureboy said:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I was not creating a straw man. Responded to quote just above. Your posted posture advice is solid. I think it pretty well agrees with 'Five Lessons'. My posts are responding to the Hogan didn't do what he said theme, not your swing recommendations.

As far as clarity of communication, I made the mistake of also using the term 'stick your butt out' originally used by another poster and in the picture you posted where you said 'define a bit'.

Hogan did not actually say 'stick the butt out'. He said the 'derriere' is the most prominent / extended feature away from the ball when viewing down the line. Others may have since used the shorthand 'stick your butt out', but not his words. Below is what he recommends which agrees with what he said and did:

Below is what is depicted as incorrect (note the swayed back / butt of the figure on the right - coupled with other mistakes). Figure on the left may be 'twerking' a bit too.

[iacas]

  natureboy said:

Dude, I never said "stick your butt out." That was you.

Nah: http://thesandtrap.com/t/78151/shoulder-turn-balance#post_1075296. You recognize this later in your post, so…

You didn't go back far enough to see where the thread had been or something. I didn't say "stick your butt out" first. I asked for "a bit" because Hogan's posture doesn't even look like he's sticking his butt out a little bit, so unless Joe was going to say "barely at all" I was disagreeing with him (him = Joe, and thus disagreeing with "Joe" means his wording of "stick your butt out a little bit" or whatever he said).

Again, I like Hogan's posture. I likely would not have changed it one bit. I also don't call it "sticking your butt out" because if you tell ten golfers to do that, none will look like Hogan. They'll use anterior tilt and actually stick out their butts.

  natureboy said:

Your posted posture advice is solid. I think it pretty well agrees with 'Five Lessons'. My posts are responding to the Hogan didn't do what he said theme, not your swing recommendations.

Hogan's feels were likely very real to him. But "feel ain't real." The best example (with Hogan) is how he described his hips moving in the downswing as a little bump, yet they slid forward more than almost anyone else. Tell other people to just give their hips a "little bump" and they won't match what Hogan did.

They were very real to him, but his "feels" will not produce the same mechanics in others.

  natureboy said:

Hogan did not actually say 'stick the butt out'. He said the 'derriere' is the most prominent / extended feature away from the ball when viewing down the line. Others may have since used the shorthand 'stick your butt out', but not his words. Below is what he recommends which agrees with what he said and did:

Right, so @joekelly is bad at paraphrasing, and the "feel ain't real" conversation is largely irrelevant since on the butt-sticking-out-edness, Hogan wasn't describing a feel, just what he could see in a mirror.

Glad we worked that out. :P

[Hammer 4]

Welp, I have to say, this was both informative, and Very entertaining..

[mvmac]

Great posts Erik, tons of good info.

[joekelly]

Hi Erik  Just how would you  paraphrase 'definitely protrudes' ? And please do not invoke the nanometer.

This entire  discussion has been useful to me, thanks to all.

. Would remind that the book i quoted, 'Power Golf', was published nearly 10 years before his most famous book 'Five Lessons'.  . Maybe Hogan's idea evolved.

[iacas]

  joekelly said:

Hi Erik  Just how would you  paraphrase 'definitely protrudes' ? And please do not invoke the nanometer.

I wouldn't. It means different things to different people.

  joekelly said:

This entire  discussion has been useful to me, thanks to all.

. Would remind that the book i quoted, 'Power Golf', was published nearly 10 years before his most famous book 'Five Lessons'.  . Maybe Hogan's idea evolved.

They clearly did.

[natureboy]

  joekelly said:

Hi Erik  Just how would you  paraphrase 'definitely protrudes' ? And please do not invoke the nanometer.

This entire  discussion has been useful to me, thanks to all.

. Would remind that the book i quoted, 'Power Golf', was published nearly 10 years before his most famous book 'Five Lessons'.  . Maybe Hogan's idea evolved.

I think his wording definitely did evolve. As a dedicated golf teacher I expect he was always looking for better analogies to aid communication. On actual setup changes, he flared his back (R) foot in 'Power Golf', but was dead set against it in 'Five Lessons'. It was really important to him, but I agree it's a preference (echoed by Nicklaus) not an absolute fundamental. It might be important or helpful if you emulate other details of his setup / swing. His 'knees in', 'but not knock-kneed' idea was consistent in both books.

On posture he explicitly mentioned the position of the 'derriere' only in 'Power Golf'. He unhelpfully did not specify what it protruded relative to, though. But, the next paragraphs go on to say from the waist up the back should be straight without 'bend' (hunch back) or 'curve' (sway back) as the knees bend - in other words 'neutral hips' in my read. In 'Five Lessons' he uses the much more precise 'Do not use your hips as you bend your knees', 'upper trunk remains erect', 'like sitting in a chair', 'like lowering yourself onto a sports-spectator-stick' 'two inches below your buttocks'. Plus there are the 'do this' and 'do not do this' drawings to make it clearer. I think the idea was the same, but the wording got more precise. Not latin terminology precise, though. Personally, I think the chair / sports-spectator-stick (two inches below) analogies were the best because they described an almost universally familiar motion.

There is a definite 'feel isn't real' in 'Five Lessons' on posture, where the his words say only the neck bends to bend the head over the ball. But, he clearly rounded his upper back & shoulders slightly in automatic coordination with the head and neck. This agrees with a later illustration that says 'head bent comfortably '. He never explicitly says don't tuck your chin into your chest, but I'm sure some literalists did that even though there isn't a single drawing showing him in such an awkward posture.

Lol, I re-read a section and just realized that Hogan originated (or first popularized) the 'X-Factor' concept.

[mvmac]

  natureboy said:

There is a definite 'feel isn't real' in 'Five Lessons' on posture, where the his words say only the neck bends to bend the head over the ball. But, he clearly rounded his upper back & shoulders slightly in automatic coordination with the head and neck. This agrees with a later illustration that says 'head bent comfortably'. He never explicitly says don't tuck your chin into your chest, but I'm sure some literalists did that even though there isn't a single drawing showing him in such an awkward posture.

Yes I would put much more value in looking at what Hogan did than what was written in books. Remember it's unclear how much Hogan actually contributed to the books.

[natureboy]

  mvmac said:

Yes I would put much more value in looking at what Hogan did than what was written in books. Remember it's unclear how much Hogan actually contributed to the books.

I guess I look at it a little bit like the false distance vs. accuracy debate. I think both a clear-eyed look at what he did as well as what he said he did (or thought about doing) are relevant. To me the example above (bend at the neck) is a perfect example of how a literalist could myopically misinterpret a sloppy phrase from the book and do something that the is not actually advocated (tucking the chin against the chest) in either words or in drawings.

Unless someone has incontrovertible proof that he simply added his name to a ghost-written book, I will doubt that implication and consider the words, analogies, swing thoughts, ideas, and preferences as being of his origin. I believe his reputation as a teacher / golf thinker was as important to him as his playing prowess.

Hogan's lack of higher education may have limited his analogies and precision in use of language, but not his raw ability to observe and reflect on how he was producing his swing & shots. His reference to the 'terror of the field mice' in regards to his problematic hook was a nod to a golf writer of a prior era. This indicates to me that he widely read / researched the available golf literature of the day. I think Hogan had a tremendously high golf IQ. Consider his response to a fellow pro's inquiry on how he hit an extra low ('quail high') shot that still had bite on a windy day: "I try to hit it on the second groove". That fellow pro thought Hogan was pulling his leg with an 'inscrutable' comment, but with what we now know about vertical gear effect was Hogan's advice pretty sound and precise (if also a little terse)?

Like I said in a previous post, the voice in both Hogan's books (and the many articles under his name) seems very consistent to me and also fits with how he spoke in filmed interviews. So for me, the words in the book by and large indicate the intentions and approach behind how he produced his 'reals' even if his description of those reals is sometimes imprecise. I grant you those descriptions / feels may not work for everyone. I do think they help inform both what he was trying to do and possibly even 'really doing' in his swing.

[billchao]

  natureboy said:

I think both a clear-eyed look at what he did as well as what he said he did (or thought about doing) are relevant.

Why would you look at both, especially if one differs from another? What somebody is actually doing is a lot more important than what somebody feels or thinks they're doing. A lot of amateurs think they're swinging inside-out when they're really OTT, for example, and they never work on the things they need to. Hell, I feel like I swing like Hogan but I clearly don't. If I went with that feel, I'd never figure out what I was doing wrong and get better.

[natureboy]

  billchao said:

Why would you look at both, especially if one differs from another?

What somebody is actually doing is a lot more important than what somebody feels or thinks they're doing. A lot of amateurs think they're swinging inside-out when they're really OTT, for example, and they never work on the things they need to. Hell, I feel like I swing like Hogan but I clearly don't. If I went with that feel, I'd never figure out what I was doing wrong and get better.

For one, I don't have current access or funds for a pressure plate analysis so using feels, intentions, and swing pictures from a range of experts is helpful to me. I put a healthy amount of stock in the ideas and words in Hogan's books being his. I don't consider any of his books or ideas, literal 'Gospel'. I take into account that he wrote the book before modern analytical tools. Many in this forum seem to imply he was a 'phone it in' author using a ghost writer. I think that's a bit insulting to Hogan's knowledge and seriousness as a student/teacher of the golf swing. If there is a discrepancy between what is written and what he appears to do, I would default to a 'That's interesting, why is that?" mode, rather than a somewhat dismissive, "He didn't know what he was actually doing so ignore what he wrote".

Second, there is no 'real' data on Hogan's swing better than films or pictures. As we know from the effects of parallax in 2-D projections of 3-D bodies, pictures may not always tell us the full picture when a moment in a dynamic motion is isolated. For me, at least, Hogan's intentions from his writings are clues to help fill in the gaps.

My 'contrary' opinions to some posts or assertions come from a place of trying to understand nuances. I think the moderators here give good advice. I sometimes disagree with characterizations of Hogan's particular details and preferences that may differ from their own.