I’ll admit I don’t know who Steve Lightfoot is so I googled him.
If this is the guy lennonmurdertruth.com/about.asp he sounds like a very interesting fellow 
Lag I’d trade him training in module 1 for the seafood…keep the copper faces.
If that is the same guy, I’d limit my contact with him altogether!
Captain Chaos
Captain: Couldn’t agree more with you. Sounds like a little too much mercury in the fish 
We’ll whether or not that is the same Steve Lightfoot, and it might very well be, I still find it amazing that a former Doylite shows up here as a door to door salesman, just as I showed up on Doyle’s door out of the blue with my father when I was 14 years old.
I recently told the story about that on “The Gotham Blog” (showing up on Doyle’s door) and found it a bit odd that a Doylite from that era shows up at my door within a week of me writing about it…
It still will be fun to see one of those old classic Doyle moves hit a golf ball.
I’d call that “Instant Karma”…way to complex for me…
It could be part of a much broader conspiracy, remember I’m from NYC and I was recently hanging out by the Dakota, reminiscing by Strawberry fields.
BTW the next installment of the interview will appear on Wednesday 2/3/10 at 2:OOPM EST
Ralph
Lag,
What do you think of the new ball flight laws and these new Trackman teaching methods?
Ralph
Please educate me…
Did the laws of physics suddenly change to where the ball now does something different?
Is Trackman the latest version of Pacman?
This might be old news to you, but here’s a link explaining the laws.
http://www.tutelman.com/golf/clubs/ballflight.php?ref=
It’s basically a fitting system that some are going to parlay into a teaching system. I tried it out last week at the PGA show. It’s based on military technology, Doppler radar to be exact and it gives you all kinds of data in terms of spin, club path, face path , angle of approach etc.
Here’s a link to their website http://www.trackman.dk/Home.aspx
Here’s a more interesting thing I got on in Orlando. It’s a lesson system composed of video, trackman and force plates. It measures rotational forces and and weight shift in addition to all the other stuff.
For some reason I can’t get the images to post here. I’ll email them to you.
Not bad, but I wonder how information is too much information.
It’s good to see you have Two Masters in your fold. He was always a favorite of mine.
ok…
The first glaring oversight is that you can’t begin a conversation about ball flight unless you add in trajectory.
So this is another attempt at trying to explain golf by likely another mid or high handicapper.
I wouldn’t even consider the six other off plane swing flights. Simply not necessary.
Any good player can get around the golf course with three directional flights, and then vary trajectory by either switching clubs or changing release sequencing.
Why make this more complicated?
As far as the Trackman… I think it’s wonderful for viewing golf on TV. But how is that going to help me play better golf?
The best evaluation of the shot will be me, not a computer.
I also don’t think much of laser yardage scopes. I played recently with a top college player who twice in the round got
the wrong yardage because he hit a tree behind the green with his scope and airmailed. Just the idea that that could happen EVER is too often for me.
I like a pin sheet to see where the pin is. I play totally by intuition because the more I can engage my mind around the shot the better. A general rough in as far a yardage is all you need, from there, fine tune your shot with your feel and gut.
If a yardage is WAY off your intuition, then step back and take another look… maybe meet it half way.
Exact yardage is only about 20% of the equation.
Lie - temperature - humidity - altitude - wind - trajectory - slope the ball is on - how you are feeling - that’s 80%.
There is no substitute for spending time actually on the golf course playing. I really question more and more the benefits of beating range balls. Even if you are doing to find out how far you hit your irons… that all goes out the window on the golf course.
Look at the PGA Tour guys… and you will see them coming up short and long all the time… they are not nearly as accurate with their distance control as they should be.
Hogan didn’t use yardages for a lot of these reasons… He said he had no idea how far he hit each club, because he could hit each club any distance he wanted within the parameters of that club. He used his choice of clubs to adjust the trajectory of his shots, because he liked to play the ball in the same place in his stance generally speaking.
Personally I like to hit the ball as low as I can… because that is the shortest distance between the ball and the hole.
I don’t need a trackman to tell me that… but if you don’t understand that concept, then view a trackman from a side angle.
Low means less energy exerted by you, and you take wind out of the equation to a great deal. If I have to drop it it from high, then I can do that… but I don’t really like golf courses that make you have to do that every hole… BORING
A good golf course should typically have a run up option into some part of the green, unless the hole is short. The occasional mandatory carry shot is fine, but that really has been over cooked by modern architects… BECAUSE…
You can’t play God with the weather, and sometimes greens get dried out… wind swept, and simply too hard to be playable
like I had to deal with last year at US Open qualifying. It was a complete joke. I shouldn’t have to have square razor sharp grooves on my club, milled textured faces to get the ball to stop on the greens.
I played a lot of golf on the Australian Tour back in the late 80’s early 90’s and there were some very hard fast greens going on…but it was fair, because you always had an option, and of course the balatas were wonderful for controlling the ball into the greens.
What is going on today is absurd.
Trackman can clear up some misconceptions about how the ball flies that most golfers either have no idea about or have been mislead by the old ‘ball flight laws.’ For example, if the face is 4* open to the target at impact and the club path is 4* to the right (inside-to-out) of the target, the ball will result in a straight push. The ‘old ball flight laws’ would say that the ball would result in a push slice.
So, if I hit a straight push one would think that the face was square and the path was out to the right according to the ‘old ball flight laws.’ But now with the ‘new ball flight laws’, which is what Trackman more or less verifies, tells us differently.
Then there’s attack angle and inclined plane and how those factor into the way the ball flies as well. Steeper attack angles move the effective plane line to the right.
A lot of the PGA Tour players are using Trackman with their practice sessions. Kevin Streelman used it for his driver and found that his attack angle was too steep and just by shallowing that out, he added 23 yards of carry and was straighter with the same clubhead speed. All he did was go from a -5* attack angle (very steep for a driver) to -1* attack angle. He was also able to hit a lower lofted, shorter shafted and much stiffer shafted driver just by changing his attack angle And there’s other things that Trackman does like being able to show how players can have the same type of ball flight, but do it much differently.
However, Trackman doesn’t tell you how to do it, but it does tell you what you are doing and that can be used to give the golfer of an idea of where they need to focus on if they are having problems. If you hit the ball consistently well and accurately, then outside of maybe wanting to increase driver distance, then it’s not much use to that golfer. But, most golfers do not fit into that category and most teachers can’t spot the problems without having the data that Trackman provides.
3JACK
I have quite a bit of footage from the Australasian tour in the 90’s. It looks like hard running fairways and fast greens.
NYC Lagster
Thanks Richie for that information…
I am always encouraging students to enter into a flatter more shallow approach as the majority of great strikers did or do.
Also stiff shafts will give better control, so that all makes sense.
The only problem I see with a lot of the computer analysis stuff is exactly what you described… it’s tells you what’s wrong, but doesn’t tell you how to fix it.
Also it tends to deal with snap shot analysis stuff, and we all know that the club is moving over 100 mph, and the golf swing is just that… it is a swing… and the club is moving, and this is why I don’t teach positions… I teach dynamic actions that will give some nice looking snapshots if you want to take them… but you simply can’t try to get into a position in the golf swing.
It is either in your swing DNA or it is not…
The only positions there are is a starting position, and a finishing position… and all the module work we do is based upon that.
Everything must be translated into a clearly understandable feeling or tangible sensation, otherwise, you are playing the paralysis by analysis game. I don’t do that.
Ok,
here is the danger I see in this kind of thing…
let’s take the foot pressure analyzer. Now given I know nothing about their technology or platform… however…
Usually, they have some kind of model of what is ideal… it might be Tiger, or VJ or whomever is on their marketing crew.
Now… some kind of ideal will be prescribed from some kind of input… but for instance, ground pressures are very dependent
upon the type of swing you have, if you are hitting or swinging, and really dependent upon how flat you swing, and how you have your gear set up…
For instance, I swing pretty flat by modern standards, irons are down about 6 degrees from standard, so the pressures in my feet are very very different because of the more rounded action I make compared to say an upright guy with a much more armsy swing. So if someone were to put me on there, and say, you need to be more like Tiger or whomever, and I did things in my swing to try and create those #s without completely understanding what I am doing, it could really damage my golf swing… and visa versa if someone used my data.
The other thing is that when these computers spit out information… someone has to be able to extrapolate that information, and this is the pony’s trick… suddenly what was so called “scientific” just minutes ago becomes very subjective in nature, because the so called “expert” to some degree is giving you an opinion that may or may not be correct.
He or she might say, “well, you have too much weight going here or there, so you are going to need to do this or the exercise, or feel more of this or that in your swing” but in reality it might be something else, like flattening out our irons.
The clubfitting nightmare that the public is being brainwashed into is one of the worst things going on in the game today.
You cannot set someone up with gear that matches their horrific current golf swing…
You must first, find out there potential for proper impact, and find that ideal first, so that the brain can then lead the golfer to the holy water… otherwise, you end up locking a player into a swing coffin that gets nailed shut with every ball they hit from that fitting day onward until their golf life is over.
One of my top students is 6-4 and he is playing off irons about 6 degrees flat… and this works very correctly. Just basing
club fitting upon a players height and arm length is not good science nor does it make any sense if you actually know better. And basing it upon there terrible golf swing is even worse. It’s really shocking how poor the average club fitters knowledge is. And it seems the more “technology” is introduced, it just makes the profession even more brainless.
Lag,
I think you’d really like Trackman. You wouldn’t really need it, but I think you would find it neat. One of the beauties of Trackman is that is does not use the ‘snap shot’ analysis like the other launch monitors do. The military grade doppler radar technology catches everything ‘live.’ I completely agree with the clubfitter thing and I’ve embarrasingly been thru it myself being 6’4" tall.
I haven’t talked to a lot of teachers that use Trackman because very little do (it costs $30K + $300/month maintainance fee). To Manzella’s credit, he and his teachers don’t really try to get golfers to swing one type of way to hit a certain shot. From talking to them, the way Moe hit it dead straight and the way Hogan would hit it dead straight are competely different ways, but they ‘zeroed out’ (clubface angle close to zero and path close to zero) and they could do it consistently. From reading here and looking at Moe’s swing, he certainly swung out to right and it’s my current belief his attack angle was pretty shallow (bacon strips, not pork chops) which go hand in hand if you want to hit it dead straight. Somebody like Trevino who took big divots needed to swing more left to hit it straight and it’s not really a coincidence that he aimed so far left. With his attack angle probably being so steep, if he ‘swung straight’, he’d likely hit a big a hook. But instead he swung far left and ‘zeroed out.’
That being said, I think we’ll see more teachers get Trackman’s but try to fit everybody into ‘do what Tiger did’ and screw a lot of people up and take a perfectly good piece of technology and ruin it.
From the way I’ve seen Tour pros use it…let’s say a guy is hitting a sizeable draw and wants a dead straight ball flight…he may hit a few shots and see what the numbers say. Then the teacher could say ‘well, your attack angle is average, but you need to swing more left.’ So the pro goes back and swings more left, looks at the number and if that’s not far enough left, he continues to swing left until he gets the number he wants and the ball flight he wants and then he just tries to feel that ‘swinging left.’ That being said, the Tour pros are talented enough to take instruction like ‘swing more left’ and execute it. The average amateur needs to know how to swing left and in more detail.
3JACK
Well that is interesting…
But even from a pro’s perspective, what if you really embrace this thing… and it does wonders for your ball flight… but then you get a bit off,
and then what do you do? Fly home that night and get on the machine and then catch a red eye back to make your morning round?
I just think it is very important to be able to fix your own swing as simply as possible. Is this something you can fit in a suitcase or carry on?
I think your post two before is pretty spot Lag and I see it a lot with the biomechanical motion analysis craze in golf. For what truly is the reference? One can measure hundreds of pro golfers and have tonnes of data, but then what? Does Tiger represent correct? Or do we average all top golfers like Ralph Mann did with the computerized model morphing top players together and try to make everybody the average? Is there really something critical we can find out from all this that a decent instructor can’t see straight off or we don’t intrinsically already know.
Trackman is the bees knees when it comes to launch monitors, but still has inherent inaccuracies. For example, Trackman is a great at tracking the ball in flight and a great time saver in getting a dispersion pattern of shots without having to go collect the balls and a host of other things but not many of its users are aware something simple like clubface angle is tough for radar to measure accurately, so it attempts to back calculate it from the ball flight. Accurate ball flight calculations are not simple. So suddenly you might find yourself working on something that is approximate and possibly not even broken.
Other launch monitor technologies might get club properties more correct but start guesstimating the ball flight, or spin rates, or attack angles… Unless you know the limitations of all this stuff, you may get misled.
And isn’t a piece of carpet achieving what this fancy program is pictured above, with the added benefit of indisputable feedback, in real-time, that can be most importantly drilled, without having to trust the algorithm in a piece of software that probably a 100 shooting engineer wrote (if he even plays) and one which will probably undergo 20 minor bug fixes before they release new technology with unprecedented accuracy? Huh? I thought the last one was accurate.
Boy, the Aussies here reading probably saw the sensor glove reviewed last night on a televised golf show we have. A glove with pressure sensors in the finger tips and a digital display on the velcro tab displaying which finger is squeezing too hard. Grant Dodd, the reviewer, said he couldn’t even get the display to register unless he squeezed the crap out of the club. I think veins on the forehead should suffice – do we need a electronic glove?
I wouldn’t knock back a Trackman, but I think there’s a lot more coarse tuning needed before fine tuning.
Wentworths West Course has been completely redesigned to eliminate the run in shot . The greens have to have a shot coming in from as high as possible.
Sad state of affairs on a classic old track now “modernified”
OK, that last post was meant to be on a thread about courses.
My computer skills have been zilch last two days.