"Keep your head down Joan!" (Part 1)

Your husband, your friends feel, that you "look up."  You are an educated adult.... with children and a career but for some reason you don't have the attention span to look at a ball?  "Joan you you looked up…you need to keep your head down……"  (Grrrrrrrrrr…….why did I marry this man?) I am amazed that more women don't pull an Elin Woods at this point.  =)

This cycle goes on forever.   The answer?  As long as you think "I am looking up" and "Keep my head down " it's never going to get any better.  How about that?  I am not being helpful so far? …read on.

So when you teach a child to ride a bike at some point you plant a foot in the ground and push and the bike and your child goes forwards.  Right?  Success.  You are planted on the ground and it has wheels so off your child goes to skin her knees.  It's Newtons 1st. "An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. " That little golf club of yours that seems like nothing in your hands ….when it's going 90 miles an hour it acts like the ground and you act like the bike and forces you and your head up.  (At least on the golf course you don't skin your knees.  =)

Trying to hold your head down or trying to do some simple mechanical thing will never overcome that the club is too "heavy " and is pushing you up and out of the shot.  Until you change the real cause you will always be getting pushed around.

Thin to win?"  Nope.  That's a bunch of crap.  Thin means your clubs act "heavy" and you missed it. 

I keep saying "heavy."  This is where clients usually object heartily with comments like "But last year I paid $200 for a lighter shaft in my driver!"  Odds are that made your situation worse.  "Heavy" doesn't mean gross weight but the way it swings.  The way a club is assembled determines if it is heavy based on the location of the balance point.  If a 320 gram driver is built one way it can be VERY heavy.  The same 320 gram driver built differently can be light.  All the golf club feels until it hits the ball is itself rotating around YOU.   

You can experience this very simply.  Take your driver and hold it in one hand horizontal to the ground and walk around the kitchen with it for a few minutes.  Very heavy right?  Now grip down about 6 inches and you reduce the balance point length.  See how much lighter it is?  That is the MOI getting less.

So.  Lose all the things your husband has ever chirped at you about keeping your head down and do one these three things……

        1)Have the club you are hitting adjusted for a lower balance point (which also makes it go faster.). If you don't want to change the total weight of the club then some weight needs to come out of the head and that amount of weight needs to get added to the grip end.  This little move changes the center of balance so the club is MOI lighter and it works like a champ.

        2)If you are afraid to pull weight out of the head then you can add a weight down the shaft but on the grip end of things to change that balance.  Most players use the " Tour Lock Pro."  To a point with most players this will add distance as the lighter feel makes you accelerate the club faster yet since the club weighs a little more it has more punch in it.  Link at Tourlockgolf.com.

        3)Swing "Bigger and smoother."  There is a swing size for every club.  This is why big dudes on tour like Vijay Singh and Ernie Els swing so smooth.  If the size of your arc is too small then accelerating it late or in a small arc will blow you up out of the shot.  That is why people hit chips and pitches thin.  Too big is "fat" as you generate too much power for the club and it is "light" and gets driven into the ground.

Ok?  It is simple to test if your clubs are heavy or light.  Here is how you help the club repair guys.  For starters every club is different.  NEVER let someone treat/ adjust your clubs as a set.  Depending upon how they are spined or glued together they will each react differently.  What you can do yourself is a lie angle test hitting balls marked with a Sharpie.  Draw a heavyish line on a range ball or your ball on the course and immediately set it up vertical and hit it.  It should leave a mark on the face of your club.  The location of the mark reveals the physics of the club.  If it is low on the face the club is too heavy.  If it is high on the face the club is light and you are driving it too deep into the ground.  If it marks on the toe your club is too long (yes, too long) and if it marks heel side it is too short.  If it marks all over your club is wonky and needs to be correctly spined.

Don't do the Elin Woods thing with your hubby btw....he's a good guy.

"Golf is like a box of Chocolates"....well..no. But golf is like a teeter totter

It's going to be very important as a teacher to get a student to understand that in golf few things are ever singular and fewer things are ever permanent.  A lot of players think "I paid $30 to have my clubs lie lofted now they are good.”  That is singular and will be painful until you figure that out.  
 
A mentor once laughed at me as I made some comment like "I had this club bent so now it should be fine".  He went on to tell me that good players understand their tools and that they have a relationship with them that is always changing.   He said that he “was lucky to be married to such a great woman for 40 years”…..and asked "what would have happened if I put in some effort on the first date (akin to bending a club) and then for years after didn't put any more effort in?"  Do you think I would still be married and have those beautiful kids?  NO WAY.  He told me that my clubs are the same way.  
 
If this is too much for you that's fine, but don't ache if a friend gets better and better and you never move off 86.  
 
As an example let's say you get your Driver impact willingness tuned (real MOI).  You hit it leagues better.  The mistake is to think that this is singular and permanent.   Big mistake.  Lets say you take a driving for distance series and gain a smooth 10 mph and lower spin by 800 revs.  25 yards!  Success right?  Almost.  Now you will likely be hooking the Driver as the impact tuning will need to be reset for the extra speed.  
 
Back and forth, this is how it will always be but you will always be improving.  

Notes from putting clinic 1

This step is fun!  Drop 5 or 6 balls and putt at hole, when it is straight put a tee down and find the next straight one!

Now hit a few putts right and left of each point you found before until they start to break....at this point you can stand there stunned that there are such big chunks of easy putts on greens.  This is how you cut your handicap in half and help the local golf teacher pay his mortgage....=)

This is now where your world changes as far as playing golf.....Before you were guessing on putts and had no real strategy for approaching the hole from tee/fairway..  Once you find the outside edges of the "chunk" you now have a geometric model to determine the exact break of all the other putts on the green!

Logic says that if most of your putts all day are straight your scores will plummet.  That's what happens....but once you have straight putts do you actually line up at the hole with your putter like you think or see? We should check or else you are wasting your time playing!  The answer 90% of time is you DON'T.  Ask Marco or Randy.....it is optics and easily solved......Imagine!  Straight putts AND good alignment?  From a $25 clinic.....?  Shoot that's a good deal. 

A great Jerry Rice story. Oh yeah, and Golf.

So about 7 years ago I'm in San Fransisco at a trade show with a good friend and he knew Jerry Rice the NFL Hall Of Famer from the San Fransisco 49s….We ran into Jerry and talked and when he left my friend asked me a trick question…he said "In the NFL what was Jerry MOST famous for?"  I of course answered "stats…games played..touchdowns..Super Bowl rings...etc etc?  

Nope. 

He said that is what he was known for outside the NFL…..what he was known for inside the NFL is this story…..

"On the first day of practice of his rookie season the wide receivers coach set up a basic drill on about the 20 yard line.  The idea was a quarterback drops and throws a simple pass to a wideout….who returns the ball and gets back in line and the drill continues.  Jerry catches his first pass......and then runs all the way, 80 yards, through all the other drills and cheerleaders and all the noise to score a touchdown.  Then runs back.  The coach blows his lid and grabs his face mask and yells at him "#$%^!!!! The heck you doing son????!"  And Jerry replies……

"I intend to be the best wide receiver in the history of the game sir, and in my mind every time I catch a ball I want to score a touchdown….so that’s what I did sir…"

The coach told him not to do that again and the next catch…..touchdown.  Every play.

The story is he did that every catch of every practice his entire career and they eventually had to design practices to allow for it without Jerry running through the other drills.  So who has the record for all time touchdowns in NFL?  Jerry flipping Rice at 208.

So how do I see this relating to golf?  Today I was talking with a player of mine, and we were finding the chunks of straight putts that are on all greens.  She was super excited about how much lower she would score but expressed concerns with how to do this at "practice with the other players". Etc etc.  We talked about playing from the tips of every course she ever plays unless it's a tournament.....we talked about the practice before a qualifying round......asking the coach if she could leave so she could go learn the greens at the course to be played the next day.   She said "there is no way I can do that compared to the way things normally go- what do I do?"

I said "Be Jerry Rice …..be like Jerry Rice."

3 easy steps to take 4 or 5 strokes off your handicap

 
I was talking with a client this morning on the range and he was asking me about any good teachers I had….and it made me remember some really awesome lessons I took from Gary  Lindeblad in Spokane  Washington.  Gary could play and teach AND understand his clients so it was always a treat to see him.
 
"Alright Matthew …….what can we put to bed today."  He would say.  I would have a list of 6 or 10 things I had my butt in a twist over and in about 30 minutes we would sort them all out and off I would go happy as happy gets….. hitting the ball great.  
 
So that is #1 on my list…..
 
1)Find a good teacher that will help you further understand what you are thinking about and working  on….so it can be finished or "put to bed."  Or…… understood completely and put away for a while in favor of a better choice or …….simply understood and tossed out.  
 
(It is one of my favorite things to do as a teacher.  Helping a student  who already has done 80% of the work on an idea wrap it up to the point it is an asset is a great feeling for both of us.  Usually what someone is thinking about is very close to being the right thing for them to work on and it's a lot easier to just finish that program than it is to pivot and go a completely different direction.)

2)"Big forces ALWAYS trump little forces"
 
This is what my father always said and as a physicist I took his word on it.  When I was a kid he would always tell me stories as examples like "They couldn't get the P51 to fly for a long time in WWII.  The engineers were fooling around with flaps (little forces) and all sorts of things and it never worked.  Finally some college kid who wasn't an engineer yet suggested they make one wing longer (big force) and this solved the entire problem."  "That kid saved a lot of lives of the boys flying the b17s.."   As a ten year old this was a little heavy ….:) but he was right.  It is a very important concept in golf…..I'll try to explain. 
 
As a player when you are truly hitting ball the distance you want and truly flighting it the direction you want 90 % of the time then the "big forces" are probably in place and correct.  (From what I know there are 5 big forces and it's fun to break them out and study them.)   After the big forces are set up a player can begin to play with all the little forces (usually Golf Digest and Golf Channel sort of tips) to flight that existing shot differently.  There are dozens of little forces and playing with them is one of the great joys of golf.  
 
When a player isn't hitting the ball the full distance every swing or flighting it really well (you just need fades to fade and hooks to hook)  then it is a huge mistake to be worried about a "little force."  There is some big force that needs some love before the little force will even have an effect. 
3)Learn to be LESS specific
 
My least favorite golf expression is "Take Dead Aim."  Mainly because is just doesn't work.  It is complicated to explain but it makes most golfers look too intently at the ball and their move follows this "overlooking" and tears itself apart.  One of the secrets if there is such a thing to becoming a scratch golfer is to generally flight the ball well and to back way off the specificity.  
I have some golf buddies I play with on Sunday's….cute older guys that are about 15 handicappers…..we will be on a tee and have an exchange like this…..
 
"So Matt should I take this drive off the top of that mound where the grass changes color and turn it over about 3 yards"
 
(Me) "yo whuh?"
 
(Him). "That mound out there about 240 right on the left side near the top where the grass changes color!"
 
(Me). "dude….chill……."

=).  That sort of specificity is not how good players roll.  On that same shot I might set up "left" and " let it go right."  That way I can take a good full pass on the ball and get it going forward …..it'll go 290 or so and cut and end up where it ends up.  It's not that I am lazy or so good that I don't care….its just that I have learned from other players that just a nice full shot will work out great most of the time.  
 
Golf courses are big.  
 
As you get closer to the green good players start to hunt for chunks of the green that have straight putts and the specificity increases some then……
 
Cleaning up the "to do" list in your head of mechanical stuff and getting them in the right order is always good.  Most  anyone can get surprisingly good if they get big forces and specificity in the right order.  As I mentioned earlier playing around with little forces is really fun but only when the general big stuff is in order.  
 
Cheers.  Matt

Stuck in a rut? Think about Laws and Legends

So I believe personally in this Idea brought forth as I read it by Robert Bly.  Laws vs Legends.  When I think "Laws " I think of the guy at the course all fired up about something learned on the Golf Channel that came from a different player.  When I think Legends I see Seve learning how to hit balls on a beach.  I saw John Mahaffey one time (in between cigs ) at Missoula Country Club.  He needed about ten yards extra for a drive to get to a dogleg so before he hit his drive he bent the shaft of his driver over his knee.  He fired a smooth little 62 and all it cost him was a bruise on his leg and 2 packs of cigarettes.  Serious Legends.

I think it's natural for one to think that in the clinics I teach it will be all the Laws, and organized.  What I actually teach are dozens of ways for any amateur to spark their own Legend and to regain some smoke in their own mind and intuition again with the game.  I think most players think that the path from 86 to 75 will take ten years and slow painful progress working through tips on their swing.  There is leap missing in this idea....the leap has to be considered at least a possibility.  Some players just make that leap all at once without knowing how or why.  Ever hit a almost thin wedge and in the air think "oh shiiiiit" and have stop on a dime 4 feet from the hole?  The Legends are trying to teach you to hit your wedges lower ……are you listening?

Laws vs. Legends

Golf Digest (incremental change) vs. personal discovery (huge change)

Swing weight matching vs. Golf club willingness 

Big heavy putter grips (trend) vs. the correct grips per your carrying angle

Not reading putts vs. Pelz

Pelz vs. finding chunks of straight putts                                            

Learning straight putts from me vs. doing your own searching for straight putts            

Your clubs are a "set" vs. fitting your clubs one at a time

"Someone else glued them up" vs. You spine and glue up your own sticks

Fear of bogey or double vs Hunting for birdies and getting tap in pars

Trying to hit it perfect vs. hitting it "dirty" but shaped correctly

Practice is "boring" vs.  You understand "calibration" so you can't practice enough

Trying to hit, steer, control ball vs. Trusting preparation and letting it fly

Using a handicap vs. Playing the ENTIRE course straight up

Doing what your buddies do vs. Building your own yardage book and playing from that

Pouting, tantrums, explaining crap vs. Not taking up other people's space

Fair weather golf vs. Loving the wind and rain

Big fat bounce angles on wedges vs. Rusted ground wedges that work

230 and excuses (age, knees etc) vs. 270 cuz you are smart

Wishful thinking vs. Seeing things as they are

Specificity and fear vs. General flighting and degrees of freedom

Praising what is killing you vs. Not knowing…exploring…being stumped

There will be a lot of times in my blog where it sounds like I am hating on Golf Digest and the Golf Channel…..that is not the case….what I am worried about are players that get their information from only these two places.  There is a serious lack of the wildness that goes into a good player in that program.  It is Laws and Laws only.

Several years ago I remember playing In Web.com Monday qualifier….on the first tee I am introduced to this kid from Texas that looked rough…..I look into his bag and he had Pings that we're all victims of a grinder and smothered in lead tape…..I passed a " tisk tisk " judgement…..he hit this weird hooking runner on the first tee…..I thought "tisk tisk" again….he then hit this chin high wedge to 5 feet….I thought "lucky dude thinned a wedge and it worked out good."……I shot 68 hitting my pretty clubs high and got smoked by that kid (who has since won on the PGA tour).  He shot 62….with the runner hook and chin high wedges ALL DAY.  It was Legendary.

Let's bring it closer to St George.  Let's say you take a clinic from me on short game.  (Still borderline Laws…..) You learn that a big chunk of the green you are playing is nothing but straight putts .  (Curiosity raising…)  You learn that when chipping to this green that the trajectory of the chip or pitch is relative to where you are in relation to this chunk-  and that it makes scoring crazy easier.  As a bonus at the end of class you learn that the big chunk of bounce on the bottom of your wedges was designed to be grinded off and that doing so makes the club a billion times easier to hit and more consistent.  (More energy but still Laws…)  

Right?  Still Laws?  But......you go buy a vice and angle tester and start grinding your own wedges?  LEGENDS.  When you are grinding the golfing Gods will grab your file and refine into the Legends category.  You will feel it.  You are like a caveman that gets to leave the cave the next morning to hunt with this new thing called a "spear."

The "my putter isn't aimed anywhere near I thought it was " vs serious fun

Type

Draining bombs is not a special occasion

The topic of golf expectations...putting expectations is a touchy one.

Noyone wants to play with an asshole who gloats about draining putts all day long. 

I talk with my players about when they have made putts and they usually say something like "three years ago there was a day when I made 3 putts over ten feet."  They say it in a tone like the day they met their wife at the lake or when the Bengals last won a playoff game…..

I think that the correct expectation is to know that you've done the work around putting (easiest organized way is to practice what you learn in my 8 step putting camp).  You have a yardage book of your favorite course and know the straight putt sections of each green.  If you know that you know the break of every putt on the green and you can study it at night on Google Earth.  You know the sections and then you can fiddle with your approaches to take MANY feet out of the total break of your putts in a day.  Easier putts mean more putts drained.  Your putter aims at exactly the target you want and you tell stories about how far off it was when you were tested.  You learn your putter "willingness" so the putter itself wants to arrive in front of you without your help.   You practice with your eyes closed and make a huge majority of your practice putts.  You learn about grip size and how it effects the geometry of your hips when the putter is in motion.  After that your body feels super stable.  You start making a lot of putts.  The putts you miss are tap ins. 

The correct expectation in putting is to think you might make 4-6 putts a day that aren't "short."   I think its important to be low key about it as most of your buddies don’t make that many in a month.  I try to be helpful and chill and keep the utter pleasure of great hunting inside me every day. 

Making putts is a daily thing and should not be revered like a special occasion.

Really good golfers make good decisions

Just as it says....instead of worrying about how one feels or the score on the last hole it is about staying focused on a process and making great choices from that process