No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 913 - The Stack System with Dr. Sasho MacKenzie

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

If you wanna swing the club faster, this episode is for you. The co-founder of The Stack System, Dr. Sasho MacKenzie, joins the show to chat about the program that’s allowed thousands of golfers (including Soly) make meaningful gains in their swing speed. He explains the science behind the system, and how they went about gamifying it for maximum user enjoyment and benefit. Soly will testify… it works! You can save ten percent off your order with code: NoLayingUp If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining The Nest: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at nolayingup.com/join Support Our Partners: Rhoback fanduel.com/nlu Harry's Razors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be the right club. Be the right club today. Johnny, that's better than most. How about him? That is better than most. Better than most! Expect anything. better than most. Expect anything. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the No Lang a podcast.

I am stoked about today's interview with Dr. Sasho Mackenzie. We are going to talk a lot about how I ended up gaining a lot of speed in my golf swing, the science behind it, how it all happens. It's if you want to listen, I explain the whole thing. If it's going to it's going to sound like an infomercial, that's totally fine by me. The experience has been that fantastic. We talk about all of that. I want to give a shout out to our friends at Roeback. I've been telling you

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R-H-O-B-A-C-K..com 20% off polos, bottoms, qzips, hoodies, vests, hybrid jackets and more with code NLU follows not the same without row back. All right, I'm really excited for today. I'm very much so if this sounds like an infomercial, it's on me. This was my idea for the listener's sake here. Listen, we do get an affiliate fee when you use code, no laying up at the stack system.com, but I promise all of you is not why this episode is happening. I've been fascinated with what has happened in my golf game in the last three months. I've been doing the stack

system. I've seen gains. I didn't think were possible. I'm kind of scared of how fast I'm swinging the golf club right now, but I'm joined today by one of the developers of the stack system, Dr. Sasho McKenzie. I'm late to this thing. This is not a new thing, but Sasho, is your reaction, is the reaction you've heard from me on this thing? Is it a familiar one to you at this point? Yeah, it's pretty normal. Yeah. If you take a, you know, a pretty athletic person that's motivated about improving their golf game, you know, you're going to see some speed increases and you're going to be overly joyed the way you are, I think.

Well, I was intimidated by it. I think a lot of people can be intimidated by the speed process. When I've told people about this, the quick stuff I hear a lot is, you know, you know, what goes into it. You know, I, this thing sat in my garage for close to three years before trying it because I was a little intimidated. I thought I maybe needed to go to a gym, thought I needed all kinds of stuff, but like that's not the case. I guess kind of, can you tell us a little bit about like why, you know,

what went into this in simplifying this process down? And I want to get into kind of some of the psychology of the app and how it's all worked. But give us just kind of a foundation for, and I promise we're on the back end of this, we're gonna break down a lot of the science behind this, but a foundation for what the program, what people can expect with a program like this. Sure. Well, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to get faster.

So the programming itself is designed to maximize the efficiency of speed increases. So we have no things like swing from your knees. We have no non-dominant side stuff. Basically all my work with tour players and amateurs and the theories and the research is like, what's the quickest way you can do a workout and what's the least amount you can do workouts over the course of a few months and see meaningful increases in speed? Yeah.

Then also, we did put a lot of thought into we want to make it game of five. We want to make it addictive. We want to make it easy to do. People don't have to think. They just show up. They do what the app says. You get these dopamine hits from setting records. And that's it. That's what we tried to do. That's exactly what worked. And honestly, I look forward to it. I'm not a very disciplined person in general, but like that grit score. So for those that don't know, there's a grit score

that gives you, basically it's judged off of how frequent you're doing your workouts. And like, I don't want my grit score to drop. Like that is gamified and it's worked from a dopamine perspective, it keeps me doing it. So to give listeners an idea of kind of the baseline here and what's going on here. So the program starts with you do a baseline measurement,

you take it out back, you take your driver and you do some swings at different weights and gives you measurements. And I started with a driver E-speed or estimated speed. And I want you to explain that here in a second of 117 miles an hour with my driver, which is a little faster than what I think I am on course or was on course at the time. But I tested it yesterday. I got the driver out and in the training, you don't

do many driver swings. Really, it's at the end of a session or a program that you've done, which may last several weeks. And so I haven't been testing my driver's swing speed, but I got the driver out yesterday and I swung it at 127 miles an hour. Nice. I mean, I was blown away by it, right? I mean, because there's all kinds of measurements you're doing within it. It's kind of giving you an estimated speed, but like that is what it says. My estimated speed should be in the app and it was what I swung it at yesterday. My distance potential has gone from 290 carry at sea level to 317. I've spent 9.6 total hours in training.

I've made 917 swings in my backyard. Says once every three days, maybe 35 minutes when you include the stretching that goes into it. App walks you through. So explain to me how this worked. How did I get this fast, this quickly with the program you created? Yeah, so you've hit on a lot of points.

So we only require a driver in what we call a baseline session and a progress check. And those are identical sessions where there's a couple of main points. We want to see where you're at. So it's important for you to see that you're improving. At the end of the program, how much faster am I swinging my driver?

But we also use the baseline session to come up with customized programming. So over my research, you know, the early stuff was like, okay, if you swing stuff that's slightly heavier than your driver overload training, you can get faster. This has been proven with with jumping with sprinting with throwing. The key is, it's, it's a certain percentage of load increase that we're trying to target. So a lot of research goes into figuring out, okay, how much weight do we need to have added

onto this stick so we just get a little bit increased in the forces you're required, the torques that you're required. And then there's overspeed where we have you swing things slightly faster in a driver and the same principle applies. We don't want you to swinging way, way faster, just a little bit faster so that there's that adaptation that's appropriate.

When you do the baseline session, we have you swing things slightly heavier and slightly lighter than your driver, along with your driver, so we establish what's called a force velocity profile. And certain people tend to swing or better at swinging heavier weights or better swinging lighter weights and depending on that proportion

Will fit you into a specific program and that will change so you're you're just about through the first program I believe I've completed the base the foundation and I'm in my first program. Yes, right So you're in that first program So the app would have looked at all your data so far, looked at the force velocity profile, then made a recommendation of what program you should go in. So that baseline's key for those two reasons. We wanna know where you're at with your driver and we wanna get some idea on what's the best program for you.

Then during the training, we wanna make it as easy as possible. Lots of people have just enough room to swing this, it's a hybrid length stick. If we're asking people to hit balls all the time, that's a barrier. If we're asking people to swing their driver all the time, it's not necessary for the training, it's necessary for testing, that's a barrier. So you just swing the stack.

But what we've done, as you're probably aware of really quickly, is we have you swing the one night for you, the 195 gram load on the stack every session. And that's the one that best correlates to your driver in terms of how fast you're swinging it. And that allows us after every session you do, we see how you're swinging that 195 and that allows us to adjust the next session's workout. Right, so as your force velocity profile changes as you go

or as you swing faster or slower, that dictates what your next workout goes. So the app creates these workouts on the fly. And from earlier research, you know, over the past 10 years now, I know that certain people need a little bit more overload, certain people need a little bit more over speed and that gets sprinkled in as you go as well. So those those

You know, you don't have to worry about that. It's like the the trainer you go you go to the gym The trainers like right. Sorry, we're gonna do incline bench press and you're gonna do the 60s You don't have to think okay. How many how many reps do you're gonna do six reps? How long do I rest? Don't worry about it. I'll tell you, you know, I'll give you a little timer. So we just guide you all the way through. Yeah, gosh, there's a lot to go with that. So how much does the actual without the weights on it? How much does the stack way

like I compare like if I do the 195 plus the actual weight of it? I think drivers typically weigh around 310 315 grams based on a Google search. Is that pretty comparable? Because my speed with the 195 is slower than my actual driver speed, right? So I just wanted another relationship between that. Yeah, so it's quite complex, okay? So we've got, it's easy to think of it

as just heavier and lighter. But this is your podcast, Solly, so stop me if I'm a little bit too far into the weeds. Well, before you go ahead and get into the weeds, but I'll point out like it's simplified on the front end, right? You don't need to think about this, right? So as a user, just like do what it says

and you don't have to worry about any of this, but I want to pick your brain as to how it actually works as well. Yeah, exactly. So there's three properties of a golf club that determine how much resistance we have to swing it. Like how fast we can swing it. There's the weight, which is easy to set the thing on a scale and you're right, a driver

weighs about 320 grams. The equivalent weight for the stack is going to be heavier than your driver because it's shorter and that affects two other properties, the center of mass location. So that's where if you took the stack and balanced it on your finger, where would it balance? The further that balance point is from your hands where you're holding the club, the more resistance there is to swinging it.

And then the third one is the moment of inertia. That's if you closed your eyes and waggled the club around, geez, how tough is it to change the direction of this thing when I'm moving it? That's the moment of inertia. And what we've been able to do is actually that 41 inch length isn't by accident. It helps people swing it without sticking the thing in the ground, but it also allows us to create for the 195 condition a slightly overload condition, but still swinging it at the same speed as your driver.

So when I say swing at the same speed, because it's shorter, the speed on the radar will be slower, but how fast the shaft is moving, it's angular velocity, how fast your body's moving will be about the same as your driver, if that makes sense. So we then using that 195 gram, we've, I've got tons and tons of data. And now we've got data on almost 50,000 people where they swing their driver. And people like you that not everybody gets the 195, but most adult males

get the 195 as their standard stack weight. So we can be like, right, here's Solly swinging his driver, here's Solly swinging the 195. And we know that those are equivalent. And we can have this little prediction equation that just says, hey, if you're swinging the 195 this fast, you're probably going to be swinging your driver this much faster. And it's just a little physics equation allows us to predict that. So if you're swinging the 195 at 100 miles an hour, you'll probably be swinging your driver at around 110. That makes sense.

And that's when I've taken it, I need to go test. It's been a month since I've tested it on the course. But like what the app was saying, I test, I had like a median or mean carry distance gain, like 11.8 yards. And the app is saying my distance potential had increased by 11 yards. So that was like, it was pretty, it was extremely well correlated. And I was, I was, you know, just trying to interpret all the data I'm looking at there. Right. So for example, you were telling me before we, you know, we, we went live that you've been swinging the 195 at 116 miles an hour. You hit a couple of swings, right?

Well, and you just said your driver was at 127. So that's the appropriate ratio. So that makes sense. That adds up. If you multiply it by about 1.1, 1.1 times your 195 gram speed will get you to about your driver speed. So here's kind of why I wanted to get into this. We filmed our club championship at Aaron Hills in May. I think I was touching 162 miles an hour ball speed, which is lower than I have been in the past. I've had some back injuries. I've not swung the club the same since I hurt my back two and a half years ago. And I felt like, and this is my interpretation, this is not, maybe you can help me with the science in relation to this, but I felt like I'm slower now and I'm struggling to get the club. It is affecting my swing it in and aspects of more than just distance, right?

I'm not, I am not messing up on the golf course because I don't hit it far enough. I guess not my biggest problem, but I'm getting stuck behind. I'm like lifting the handle at impact because I've feeling slow. I've messed up my transition, all kinds of things that I'm like, man, if I could just get faster, I feel like I could solve a lot of my problems going through the zone. And like that has been the shocker to me is I don't, I can't like adamantly say here I'm hitting more fairways.

I just have, I've played six rounds of golf the last two months, but my corridor is better. Like I am hitting it more accurately, less like duck hooks, less way offline hits at a much higher speed. Explain that to me. Is that a normal kind of reaction? Because I want to get into who the stack is for and the different lot of different profiles of golfers for this. But like for how I wanted to use it

and the benefits I've seen so far, I'm surprised by that part of the development. This is very typical and it's not surprising. And I've got a lot of different perspectives to put on this. One of them is that the fundamental, this is a training program. This is an app and a piece of hardware that puts you through a training program where we fundamentally wanna increase your maximum speed.

How fast can you swing if you just go for broke, right? Theory being that allows you to then bump up your on course playing speed. And I've got a couple of examples here. Let's say you're playing golf and your current max speed is 100 miles an hour. Okay. And you're out there playing at 90. Okay, so you're at 90%. You go on the stack, you raise your maximum to 110. Okay, but now you're playing at 95. Well, you're actually now that they're playing at a lower percentage of your maximum, your absolute value has gone up, you've gone from playing at 90 to 95. So you know, you're getting an extra 1415 yards, you're feeling great, but you're actually swinging at a lower percentage of your max. So everything's more doable.

Right? It's way easier to hit shot shapes with your seven iron at three quarter speed, you know, if you're trying to hit a punch shot, draw it around a tree, than it is if you're like, right, I'm going ballistic here. So you know, the closer you get to that maximum, the tougher it can be to do some things with your body. It just gives you more and more potential. That's that's one side of it. And another analogy I would give to that that that I think will resonate with a lot of listeners is like, I don't want to chase speed.

You know, I chase speed. I'm going to get wild. And Rory, a number of years ago on the heels of Bryson Winning the US Open and you know being like wow, this guy's now in another stratosphere off the tee. I Think Rory went through this thought of right. Well, I see Bryson's got a ball speed out there of 190 Well, I can I got 190 ball speed on the radar on the range. I'm gonna start trying to hit it 190 That's his that was his version three years ago four years ago now chasing speed but what you have to realize is that at the time Bryson's max ball speed potential was over 210 he had just he just competed in the world long drive we saw

he hit you know 218 219 ball speed so with his his gamer driver on the course he's probably 215 easy but let's say 210 for easy math well Bryson playing at 190 ball speed that's a 90 effort he's out there he can play 190 ball speed in control no problem life's good Rory's max ball speed is probably 195 so he's like oh yeah i'm gonna you know let's do this chase the speed thing i'm going to go out and hit 190 ball speed that's at such a high percentage of his maximum of course he's like, Oh, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, let's do this, chase the speed thing, I'm going to go out and hit 190 ball speed. That's at such a high percentage of his maximum, of course, he's not going to be as effective finding fairways for Bryson at the time 190 is like, this is no problem. This is to put it in perspective, you know, this is like 160 ball speed max person going out and playing at 140. They're like chipping around, you know, of course, you're going to find more fairways. I think that's, that's the important thing to consider.

It could be something, you know, where you're at right now. And also this is, this is a workout. You're forcing your body into little bit more extreme ranges of motion with slightly heavier weights. So if you maybe struggle with a bit of trail shoulder external rotation, maybe that's gotten a bit tight. Well, now that you're doing the stack training, that's just a little bit of stimulus to force that trail shoulder, just a little bit better position. You're working on separation. Everything's just a little bit more extreme, just a little bit than your real swing. So everything's a little bit easier to hit those positions when you're actually out on the course. That makes a lot of sense, because I said this out loud too, is like my goal is not to max out the distance I'm hitting it

on the course or you know to whale on the ball in the course. But it is so if I can cruise at 170 ball speed, I'm in a way better spot versus can you? I want to talk to you some about other sports and I know that I heard you reference that there is a stack for baseball and I don't want to go down that avenue just yet, but maximum exit velocity is something I hear talked about with a lot of major league hitters in terms of power, which is like the hardest you will hit a baseball

in one single year, whatever that is. And as I understand, the importance of that stat is to say like exactly what is your 90th, when you hit your 90th percentile exit velocity, like the harder you hit a baseball, the more likely it is to do more damage via slugging. But like basically what can you tap into is a measurement there is that kind of is that similar to how you view what your maximum speed would be with driver? It's from that angle. It's the same as baseball You know if you if you if the and you know I'm working with a lot of baseball teams right now if the fastest you can swing a bat is 75 miles an hour

You're not going to be able to put that in play on the you know when you're taking a pitch but if your maximums 90 miles an hour you can put 80 85 and play and Also with baseball on like golf, this is a nuanced thing, not to get down the baseball route, but swing time is super important. With golf, if your swing gets faster, if you're like John Rahm or Matt Fitzpatrick, they would be great for baseball, right?

They have time to execute their swing and adjust to a particular pitch. So in baseball, the faster you move the bat, if you don't make your swing longer, the more opportunity you have to hit different types of pitches, right? If it takes you forever to get the bat around, that's not going to be very helpful. Odds are if you can swing the bat at 90 miles an hour, you're going to be able to make your your swing a little faster or the swing

you can generate to to get up to you know, 80 mile an hour bat speed is still going to be super effective, right? So who is the stack for, right? Cause if I went down the profile of the 10 golfers we have here at NoLayingUp, there's a couple that I'd be like, like Ben and Neil already hit it far and relatively accurate. I'd be like, I don't know if I would go for this

if I was you, but like DJ, who we've talked to, I forget if you've actually talked to him or not, but I texted him back in July with him doing three workouts. I was like, dude, this is gonna be perfect for you. Cause we hit our irons around the same distance, but I'll drive him by maybe 50 yards. Like he's just not releasing driver. And like, wait until you see his videos.

I think his potential distance gains up like 40 yards in the app or something already. But so, you know, can you talk to me about I'm guessing your answer is going to be the subtle on lines of it's it's for everyone or almost for everyone. But talk to me a bit about how how the stack would fit different profiles of golfers different ages, different skill sets. Yeah, sure. So we can we can dissect it in a few different

categories. So if we think in terms of speed, you know, if you're already cruising at 130, there's going to be very minimal gains for you to, for the stack to help you. It's just the reality of it. But we've got a guy who plays in the mini tours, Derek Fribs. He's won a couple of times this year. He still stacks his swing speeds at 127 because he's 30. He's now just, I want to maintain this, right? So he's trying to keep his cruising speed at 127 is what he plays at about. And then it's just diminishing returns for people that fast. You know, it's like,

great, I can put more time into practicing. But if you are 120 or slower, definitely the stack is for you from a speed training perspective. There are gains to be made if, if you can get, you know, swinging up to 125 for sure on 99% of the course layouts from a, then really the only other category that matters is how serious are you about golf? Do you have any time to practice if If you're like, yeah, okay. I think I'm going to put a couple hours of practice into my game, whether it's on the, the putting green, the range, if you, if you're willing to put two hours of your week into doing something, then you're serious about golf. Then the stack is for you, which probably applies to every one of

your listeners, you know, that, that's why I'm screaming this thing from the rooftops is like, it's hard to apply something that I think would apply to almost everybody. But the more you pull back and I'm sorry to interrupt you there. But the more you pull back to have just like, you know, strokes gained understanding what extra distance is going to actually get you it's not an ego contest, right? And that that's kind of where I'm the little bit of golf I have played, I'm kind of like,

Oh, man, this is just all kind of easier from up here. But sorry to interrupt you pick back up if you don't mind. Yeah, no, no problem. Yeah, so who is it not for? If you do not want to practice at all, you don't want to go to the gym, you want to play golf once every two weeks, and you're looking for like a quick fix,

give me a tip and a training aid and I'll take 10 swings. Yeah, I'll be honest, it's not for you. Don't tell any of my partners I said that. But it's just, it's not, you need to be willing to put in, but it's not a lot of time. You know, do you have a half hour or 40 minutes for the training session? And we can get into, you know, how long you need to warm up and stuff. But if you are a semi-active person who golfs a couple of times a week, you

can really cut down on the warm up time to truly make it literally like 30 minutes to 40 minutes of your time. Line up your first win when you bet this week with FanDuel, America's number one sports book. You'll get $200 in bonus bets guaranteed when you place your first $5 bet. They're out in Utah, the PGA Tour is, of course, this week,

brand new golf course to see. Listen, maybe based on this interview, you're going to want some guys that have a little bit more speed in their golf swing. I haven't done enough research on that one to give you that full on tip, but it's starting to make a lot of sense talking to Sasho about why distance is king on the PGA Tour. But you can check out live golf markets every week to stay in the action even after the first tee, plus track every shot live in the app and watch select par three holes while you place your bets. Just visit fandle.com slash nl you and get $200 in bonus bets. Fandle, official betting operator of the PGA tour, must be 21 and older, 18 and older in DC and present in select states. Gamma problem called Wayne Hunter Gambler. Visit rg-help.com. First online real money

wager only $5 first deposit required bonus issued as nominal bonus bets which expire seven days after receipt restrictions apply C terms at sportsbook.bandle.com back to the pod. That's been the benefit for me. I've been extremely busy the last couple months and getting my you know, getting dressed, getting in the car, going to the range hitting balls, maybe going to put getting all the way back to the house, showered, whatever it would be.

Like that, that, that time was just a little bit intimidating at times and a hurdle for me to get in on practicing. Whereas like I can literally roll into my backyard, do my stretches, which is helping me, the other warmup and stretches are helping me in everyday life as it stands. And then it's just freaking fun to do. Like, like you said, the dopamine hits of all your, of you don't have to think about what you're doing.

I was really impressed to you. Like your reps are timed out on the, on the all your, you don't have to think about what you're doing. I was really impressed too, like your reps are timed out on the actual, if you have the stack radar thing, it automatically, you don't even have to enter your numbers. Whereas I use the little PRGR thing. I just say my numbers out loud. You don't have to type them in. That was a hurdle for me of like, you don't want to go back to your phone

in between every rep and like, it just is, yeah, the feedback is immediate. You see the gains immediately. And then how that's translated all into the golf course has just been like, it's been, it's been really, really eyeopening and really fun. That's the word I always come back to is like, you guys gotta just try this. Yeah. Yeah. And even the folks that there's some people out there, I can hear them saying it right now, but I'm not a good golfer. Yeah. Okay.

I practice a couple of times a week, you there, I can hear them saying it right now, but I'm not a good golfer. Yeah, okay, I practice a couple times a week, but I'm a 15 handicap, or my swing's not in control right now. I don't wanna add speed while I'm still working on my swing. No, the stack is for you, and I have used it very effectively for people trying to improve their swing mechanics, even with my kids. So I've got right now now i got an eight year old boy twelve year old daughter fourteen year old boy and they're all going through it.

Phases of things i need to work on their golf swing. The stack has been is been awesome for that you know it doesn't apply to children but applies to people to people just trying to improve something in their golf swing. They've gone to a lesson and the pros said, hey, I want you to weaken the grip of your bottom hand. We can all empathize with this. You go get a lesson and you're hitting it okay. You're flushing the OB1 and the instructor's like, right, I want you to do this. And you're like, this feels wacky.

And you thin one, you chunk one, and you're like, yeah, I don't know if this is for me. But especially with a kid who's found some success with their crappy swing, but they're making contact and you're trying to get them to do something, some fundamental change, that's where the stack can come in massively. So you can imagine, Solly, you take your first swing, then you've got that timer. So what I have my kids do is I've got this little, we got like a gym floor in our garage. So I draw an outline

with chalk for their feet, right? So they just put their feet in it. So they're working on it. Got a little chalk for where the ball is. So they're getting in their posture. And then they check their grip. And then the countdown timer goes beep, beep, beep. And they make their swing as hard as they can. And then they got 15 more seconds. So they get in. So they just naturally are going through this routine every time. And the grip yet maybe feels weird, but they're not getting any negative ball feedback. You know, my 14 year old, you know, if he's, he's, he was swaying a bit too much towards the target, you know, but

making good contact, hitting them kind of low, but good contact. Well, hey, I want you to, you know, adjust that movement pattern, start to get negative feedback from the ball. So everybody is on a, when they're doing speed training is on some kind of continuum from, Hey, I'm going to work on my speed, but I'm going to also is on some kind of continuum from, hey, I'm gonna work on my speed, but I'm gonna also focus on all these fundamentals and mechanics, pick one or two things.

Maybe one thing in your swing, but whatever you want in the setup, right? While you're speed training. And then you've got folks, and these tend to be like champions tour players, haven't missed a fairway since 1942, but they're only driving at 230 yards. These folks just need to focus on swing really hard.

So everybody that's stacking is somewhere on that continuum, right? Where you can let up a little bit on just focusing on speed to make sure your swing is improving. But then there's still some folks that are just, look, you just have to go hard. LPGA players, some of them just hit fairway after fairway after fairway. It's okay to go after a little players. Some of them just hit fairway after fair after fairway.

It's okay to go after a little bit of speed, especially in your training. Cause is it, is it fair to summarize that in a bit to say like, all right, if I swing at a hundred miles an hour in my head, if I'm thinking the harder I swing right now as a hundred mile an hour swinger, the worst things get for me. Right. It's never, no one's ever told me just swing as hard as you can in a golf ball. And that's going to help you, right? That could be a problem.

So in your head, you can think like, if I go from 100 to 110, like, things might go really bad for me, when in reality, if I could sum it up, a way of saying it also is like, it's harder to swing the club that much faster consistently and swing it worse. Does that- 100%. Like, the funda- They're not the same thing as being 100 mile an hour

swinger and swinging hard and like actually tangibly increasing your because you're learning mechanics of how to get the club through the zone faster, which people need speed like you need like it is as much as we rant about like distance being a

problem at the highest level, like the mid handicapper is better off hitting the ball farther. You know, there's not that many mid handicappers that are extremely accurate, but just not hitting it far enough. Like's not that many mid handicappers that are extremely accurate, but just not hitting it far enough. It's, that's kind of where I was at too,

was like I was not short, but not long, but I was inaccurate. And I just like, again, listen to Steven Yeager talk about what he's done to increase his driving distance was like, dude, this is me. Like if I wanna cut, the fastest way for me to cut shots would be get farther down there.

As long as I'm not like blowing it out of bounds, this is going to help me greatly. But it's, I, again, like I have not played enough to be able to say like this has helped my eight iron swing, which I'm still kind of curious to see how it all translates down the bag, but I can say with drivers like, man, my swing feels better. I feel more athletic.

And I feel like when I get back into that 90% you're talking about, I think I could play golf really well at this level even without having getting a lot of reps in between. Yeah, absolutely. I think so that, you know, the fundamental thing you said there is that faster swings tend to be better swings from a mechanic standpoint, from an accuracy standpoint. Even if you're stacking, so you know, to make it specific to you, Soly, if there's something that you're working on in your game, like let's say you noticed it's possible that, oh, you know what?

My path has gotten a bit too far left while I was stacking. Then next stack session, focus on swinging it out to the right. Oh, I'm hanging back. I'm starting to hang back now. I'm ripping it down from the top and I'm not getting the shift. Then next stack session, make sure you're getting you're getting into your left side. You know, like the you can work on

these fundamental movement patterns, you know, with Fitz Patrick, that's been a bit of a change in his routine, you don't need to have all 200 reps hitting a golf ball with your driver, especially if they're gross movement pattern things, why not do them while you're trying to increase your speed ceiling? Talk to me about the Matt Fitzpatrick success story, right? I think a lot of people that the stack got on the radar around that time was he, I imagine he wasn't the first professional to start this thing, but he is probably why it was

the first professional to do it. Tell us the story. Yeah. So I mean, he was one of the first people to use like a Home Depot version of the stack. So I'm a biomechanist. So how I would help tour players initially, I would work with coaches is through improving biomechanics for speed mostly, right? Okay, you know, is there something we can do with the ground or something to get better

speed transfer to the club? And I would try to find in a session or two, some mechanics that made the golfer feel comfortable that they liked executing, but also worked at increasing their club head speed. But I just knew that in order for this to be, you know, some see long term progress that would stick, they have to do a training program. Like the stack is just is going to help you learn those mechanics, but also change your neuromuscular system, neuromuscular system in a way that those adaptations are going to stick. So with Fitz, when I first started working with him, he was like 112.

Gun to his head, you know, super warm at the Bears Club, might be able to get 114. So we got him to a point with just working on his mechanics without any changes to his training so he could hit 116 on the course. But to really move the needle, got him on the stack. And I mean, there was one season, the season he won the US Open, he started at Pebble. Average tournament clubhead speed was 113. This was at Pebble. And then it just went up every tournament. This is

the average of all drivers for that tournament. This is right from the shot link data. And at the US Open, he was averaging 119 clubhead speed in play. And even he kept training after he won the US Open in the Tour Championship, his average clubhead speed for the tournament was 121, 181 ball speed. So this is someone who is 27 years old at the time, right? And he is a professional athlete, took training seriously, doing gym work, doing stuff, went to, you know, put some time in at university. Yet the speed doesn't necessarily improve with all that stuff. He's hitting driver all the time. But you get you give him something like the stack system with the right mechanical thoughts. And all of a sudden,

he can go from 112 to 118. You know, over the course that's those were the average from his 2020 season to his 2022 season. That that's massive. But gradually didn't feel like a massive change to him. Right, it was like, oh, all of a sudden it was kind of like where you're at, where it was like, oh. And he's not swinging out of his shoes at the US Open either. That was the thing. To your eye, it didn't look anything different

other than that ball speed when it pops up on the screen. Right, so to me, that is the toughest case to take someone who he was already 19th in strokes gained off the tee when I was working with him, there's a lot of downside, he was super accurate. If there was anybody who's like, this is gonna go sideways on it would be him, right? It's like, oh, great, we've gained a bit of speed, but now he's hitting balls OB all over the place. This is not going to work. But it was the, the tipping point for him to win a

major, you know, he just, you need to be so off the charts amazing in every other category. If you're hitting with 112 club at speed, that it's just probability, you're just not going to get it done in a major. The things are too long. There's too many good golfers. You need to be fast. I've been big on the baseball playoffs, these teams, you know, a lot of a lot of big payroll teams in their teams,, teams who seem to have a lot of millions to spend on their baseball players. But when it comes to a great shave, you do not have to shell out a ton of cash. Harry's

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I mean, Strokes Gained has been around for however many years now, and we understand hitting the ball farther is better in any situation. But can you you your background is fascinating, all the research that has gone into creating this whole program is fascinating. Can you you know, I don't know if it needs to be in a way we haven't heard before about why

hitting it farther is better. But you know, for the amateur player for you know, it's easy to understand that at the pro level, especially with how accurate they are. But for the end, the farther you get down the handicap spectrum, can you explain how distance can be potentially, if you would agree with this, to be the fastest way to improve your golf game from a strokes game perspective? Yeah, well, for sure it is. It's even more important for amateurs. So Mark Brody in his book, Every Stroke Counts, tried to make that very clear in his son who actually works for ping, came up with this really interesting rubric,

this heuristic heuristic that shows how for every little bit that you increase your dispersion, two yards increase in dispersion gets washed out by like three yards of, of distance gain. So the vast majority of people that go through my lab with the stack and increase their clubhead speed, that ratio is more beneficial for strokes gain. They're gaining distance at a rate that's washing out the negative effect of that increase in dispersion. And there are folks that actually tend to hit it straighter, you know, but just from geometry, even if you keep the same level

of accuracy, face to path variability repeatability, you're hitting a longer you're going to get a little bit more dispersion, but that added distance is more beneficial. You are hitting less club into a green so that most people if you're playing a five iron into a green, that's tough. You're better off playing an eight iron into the green. So, but not only are you going to be further down, but now your irons are probably going to be going further. So you but not only are you going to be further down, but now your irons are probably going to be going further.

So you really see this, this combined effect. The other thing is if you, if you look around, you know, there's some great graphs out there that are like, Hey, what are some things that correlate really well with handicap? Clubhead speed has a super strong correlation to handicap. You're just not going to see someone winning your men's club championship that swings with a 95 mile an hour club at speed. It's the it's the guys that are swinging, you know, 105 to 115. Yep. Right. Well, that's the reality. Can you like if I pulled up my app right now and said I just did a workout

yesterday, so my next workout will be on Thursday as we're recording this here on Tuesday, I hit that preview button. I have no idea what's coming in my next session. Usually. I mean, can you, how iterative is like I have, this will be session 12 I'm on next is session 13 made yet? Is that going to be dependent on what happens in session 12? Can you talk to me about how, how the system kind of iterates as you go along? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So no, it's not made yet. So I basically took all the philosophies,

turned them into algorithms, put them into the app so the app computes your next workout in real time. As soon as you finish, we're like, okay, we know what Sali's gonna do next. And it comes from my track and field background where track and field is probably the most scientific sport. There's nothing but training. You know, it's, I'm a hundred meter runner.

Well, there's not like, there's not much in terms of strategy. There's not much. It's like, you just got to get faster. Right. So it becomes really easy to look at the effect of training. And all these studies have been done. You know, so if I'm trying to tow a sled to get a certain level of resistance, we know exactly how much weight I should put on there because I need my springtime to be, you know, 0.05

seconds less, or if I'm being pulled by some weight. So with applying that philosophy to the stack, we want you with overload training to be at a certain percentage of overload. And that's based on how fast you're swinging the 195. So as that 195 changes, right, for that particular session, for example, maybe you took a few days off, maybe you are hitting the gym really hard and those speeds drop down,

we're gonna adjust what we think you're gonna be able to swing the heavier and lighter weights at for your next workout. And then we also have you, as you go through the program, going through a bit of a flow in terms of volume and intensity. A major factor that can't be overlooked is the psychology. So while it's awesome that we have these 30 weight combinations that can really fine tune

the loads we want, that also makes it really fun because you're continually setting new records, right? So you're like, oh, I haven't swung the 135 yet in this program. Sweet. Here's an opportunity to see how fast I can swing the 135. Swinging it says, fastest you've ever swung 135. Right. And then the next workout, maybe you've got it again,

and it tells you, hey look, Sully, your fastest single swing with the 130, you see it's right in your face. Your fastest single swing with the 135 was on this date, and it was 122 miles an hour was, you know, 122 miles an hour. Your set speed was 121 miles an hour. So when you're in there, we didn't just have, there's so many psychological layers to this. We didn't just want to have, oh, here's your single swing, because then you just hit that

one, and then it's a letdown. No, no, no. You need to have every swing in your set be really fast, because the set speed is the one that matters the most. And we take the median instead of the average because we want to knock out those outliers. So the workout that you're getting next is the best we can do at guessing exactly the stimulus you need to continue your speed progression to be able to swing the fastest at the end of the program. So it's quite common. Are you in full speed spectrum right now?

I am, yes. So you could go through a period where you are not seeing speed increases in your training, but it doesn't mean the training's not being... If you're watching on the video, I can put the screenshot up so it's a little bit more clear. But that, this was when I did the initial program. I got, I went from 108 to 113 very quickly and the remaining 10 sessions, I was still at 113 kind of bouncing around in between that,

kind of plateauing a little bit within there. Yeah, and that's classic and that's to be expected. within there. Yeah and that's classic and that's to be expected. If you would imagine that gaining six miles an hour a year, that's phenomenal. If you go from 114 to 120, that's a whole new game of golf for you. But then you break it down, you go, right, that's only a mile per hour every two months. So then you go, okay, well that's a half mile an hour a month. That's not even going to show up in the data barely, right? So there's going to be some ebbs and flows just based on that. But also, while it's fun to track your speed all the time, you have to realize that we're

not testing you all the time, right? Some of those speeds are going to be slower just because we've jumped up the volume. You should be gassed at the end of the workout. At the end of the workout is usually when we, you know, have you do the 195, um, cause we want to make sure you're, you're in a particular state. So, you know, that graph you showed is classic and you got to ride it out. But, but hopefully within those workouts where you weren't setting records with 195, you would have been setting a record with the 240 or the 140.

And I was feeling faster throughout all of it. I just came to that 190, that constant. That's why I was super curious to pick your brain on the science behind all the different speeds because it's like, if you give me the 225 and I'm going to set a record with that one, almost every time I touch it, I feel like. Because you give me the 225, and I'm going to set a record with that one almost every time I touch it, I feel like. Because I'm doing the 195 so frequently, I have found that one hard to just up it. But I'm in the full speed spectrum now,

and I'm about halfway through this one. And it's a more straight line here. I was hovering around that 110 at the beginning, and my last two have been at 115. And I mean, that's also, I'm taking the warm up a lot more seriously than I probably was at the beginning of my last two have been at 115. And I mean, that's also I'm taking the warm up a lot more seriously than I probably was at the beginning of it's a 16 minute video that I think I've memorized by now is exactly when you're going to say I should be sweating in the video

and everything. But like that, because another question I've got a lot of is like, I'm afraid to hurt myself. I'm sure you've heard this too, like, you know, go ahead. I'm not here to say you've cured my back issues. That would not be, I don't think in the science, the promises you want to make, but I'm taking the stretching more seriously. I'm doing workouts before I go swing a club as hard as I can, which makes makes more sense than kind of the way I was doing it at the start. And like, I

have not experienced back pain. I don't want to say it's better, but I think it might be even a little bit better just because I'm taking a little bit more care of my muscles and all. And that's where like your background of science and biomechanics is where it gets super interesting of like, again, what hits you as a user is all very simple and easy to digest, but the science behind and what has gone into it, I imagine is more complicated than any of us on this side of it would ever know. Yeah, especially with the overload stuff, especially with the junior stuff, the junior algorithms are really nuanced. Somebody will say, I don't want my junior speed training.

They can't handle these high speeds or extra loads. It's like, take a step back. Let's put things in context. Do you let your kid, let's say your kid's 12, do you let them play baseball? Well, if you take an aged match baseball bat and you measure the forces that are going through your kid's body when they swing that bat, they are higher than the heaviest condition they will get recommended by the stack system. Would you let your kid play badminton? Yeah, okay. Well, they're going to swing that badminton racket way faster than any of the

overspeed sets with the stack system. You know, so there's just some things it's like, what you need to worry about is having your kid hit balls for four hours. So if you look at injury risk, swinging something without making impact with the ground or a ball is less likely to cause an injury. And we can take this just to a tiny extreme. Okay. You got a ball sitting on the ground and there's a root just in front of it. What are you worried about hurting yourself? Right? Because all of a sudden we've taken that ground impact, which is quite stressful, but we've just ramped it up a little bit more, you know, or a lot more at that route. But that's really like, I'm going to hurt my wrist. Well, now go, okay, I'm going to hit a bucket of balls in the range, where I'm pounding into some

pretty tight turf. That stress from having the club go from 100 miles an hour and rapidly stop, you know, that that's creating more stress on your body than swinging the stack system and gradually slowing it down under your own volition. Now, you still need to be warmed up, but with all of the folks that have used the stack, we have way more, way more people that say, hey, I've hurt myself golfing, what's my best way to get back into stacking versus people that are saying, I think maybe I overdid it with the stack. And usually the people that have overdid with the stack are also playing golf four times

a week. They're hitting tons of range balls. So it's just the overall volume. And that's one thing we're very cognizant of is making sure that you're super warmed up when you do the stack. We try to go out of our way to tell people you need to be really warmed up. We have a certify your warm up feature. I don't know if you use that, Solly, but that is key. And the volume is low. It's high quality, it's high

intensity, but it's low volume. I would say, yeah. If the app asked me to do something, I'm doing it at this point. The certified my warm up thing. Yeah, you go and you, you swing the 195 to start your workout and you got to get you know, gives you a green light when you hit a mile, two miles, two swings in a row that are up speed that are somewhat close to your max stack speed that's saying, all right, your muscles are warmed up and it's time to go and there are days I've taken off when I should be on because my back isn't feeling good. I don't I would not tie them as related necessarily, but I would

say, hey, I don't need to go swing a club, you know, maybe 127 miles an hour today. And I'm sure you would agree that's fine. That is smart. And that's why there's really a three day window that goes from 48 hours. That's what the Apple recommend 48 hours after your last workout, all the way up to 96 hours where you can work out in that three day window without losing any grit. And it's, it's that window is there. We don't know everything that's going on in your life. We don't know how well you slept. We don't know what your back feels like.

We don't know if you just, you know, stacked a quarter wood in your backyard. So we looked at, you know, maybe using some whoops or aura stuff, but it's just not super reliable enough. The best thing is for you to make an assessment of your situation. You know what my back's a little tight. I

think I'll put it off till tomorrow. You know what I just played 36 holes. I'll put it off to tomorrow. Or sometimes if it's just busy. It's a good idea to get that stack session done. This relates to something you want to bring up. I have you know, the frequency is a big one, you know, like, hey, if you stack This relates to something you want to bring up. The frequency is a big one. Like, hey, if you stack every Monday, I don't know if you want to... Yes, take me there. Because I'm curious, we're getting ready to have a couple babies over here. And by the time this comes out, they may already be here for all I know. But I'm

going to guess my workouts are probably going to drop for a certain amount. So how does, in theory, if I take a month off from stacking, what would you expect to happen? Why is the frequency of the workout so important? Yeah, if you took a month off, it depends on where you've gotten most of your speed from. So if you've made some mechanical changes, they're probably going to stick. You probably learned, hey, this is a better way to move the club. They'll probably hang on. But then the changes to your neuromuscular system, how fast your nervous system is firing,

co-contraction stuff, that's probably going to start to leave. So you will lose some of your speed for sure. But you can gain it back. I think everybody, people that are in our situation with kids and families who are not professional golfers, we should go through ebbs and flows of our swing speed and hopefully, you know, that the peaks aren't, you know, aren't dropping off too much over time. If you're a tour player, you should be thinking, what weeks of the year should I not be stacking? Pick, you know, three or four weeks, you're like, right, you know, maybe up to six weeks. These are the weeks I'm not going to stack. I'm stacking every other week. This is your job.

Frequency is a big one. And I ran first ran this issue a number of years ago with an NCAA team where they had, okay, the trainer got the system like we're going to we're going to stack every Monday. This is we got this routine for the week. And Monday is going to be just like how Monday would be your day with the psychological coach or whatever. Tuesday is yoga and yeah, we're not seeing much speed gain here. I'm not sure what's going on. I'm like, what would happen?

I'll go a little bit more extreme. What would happen if you did bench press? You did a chest day. You did cable crossovers, bench press, incline dumbbell dips, but you did it every 10 days. What do you think your athletes would say? They would be super sore, you know, for a few days, then they drop back down to next to nothing, and then they'd be back where they started again for the next workout. So like doing a really heavy chest workout every 10 days would be a terrible, you'd probably

injure yourself, it would be very demotivational. It's the same thing with speed training. Once you're a relatively conditioned golfer, you play golf a bit, that's not enough stimulus to have anything really move the needle. So the analogy, if you stacked every Monday for a year, I would expect you essentially gain no speed. That's 50. That's crazy to me.

Yeah, that's 52 workouts. And if you did them hard and you were a gen, you played your favorite music and you're like, yeah, warmed up, let's do this. Versus if you cut that down to 26 workouts, but did it over three months, I'd expect you to gain six to 10 miles an hour. That frequency is super important. And that doesn't

have to be perfect. You have a three day window where you need to sneak that workout in and it's up to you when you want to fit it in. But you need to be having that stimulus build. You need a recovery period. You can't go back down to the bottom. You need to recover a little bit, train. And then that will build as you go along. And then take a few weeks off or a month off or in my case, I'm super busy. I do very minimal stacking over the summer and I'm swinging my slowest right now. So I'm playing at 106, the start of the summer, I was hopefully around 111, 112, but I'm ready to start my off-season stack training any day now. That part was amazing to me because like I said, I was amazed how fast it's all happened.

So kind of why is that from a muscular standpoint, if you want to get as nerdy as you want in this part as well, I am curious why, kind of how does the body cycle? Like what is that about the two, three, four day cycle versus a seven day cycle that you, is it psychological or is it truly just biomechanics help me out there?

Yeah, well, there's the neuromuscular system is quite complex. So there's a there's a coordination aspect to it. So you know, if if you do if you don't practice something, you become less coordinated at it. So that's big. You don't do it. You kind of forget, oh yeah, I usually start my downswing by planning my heel before my hands start down. Well, if you don't stack for a month, maybe all of a sudden now you're planting your heel at the same time your hands come down. So there's a coordination aspect that you haven't been practicing.

But then we also have the body adapts to whatever stimulus you're being exposed to. Probably a good analogy is a suntan. Okay, so if I stay in this building, I'm in for 10 days, and it's dark and cold, I'm going to get a little pale, go out, get some sun for half an hour, my skin says, Hey, let's adapt to this stimulus. We're going to start to get a little more tan, but I can overdo it. I could stay out for four hours and I'd be burnt to a crisp. And there's going to be, if I want to maximize my tan, there's going to be that frequency. You want to, you know, get exposed to some sun, allow my skin cells to recover and repair and adapt to that stimulus. And then I go out again and I get some more sun. So that's the same thing that's going on and at the muscular level as well. So I mean we've

got fibers, muscle fibers that need to contract and there are certain processes that happen those muscle fibers and if we start to tell those muscle fibers, hey you need to do this really fast, then they start to adapt and develop structures and systems and processes and chemicals in there that say, right, we're now better at doing this fast. And the same with the nerves and even from a coordination standpoint, having the brain tell the backswing muscles to turn off when it's time for the downswing muscles to be active, right? So it's not just about the ability to turn on muscles faster, ramp up force fast, elite athletes and trained athletes have the ability to turn on muscles faster, ramp up force fast, elite athletes and trained athletes have the ability

to shut off muscles quickly. Okay, we could almost double click on any aspect of this and get a scientific explanation of all of that. So I have experimented a fair amount within like of the 900 plus swings I've done it as to what makes me go faster. I'm not good with choreography. I've watched your videos within the app explaining a lot of you know, things about motion and

all that. That doesn't work a ton for me like that. I you know, I've read so much stuff on what you should do with your body to swing it faster. And I've never felt the benefits that I'm getting out of just swinging this thing hard. But one thing that I have found that has worked for me, it's kind of surprising. I have a tendency when I go into my downswing, even if I'm trying to stay as loose as possible to once I transition, tense up in the forearms, like everything, my whole body tenses

up. And the more and more I do my stack swings, where it almost feels like I'm going to throw the club, I pick up two to three miles an hour in a swing. And even with my brain is thinking it, thinking it, sometimes I still get tense. Does that sound normal? Talk to me about how my brain is like, or my body's prohibiting me from speed. Yeah, that is super common. What you were referring to earlier is that we've got this learning library in the app, there's 60 videos. And one of them is called Max Grip Pressure.

So I actually have one of these videos from like, all right, Solly, let's squeeze that club as hard as you can, hard as you can. And now let's see what your maximum speed is, right? And 99% of people swing slower. The problem is we could have a whole episode on issues with understanding grip pressure and I'm not, you do not need to have high grip pressure in a golf swing. Squeezing a grip is not something you do to move something faster. One analogy that I give with golfers, I use this one a lot with tour players who are kind of late 40s, 50s that are trying to get speed. I'll say, have you ever played

baseball as a kid? Oh yeah, great. So, you know, I'll be doing the last time I did this was a FaceTime session. They're in their simulator. I said, pick up a ball and I want you to just, you know, throw it into the simulator screen. Great pitching action. Looked awesome. I'm like, all right, now grab your club again. I want you to focus on your level of grip tension. Take a swing. Okay. Now I want you to repeat that level of tension while holding the golf ball when you're going to throw it. Now try to throw it. It's like, huh, you squeeze a golf ball to try and throw it. You're not going to be able to throw it very fast. And the golf swing is very much a throwing motion.

You just need enough grip pressure in your hands so the club doesn't go flying, which isn't very much. You look at Fred Couples, you look at Vijay Singh, their trail hand is off the club going through impact, right? You look at Shane Lowry, his trail hand's off the club, you know, early in the downswing. There's an amazing picture of when he won the British Open, it's raining and from down the line, his trail hand isn't even like touching the grip, you know? If you were to do, I got a lot of thoughts on this, but since you brought it up, if you were going to do a pull up, if you were going to do a

deadlift, you do not squeeze the bar. Imagine going down to do a deadlift and being like, wait, I'm going to squeeze this bar and I'm going to lift it. No, you've actually, you've got enough force that you're applying to the bar where you can lift it, but you're not trying to squeeze it, right? If you squeeze something that involves contraction of the muscles that really you want to be quite relaxed and able to get speed out to the club. So our our wrist muscle muscles that contract our wrists and move our wrists actually can't apply forces at the speeds we need to swing a golf club. So if we try to engage them we'll actually slow the club down. It's like going downhill on a bicycle and an old

BMX bike and eventually you can get so fast where your legs can't keep up with the pedals. You're better off taking your feet off the pedals. Phil Nicholson to an extent does this. Vijay and Fred are really good examples of just like letting that club head go. You know, they're extremes. What would, you know, again, you have 70 videos you said in the app that kind of talk about all the aspects of that would help you swing a club faster. So it's asking to cheat a little bit in terms of what are what are the most like the

easiest fixes, the most wide ranging fixes for people that want to do something fundamentally different to swing the club faster? Is there a if you had to pick one of those videos, two of those videos that are the first ones you would show someone that wanted to get faster? I know the answer is going to be it's unique to whatever your swinging profile is, but is there a general one that you would say like this is where a lot of people go wrong? Yeah, to me it's still casting. You know, like when I, with users, if they hit a plateau in the app, usually mechanics are an issue and I'll say, hey, send us a message. We'll try to help you out.

Right? If you've only gained three miles an hour in the first say, hey, send us a message. We'll try to help you out, right? If you've only gained three miles an hour in the first five or six weeks, send us an email. We'll see if we can figure something out. I'll take a look at their video. And usually the club head is moving in the downswing direction, or their hands are moving in the downswing direction

before anything's happened in the lower body. So we've got a couple of videos, one's called down cock and one's called functional lag, that I think are really about sequencing the body correctly. That's a massive one. Another one that I see is folks that keep too much speed in the body, especially when you're doing speed training, like this feels effortful. In golf, we don't want the body moving fast at impact. We want the club moving fast, which means we got to get the speed from the body out to the club. Here's a great analogy I give and it's in one of the videos. But let's say you and I are driving along in a car. Okay, so I'll and you're in the passenger side. Who's someone you don't

particularly like in the golf industry. This one, let me use someone I do actually like so we can use it as a joke. Max Homa. Let's let's use that. All right, Max Homa. Max Homa is walking down the sidewalk, right? And you're like, you know what? I'm going to whack him with the door, but pretty hard. I want to knock him over. So we're driving along. I'm going 80. I pull over along the sidewalk. You know, you on latch the door, you're getting ready to push it out. And at the last second, I'm like, yeah, you know what? Fuck Max Homa. I don't like Max Homa either. So I'm like, I'm going to help you. I think I hit the accelerator, try to accelerate the car up to 100 miles an hour but unfortunately wow the door shuts back on you when I hit the accelerator right and we whiff them we

whiff on Max Oma what a wasted opportunity so but it feels more effortful that analogy of accelerating the car is the same as someone just continuing to rotate the body super hard through impact feels effortful there's more speed in the system we don't want the speed in the system, we want it out to the club, out to the door. So it would actually be a lot better for me if I just, as you're about ready to push the door open, if I tapped on the brake,

that's gonna create a system of forces at the door hinge that actually will facilitate your effort to push the door open. That allows us to get the speed out to the door. So I see a lot of folks that feels effortful, they're trying really hard, the radar's not picking up a big speed. And there's some clues to that.

Is the club slamming off your back? Does it feel super effortful? Does it feel like almost painful? We wanna get that speed from the system out to the club. Gosh, yeah, that was so one thing I feel like that has just gotten implemented in my training that's somewhat recent that I think has helped me if you looked at my my little graph thing, it was you know, it's ticked up in recent weeks

is the step training the step swings, which which I, I didn't know that existed in the in the program until I was 30 workouts or so into it. But tell me about that because I do feel like I swing, when I get to my final set of my 195 after I've done my step training, I feel like my body is almost tipped off as to like, no, that's actually how you're supposed to create

a little bit of speed. Talk to me about that. 100%. So to me, a fundamental of people that swing fast with less effort is the transition sequence. Want the lower body going first, then the torso, the arm comes off the chest and the last angle to release is between the forearm and club. With the step swing, we, we make sure people get the lower body going. So they're stepping,

their hips are probably going to be sinking, right? A a little bit hips opening up as the hands are going back so that's a fundamental we want the lower body going in the downswing direction before the hands and club are done going in the backswing direction so that step is adding a little bit of speed into the system and if you're not able to make your step swings faster which which is common, then it says that your coordination is not great. You should always be able to get, you know, theoretically, if your mechanics are good, two to three miles per hour more with a step swing,

because you're giving more speed into the system. So therefore you should be able to get a little bit more out to the club, if your transition sequence is coordinated appropriately. If it's not, then you won't see an increased speed. If you see a decrease in speed, that's fine. Keep doing the step swings and focus on getting that appropriate level of coordination and transition.

Yeah, that's why I find the widest range of swings to be in that step. Like, well, I'll have one where I stepped wrong or my timing was off. I had a really lightweight on it yesterday. And I had I was at 120. And then I timed one well and it went up to 127. Like it was it was it was you don't get that usually in your normal that much of a range of back to back swings and when

you're doing more of the max training within it. Right. The lighter sets, I go over this in the learning library, when I when I go through certain tips, the lighter weights are really good at allowing people to learn what's what's what's helpful to get speed out to the club. The heavier weights are good at understanding what you should do with your body to get speed into the system from the ground. So usually there's an issue in one of those two areas. And I don't know if you've looked in

the app, but if you swipe and you go to your personal, personal best records, you can tap on the label that says speed. And you can change it to percentile. So you can see, I'm curious to know you're at 100. I'm 38. 38. So you're probably in the high 90 percentiles for everything. So you're probably in the high 90 percentiles for everything. I am 98 percentile for 195 grams.

90, yeah, 99 for 125, 95 for 225. Yeah, I've never looked at this. Yeah. So this is, we try to, different people have different motivations. So if you're someone who's internally motivated, you want to keep, so you want to hit 117, you know, which probably you do and you are, but you also seem like that person has a little bit of extra motivation, you want to say, right, there's 50,000 stackers out there. For the folks that are my age and gender,

I would like to be in the 100th percentile. So you got a couple of percentiles to go. And you can look there if you notice, are you a higher percentile for the heavier weights? Or about the same? the higher percentile for the heavier weights or about the same. I'm 9492 9591 but looks a little. I'm a little bit lower percentile the farther down that chart you get. Yeah, exactly. And make sure if on the filter at the top, the middle button put on put the set the intent to Max. So that's mixing full in

Max right now. So now you're on Max. Yep, so this is what it is. Perfect. So this is what it is. Perfect. So this is exactly. So you see that that really lightweight at the bottom that says to me, you're good at getting speed into the system from the ground, but that you need to work on getting it out to the club. And that's why you see that variability with the step swings. Right? So, so you're like every once in a while you get in a flash of

like, Oh, wow, I got all that speed in my system out to the club. Boom, there's a 127. You know? Interesting. Very interesting. So what should, this is the last speed question because I want to talk to you some about putting, but I could probably talk to you for another couple hours on this. But what should my goal be if you're, if you're counseling me in this?

Like I feel like I've already reached a level that I did not even imagine I could this quickly. Should my goal be to maintain this? Should I still be trying to get faster and faster? Is there a way, you know, kind of talk to me about what I should be looking to get out of it now that I'm three plus months into the program. Yeah, I think it's safe to say that on the courses you play, probably cruising at 125 would be helpful to your score. You know, that says that you're probably getting close to there, you know, another five to six miles per hour and you're probably there.

So to me, keep pushing, right? Let's see where your ceiling's at. You could be a freak athlete in there, we don't even know. So let's express that. Let's get that out. I very much think this app is incredible. I don't think it's magical. So at some point, though, it's going to start to feel,

you know, maybe you do great for a full year. Maybe you just keep chipping away and seeing speed increase for years. But at some point, you're going to want to decide, OK, the stack is primarily for me to maintain my speed. OK, and that's awesome. That's what you're going to do. You're going to go through cycles for the year where you're just like, I need to maintain my speed. Okay, and that's awesome. That's what you're gonna do. You're gonna go through cycles through the year

where you're just like, I need to keep my playing speed at whatever it is, 115. And then you can dial down the effort level, the amount you train, it becomes less about building, and it's much easier to maintain. Okay, that's fine. And you settle in that, it still means you stack till you're done your golfing career, right?

You should be stacking all the way till you're 85. But it's good. It means you've made all this progress, and you just need to try to maintain it. To me, your objective right now is still, let's see how fast you can swing. It's still super fun. But what we've done, and some people get mad at us.

So I want to see a global lifetime record. Yeah, that's nice. But what you have to realize is that we want people stacking for their entire lives. And it's much better that if, you know, Solly, if you take a few months off and you come back and you're, you know, swinging now the 195 or 108, not 116, you don't wanna not hear the record setting, right?

It's a new program, new day, or a different point in your life. Let's keep setting records throughout that program. You can always go back and look at every completed program and see where your overall speed record is. But the reality is for most people, they're going to hit their peak somewhere between 25 and 35. That's 99% of the population is gonna hit their maximum seed potential in those years. You know, we still wanna set records every time we start a program. And for those that they'll listen to the show,

I'm not gonna go too deep down, roll back equipment and all that stuff with you, which I think is a different conversation. I'm still of the opinion that like, what we're talking about here is, I don't, it's not the most romantic thing about the game of golf. There's many things I like about golf more than just turning into a brute force contest that all that to say

like, the rules are the way that they are, I suggest that you get all the maximum amount out of it, like whatever you can do to shoot lower scores within the rules do right? What I would personally say this is again, a topic for another day, like driver heads are too big that kind of permit you to swing us very hard at it with less risk than there should be in it, right? But if the equipment is going to be the way that it is, you should try to get the most out of it. I've been ranting about that for years and have not taken advantage of it. And now I'm like, okay, well, this is if I really want to improve, I have a finite amount of time I can put into golf right now. I wish I could hit balls for every time I go use the stack, but like for the time that I can put into it right now, the benefits I've gotten out of it have been wildly impressive. So that's why I'm a stacker.

Everything that's on the horizon is going to make speed more important. If the USG and RNA keep moving in the direction they're moving, I like to look at the players as a perfect example. I love the players as a golf course, right? Because you got Brian Harmon this year competing against Schauffele, against Scheffler. Matt Fitzpatrick was right in there this year, probably one of his best tournaments. There's so many holes that epitomize exactly how I think a course should be designed to limit the influence of distance,

but also allow people to take advantage of their high clubhead speed. So Brian Harmon and Matt Fitzpatrick, for example, in 18 hit driver and they hit it down there and they've got an 8 iron in. Scheffler and Shoffley, they're hitting a three-word or a hybrid, right? They're not hitting driver. That's how that, and there's a couple other holes where the course is designed to be like, look, you, you need to hit it this distance. If you hit it further than that and you start to spray it, all of a sudden it's not advantageous. But Shawfully this year, even though he's hitting three wooden places is still taking a massive advantage of his speed game. His ball speed with his three woods, 180. Like how awesome is that?

You know, great. Like, like give me the three. His ball speed with his three was 180. How awesome is that? Great. Give me the three. So the slow ball is coming in 2030, I believe, for everybody, something like that. We've got a bunker, the first hole at Antigonish Golf and Country Club that's 225 carry and probably half our members can't carry it. The ones that are carrying it right now, they're gonna be running for the stack when all of a sudden it's because it's gonna be, you know, overnight. It's like, here, play this ball. I'm in the bunker. The three or four yards doesn't seem like a lot, but

people will notice it on those holes they're used to. Hey, I always do this on the hole. You know, and all of a sudden speed is going to be more important for the amateur to have fun. Yeah, again, not to go down this rabbit hole. I'm still always of the opinion on this though that golf is what you make out of it in terms of challenge, right? I mean, when I play the up tees at Timmaquana, there's a bunker on the second hole that's like 185 yard carry for me and I get no thrill out of carrying that, like I did just it becomes a bypass words if I go that back to you and there's a summer wind into has to be or winter wind into I gotta hit driver get over it like I can't cover the

240 over that like I've taken control of what challenge I want out of my day of golf by the T that I've chosen to play so I feel like I don't want to get down a rabbit hole on rollback and distance but like I want people to recognize like you're in control you know if the ball is not going to go as far into Again, I don't want to get down a rabbit hole on rollback and distance, but like I want people to recognize like you're in control. You know, if the ball is not going to go as far into the future, that the clear message here is move up a set of tees, right? Like there's no reason to be overly prideful on

what what tee you play from and kind of what challenge you're taking on on things. But again, that's a that's a topic for another day. So I don't have you here for a few, a few short minutes, but you have said to me, and I don't wanna quote you on this or directly on this, but almost something along the lines of, you're more excited even about the stack putting than you are all the stuff we've spent an hour plus

talking about to this point. And just for listeners sake, I've barely touched the stack putting part. I've used it four times, but I have not been able to give the dedication of the hours and hours that I have into the speed part, but tell us about stack putting and kind of what the benefits of that are, what that looks like, how that works in the subscription and what the, what you've seen out of that so far.

Yeah, every, every stacker does the speed stuff, gets free access to stack putting. It's its own standalone, you know, subscription. So if you want to get it, go ahead and you don't want, you're not into the speed stuff, but it really is a much more nuanced product than the speed. There's a million features. It comes from all my research with Ping on putter design and research. I've done a lot with it. You know, one of my first articles published was on plum bobbing in the Journal of Sports Sciences, one of my first academic articles. So it takes all my years of understanding what's important to putting, what's under the control of the golfer that allows them to put a ball in the hole and puts the practice on those things.

So this can be super controversial to me. It's just obvious, but where the ball hits on the face, practicing trying to hit the ball in the center of the face is a waste of time. Working on improving your path is a waste of time. Speed control, super important. Green reading, super important. If you want to work on those two things, you need to see more putts in a practice session.

So that's the primary thing that we focus on in stack putting is look, let's give you there's there's three modes, but the mode that I think is the best mode that we call our flagship mode is premier putting. So it gives you 18 pots over the distances that are the most important for improving your putting. So Mark Brody is showing that look, there's certain distances that separate good putters from bad putters. We give you those putts and while you're seeing all these different putts working on your speed control, working on your green reading, we have this super easy intuitive interfacing app that allows you to quickly, I use my ear putts, I put my earbuds in, phones in the pocket and I just talk out the results. So the app for example will say hole one, seven feet uphill left to right. I walk around,

find that hole, could be any hole in the green, there could be other people in the green, doesn't matter. Drop it, hit the putt and then with a couple of simple commands I tell it the result. If I sync it I say made or I'll tell it what the error was. Launched too far left and was too fast. App records that, right? And then I'll tell it what the next putt was, tap in, say great two putt, give you my strokes gained for that hole. And they'll say hole two, 18 feet downhill left to right. I walk over, hit that putt. So it's giving us a really good practice session

in terms of the things we need to do to improve our performance, but also it's gathering all these insights that we can't keep track of when we're out there in the green ourselves. So you finish the session, you're like, huh, I'm leaving way too many putts short. I'm missing all my right to left putts to the left, you know? And then we can make adjustments. And there's, you know, it's super nuanced, but one of the best features that we have

in this is called statistical comparison. And I think back to Shawfully a few years ago, when he switched to the arm lock method, if you remember that, but he was like really high up in strokes, gain putting. And it was there was some controversy with Billy Horser, like, oh, this should be banned. It's anchoring. And he's like, yeah, this is definitely better. I've tested it out. I'm, you know, I'm going to give it a go. And I don't know if him and Derek actually did test it out, but all I could think of was if there was just an app out there that allowed people to do this. So with Stack Pudding, before the session,

you just make tags about what putter you're using, what technique you're using. And then you can just alternate. Hey, I'm going to do a session armlock, session regular, session armlock, or regular, session armlock, or session with my answer four, session with my answer five putter. And then after you do a bunch of sessions, you just hit the statistical comparison button and it will run like legitimate stats. I teach quantitative research methods at university here. And it will do a legitimate statistical

analysis to tell you is this more effective and how much more effective it was. That's what, what I've heard that explanation. I was like, oh gosh, I mean, I want to enter all my on-course stuff, right? Because I personally just don't, I don't have a lot of time to practice putting and I don't have a very disciplined putting style and I don't have the same mental focus on a seven-footer on the putting green as I would in an actual course of a round. But if I'm between a couple different putters that I like, you know, kind of getting that even that information of, all right, on Bermuda greens, blah, blah, blah, this works really, really well versus like, hey, when greens are really fast, I don't want a mallet putter, you know, maybe when the greens are slow, I do want a mallet or a mallet putter or

something like that was particularly interesting in terms of venturing out that because I do, I have used in the four sessions I've used it, like you can see within it pretty quickly. It says like within my completed sessions, what my direction bias is. Like that was the first takeaway I had was like anything left to right. I was missing right. Like it was giving me an overwhelming, I'm trying to get this in focus on the camera, but it was giving me, uh,

you know, a very clear direction bias of, of missing right on those putts. And my brain might say I'm pulling a bunch of putts, but the actual information is telling you something different. Well, there's so many psychological biases we have. We'll tend to remember that one putt where our buddies were all gathered around, you need this to win the match, and you miss it to the right. And you're like, I've been pushing pushing the pots all day. Well, actually, maybe you pulled seven other pots, you just didn't register in your brain, you know, and that's where the app is great to be like, No, no, this is, this is the issue. And it's great you can't it strokes

gained for every pop, but you can set your level of strokes gained. So it doesn't have to be to a tour player, you can set it to a 10 handicap, a 30 handicap. Yeah, lots of cool features. I'll report back on that for the listeners as well. I'm gonna convince you to be, you're gonna be a stack putter. I don't need convinced, I need babysitters over here

so I have time to go to the golf course. We need a green in your backyard, that's what we need. Working on redoing the backyard, we might sneak one of those in there as we go do that as well. So I'm gonna let you go. This was extremely enlightening. I want to thank you for bringing the stack into into my life. The stack system com code no laying up for our listeners there. If you want an

experience like like I've had, it's been it's been truly fantastic. But let's do this again sometime because like I said, we've barely kind of scratched the surface on all the research you've put into golf, you can go to your website is it it sashomakenzi.com? Is that right? Or you can read a bunch of your published work out there. Twitter, X is where I put all my stuff out there. So sashomakenzi on X is probably the best. Or the stacksystem.com is where I put all my content. There's a lot of frequently asked questions on the stacksystem.com as well if you have

anything in there. I'll answer as many in the YouTube comments here as I can as well. But appreciate your time as always and look forward to doing this again sometime. Awesome. Be the right club. Be the right club today. Johnny, that's better than most. How about in? That is better than most. Better than most! Expect anything different? For Fandel, it must be 21 older and president select states. For Kansas, an affiliation with the Kansas Star Casino. Or 18 and older and president in D.C.

Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. Call 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut or visit mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here visit gamblinghelplinema.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24-7 support in Massachusetts or call 1-877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York. Thanks for listening.