LankyLefty

Real bannana slice but still hit your fairways, thats just as good and being dead strait and hitting all your fairways. Long as the ball ends up where you intended it to go... your in good shape.

I really think If he saying that 1 man will be the future of US golf then hes automatically comparing them to Tiger and Jack. Just like every talented wing man in the NBA is compared to Jordan.

Keegan who? Oh that nobody who came out of nowhere to win the lamest major of the year.... Common, congrats to this dude, hes probably got a bright future on tour but... Common man, Nicklaus was the first guy to really come out on the modern media stage and take the professional golf world by storm. It would be more then 30 years later that tiger would come out and one up him. Outside of those two guys, no one has been the "the guy" for more then a a few tournaments in a row, Ben Hogan was great but his career was marred by injury and subpar competition. So if history is any indication It will be at least 10-15 years before we see someone who is capable of what Tiger or Jack did. Until then we will have to settle for the smattering of somewhat exciting young guys we have, but comparing anyone to Tiger or Jack at their best is just setting them up for failure.

This has gotten a little crazy... I think we can all agree that someone in good shape is going to hit the ball farther then that same person out of shape. What I take issue with is the notion that you can train swing speed. A reasonably athletic person is not going to make significant strides in swing speed by working out or doing anything really.

Thats the greatest thing about this game, length is nice but in the end if you can drive it 200 yards youll be ok. I will never hit a baseball 400 feet. Ill never throw a fastball 95 mph. My curveball doesn't really curve. I cant hit the pilon in the back of the endzone off my back foot with a 300 pound DE in my grill. My jump shot isnt all that good and I cant dunk it. But in golf, while i dont do it as often as the pros do, I can make a shot that any PGA pro would be jealous of. I can sink a 30 foot birdie putt. Or come out a trap and make an amazing chip to save par. I can make an approach shot that stops 2 feet form the hole. But distance? You cant train it you've either got it or you dont.

Lets stop looking at extremes. Average Joe 90 MPG swing speed, not out of shape, not in shape jusr average. If this hypothetical person with a 90 MPH swing, which on a good day will give you 230 yard drives, starts hitting the weights, doing hardcore training. It is within reason to expect that he could extend that to 95 or a bit more MPH or more. Perhaps crack 250 on a good portion of his drives. So in that sense yeah you can "train" distance. If you work everyday on your putting, or short game, or any skill. You can get very good at it. If you work everyday on hitting monster drives... your going to hit a wall. I pitched in D-III for a year, i threw maybe 75mph on a good day, no amount of training was gonna get me to throw 90 I just didnt have that good an arms. Similarly on the golf course I drive the ball around 280, and no amount of training is going to kick that up to 325 or 350. You can maximize your body but you cant train what you aint got.

One of my favorite sports quotes ever came form Kevin Durant he said "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." Training takes whatever talent you have and lets it come out, but you cant train Talent.

What you bench has zero effect on how fast you can swing a relatively light object. There are 2 forms of muscle fiber, one exerts short powerful bursts but runs out of energy quickly, the other takes longer to get going but does not tire as fast. The first kind, fast twitch fibers, allow you to move a relatively light object, such as a golf club, in a short powerful burst. The other allow you to exert much greater total force but over a longer period of time. Jaime Sadlowski, could hit it 400+ yards when he was 17 and skinny. Through training and to a larger extent technology hes extended that to 425-430. Being relatively fit, having proper nutrition, and all that stuff will allow your body to perform at its peak level. However training in the gym will not increase that peak level.

Strenth is not equal to distance at all. The gym does nothing for you. The longest hitter in the world, owner of a 150mph driver swing, is a 5 '10 160 pound canadian, muscles don't get you distance.

I chip everything, unless i absolutely cannot. Pitching for me is like closing my eyes and throwing the ball where I think the pin might be, I really have no clue where its going. I think in a perfect world you'd use both depending on conditions.

I struggle with an open face at impact with drivers and woods, to fix this I tweak my grip, to keep the face more closed. With this grip I occasionally roll the wrists creating a shot with almost no lofts pulled way off the right. I usually do this right after Ive hit a bad shot and left the face way open, I over compensate and pull the ball.

And you win the award for necro thread of the year lol... 5+ years old.

While FLOG4 may be putting it in a childish way... and their have been plenty of great golfers who have know clue how to teach what they have. The hardest thing in golf to teach is distance, teaching someone to really compress the ball to get that amazing arcing flight that the really good ball strikers have is really really hard. So im not saying that you should swing as hard as you can, but when your starting out... swing for the fences and be happy with good contact even if you land in the weeds. You can come back and adjust the grip, adjust the backswing, adjust where the ball is in your stance. Its much harder to adjust the muscle memory that you've built over years of practice and playing.

Im gonna go against the grain here, for a beginner Ill take length over straightness any day. Especially in irons. If you learn to compress the ball effectively with your irons, even if they fade or draw(or hook/slice) a bit its much easier to come back and straiten that out, then it is to teach someone who hits it strait but sweeps or scoops at the ball how to hit down on it. That said if you can hit a 7 140 your probably OK plenty of people use their 7 for 150 so you aint to far behind.

The question asked was how some pros could get near 200 yards out of 8 while he could barely get that out of 3. The answer is swing speed, pure and simple. With a better swing could he get 220 or maybe 230 out of that same 3? Maybe he could. But the fact is hitting an 8 Iron anywhere near 200 yards is going to require swing speeds that a very small percentage of the world has.

Physics disagrees with you.

Sorry but either your swing speed is wrong, or your distances are wrong. A 90-92 mph swing speed with a 9 degree driver would have trouble breaking 210 on the fly and 225 or 230 absolute max with a nice roll. If your geninely a 90-92 swing speed then I think a reg flex 9 degree with a slightly shortened shaft would be fine, you would not be able to tell the difference. If you genuinely hit it 270, your swing speed is likely 105-10 and you should be using a stiff flex.

Average Joe swing speed 85-90 MPH... Average PGA Tour swing speed 110-115 mph...

I don't think their is a right way to swing, but there are some things that most or all great golfers have in common and there are some things that almost all bad golfers have in common. Their are also of course the freaks of nature (Bubba Watson or Furyk for example) who fly in the face of conventional wisdom but still strike the ball very well.

Tour Issue basically means that they are manufactured to tighter specifications then normal clubs and also often have attributes that normal clubs do not. For example a Tour preferred driver head that says 8.5 degrees on it, might range from 8.4 to 8.6 where a driver head you buy stock at the store that says 9.5 could range anywhere from 9-10 degrees. Regular joes tend to slice the ball with a driver, so you will never find a driver that is open, however some "Tour Issued" drivers might be as much as 3 degrees open.

I think its easier to replicate the standard impact tape/lie board at home.

Im fairly certain that if you are more likely to break your club coming into contact with very hard little while ball then a very soft cardboard box.

Im sort of going through the same process as you although I wont be joining anywhere until next season. My choices are somewhat limited though as my country has only 6 courses and only 3 are anywhere close to me. None of the courses are busy, I can walk 18 holes in under 3 hours when im out alone at all 3 places. Nor are any very expensive both of the places Im seriously considering are under 1000(about 1450 american) euros per year. The savings from on a per-play basis are quite astonishing. To break even you only have to play 3.3 times per month at one place and only 2.5 times per month at the other. They are both gonna cost me some gas but thats ok. The courses are both very nice, one is out near the sea and was rated one of the top 100 courses in europe in 2009. The other is not anything special from a golf perspective but Is a nicer environment. Both are well maintained and staffed with very nice practice facilities. I dont know which one I want to join yet, good thing i have until next spring to decide...

Even after watching this video im not sure what the hell this thing does besides make you look like a tool.

They are not clones. Top Flite is owned by Callaway. They are just a cheap entry level set, if your not sure youll like the game or are on a real tight budget, sure go for it. But for just a little more you could get some nicer used clubs if you shopped around.