A divot does tell a lot. It shows entry and exit… and lowpoint as well as if it was toe heavy or heel heavy. There is a lot there if you know what to look for.
When I am really hitting it my best, my divots will start just slightly inside out, but then curve off to the left quickly… long and thin. It can appear as if the divot is cutting left, but I can actually draw the ball from the divot.
The nice thing about understanding your divots is that they come out onto the golf course with you. You don’t get that with Trackman or other analytic devices. I can take divots before or after shots if I am trying to feel something.
Hitting off a mat has it’s limitations when it comes to divot analysis… you just don’t get that feedback.
I am not against Trackman or any of these devices, but I do see the limitations and potential pitfalls. I would not want to have to rely upon them to correct my golf swing or a students for that matter. I am sure some find it beneficial for certain things.
BlockquoteWhen I am really hitting it my best, my divots will start just slightly inside out, but then curve off to the left quickly… long and thin. It can appear as if the divot is cutting left, but I can actually draw the ball from the divot.
Love this…in the Jody Vasquez “Afternoons with Mr. Hogan”, he described something eeeeerrrrrriiiiillllyyyy similar. Said they looked like jumbo shrimp tails. Something about accelerating past the ball i guess…
On this note, ballflight and divot reading is instant trackman for ABSrs. A skill you can take with you while playing/practicing…no orange box needed!
How does one take into account the downward deflection caused by impact? I have no issue saying that those with steeper angle of attacks will tend to have deeper divots, but AoA is ever changing throughout the downswing and the relevant piece of AoA occurs before the ground is touched. As far as divot direction, I don’t think it’s as relevant to swing path as it would be reasonable to assume. Launch monitor data is pretty clear on that based on everything I’ve seen and experienced.
I can’t say I really understand what you are saying here… swing path and divot direction are not relevant to each other?
Downward deflection caused by impact? Are you talking about the force of the club being pushed downward into the ground by the more lofted clubs… from the impact collision?
Angle of attack would be affected by ball position, how steep the shaft coming down, how much wristcock is being held late into the downswing and of course lie angles.
I practice lowpoint control by moving ball position around and feeling the lowpoint with a certain degree of hand eye coordination. Lightly nicking the ground on a hard pan surface would give me instant feedback, swing after swing… starting slow, short backswing and going back farther gradually and picking up speed until I feel what I am doing… one swing every two seconds. I can really get a lot done in a short amount of time. Not sure how a launch monitor system would be more effective for getting control of my lowpoint.
Yes, I’m talking about the downward deflection the clubhead experiences due to impact. On a well struck shot the angle of attack steepens post impact involuntarily due to downward deflection. A golfer could deliver a clubhead going 3 degrees down at first touch and by the time the ball is gone they’re 6 down and taking a divot. At impact the hands are moving up, the clubhead is moving slightly down within its elongated flat spot, and then impact causes downward deflection.
I’m saying that low point and angle of attack are two distinct and separate things that are only related to each other. You can have an incredibly steep angle of attack and have your low point behind the ball or ahead of the ball varying amount. Or you can have an incredibly shallow angle of attack and still take a post impact divot due to downward deflection.
I’m not going to say that divot direction is totally unrelated to swing direction, but it isn’t as simple as “you swung where the divot went”. And then when you look at the difference in swing direction vs path due to angle of attack and vertical swing plane you’ve simply got a mess that you can’t see with the eye or with a divot. Now there are certainly checkpoints and things you can look for on video which will give you a good indication, but path, face angle, and angle of attack are simply not something the human eye can see. We’re talking about 2 or 3 degrees here. It doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe irrelevant amounts, but 3 degrees on the face, 2 degrees on the swing direction, and 2 degrees on the angle of attack adds up to the difference between a hook into the left rough and a block fade into the right tree line. The eye, or camera frankly, not being able to see those things is important.
All the more reason to be holding shaft flex into impact. The kinetic energy stored in the shaft creates a shaft that is much firmer and stable than one thrown into the ball with only a momentum strike. Starting with stiffer shafts in the first place would also minimize these deviations.
Moe would always say “bacon strips, not pork chops” regarding divots. It’s pretty simple if you think about it. The impact is just going to be more linear and less glancing. Nothing we can do about the loft on the club sending the club down into the ground with the shorter irons… it’s just what happens and a good reason short iron shafts are stiffer… and applying the orbit pull move through the strike which also does wonders for lowpoint stability.
Of course low point and angle of attack are different. Even the steepest golf swing will have a low point relative to “earth level”.
But to bring it all back around to the point, how would using Trackman, Flightscope, quad, or being on gears hurt or be counter productive? I understand you like to do drills and use video and take divots and study the divots and look at ballflights, but none of that changes or goes away just because there’s a launch monitor there. People using launch monitors also do drills, take divots, and watch their ballflight. It’s just more information and you can pick and choose when and what you look at. Launch monitors aren’t telling you to do anything, they’re just measuring what you did.
Crankus, I don’t think anyone has necessarily said it would be counterproductive. The purpose of this thread was to gather information about the GEARS system’s functionality and any limitations.
For me, personally, I think a real sticking point in some golf instruction circles, particularly those that are heavily TGM focussed (not suggesting that you are), is that people end up devoting an extraordinary amount of time and energy toward developing a detailed biomechanical description of the moving parts and precise measurements - to the Nth degree - of launch conditions and ball flights (“results”).
I think what ABS is exceptional at is cutting through much of the descriptive analysis and actually providing useful instruction on the intentions and pressures that a human being generally needs to perceive and execute in order to generate those “results”.
I also think that once a golfer reaches a certain level of skill (advanced skill), they are able to distinguish between 7 degrees in to out and 7 degrees out to in, or 5 degrees down and 5 up, without a launch monitor. There will certainly be inaccuracies in that perception, but I would argue that those inaccuracies would be virtually inconsequential. In my opinion. the “real world” ball flight, the divot in the ground, together with the golfer’s recollection of the internal pressures experienced and their assessment of their own adherence to their preconceived intentions, are going to tell a sufficiently advanced golfer everything they need to know about the “results”.
This is how Jones, Hagan, Hogan, Snead, Nelson, Nicklaus, Player did it. Would they have liked the opportunity to have a session on GEARS had it been available in their day? I’m sure they would have been curious and I suspect they may have experimented with it. Would GEARS have made them hit the ball any better? I very highly doubt that.
My goal, and I think the goal of gears, isn’t necessarily to develop a biomechanical description of what happens although there is a critical place for that. As an example off the top of my head, I think it’s critical to know the difference between the left arm adducting across the chest in the backswing vs the left shoulder protracting and the right shoulder retracting. By measuring how much left arm adduction a 15 handicap has and comparing it to a specific Tour player or an average of Tour players we can start to see differences in what the arms and pivots are doing in good players vs not so good players. This is something I don’t think can be conceptualized using video. The same would go for something like forward flexion of the spine being replaced by extension and left lateral bend on the backswing. You need 3D, or at least a moving reference frame, to see how it’s happening.
One thing I think shows a huge use is gears combined with force plates. Most amateur simply have no control over their pivot or their center of mass positioning. We can see with this technology what is happening and then we can get the students to experiment with different feels and immediately and directly see what that’s doing to their pivots and center of mass movement. Maybe a player gets to their right side and never re-centers; to fix that maybe they have to feel like they shift back to their left foot 2 feet into their backswing. It may feel awful and uncoordinated, but they can immediately look at it video, gears in 3D, as well as force plate data showing what that feel actually produced in reality. Or you put a hooker with an 8 right path on Trackman and tell them to try to swing 4 degrees left. They do it, and swear to you it has to be 4 degrees left and they swear to you the ball they just watch fly through the air was fading, but you look at Trackman data and they swung 3 degrees right and that “fade” drew 16 feet. I simply don’t think our perceptions of our face/path relationships, our start lines, or our ballflights are accurate, but yes, the better the player the more proprioceptive skills they have. But even world class player fall into patterns and habits they can’t get out of.
All of those players you named “did it this way” because none of this stuff existed. They had no other option. And that’s part of the problem. Stuff has been passed on as lore in golf playing and instruction for a long time and it almost impossible to get it to go away. We still have golf instructors telling people the ball starts on your club path and curves where the face was pointed.
If prime Hogan came back to life right now he would hit 1,000 balls a day and I promise you he’d have a Trackman and a Quad set up running simultaneously and capturing every single shot. He’d review them all, make notes about them all, and then go home and sit on his iPad reviewing them all while going back over his notes.
Out of curiosity, what tour player is really taking the deep dive into GEARS and how is that working out for them? Would love to see their swing currently… even better yet would be to see a before and after they indulged the technology.
Is that something we could do here?
I think it would be interesting…
I don’t think it’s the Tour players taking a deep dive into gears. I think more likely they get their swings captured on gears, look at the captures with their instructors, and then make a game plan to make changes. And I’m sure they recapture to see if anything changed. The first example that pops into mind right now is Padraig Harrington. He’s been working with Michael Jacobs and making some changes for a year and a half or so. Michael Jacobs has worked with Dr. Steven Nesbit for a decade or so now developing the application of Nesbit’s force and torque formulas. They’ve created Jacobs 3D which computes the actual forces and torques the club experiences and also the forces and torques the golfer is applying. To be clear, I don’t understand all of the inner workings of their software, but Padraig Harrington has been applying that and has won 3 times in the last handful of weeks after spending years doing some pretty goofy stuff.
GEARS swings are “owned” by the teacher or entity which owns the unit. I am sure there are many tour players or elite level players (college players, etc.) who have made swing changes using, in part, GEARS, and probably their coaches or teachers have the swing captures. I would be surprised if they weren’t willing to share the GEARS data and swings for something like a teachers’ forum.
I don’t know specifically who might be using the system alot, taking a “deep dive” as you say.
Again, I think as has been pointed out by Crankus, GEARS isn’t a teaching method per se. A golf swing is still a golf swing, and any changes a person makes are human decisions made by the player himself, and/or his teacher/coach, presumably based on whatever philosophy of teaching or methodology they embrace. But the basic idea is that they have a swing, X, and they believe they should change it to another swing, Y. GEARS and trackman are simply tools which allow you to see the swing in a much more detailed, precise way, qualitative and quantitative, such that any changes you choose to make are more informed, and, hence, more productive and more accurate.
To do it here, all you would need to do is contract for a GEARS session. You could take one of your students who is new to your system, document their swing with a GEARS capture and a Trackman combine, and then follow their progress with periodic re-testing. It might show you something about your system that you didn’t expect or realize.
And I completely agree with Crankus that if Hogan were learning golf today, he would absolutely want high level, quantitative technology available to him.
I would actually guess he would not… particularly if the captures are owned by someone else. I can’t imagine Hogan giving much anything away to anyone during his peak playing years.
Knowing this, I would also be reluctant to have my xray owned by someone else for their personal discretionary use.
Hogan wouldn’t need film. He would have his own Trackman and he could just experiment with his swing and how it changed his club delivery and ball launch. I think Hogan would have learned a lot from this tech and I think he would have been a master at using his swing to manipulate the ball any way he wanted. And by that I mean to the number, not just a rough estimation. And instead of just watching his ballflight and guessing and beating ball after ball “digging it out of the dirt” he wound have had real direction and he would have known where he was going. He would have ended up where he was, or maybe better, much more quickly without as much experimentation.
Hogan would probably have bought his own gears system and set up his own studio at his house so he could put in extra hours practicing without worrying about weather or daylight. And he would own his own launch monitors. Nobody owns your launch monitor data except you.
I didn’t mean they “own” the swings in the legal sense, or that they have “discretionary use” of them. I was speaking practically about the location of the files, in response to your inquiry about whether we could see before/after studies of golfers, etc. The files which contain the swing capture are maintained on a server which is accessed through the account of the person who captured the swings. The same way any teacher maintains the video captures of their students, on a computer.
