StarTalk Radio - #ICYMI: Biomechanics of the Perfect Golf Swing

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice investigate the science that is making golf swings that much sweeter, from biomechanics to cutting edge technology, with sport biomechanist “Dr. Phil” Cheetham and pro golfer Rob Labritz.Don’t miss an episode of Playing with Science. Subscribe to our channels on:Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/playing-with-science/id1198280360?mt=2GooglePlay Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Iimke5bwpoh2nb25swchmw6kzjqSoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/startalk_playing-with-scienceStitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/startalk/playing-with-scienceTuneIn: http://www.tunein.com/playingwithscienceNOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

I'm Gary O'Reilly and I'm Chuck Nice and this is Playing With Science. I'm Gary O'Reilly and I'm Chuck Nice and this is Playing With Science. Today we'll be taking a look at the science that is making golf swings that much sweeter. Keeping them out of the parking lot and hopefully on the fairway. Yes, with any luck that is. Yeah, maybe not. Not going to happen. and giving us a low down on what it takes to make that happen we'll first chat with one of the world's leading sports

technologists and golf biomechanics expert dr phil cheatham and to boot he's a former olympic gymnast nice absolutely can't wait to have that conversation. After that, we'll be getting the pros eye view with PGA Championship golfer Rob Labritz from New York State. So a packed show. But Chuck, here we go. First question. What do you fancy? Hole-in-one or do we go for placement? Well, you know, I'm the kind of guy that always loves a good hole-in-one.

So, you know. But I'm actually going to play the percentages, to be honest. A hole in one is so unlikely. Actually, getting it in the hole period for me is so unlikely. I don't even play golf. I play a game called look for the ball in the bushes. So you judge around by the number of balls you use. That's right. But see, when I played, and it was a long time ago before I sold my golf clubs, not in a fit of rage, but too much spinal surgery meant that I couldn't. And maybe we'll get into that with Dr. Phil Cheatham. It was just a case of, can I?

How can I? How can I address the ball in my mind using techniques that maybe I'd learned as a soccer player? Really? But yeah, so you're just thinking about, can I transfer that stuff? The answer was quite simple. No, Gary, you can't because you're not a natural golfer. It's a stick.

That's not a ball that you can recognize. So that's where we were. So, you know, this is what needs to happen. We need to find out how you get a golfer and turn him into an elite athlete, a guy who can destroy golf courses. And I think the best person to speak to is Dr. Phil Cheatham. Yes, Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil, don't you hate that? Dr. Phil Cheatham, are you there?

Yes, I am. And that's funny you should say that because as soon as I got my PhD, people started calling me Dr. Phil. And I'm like, oh, darn it. I didn't realize that was going to happen. But now I get called Dr. Phil all the time. Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. You work with not just golfers. You work with a range of elite athletes, do you know?

Yes, I work at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego, for the U.S. Olympic Committee. And our charge is to make our athletes better, help them become better, and win more medals at the Olympics. It's simple as that. So I work with several sports, track and field being the main one currently, and have worked with trampoline and gymnastics, and maybe we'll be working with diving in the future too.

Wow. And swimming. There's a lot of sports we work with. That's great. And at the risk of seeming somewhat forward because we haven't even begun to get through this show. But with that kind of expertise, do you mind if we call on you again and bring you back for some of the other subjects that we talk about? Let's see how it goes today. Oh, Dr. Phil the diplomat.

Putting the pressure on us. Look at that. He just slammed that one back at us, didn't he? Yeah. Okay, fair enough. That's good. Competition. Let's start off really simple here, though, Dr. Phil, because there may be some people out there that don't know what biomechanics is all about.

So can you explain to us what it is that you do as a doctor with biomechanics? What is it? Well, firstly, just let me say that I am a PhD, not a medical doctor. So my PhD is in sport biomechanics as we're talking right now. And sport biomechanics basically is the physics of human movement. We look at how people move and we try to make it not just as efficient as possible, but as effective as possible. Make them move the way that's going to achieve their goal, achieve the end result, and do it in a way that they're not going to injure themselves or at least lessen the chances of injury. Because when you're a peak performance athlete, injury is always, you know, on your right shoulder and on

your left shoulder is performance. So basically we're looking at performance improvement with reduced injury possibilities. Is that something you have to tailor to each particular golfer? Yes, absolutely. Each particular golfer, each particular athlete, there's no question that there's basic principles of human motion. I mean, if you jump off a cliff, you fall and hit the bottom. There are certain physical principles that being here on earth, we cannot avoid. But that being said, everybody's built differently. Everybody's got a different structure, different makeup, different muscles. Even when we do a similar motion, a lot of people use different muscles than each other. So the way you learned it is the way we try to tailor it because one of the things that's very

very difficult is once you've learned something is to reprogram it in a different manner it's better to kind of tailor it rather than reprogram it really so i i was very i'm very surprised to hear that because uh a lot of times you'll hear coaches talk about how you have to unlearn something in order to learn it correctly. Like I'm thinking, which might be similar to a golf swing, which is a football mechanics quarterback, the mechanics of throwing a football. And you'll have coaches say, oh, this guy, see how he drops his elbow. It's like, you know, we've got to show him he's got to unlearn that and then learn the proper fundamental mechanics and then we can move on you're saying it's better to just tailor that and no i'm saying that it's very very difficult to unlearn something once you've learned it and

once you've spent many many many hours doing that and then another coach comes along and says well i don't like the way you're doing that we're gonna do it this way gotcha now your brain has got two programs one for the previous way you did it and one for the new way you did it and the danger of that is when you get in a stressful situation like in a competition in the final round where you're leading or somebody's nipping at your heels yeah quite often that stress brings out the old familiar motion pattern. The body says, oh, I know this one. I feel more comfortable with this motion pattern,

so this is the one I'm going to do. As a gymnast, I found that quite often. I would learn a skill, and if you learned it the wrong way to start with, sometimes that would come back and you'd be in trouble. So there's no question it's better to learn something the correct way first than learn it incorrectly and then try to relearn it later on, especially if you're in, you know, they say you can't teach old dogs new tricks. Right.

That's partially true, but, you know, you have to try and stay on the right path, learn it the right way first, and ingrain the correct technology. You know, it's not practice. It's perfect practice. Interesting. That's a maxim I'm sure you've used before. I'm just thinking to get, and everyone wants the perfect swing. I mean, no matter how often you can't get close to it, the objective is to aim for it.

objective is to aim for it. Are you saying that to enable a golfer to get closer to that perfection, you're going to have to approach it mentally first before you can even get to the biomechanics to get that golfer to rely upon what you're saying and to break away those bad habits? Well, I guess I wouldn't, I would slightly disagree. There's no question in your head, you have to be on point. But the bottom line is if your body learned it the correct way in the first place, then your head can be just more in line with what you're doing because your head is now confident. Oh, I got this. I know how to do this.

I've been doing this for thousands and thousands of hours, many, many years, and the motion is ingrained. The head gets in the way. I mean, I work a lot with diving, and you can see the divers sometimes getting themselves psyched out, and then they get stiffer, they get tighter, and the body doesn't move the same way. But if you're confident, and I won't say relaxed. Relaxed is definitely what you don't want to be. You don't want to be relaxed. You want to be focused and focused relaxation, if you like. But if you can get to that point, then you're confident. You go ahead and let your body do it.

Clear your mind and let your body take over. Wow. But it has to be pre-programmed. Okay. From the point of view of the biomechanics, if I gave you, in terms of a golfer, a clean sheet of paper, how would you build from the bottom up from the golf swing to give that perfect? So starting with the feet and then ending with impact and then the follow through. How can you talk us through the perfect swing from that? Yeah, well, being a biomechanist, I like to start from the foundation. There's a thing called the leading joint hypothesis by a professor of mine who was on my Ph.D. committee called Dr. Donna Skia from Arizona State University.

And she's coined that term leading joint hypothesis. And what that really means is that in most motions, most especially skillful motions, there's one joint in the body that's the key joint, the prime mover, if you like, and it's the one that drives the motion to start with. So that's where, in my opinion, that's where you should start. In golf, it's the legs and the pelvis action. And that leads me to what's called the kinematic sequence or the kinetic link. We want to start from the ground or the pelvis starts the motion, the muscles. By the way, a lot of people say, oh, the motion comes from the ground. Well, yeah, that's kind of not true because ground doesn't do anything. Ground just sits there. You're on top of the ground and

you've got to drive into the ground. So your muscles are what creates the motion. And that muscular action has to happen in a nice, even, effective sequence, sequential sequence, where the pelvis starts the rotation. This is like in the downswing. The pelvis starts the rotation. The shoulders and the thorax or the ribcage follows. Then the arms. Then the club. And so it's this smooth acceleration action into the downswing. And surprisingly

enough, it's actually an acceleration deceleration motion that causes the club to hit the ball at its most, I guess, effective or fastest. In order to increase speed, we need to have this sequential motion that happens from the top of the backswing. So the pelvis accelerate, and then they actually decelerate. They slow down as the ribcage accelerates because the ribcage turns on top of the pelvis. And when it rotates rapidly, there's a principle in physics called action-reaction. You may have heard it. It's one of Newton's laws.

And so as you turn towards the downswing with your upper body, you can imagine a bungee cord going across from one side of your rib cage to your pelvis. And that bungee cord pulls to pull the rib cage. It has to pull against something. So it's pulling against the hips. So that tends to slow them down. So you see this beautiful acceleration, deceleration. Then the same happens with the shoulder and the arm. When you release the arm, that actually pulls on the shoulder, slows the shoulders down a little bit. And then the same happens with the club. When you release the wrist, the action of the club swinging out actually slows the arm. So you see this acceleration deceleration. In fact, everything, the major parts of the body decelerate

into the downswing the only thing that sorry into impact the only thing that actually accelerates is the club itself hopefully peaking out at impact so speaking of that where does the power in a swing come from is it is it the strength of the golfer is it technique is it using the proper club is it the club head what what exactly creates the power in well i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna take the easy answer and say all of the above i mean that that's why that's why it's it's a beautiful sequence it's all gotta happen and it's all happen together. You've got to have a strong body. To me, golf is a sport, not just a game. I mean, if you want to make it a game, that's fine.

If you're the weekend warrior and you like just playing for fun, that's fine. Have a beer at the 19th hole, yeah. But if you're an elite athlete, and I'm used to working with elite athletes, tour pros and Olympic athletes, you've got to look after your body. You've got to train your body. You've got to be strong. You've got to be powerful. The downswing takes only a quarter of a second to go from zero miles per hour

to 120 miles per hour. That's an incredible acceleration. That's about 20 Gs, if you like, the club head is going through. So you've got to be explosive. You've got to be powerful. But that being said, you can't just be a, you know, an upper body muscle man, you have to be flexible, you have to be strong and flexible. And one of the misnomers I find is people think that if you work out and get strong, that necessarily means you're going to get tight and less flexible and that's not true in modern day training the the athletic trainers and the therapists and the people that

make you strong they know how to keep you flexible at the same time so it can be strong and flexible so would you say mean, because you have guys that are very muscular, yeah, it's, you know, really like top heavy, lots of, you know, linebackers, lots of arm strength, can't hit, can't hit the ball as far. So how does the flexibility and the strength combination play into slapping that ball, you know, 273 yards or something like that. Maybe 320, 330 perhaps. But yeah, I think that was a good lead in right there. If you are strong and very strong in the upper body and you just try to muscle it, try to force it, it's not going to happen. You can get so much more power by the sequence of the pelvis, ribcage, lead arm, club. And if you do that in the right manner, it's like cracking the whip.

You can throw the whip as hard as you like, but unless you tap it right at the last second, it's not going to drive through. Think of, let's see, what's a good analogy here. There's several good analogies for the kinematic sequence. But think of a rocket ship. You've got the stage one, which is like the legs and the pelvis. And that stage one lifts the whole rocket. But the whole rocket initially, you can see it taking off from Cape Canaveral.

And it looks like it's going really, really slowly. It's amazing. But then the next stage fires. So all the power is in the lower body the big muscles the arms and the wrists are not the big muscles compared to the glutes and the and the lower body and the abs and that sort of thing those are powerful muscles that get it going and they're not moving that fast but they're creating the power to transmit that energy to the next body segment. Then it goes to stage two, which is smaller now. So it's faster because it can transfer the momentum better.

The smaller momentum, a smaller mass, faster, larger momentum and so on down the line until you get right to the club, which obviously is the lightest. And so all that energy gets transferred into the club and the speed increases significantly. Interesting, doctor, that you mentioned just a while ago when you were describing the sequence that when the club face connects the moment of impact, that's when the club is moving at its fastest. Now that's timing because quite often, yeah, club is moving at its fastest now that's timing because quite often yeah because quite often a golfer swing will the speed will be diminishing at that point of impact so is it that the elite golfer knows exactly when to time that to the point of impact with maximum speed yes and that's a that again a good excellent question because we have what's called 3D motion analysis, 3D motion capture.

And that's what I'm an expert at, and that's what I've done for the past 30 years. And we use that motion analysis technique or that motion analysis system to measure these. And when we're looking at novices in the kinematic sequence, quite often we see the velocity of the club, you say diminish or decrease before impact and so basically you'd have to put the ball back about a foot or two for them to have it at maximum speed but obviously that's not going to happen because that's not the bottom of the swing either so it takes a good efficient effective precise swing to be able to hit the ball. Well, I won't say at peak speed, because it's interesting. If you use a motion analysis system and you look at the swing speed of the club head and they just do a free swing, an air swing, if you like, you'll see that the

peak swing, peak speed of the club is usually after impact. And so what happens is, of course, the peak speed is normally going to be at impact because when it collides with the ball, the ball slows the club head down and drops the speed by 40 to 50 percent immediately because of the collision. But we see that the club head speed is usually increasing or just reaching its peak velocity at impact. One of those two conditions usually applies or always applies with a pro. Doctor, you mentioned the 3D analysis and it obviously has a massive impact upon a game. But is there any other technology that's beginning to emerge or that is now in play that can really dramatically improve a golfer's game, be it the long game or the short game?

Well, again, I'm going to be biased because I'm a biomechanist. I'm not a sports psychologist or a physiologist. So as far as I'm concerned, my area of expertise is in the motion side of it. So there's two types of motion or there's two parts of the motion. We want to look at the input and the output yeah so the input is what your body does and the output but is of course what the ball does when it's in the air so there's technology for looking at both of those you've got the radar devices like the Trackman and flight scope and there's several other

different versions yeah that watch the flight of the ball the spin of the ball the direction the distance all of that type of thing. That technology is very, should I say, is evolving very rapidly and getting more and more accurate. But that uses Doppler radar, does it not? It does. The TrackMan, yeah. It does indeed. Now, the golf ball, obviously, with spin, it'll do all kinds of different things depending on the spin axis. So with the TrackMan and FlightScope, we can look at that and we can fine-tune that.

Now, how do we fine-tune that? Well, we've got to come back and look at the body motion. And that immediately brings us back to full-body motion analysis systems. I developed a system many years ago called the AMM3D system, and that tracks the full body, what we call six degrees of freedom of motion how you move not just forward backward left right but how you tilt forward how you tilt sideways and how you turn all of those things make up six degrees of freedom and if we can get six degrees of freedom motion of every part of your body then we can basically measure anything we want from

the center of gravity motion to just a simple joint motion. And the problem with that technology right now and where I see it heading in the future, the problem right now is it's too invasive. By that I mean you have to stick those markers on people, the little ping pong balls that you see Tiger Woods having on or when they're doing basketball shots and when they're making video games. That's kind of invasive because you have to suit the person up and it takes, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes to get that done. What I see happening in the future is the ability to do that with just what I like to call a magic camera. You point the camera at the person and with artificial intelligence methods, it figures out where the

person's body is it figures out where the joints are and it automatically gives you that 3d avatar from which you can then measure all the angles and the velocities and the distances that you want that's very cool that's an incredible look doctor would you mind we are going to take a break but we we can't let you go. You're far too interesting. Absolutely. And six degrees of freedom, Chuck. Yeah, I believe we're going to have Will Smith starring in that.

We have a hit on our hands. Yeah, there you go. Definitely. That's got a movie title written all over it. Okay, we are going to take a break. The good Doctor, Dr. Phil Cheatham, will be with us when we return. If this has got your attention, stick around. We've got a nice little show.

Welcome back to Playing With Science. I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I'm Chuck Nice. And we are taking a look at the golf swing, but not just any golf swing, a man that can make you the sweetest swing you've ever seen. Dr. Phil Cheatham. Chuck, tell the people exactly what our man is. Yes, Dr. Phil Cheatham, who is a doctor of biomechanics. Is that right, Dr. Phil? That is correct. Yeah. And you are also the sports technologist for the U.S.

Olympics Committee and their biomechanics experts. so we're talking to the right person we are so here's what i'd like to do uh one of the things that i hear all the time not just from the pga tour when the news comes out but from regular golfers and that is back injuries back injuries are always like the biggest lower back lower back biggest news yeah why is it that so many golfers injure their back well we kind of uh touched on it a little bit earlier about how fast that club head is going and how slow or zero velocity at the top of the backswing so basically the golf swing is an explosive motion and typically golfers are not trained to handle that explosive motion. And what we do in biomechanics is we try to improve

performance, but improving performance, it's a balancing act. You're risking injury at the same time. So we've got six degrees of freedom. As I mentioned earlier. We've got six degrees of motion or six types of motion going on simultaneously in the lower back as we do the backswing and the downswing. We've got left and right shift. We've got forward and backward thrust. And we've got up and down lift. But not only that, surprisingly enough, your pelvis is moving anteriorly and posteriorly. In other words, it's tilting forward and backward. It's tilting left and right, and it's rotating all simultaneously.

So you've got those three rotations happening as you turn from the top of the backswing into the downswing. So that puts an enormous stress on the lower the lower back itself one perfect example of where this happens is in that forward backward motion or the forward backward tilting of the pelvis yeah it goes at the top of the backswing as we start the downswing it's like you sit on a bar stool basically you kind of stick your butt out you tilt your pelvis forward and you shift to the left or to the lead side and then you tighten your abs as tight as you can to create and transmit energy to the rib cage so what that means is all of that all of that tension is going through your lower back and we don't this this is where i'll get on my soapbox now

please do please do we don't strengthen our golfers enough again i said it earlier it's not just a game it's a sport and so you have to be prepared for that and so i think if we did more physical conditioning because you you put together the weekend golfer who just goes and plays, you know, 18 holes or maybe even 36 holes on Saturday and then sits in front of the computer the rest of the week. Right. And doesn't do any conditioning because, oh, I'm just going to play a round of golf and then I'm going to have a beer with my buddies. Well, you think now he's probably got a decent speed swing maybe maybe 90 100 miles an hour and that's putting a lot of tension there's something something called tension that he's not used to exactly tension that his body isn't accustomed so what would you recommend i mean

it's a bit of a board solution for for your uh weekend warrior as you would call him. It sounded to me from your description of what was going on that in order to diminish injury, you really need to do some core training. Like you really need to strengthen your core as much as you can before you get out there and start just willy-nilly swinging a hammer. You hit the nail on the head, and not just before, but while. In other words, keep that workout going. Ghosts play golf on Saturday and Sunday, but work out on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And as you say, core strength is enormously important, not just linear core strength, in other words,

not just lifting straight up and down in what we would call a sagittal or front to back plane, but rotational motion as well. So you've got to do those side to side exercises, those turning exercises, you know, get yourself as strong as possible, and that will protect you. Oh, interesting. And the other thing that came to my mind while you were making your description is, you know, about going forward, back, and the way you tilt your pelvis and stick your butt out. Have you ever heard of twerking?

Have you ever heard of twerking, Doctor? Yeah. I mean, if you can practice twerking, that's going to help your golf. You heard it here first on Play With Science. This is what you will find no place else, okay? Twerking helps your golf game. Get to it, people. The road to the PGA Championship title is through twerking. It goes right through twerking.

Have we seen a human being hit the ball as far as they possibly can? Or do you think, oh, we haven't? Simple answer, no. No. What do you think we can get distance-wise? Well, what do I think we can do? Well, I don't know what that number is going to be but you know it's the long drive guys are just just learning to really be long drive i'm it's it's

it's exciting for me being here at the olympic training center because i see some very very um elite athletes and with the shot put, the javelin throwers, the discus throwers, the hammer throwers, I see some big, big people. Yeah, for sure. Our shot putters are 6'4", 6'7", 300 pounds. Wow. So imagine one of these guys, and they like to play golf.

Imagine when he's retired from his shot put career he says oh i think i'll go and swing the club a little bit these guys if they can learn the sequence of the golf swing which is not too different from the sequence of the shot put i mean for example you can't throw a shot put by just using your arm. That's not going to happen. That's why these guys are so big, because they use their body to get into it. So we can see in the future, I think, and you know, you've seen guys like Tim Burke. And on the other hand, you've got Jamie Zedlowski, who's a small guy. So you've got power versus efficiency, right there. But if you put somebody together, like if you put a Tim Burke and a Jamie Zedlowski, like together like if you put a tim burke and a jamie zavlowski like

together and and you have a big guy a really big guy with um perfect sequence then it's going to fly another hundred yards i think you know 400 something like that i can't wait to see a six foot seven 300 pound pro golfer i can't wait to see that happen. I will actually watch every single match. It's going to go down to Augusta and eat it. Oh, exactly. It's just, that would be amazing. It's just like, I want to see a golfer who can actually scare the crowd

as much as he can excite them. Now, that's funny you should say that because that would, I agree, that would be terribly exciting to me. I do a lot of blogs and things on Facebook and I have my own website called skilledmotion.com. And we talk about that sort of thing there. And one of the things I've talked about often is that golfers are athletes and need to be athletes. And man, I get a lot of pushback on that. This guy's saying, oh, you don't need to be strong to hit the ball 300 yards and to, you know, score two or three or four under par or whatever and have a decent round. And I'm like, yeah, sure. That's true to have a decent round, but I'm not

talking about a decent round. I'm talking about a phenomenal round. And I don't think we've seen that yet. I mean, you've got, you know, you've got extraordinary people like Spieth and McElroy and, you know, Fowler. And certainly Woods in his heyday. But I think that there's some young kids there that are waiting in the background that are just going to come up and shock us in the future. We're seeing that now in all the sports. Well, we are looking forward to that. The totally jacked pro golfer. The perfect beast with a golf club.

I can't wait as long as he's not doing roids because roid rage and golf clubs do not mix. That's going to be an awfully busy lake where all those clubs are going to land. Good stuff, man. Thank you. Very, very good stuff, doctor. Dr. Phil Cheatham, absolutely wonderful. I'm just captivated by that.

Yeah. Thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. You're welcome. Brilliant. Thank you. Well, speaking of the pros,

we've got to take a break, right? We have. And we have a pro coming up. Yeah, we do. So stick with us. Rob Labritz, PGA Championship golfer will be our guest when we get back. This is Playing With Science and as I said

back shortly. Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly and I'm Chuck Knight and this is Playing With Science. Yes, today we're breaking down the science and biomechanics of the perfect golf swing. So there you go. We've heard from the sport technologist and biomechanic Dr. Phil Cheatham. Dr. Phil is known to us now and everybody else. And now joining us to give us the pros eye view is Rob Labritz.

Rob, welcome to the show. Hey, Rob. how are you? Hey, doing great. Thanks for having me on, guys. You're welcome. You recently won the PDA Westchester Championship. Congratulations, my friend. Thank you very much. Yeah, good year so far. So, you know, where we left off when we were talking to Dr. Phil Cheatham was he was talking about the fact that we're not seeing these physical specimens that will one day be in the game. Do you agree that if a guy is in really super like top shape that we may see like super golfers at some point? we may see like super golfers at some point? You know, genetics has a lot to do with it nowadays. And the pool of people, since more people are starting to come into the game,

you know, from other areas, you know, you're going to get some really talented, strong people that are going to play the game, sure. But, you know, you look at guys like Rory McIlroy. Now, I've played in five major championships myself, and the last one was, you know, Baltus Raw last year at the PGA Championship. And I teed off right behind Rory McIlroy. Now, I've played in five major championships myself, and the last one was, you know, Baltus Raw last year at the PGA Championship, and I teed off right behind Rory in the practice round

when they were doing the long drive, you know, contest. And here's Rory. You know, he's a small little guy. Yeah. But yet he's just massively muscular. Oh. And I'm kind of like the opposite. I'm tall and lanky.

I've been working out for about 14 to 15 years now, and I just really work on strength and flexibility. I'm not trying to get big. I'm 6 feet, 172, very lanky, but I can bend my body in any way and have pretty fast twitch muscles. But to answer your question, you're going to get pools of guys and gals that are going to be a lot bigger than your average tour players. And sure, they're going to start hitting the ball farther and farther,

and it's going to make it easier and easier. Wow, that's super cool. So the secret to distance isn't just the guy with the big or the girl with the big muscles. It's got to be about how you execute your technique, how you execute your swing. Looking at that as a pro yourself for all the years you have been, what is the most fundamental, most vital part of that swing to you?

Yeah. So, you know, for me, it's stability. I'm a big believer in less is more. The golf swing starts from the ground up. So you have to be stable. You have to have a strong foundation. And then you've got to know what you're doing, you know, with the golf club taking it back. But if you have a super strong, you know, foundation and know how to use your, you know, use your body properly, you can hit the ball very far. And obviously genetics has

a lot to do with it, too. The faster twitching muscles, you know, you can hit the ball far like a Justin Thomas. I mean, these kids right now, they're tall and light. You look at him, he's, he's what, 6'2", but he's, you know, probably 150 pounds, but he hits the ball 360 yards. Yeah, that's a distance. Yeah. So kind of piggybacking on what Gary just asked you, what are the key differences between the long game and the short game? Is it more mental? Is it more physical? Because, you know, you know, drive for show, putt for dough, you hear all these kinds of things, you know, so when it comes to being a champion in golf, what is more important is in and what are the key differences?

what is more important and what are the key differences? Well, you know, I think each player out there has certain strengths and certain weaknesses. If everybody was a great, you know, off the tee, great middle iron, great short grain, great putter, they'd win all the time. Yeah. And really, you know, the way it is is all the guys out there, you know, and some of the top, you know, club professionals in the world, you know, world you know all have you know great golf swings they hit the ball very far it really comes down to who's making enough putts that week and who obviously gets you know some of the good breaks um you know for me

when i practice you know i still compete very hard uh up in this section and and you know still try to play in some majors but um you know me, it's really just most of my practice is bulked into the short game, anything inside 100 yards. I'd say 85% of my time is focused inside 100 yards, and the other 15% is working on my golf swing. You know, and that includes, you know, obviously, you know, working out and all that stuff, but going unsaying. Have you ever come across a game a player who a male

male or female here uh that short game was just uncrushable because it does it's just so obviously in the head as well as the the technique but ever ever seen someone who just said this is in the hole before the ball even gets placed down yeah ben crenshaw did a lot of that i mean he was one of the greatest putters that ever leave you game. But yeah, definitely. There's guys who have so much confidence in certain areas of their game and they don't have confidence in other areas of the game. Some of my students are the same way. I'm kind of that guy too, whereas I'm a very, very good ball striker, extremely good around the greens and putting gets hot and cold with me uh if i putt well i win if i don't putt well i finish in the top 10 at

least at the club professional level um and then when i'm i have to play well to uh you know to make cuts in majors and stuff which i which i did a few years ago but um it's it's a different it's a different animal you just have to know what your strengths are. And you've got to, in my opinion, if you know what your strengths are, I want you to go to your weaknesses and try to make those weaknesses even better because then you'll become a more complete golfer. They say a good pro knows his weaknesses. There you go. You talked about your students.

And I'm interested because of the science and technology part of our shows always. Do you employ any technology to help your students improve their game yes i do of course um i'm a big statistician i use um i use game golf which is a game shot tracking device uh which tells you exactly how far and where you hit each shot on the golf course everything is plotted out plotted out, GPS through satellites and through your clubs. And then also, you know, I'm a TrackMan user. I just decided to get MySwing, which is a 3D motion capture. Interesting you mentioned TrackMan because that was the technology

that Dr. Phil Cheatham was using, the 3D analytics, et cetera. Yes. The TrackMan is really good because it gives you club data and ball data in certain conditions uh whether it be humid and hot cold it tells you exactly what's happening uh from i believe a foot before the golf ball with the golf club to impact and then a foot after wow and it reads it reads uh it reads the ball in the club data does it give you all the the the is it the d-plane the the angle of approach before impact etc etc and all of it club face closure uh it might even give you your social security number if you program right

i was going to say can it can it also give you my sperm count it can do that i think there's a button on that one but there's a button for sperm count right don't encourage him please don't encourage him hey let me ask you this since we're talking about equipment um he's off you see what i did there right yeah yeah exactly you see what i did there okay all right but anyway uh i would would like to know what technological advances in clubs, the balls, or anything, even the greens, have made this game that much better? So when you think about, I mean, golf has been around forever. I mean, come on. So, you know, from wooden clubs all the way up until now. So what has been the primary technological advancement in equipment that has caused the game to become so much bigger than it is?

You're thinking golf buggy, but let's rub on, sir. Yeah, you know I'm thinking golf cart. It's all of the above. I mean, it's the shaft. It's the club head. It's the golf ball. You know, the club heads nowadays, you can have any type of head that you want to get on. Hit the ball high to hit the ball low to hit the ball load hit the ball more spin less spin uh the shafts you know equal that too and then the golf ball is uh you know the usga is putting limits on what

they can do with uh you know with club design and golf ball design because if they let these engineers just keep going you'd see guys hitting the ball 500 yards and guess what what's wrong with that that's what nothing is wrong exactly exactly man so the thing is for me i mean the people i speak to about the the golf club technology they said the club's probably gone as far as it can but the real major developments have taken place with the balls themselves, and particularly the coating that's on them. Yeah, I mean, the coating has something to do with it. And don't forget, the USGA, you know, they limit how much the club face can rebound. Right.

So, you know, the more that you have that rebound effect off the club face, the farther you're going to hit the ball like a trampoline. Absolutely. You know, it's one of those things where I like them keeping the playing fields level, although it would be interesting to see if they just allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do, how far a human could hit the ball. Yeah. I think that that's where the excitement is. People love that.

People want to see that. Totally do. They totally do. Hey, so let me ask you this. Who's the best golfer today, and why are they the best golfer today? And following up with that, Tiger Woods was such a phenom. Was it his game or the fact that he just looked different? Okay, so let's see.

Tiger Woods played a few tournaments with Tiger Woods in the field, 0-2, 0-3, 10. He had an intimidation factor. I mean, I'll never forget the first major I played in 2002 at the PGA at Hazeltine, and I got a chance to hit balls next to Tiger. You know, it was impressive. First of all, he was an alpha male.

He just had this aura about him. you can feel an energy coming off him that's just uh he knew he was better and he knew he was great and we all knew he was the greatest you know it's again it goes down to confidence i would i would love to see you know tiger to watch what he did uh in his span when he was the greatest was just totally impressive and what he did for the game. OK, absolutely. You know, just to see it and to see how Mr. Nicholas got even scared a little bit, it looked like to see how his records were going to be, you know, broken until, you know, obviously Tiger had some problems. Right, yeah.

But, you know, other than that, he had a thing about him. I didn't think there was anybody better. OK, so who's the best today then? But other than that, he had a thing about him. I didn't think there was anybody better. Okay. So who's the best today then? Yeah, interesting to see who's got the crown right now. You know, you can look at the world golf rankings. And the world golf rankings, I guess they have Dustin Johnson ranked as number one, and Matsuyama as number two, and Jordan Spieth as number three, and Rory's number four.

So you have all these guys who are, you know, world beaters. It's hard to pick a, you know, a number one player because golf is such a sport where, you know, you're going to get hot for a few weeks and you're going to play great. And then it just happens, you know, like you cool down, you just, you just do either get mentally tired or whatever happens. It's really hard in the sport to maintain, you know, this, this level of just crushing it you know for months on end gotcha um so you know it's kind of it's a hard question to ask i'm sorry i'm kind of dancing around it no no i think what you're saying is actually really insightful it's interesting because there's it just says like for for a month somebody is absolutely on it and then they might just float away and someone else picks up and takes over.

So you're actually making a valid point rather than saying something that's not true. Yeah, it kind of sounds to me like it's more of a mental burnout thing. Yeah, it almost is. I mean, you know, especially the guys on tour, you look at like Jordan Spieth, the year he had last year where he almost won the four majors. Was it last year or the year before? He almost won the four majors. And it looked like every tournament that he played in, he was going to dominate. He dominated Isleworth.

I think he shot like 26 under for four rounds there. And if you guys have ever played Isleworth in Orlando, that's not an easy feat to go around 26 under par in four rounds. That's a hard golf course. Yeah. I'm sorry. I only a hard golf course. Yeah. I'm sorry. I only play at Trump courses. Okay. Don't worry, Rob.

I'll deal with this off air. So it's interesting. To go back to that point, for someone with longevity, and I'll just pick Phil Mickelson, to see the amount of times that guy has parked up to the high end of the leaderboard over so many years, when we're talking about the fluctuation of form, to see consistency like that, that to me is something that's probably as impressive as anything else. Yeah, definitely. I think what you said hits the nail on the head, the longevity of these guys. So

again, if I'm going to pick a great player, I'd have to say something like Phil Mickelson because he's been doing it for so long. He's my age. He's 46 now, or 47, and he's been winning tournaments since he was in college. So, I mean, you think about that. That's 20-some-odd years, almost 30 years of longevity.

So that's, you know, barring injuries. I mean, you think about all the times you have to practice and all the hours that you spent hitting golf balls. It's not the most, you know, gracious thing to do to your body. Yeah. So to be able to hold your body together and then compete at a huge world worldwide level and win all the time over that 30 year span. Yeah. It's just incredible. Wow. Hey, that is that I never thought of it that way, but that is really incredible. Hey, listen. So listen, we've got to wrap things up.

But before we go, Rob, I have to ask you one super serious question, okay? And that is this. What do caddies really do? And is the caddy responsible for washing the players' balls? So the caddies are... You're treating this question seriously, Rob. Don't do it. No, I am serious.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to get a little fuzzy with it, but here's a perfect example. You've got a guy like Bones McKay who's caddy for Phil for a long time. When you become with a player and you're with a player for so long, you're going to give them a lot more help. You know, you're there to keep them calm. You're there to do the yardages.

You're there to know how far it is to certain bunkers, certain trees. You're there to know the lay of the land, the greens, take care of the clubs. As far as, you know, you know, pulling, you know, clubs for your, for your player, you're not going to do that that you're going to talk about it with your player okay and from a player's standpoint on my side you know it's nice to have somebody that you can kind of just brush an idea off of uh okay well the wind's up a little bit here you know i normally hit 7 185 winds up should we go for the six you know what do you think or if you're looking at a green and you're looking at it you say okay well i see it going a little left to right what do you think

gotcha um they're there kind of just to be a sounding board and they're there to keep you calm and they're there to be your friend uh and that's really what what they do and then great when you get a good partnership i've been with my caddy now for for almost nine years and uh we've got a nice thing going we understand each other and it And it's very calm out in that club. Well, Rob, thank you. That's great, yeah. I think I need a caddy in my life. We all do.

I need a life caddy after this. We're working on that one. I'm sure they've got a website for that. Yeah, they probably have. You're right. Rob, thanks so much for your time. It's been fabulous. Yeah, we look forward to getting you back and talking more golf

at some point in the future so Chuck I mean golf may not be everybody's sport but you can see why it grips people and they become addicted the science the biomechanics the technology that we're finding employed by

golfers and by coaches now is breathtaking. And like I said, we might find big, muscly golfers hitting the ball 500 yards. Now that will change the sport completely. Absolutely. This was really a fascinating show. I really enjoyed it. I have to tell you this much.

After talking about golf all this time, I'm just saying I feel like a rich white man. So I'm very, very happy for that. Oh, dear. All right. All right. While our listeners. Yeah, Rob, thank you. While our listeners come to terms with Chuck's new image crisis.

That's it. This has been Playing With Science. And Chuck's just getting a call. I'm actually off now to go do a few real estate deals on the golf course right now. Yes, I am. Yes, he is, yes. Feeling very white. Feeling very white.

Okay, when Chuck comes to grip with his new image crisis, we'll say goodbye. That's it from Playing With Science. I hope you've enjoyed our show, and we look forward to it coming soon.