where club head speed comes from

[golfinguy28]

post removed

[GoNavy]

Re: where club head speed comes from

I subscribe to the Sam Snead method of improving club head speed. Go out and hit 500 golf balls a day, after about a year you will be hitting it much further...it's magic.

[GolfJunkieSr]

Re: where club head speed comes from

In addition to arm, and body speed, I also believe alot of club head speed comes from holding the wrist cock (lag?) till the last possible mini second before impact. The longer the wrist cock is held prior to the start of release, the faster the club head has to travel to catch up to your impact position. Another factor I believe that is relevent, is being balanced through out the entire swing. Of course all the good things that relate to a higher swing speed probably don't mean squat unless you impact the ball properly. GJS

[GoNavy]

Re: where club head speed comes from

if only...

LOL...I am not saying you will hit any better. The point being to increase swing speed, I was trying to illustrate it has to do with muscles, specifically golfing muscles. The reason professionals hit the ball so much further then the average golfer is, they play every single day. Go out and play for four days straight in a row, and hit a couple buckets of balls after your play. My guess is you will be sore, tired and generally worn out after that week. Now imagine that for a year, or several years non-stop. These guys are on another level of strength and fitness as it pertains to golf muscles. These guys and gals are athletes make no mistake about that... Of course their club head speed and distance they hit will be further, trying to match these guys just playing every weekend is just plain delusional.

No different then someone who cuts down trees, that guy swings an axe all day, he will be able to cut trees down all day, he is acclimated to swinging that axe. I would need an oxygen tank and bed rest after the first tree...lol...but I am sure after several months I would get use to it. Doing a little more each day, after a year or so, I could go at it, just like the other guys, because the specific muscles used for that job, are much stronger and my body would be acclimated to doing that task for extended periods. Like I said it is magic....lol

So you don't have to play everyday to build golf muscles. You could for instance buy a heavy club and make sure you swing that thing every single day. start out slow and build each day until you can go at it a hundred times a day. You will, I promise, increase both swing speed and distance you hit the ball. You might even improve your swing.

[bill reed]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Hi GoNavy
i had read about Trevino hitting over 1000s of balls a day every day (7 days a week) and then going out and playing when he worked on the ranges in El-Paso when he first changed his swing from a normal swing to the swing we now think of as Trevino's.
he said he did not need to practice when he started winning on tour as he had hit so many balls in his younger years his body knew what to do without him even thinking about it.
i think your right about pro golfers golf Muscles and the fact they grove a swing by swinging every day and hitting 1000s of golf balls.
you put in the work and you'll get the results.
most of us just don't put the work in that is required or don't have the time to do it.
cheers
bill

[BrianW]

Re: where club head speed comes from

I have written an article on this subject, to create faster clubhead speed you must reduce the arc your hands rotate on through impact so that the clubhead can accelerate through just like the action of cracking a whip. If you spin a small weight on a piece of string the smaller and tighter the circle you make with your fingers the faster the weight will rotate, the larger the inner circle with your fingers the slower the weight will rotate, releasing lag is just another aspect of this physical action.

We can relate this action to the way we swing the clubhead to create very fast clubhead speed and impressive distance.

This video explains it perfectly:


http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=I5nNkzgjLUE


I agree that posture and balance is also important to generating a stable swing that will improve ball contact and power.

Here is another video to assist with understanding:


http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kUX2jZbUgsY

And finally another drill to train for that extra bit of speed:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Cq_vhKe0E

[GolfJunkieSr]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Perhaps this link will help to understand my thoughts on lag, and club head speed.

http://www.golfnow.com/greenbay/comm...head-lag=speed

Then again I am quite aware that a person can find a web page on the web that will compliment any person's thoughts on a subject.

To each thier own or grain a salt if you wish........GJS

[dagosa]

Re: where club head speed comes from

As long as one is making consistently solid contact....increasing club head speed without addressing this first is like putting the cart before the horse.
I've seem many players try to increase distance with added club head speed, when better and more consistent contact would serve them better, distance wise; myself included.

[BrianW]

Re: where club head speed comes from

ok, I got my IBA on, here we go...

I love his balance video, that is great.

So are you swinging around your body? Yes and no. Your body is swinging around and you are staying in front of it. And your club is moving around your body relative to that central point.

So now back to this body circle. How does that move around? As I have stated there is no power in spinning around some imaginary central point of the hips. The hips have a 2 ball and socket joints the femur attaches to. So we must turn around that. What is the fastest turning point on our body other than the wrist? The feet. So to turn our body we must shift our weight so that the right femur is atop of the hip and turn around that. What that does is raise our right hip and the humorous appears to be traveling upwards (which it is, but it is moving up along with the torso, not by itself). And then we can turn around that by twisting our foot into the ground. And on the DS we twist those bones the other way and that shifts our weight to have our left femur on the hip so that our body can turn around that point. This part of the swing is more difficult to explain online.

That is how the body circle happens, our weight gets shifted as the feet turn. And the wrist circle happens by pronating the wrist in the BS and supinating in the DS. Which this guy clearly does as well thought he doesn’t talk about it as it is such a natural movment, we just forgot how to do it.

Stand up, hold your arm strait out in front of you parallel to the ground with the palm up thumb facing 3 o’clock (like hitchhiking). Now turn your torso (you can turn around your hips or however you want as you are not trying to get any power, just for demonstration) and with your hand just reach back as far as you can like you are about to throw something as your elbow folds naturally. I would be that you naturally pronated the wrist and your thumb is pointing at 12ish. Now from there go back to the start position. You will naturally supinate. Now this time try the same thing except try to pronate as far and you can and then supinate as fast as you can. Now do this but bend from the waist 30*. Isn’t that what the golf swing looks like?

You mean to tell me that all the golf swing is, is twisting around my back foot and twisting my wrist and doing the opposite in the DS? Yep. The rest of the swing you have to just let the club swing as ritter demonstates. If you forgot how to do that then maybe his “humorous retraction” might help you but you but all you are doing is letting the club swing naturally. Some people see that Sergio pic and they try to pull the club through with the handle first so they can have the handle first like that pic shows and then end up with little to no club head speed because the club is only going as fast as their arms/body is moving. You want that clubhead to release and pass the handle and you try to do that from the top in order to get all of that energy into the ball. So we know pulling the handle through 1st gives us no speed, so how else can the handle get there 1st, it is through the body turn happening so fast by the time the hand has started to supine the clubhead is already there. When you add a powerful body turn it doesn’t appear that way at all, it gives the Sergio/Hogan/Woods etc. illusion.

With a club in your right hand with it hyperextended (cupped back) and fully pronated, try to supinate your wrist as fast and you can and time it. Then once you learn how to pivot correctly, go to the top, and pivot down, and time that. You will find that by the time you get to that Sergio pic, you have barley supinated at all. And ecen if you can’t turn you body very fast when first learning the pivot, still keep casting from the top as hard as you can while letting the clubhead pass the hands naturally as the club swing and I promise you will hit further than if you are just pulling the club handle through. If on video it looks as if you are casting, that is good, that just means you are not turning fast enough and you need to work on that. I wish ritter took a video of him full out hitting as hard as he can, but not having any weight shift or turn at all, you would see a great cast and I bet he could still drive 250+.

I do have problems with my balance as I didn’t start swinging the club this easy natural way and that drill ritter gives is a very good one. That is by far the biggest problem with my swing is learning to stay in balance and shed old habbits. I can swing halfway and not have to worry about balance, but then I can only drive it 270 (which isn’t bad, but who wants to hit 270 when the that is only half swing distance, and you could get a whole lot more with some practice and a full swing.

I just don't agree with you. Physics are physics and swinging the golf club is simpler than you are suggesting and can be reduced to a few actions that are easy to maintain, the part that generates most speed is what happens at the wrists. Creating lag does nothing in its own right, what matters is how you release it and you can only do that by wrist manipulation. One way to do this is by rotating the forearms and wrists so that the lagged club is whipped through, body rotation can only assist with this action and not generate suitable speed in it's own right. Another way to do it is by slowing down the hands and whipping them through a tight arc in the method Ritter shows, he is using the principles of a one plane swing where the trail arm folds back in the backswing and the lead arm extends across the chest, in the downswing the trail arm extends and the lead arm folds, the action of pulling back quickly on the trail elbow creates the small arc needed for additional power.

In a one plane swing like his the hips are quite inactive, they only react to the turning of the upper body and arms, you must also stay stacked and keep sideways movement to a minimum, the swing is quite simple, it is rotary and does not require the club to be moved on different arcs in the back and down swings, power is generated mainly by the rotational force of the upper torso and arms then the club being whipped through a tight arc at impact as one arm and wrist extends while the other folds. The analogy of cracking a whip where momentum is transferred from the handle down through the whip until the tip whips through at the speed of sound is similar in effect to this swing.

I can understand that the concept of slowing down the hands to generate speed will be a difficult one for some people to accept. I don't think you can argue that this swing method does not work, it has been adopted by so many golfers now and is starting to have an effect on the way that most modern tour players swing, they may not all be full one plane swingers but their swings are more around the body, lower at the top and more on-plane. I can testify to the way Ritters drill generates almost effortless clubhead speed, I use it very effectively and can still shoot to a single figure handicap at 60 with it.

PS:

I needed to delete some of your original text in this post as the total with mine exceeded the maximum allowed in a single post.

I think we have both explained our positions and would prefer to leave it at that if it's Ok with you. There are more than one way to swing a golf club as indeed there are to skin a cat.

[BrianW]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Further to my explanation on how to generate speed with the hands and arms in the one plane swing is the way the trail arm uses a piston type action, retracting in the backswing then pushing through with power in the downswing. Instead of body twisting or turning to create power you can produce a power source by extending or pistoning your trail arm to deliver a powerful strike into the ball. This differs from the two plane cupped trail wrist at impact.

These pictures show a classic action on how the trail arm and wrist can create a powerful piston like force into the ball.

[BrianW]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Centrifugal force is not a real force, it is a reaction to the real centripetal force that pushes outwards.

I was not suggesting rotation does not create any speed or assist a good swing, of course it does. I am saying that use of the arms and wrists are major speed contributors.

I like much of what Shawn Clements normally says but not this time. You cannot correlate what happens with the athletic action of hammer throwing to swinging a golf club they are different actions, no lag or release is used rather centripetal force is built up gradually then released instantaneously. In the golf swing no power is generated in the backswing and should only be activated around halfway down in the downswing. The collision that propels the golf ball at high speed is generated by a light clubhead moving very fast such that in the equation(Force = Mass x Acceleration) the force is created by a small mass being accelerated very fast, in the case of a hammer through the components of the equation are different, a heavy weight is moved fairly slowly to generate the force.

Your comments on the arms collapsing are not relevant to what I have suggested either and I am completely lost on your comments relating to an engine, I was only using the analogy to explain how the right arm can have a powerful role in the swing.

I have to reiterate that there is not only one golf swing. Head speed can be generated in different ways, I am merely explaining some of those ways, I am not disagreeing with your methods.

[jbrunk]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Do a search on 'snapping your kinetic chain'. This will tell you all you need to know about clubspeed and how to increase it.

[Badgolfer101]

Re: where club head speed comes from

The book "The Physics of Golf" by Theodore Jorgensen presented the author's take on this very subject. The book was rather technical, and even included a chapter on some of the differential equations relative to the discussion of the subject. Another book, "Anatomy of the Perfect Golf Swing" reads like a Gray's Anatomy edition. I don't believe that either book is of much benefit in helping a golfer improve his club speed. Ofcourse, physics and mechanics come into play during a proper swing, but I don't think that the swing should be a cognitive process - developing a relaxed thought free fluid motion would be far more beneficial. Obviously, there's no unitary definite way to swing a golf club, as evidenced by the varied pro swings on tour. However, certain fundamentals are common to all good swings - setup, balance, weight shift, timing. When club meets ball, most good swings look similar. Ask half a dozen club teaching pros how he generates club head speed and you'll probably get half a dozen different answers. Basically, they really don't know, and don't need to. They most likely started in golf young, maybe played high school golf, learned the basic fundamentals, pocessed the inate athletic ability and the mental -physical makeup to play the game, and went from there. Sure, they can sell you a lesson and look at your grip, stance, posture, etc. But, a lot of the club teaching pros are far better adapt a peddling their over priced pro shop wares. Mind you, I'm not referring to all teaching pros - some are quite good at what they do, but they can be expensive and sometimes hard to find.
Any golf instuctional text will explain that one must get the club to a good loaded position at the top with a well torqued connection between the upper and lower body. But therein lies the rub, one must conserve this energy and apply it optimally to an elastic collision with the ball. Here's where most of us fail - miserably. Typical instruction says start the DS from the ground up ; A myriad of ways have been described, bump the hip, reset the leading foot, move the knee, etc,etc,etc. - all to get the weight moving to the leading foot, to be followed by a rotation thru impact. Then, presto...it's all supposedly on auto pilot from there - arms drop, lag maintained, wrists release thru impact, end of story. Baloney, rarely does all this happen for the average player. I feel that this transition move should be more of a blended reaction to the backswing windup rather then two seperate events - something like the automatic response of starting your forward leg when one prepares to throw a ball. I also fell that not only loss of club lag and body rotation, but also the incorrect method of releasing the wrists - or lack thereof - is one of the greatest energy drains.

[Mr O]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Thanks for your idea. I've been a tennis bum for 35 years and am in shape (167 5' 9"). Yet I cannot drive far (less than 200 but age 73). I have lost strength but as you prescribe I am going to swing a weighted club hard every other day to see if your idea works. Thanks!

[Mr O]

Re: where club head speed comes from

Great pics, thanks. It makes sense.