Let's Talk Lag's Golf Machine

Essential Reading
241

Hi KOC,

My understanding would be that if all that CF stood for was “round the corner” and CP “out to right field” that would match up with Lags hitter/swinger differentiation. But the terminology gets a little confusing because CF (Centerfugal) and CP (Centripetal) are obviously terms that are already defined - here is a post from Lag from a while back in the thread that touches on this:

So essentially as I understand it you are right its just that the terminology/language might confuse some.

Cheers, Arnie

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Gerry,
Can you please answer my questions I asked, they were genuine questions.
Tell me this Gerry how does someone know how the human body is moving and provide training to someone unless you know their physical limitations are ?

how their body creates speed ? how do you work this out with out measuring hips speeds,upper body speeds and arms speeds?

Is their body creating the right sequence to create speed or power generation process? how can you tell with out measuring each body segment with biomechanics ?

how they are moving in motion ? Video can’t measure in space how do you know what ground reaction forces they are creating?
How much the are lateral bending left or right of the spine and how much force this is putting on your spine?
How much twist people are putting on their spine with out biomechanics?

How and if their muscles are loading and firing in their golf swing? how can you measure this with out measuring using biomechanics
Are they using the right muscle groups? how can you tell with out measuring?

Are these muscle groups loading and firing in the right sequence and timing?

How do you really know do we know if we are truly being honest with ourselves?

The only way your going to truly know with out guessing is to measure athletes with biomechaincs ?

Gerry referring to my accident was Muscloskeletal System, your neural drive… The commands issued bt the nervous system to activate muscle and to produce a force thats is transmitted to the skeleton and appears as a torque about the joints.
My Primary Motor Cortex if the brain was affect in the accident. this affected other brain areas such as basal ganglia and cerebel. The central commands appears to the specify the muscles that need to be activated, the contraction force and the timing of the contraction.
Damage either to the premotor or posterior parietal cortex of the brain, results in an inability to produce the correct strategy of movement, which important to the planning of movement and ensures the sequence of muscle activation for movements and also effect writing and speaking…
This is what leads to generate and transmits the central command to the brain stem and spinal neurons to initiate and modulate movement.
Neuromechaincs…

As I said my issues with my golf swing wasn’t mechanics it was nueromechanics… same with my accident…

The brain commands the muscles, the muscles commands the bones…

The human body is sending messages to muscles before they act… to commence the golf swing the muscles have already been sent the next command before they initiate the downswing.
Hope this answer your question Gerry.
Kind Regards
Bio.

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Edit.
To commence the golf swing the muscles are sent a command form the brain, another command is sent by the brain to muscles prior to initiating the downswing.
A golf swing is were aren’t reacting we are acting. Our brain and body knows the movement or motion it’s about to achieve.

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KOC,

I think Mac and I would have the same ideology of hitting and swinging differences. I really like Mac’s analogy of around the corner for hitting, and out to right field for swinging. Makes perfect sense to me.

Mac apparently calls “around the corner” CP and “out to right field” CF. As long as the student and instructor know the difference and are talking the same language there should be no need for confusion.

From my understanding of the terminology of CP centripetal (acceleration towards the center of a circle) and centrifugal CF (acceleration away from the center) I am hard pressed to understand how they could not both be present in the golf swing. A simple change in direction at the top creates CP and then once angular momentum starts releasing the club we have instant CF.

Hit or swing… if you let go of the golf club at impact or anytime after, that club is going to move away from you due to CF.

I prefer to think of hitting and swinging as what we do with CF… do we relax into it… with passive hands and let it do it’s thing minimizing interference? Or do we fight the living daylights out of it… firing the hands left around the body, or around the corner, and keep the upper arms packed onto the body… resisting the outward expansion of CF.

Two VERY DIFFERENT protocols for striking a golf ball…

Homer’s version just covers two versions of out to right field… one with a passive right arm, the other with an actively driving right elbow… The second would have a bit less clubface roll. But both create an off plane situation post impact… and Homer does describe this in TGM in chapter 2
I think at the bottom of 2-J-3. The angle of approach delivery with a momentum strike. I think Hogan’s hitting method is much better from both a standpoint of physics, geometry, and the player’s “feel” perspective. It was completely overlooked in TGM and that is why I am here… I can’ t and will not overlook it…

1 Like
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If your car won't start when you turn the key in the ignition would that be  'petro-mechanics' or would it be a simple 'out of gas' problem?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet).
Isn’t your quote above nothing more than PRE-PROGRAMMING! I believe that pre-programming was exactly what I said and intended to say.
The truth is that you are playing childish games relating to territoriality and little else and I decline to become involved in such pointless stupidity.
In it’s simplest form; the conscious mind establishes a dominant intention which is interpreted by the subconscious. The subconscious, predominantly through referral to stored memory of past performance, creates a PRE-PROGAMMING of muscular contractions which it executes in a sequential order. It is executed as a chain reaction of events blended into a composite whole.
You cannot change the links in a reaction chain other than by changing the primary causative action. And that effects the entire chain, not just some selected link. It’s of no consequence what your biomechanical wizardry interprets within the chain of events, you cannot change it other than by changing the trigger mechanism. Get used to that idea!
You, and so many others, rant about POWER in the golf swing. By its very nature the Class of Leverage applicable through the human lever systems is that of a speed multiplier, where the effort and the fulcrum lie in close proximity at one end of the lever and the load is sited at the other end.
If you want power multiplication through leverage then you need the virtual opposite; you need the fulcrum and the load to be sited in close proximity and the effort to be applied at the opposite end of the lever. Go think about that. A crowbar lifting up a rock is a good example of a lever as a power multiplier.
How much POWER is really required to swing a golf club that weighs a bit over 300 grams, with a head the other end that (say) in a driver is around or a tad over 200 grams. A golf ball weighs 45grams, four golf balls weigh more than any driver head out there. It’s more about speed and far less about power.
I have far better things to do with my time, bio, than to cater any further to your fantasies. I will leave it to those who read this thread to pass final judgment on who, and what, they wish to believe.
You have a ‘‘martyr to the cause’’ complex, you will twist and contort anything and everything to shape it to suit your own purposes. Discussion with you is not possible. You should consider the life of a missionary, you would be a natural!
As for my displayed lack of interest in answering your questions; I found them to be totally irrelevant, without substance and a waste of my time. Regarding the spine and real and potential injuries; I have been asked, countless times, to write a book on playing golf without suffering injury and without pain. I’m sure there are those in this forum who have experienced pain suddenly disappearing after reading my book or watching the video, or any of you that I may have helped or worked with. I don’t have to be a biomechanist to do that. I am an OBSERVER!
I will not respond to anything further from you bio, I am convinced that any attempt to enter logical debate with you is a fool’s errand.
Bye
Gerry

246

Lag, can you explain just a little about the Free Ride Down? :slight_smile:
Is the idea that the de-weighting brings us into the P3 position without any effort to rotate or swing, and from there we fire our hands applying the ground forces, followed by the post impact stuff? So it is basically a lower body move which naturally brings us to P3? Our transition thus requires no effort in terms of our upper body or arms or hands?
Or does free ride down mean something else?
When I look at your swing on video, or those of the great ballstrikers we are emulating, this is what I see as being the “free ride down” and to my eyes it is poetry in motion. :wink:

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The downswing can be effectively motivated by the lower body just as Ben Hogan described… this is a real trademark of fine ball strikers. We can use the legs to act as a regulator for this transition… quick and abrupt… soft and slow… whatever the shot calls for…

I like the term “free ride down” because it feels just that…effortless…de weighting feels like a momentary free fall… but when we hit ground so to speak, we are increasing ground forces… so that is what we then work on in module #2.

The weight doesn’t need to go left as quickly as people believe… it can go down… Sam Snead is a classic example… Knudson too.
If the head drops… you are in good company…!

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Bio

Your whole argument seems to be based upon the subject’s personal limitations, and thence finding the proper paths for said individual. It probably makes sense for a world class high jumper looking for one more inch, or a sprinter looking for a tenth, but for the average Joe, our limitations are quite apparent to us. As for me, you could not get me to do a sit up for any reason. Instead, I find variations on planks work my core wonderfully and keep my back happy. I don’t need nth degree, scientifically dissected and bisected total movement knowledge to make me a better athlete/golfer.

What I do need is a very specific protocol. I need one I can perfectly understand in a step by logical step way. I can then drill that into my muscle memory. Lag’s system fits this bill better than anything I have ever come across. It is perfectly fine tuned, and perfectly mind and muscle comprehensible. I know this to be a fact, because the empirical evidence of the little white orb can’t lie. Its flight and sound tell me all is working correctly. I will leave it to the world class athletes to decide what will help them the most. For me - it is what I find here. I also find that there are many here, from world class to average Joe golfers that agree wholeheartedly.

Gerry,

I’m glad you got the aspiring jet jockey to lock in on the physical aspects of physics. It definitely sounds like you put him on the right path to discovery. When I went through flight school, if a university knowledge of physics was a requirement, a lot of grunts would have been hoofing it a whole lot more. Our physics was relegated to the control of one machine, and the proper dancing with the stuff around it. The physics, both outgoing and incoming was quite personal. I guess you could say we played by feel. The old Huey gunships had a rocket site, but the best just used a grease pencil mark on the plex windshield.

Flopshot

249

Flop shot…
I grew up in the Great Australian Bush in a little ‘village’ and started that journey some 71 years ago. As a kid I was hell on wheels with a shanghai (catapult, whatever). I knew that there was no way to aim the damn thing so I ‘felt’ where I wanted to projectile to go.
My Mum’s father was one of the great gunshots of his time, he taught me to shoot when I was nine years old. With both eyes open!
In the old slab sided kitchen on the Hogan farm on the banks of the Lachlan river there resided a .22 Winchester single shot, 1889 model, 19’’ or 20’’ barrel rifle with a stuffed ejector. One had to carry a short length (about 5’’-6’’) of very straight #8 gauge fencing wire to flick down the barrel and knock out the spent casings when they jammed too tight for the ejector to pull them out. No big deal, just the way it was, back then.
First thing my Grandfather did was to take the rear sight off the gun. “We don’t need that. Fix your eyes and your mind on your target, throw the gun between your eyes and your target, ‘see’ the bullet travelling from the barrel to the target and trust yourself. You will see as much of value in three seconds as you will in three months, get on with and pull the trigger.”
To this day, still the greatest single piece of advice that I have ever received, in my lifetime! Decisions are not worth a damn unless you have the guts to pull the trigger!! The back sight eventually went back on that little gun but it was more a decoration than anything else.
Funny thing. When I joined the NSW Police in ‘62 we were issued with .32 caliber Webley Scott automatics. What an abomination of a firearm! Stories about them are legendary! They were more effective if you threw them, than fired them! Several years later we were reissued with .38 Smith and Wesson Specials with 4’’ barrels, the cream of the crop for police issue handguns, at that time. Handguns were a natural for me with what I had been taught and had grown up with. Visually lock on, point and pull! The shite always hit the fan when ‘firearms instructors’ tried to force me to ‘do it their way’. I just kept pointing at the holes that I had already grouped in the target. The holes, or the golf balls, tell the tale!
This is just a way of saying “Hey…know exactly what you mean when you mentioned ‘shoot by feel’. If you can’t trust yourself then who can you trust and why the hell would you expect anyone else to trust you.”
Incidentally my sincerest respects and eternal gratitude to every one of you who ‘served’. No nation can have freedom without the warriors to defend it or can they have a democracy without a policing body to enforce the laws enacted by those elected, by free vote, to protect the interests of its citizens.
Gerry

250

Gerry,

I grew up in Los Angeles. There wasn’t much natural space to be found, guess that’s why I now live in Tennessee. I did have a cousin who had a turkey ranch (the old real kind that are now almost gone) north of LA up what they called the grapevine. Spent a couple of weeks a couple of summers helping out when I was eleven and twelve. I got to hate those turkeys. Shoveling up their crap and dealing with mean old 40 lb toms can be nasty business. I do, however, love the revenge of eating one at Thanksgiving. The cousin was also the county sheriff, so with all the guns around it was a natural to be shown shooting and hunting.

The reason I flew helicopters in Vietnam was not because of a great desire to do so, but the fact that I was smart enough to get in a pretty good college, and smart ass enough to get the boot after only a year. It was not a great move to go from 2S to 1A at that point in time. Got drafted and during my induction physical was probably hung over enough to ace the I and Q quiz they gave. It got me a meeting with a colonel who told me of the need for helicopter pilots. I told him I was going to shoot for being a clerk instead. He came back with pilot or grunt with no stops in between. I made a 19 year old’s decision - said what the hell, and signed on the line. Once on that bus there was no way to get off. Did my time in Vietnam. No big hero, but sure flew with some who were. Came back against the war, got out and became a hippy and art student. Figured it was a choice I had earned. My biggest beef back then was listening to those who chose not to participate telling me what it was all about.

As for feel, I’ve always been that kind of player. It worked well in baseball, basketball and high jumping, but up until now not in golf. Now, I’m just an excited, still in pretty good shape old fart Lag believer. What he says works in the brain and feel level, and I’m striking the ball way better than ever before, and way better than my years (62) should allow. I also got a great kick out of your fart at your left heel visual, and am going to dig around and get your book.

FLOP

251

Lag

I have already posted on the 2nd module light bulb section. but had to say again how amazing the first two modules work in conjunction. The third is on my horizon, and if that adds as much as 2 did to 1, the golf swing enjoyment section of my brain will have to move to a bigger space. Your key of bowing to the 4:30 line to set the arms and body in a perfect position, and the pure solid power of the ground force bubble is giving me a swing I thought I could only dream about. You are oh so right - in a world that thinks the arrow is king, it’s great there’s a place like this that caters to the Indian.

Flop

252

scribd.com/doc/3195117/Why-t … d-Distance

This is a very interesting science paper on physics of the swing.

Some support for Lag’s ideas I think.

Golf swings have Moment of Inertia as well as clubs…and the ‘tighter’ the swing, the better the MOI. I never really got that. Interesting.

Contains definite support for the idea that high MOI clubs result in less skilled full swing play - first time I’ve really got it that way anyway.

Gerry, re: your earlier comment on speed (edit: I may not have fully quoted Gerry’s intentions properly here, so do read back about two posts please), could it be added that stability is also a key factor in the swing? That stability and speed are the basic qualities you need?

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Gound force bubble?!? Sounds like a very bad Japanese video game for the PS2! :wink:

Capt. Chaos

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That’s another MOI beez that I presume Lag is talking about. Clubs advertised as high-MOI have more perimeter weighting and resist twisting on off-centre hits better at the expense of good feedback.

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A proper hitting method will allow you to have a much firmer grip on the club, and that in itself will do more for inhibiting the clubface twisting on off center hits.

If you swing correctly, you do not need perimeter weighted clubs… nor do you have to hit it dead center every time.

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by Beez » Thu Nov 05, 2009 6:41 am
“When all else fails, read the instructions”
Maybe 40 years ago I developed an appreciation for Cabot’s paints. If you look on the top of a can of Cabot’s paint you may still see that stamped into the metal!
It was one of those rare ‘show stoppers’ for me, it cemented me further into a way for thinking that has never changed, never will. The more I discipline myself to submit to that rule, the more productive my thinking becomes.
So where did/ do I find these ‘instructions’?
In the Laws and Rules of each and every field of science that can, or could, touch upon whatever it is that you are trying to do.
Re; my answer relating to speed and levers/ leverage that you refer to. The ‘instructions’ are there, clearly laid out and quite immutable.
Forget all of the surrounding and invented gobbledygook about the ‘golf swing’ and go back to the simplicity and inflexibility of the laws involved. We, as moving humans, are lever assemblies. Bones, acting as levers, move about joints, to create human motion. We are therefore the servants of the Laws of Levers and Leverage.
Motion is created. Therefore Newton’s Laws of Motion must be obeyed. To be obeyed they must be understood. To be understood they must first be sought.
Leverage is applied through differing systems that are broken into three lever classes. There are vast pools of information on the net, Google and go find it, make it a fun thing.
You will quickly come to accept that the only Class of Leverage that can possibly apply in the golf swing is Class Three, acting as a speed multiplier. An F1 Ferrari can reach incredible speeds and achieve extraordinary accelerations but it cannot pull ploughs or knock down tress. A big Cat can haul huge assemblies and flatten forests but isn’t going to win much in Grand Prix racing!
Check out how the Principles of Levers applies in the science of gears and gearing. Seek out how the Laws of Motion are involved. You may come away with a very new and quite different concept of how(?) and why(?), relative to your own golf swing.
Start with a first year nurse and then work your way through to Professors of, and Lecturers in, Anatomy, Physiology, Neurology and seek their opinions on a simple matter; is human locomotion achieved through the activation of levers acting within the Class Three Lever System. And is there any alternative, is anything else possible.
I have, why can’t you, any of you. Are any of you ‘out there’ afraid of (maybe) finding anything that you really don’t want to know?
Not good news to find your herd of ‘sacred cows’ has Foot & Mouth and/ or Mad Cow disease. Your herd might be the healthiest in the district, even the nation, but then again…/ It only takes one or two crook cows to bring the entire mob down, doesn’t it!
Mother Jones watched a passing military parade of thousands and noted, with great pride, that her son Johnny was the only soldier in that Parade who was in step. And so too it goes with golf’s endless and ever broadening flood of analysts, theorists and self appointed gurus!
Here is a little gem for your consideration Beez; Newton’s Third Law dictates that, in the creation of motion, all FORCE must be met, both equally and opposite. In the universe, as we yet know it, there are no acknowledged exceptions to that, or to the function of the Class Three Lever System, that I know of.
If your availability of FORCE far outstrips the availability of RESISTANCE against which to apply it, what is the maximum amount of that FORCE that you can apply to create the desired MOTION; only that which can be met, both equally and opposite, by RESISTANCE.
If there is already available more FORCE than can be met by RESISTANCE where is the intelligence in trying to create more FORCE?
NO…the earth does not constitute the RESISTANCE required by Newton’s Third Law here. You are dealing with a very complex, multi lever system of sequential motion accelerations. Being both equal and opposite means that it has both a measure and a direction and that constitutes a real bear trap, for the unwary.
Hope this helps you.
Gerry
Copyright(c) Gerry Hogan. All rights reserved 2009.

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Beez,
Thank you for posting that link.
Best to you.

258

Cap

Thanks for the heads up! I just sold the idea to Sony as the save the world weapon, in their upcoming " I was just Mayan my own bidness when the world ended" game.

Flop

259

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

  • Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, 1676
260

Flopshot

Just to clarify there; I didn’t give him extended lectures on physics. I simply pointed his own head in a new direction. He was a physically talented young man whose most desperate wish was to become a fighter pilot and he knew exactly what he was getting himself into, and why. His fear came from the fact that the way in which he was being force fed physics was like a man trying to to climb a slippery pole, he couldn’t find any way to get a grip on it. I just sort of took him around the other side and showed him a ladder that he didn’t know was there. As soon as he got on the first rung or two he shot up that pole faster than a buck rat up a drainpipe!
The reality is that failure leads to confusion the confusion leads to fear and eventually depression and loss of self worth. I just pointed out to him a toe hold and a place to grip and pretty soon his fear of failure turned into adrenalin rushes, Pavlov’s mutts and all that stuff really!
And ain’t that one hell of a kick-ass feeling!!!
To me, that’s where the vast majority of people miss out on the magic and the majesty of what golf is really all about. It’s not about numbers at all, it’s about looking for and accepting the challenges. It’s about a shot hit pure and clean under the pressures of fear of consequence. And that’s what I miss the most now!
Show me a true lover of this game, in the purest sense, and I’ll show you Don Quixote, the man of Impossible Dreams. If there was nobody worth getting into a scrap with, he would go find a windmill or two and kick the shit outa them!!
Gerry