Let's Talk Lag's Golf Machine

Lag,

I would say my hands are passive, I consciously do nothing with them they just hold the golf club and go as George said where ever they want to, I don’t give a passing thought to them once I have gripped the club, I do however feel sort of a loading in my left wrist during transition when I am swinging it really good, I think this is something that is referred to as float loading although I am not clued up on TGM methods or phrases.

I feel the weight start moving just prior to impact almost bang on impact, through and beyond from right foot to left foot

I have seen you mention that you have some footage of Moe that he allowed you to film, I understand you not wanting to share this especially if Moe said it was for your study only, it would be disrespectful to release it, as much as I want to see it, I respect your decision!

I have a question about this footage though, was his swing more like power golf when you filmed it? As apposed to the footage that we regularly see? Think what im getting at is more up then in as apposed to in then up, hope you get what i meen. Some recent footage I have seen made me think about this. I can do a video of this if anyone wants to see it let me know although the quality is not great!, I still believe Moe was using centrifugal force back then as apposed to some con men who say Moe didn’t use CF!

Also what grip was he using back then? Overlapping or ten fingered?
would you say it was neutral? but with left thumb riding more down the rhs of shaft?

I heard Mike Maves once mention that Moe carried pictures of Hogan around in his wallet, I did ask him about this but unfortunately he never answered my question, I have always presumed these would have been from power golf as there are many sketches in there of different positions in the swing, this new footage backs my theory up, couple that with the fact that Moe said he was 19 when he truly understood the golf swing the same year power golf was published! Coincidence?
some of the pictures i think Moe might have used are on pages 71, 131!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOtScxKhxdI[/youtube]

Younger Moe

Just a general response about the wonder of Lag and this amazing thread.

Since Lag has mentioned that TGM and his perfection of the theme attracts a lot of logicians (scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and the such) I thought some views from the not as disciplined but equally as passionate about golf creative side of the coin type might add a tiny bit to the wonderful threads being woven here.

I think the right-siders of the think box struggle with golf because we much prefer options to definitive answers. An option keeps the creative flow going right on to the next option, and art or fiction usually works well when the option chain gives its all. The creative side is based on the making up its own tests and multiple, even contradictory, answers can sometime yield fruitful results. Lag’s modules allow for both the practice of a truth seeking rigorous craft, and the open zen of a meditative practice.

That said, what I love about Lag’s “spot on” spot on the web is that it is grounded enough in pure fact to appeal to the left leaners and magically poetic in Lag’s own way to cross the aisle. Lag is an amazing well to peer down into (the word deep comes to mind) because he is equally at home looking for the unique answer to a problem as complex as how to understand the true motion in golf, as he is to the myriad of workable answers game of music. He is an incredible switch hitter, both equally at home in the left or right side of his personal think box, and from one who has traveled far up the creative right side food chain – to find a single individual possessing both sides in such grand quantities is very, very rare find.

After the one brand of smoke filled low ceiling uncomfortable chaired basement of ISG, it is quite a joy to find oneself up in the clear mountain air of ABS. To see the posters I most enjoyed, showing up untethered at this great site is another real treat. From the top of Lag’s crag all views can be available, and in this friendly environ all be softly kicked around at the feet of a gently profound real “Guru.” This place is a find, and can do nothing but expand exponentially in wonder, knowledge, respectful debate, and great fun. As some say –just happy to be here.

Flopshot

Flop,

As a left-brained thinker I’d really enjoy if you’d quantify how “deep” you feel Lag’s amazing well is! Also, can you tell me what elevation that clear mountain air is at? Finally, please define the exact force of “softly” with regard to the kicking action in this friendly environ. I’d prefer standard, not metric units. :wink:

Thanks.
Capt. Chaos

I have added a bullet point table of contents for pages 11-20 of the original uber thread.

Thanks, Arnie

Cap

Since my role here is probably that of a golfer cautionary tale, I’ll have to admit that “standard” in my world is a ball of string with fugitive marks. I guess I could jpg a picture of it, but I can’t find a ruler for reference. As far as softly, the amount of displacement caused by a quarter beat of a British Cooper Butterfly’s right wing (not left, mind you) - oops sorry it’s extinct. I’ll try and get a nano bag drill measurement and get back to you. I couldn’t supply metric anyhow - I don’t have a metronome. May the module be with you. Flop

HoganQuest,

Thanks so much for sharing the video of young Moe - fascinating! As you area Knudson devotee have you seen Lags review on the Natural Golf Swing hosted here?

http://www.advancedballstriking.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=21&sid=55f902e17f5918a622de06f0cabf9468

I’d be fascinated in your thoughts particularly as you are coming from a swingers perspective. When I read the book I always struggled to square what George seemed to be saying about passive hands etc with the photo sequences showing him apparently exiting low and left and fighting the centrifugal forces. Any thoughts?

Cheers, Arnie
Knudson_sequence.jpg

I enjoyed that flop.

Steb

Thanks for the nod. To short wind it, the reason I posted was that if a scatterbrain like me, somebody who could play 18 holes with seven different swings, could find a system so amazing… The only change I foresee from here on will be the coins in my pocket. Lag knows swing, and I’m just one more in a long line of believers. Flop

I have just registered and joined in here, at lagpressure’s invitation. Yes, my statement is valid re the approximate 2/10ths of a second nerve impulse travel time from hands to brain. In fact this is the primary reason why we burn ourselves and do so much damage to skin and tissue when we unknowingly place a hand on a hot surface, it takes that long for the message to get to the brain and the brain to then take remedial action to remove the hand from the hot surface.
Different nerve impulses travel at different speeds. Pain impulses, for example, are powerful but a bit sluggish. Touch/ feel nerve transmissions, the ones that we are dealing with here, travel at approximately 76.2m/s (that’s meters per second). Nerve information relative to position(s) of muscles are much faster, up to about 119M/s but we are not interested in them here. Here, we need to know where the butt of the club is and we can only do that through touch/ feel nerve transmissions. Not my opinion, I just rechecked on a medical/ anatomical/ neurological website specifically involved in nerves and nerve transmissions and this is up to date information. And 76.2m/s is right on the button for 2/10ths of a second for feel/ touch nerves hands to brain.
Also the information re upswing/ downswing speed and time durations is valid. I refer you to pages 22-25 The Search for the Perfect Swing where tests and analysis of data was performed using a special form of photography. For example; one of the subjects used was Bernard Hunt, a UK professional, whose time from commencement of takeaway to impact was 0.82 seconds and from point of directional change to impact was 0.23 seconds.
For those who adhere to the concept that there can be conscious changes once the downswing is underway there is another major impasse to overcome, momentum. The arms/ hands have mass, in fact the average human male adult arm weighs in at around 12-13 pounds. The head of a driver on the end of the shaft and extended far from the player actually translates into a much greater ‘weight’ in terms of the energy used to motivate it and also the value of pull in terms of centrifugal force. When under full acceleration there is massive pull being exerted exerted on the player. I have seen estimates of 80 to 90 pounds of pull here.
Apart from the obvious facts that the player can never know precisely where their hands are in the downswing, at any given time, coupled with this huge amount of centifugal pull, there is yet another problem to overcome; if the player is delibertely, consciously using a very considerable muscular forces in holding back the lag or straightening out of the left forearm/ shaft angle, how does the golfer suddenly, and in any extraordinarily small time frame, disengage the very powerful muscle systems involved in holding this ‘angle’, this lag, to then engage their antagonists, their direct opposites? Bearing it in mind that we are now also dealing with the transmission of impulses through the motor nervous system, as well as the sensory nervous system. And muscles are slack until stimulated into contractile status by electro/ chemical signals emitted by the brain. How long does it take to stimulate slack, inert muscle systems into full activity?
Regards
Gerry Hogan

Gerry,

Thanks for taking Lag up on his invite. What you posted over on ISG was fun to read and contemplate. I’m as sure you will enjoy this agenda free place - as I am sure we will enjoy your unique insights. Flop

A very warm welcome Gerry
Sorry for my little post on ISG. I sincerely wanted you to be on here as for sure with your “out of Homer’s Box” approach, things were going to sour up sooner or later. Your post on the Neuromuscular Delay is really amazing. Even if we dont have answers I believe this is at the core of the mystery of the golf swing. I myself am a medical doctor (Not a neurologist but have them as friends for input if need be). I have this theory in my head but never have had the guts to research it. During the golf swing or any highly coordinated movement the body used multiple sources of data. One is the tactile and position sense as you described in your post; the other is the visual pathway. The visual pathway is much faster than the tactile. During the golfswing around impact because of the speed of the club head/ or hands the two systems become disconnected as they are registering the hands at different locations at any point in time. Thats confusing for the brain. I think a separate thread on Neuromuscular Discordance will be helpful. Welcome again.

May 1987 Golf Digest – Mac O’Grady interview

“The more I learned, the more I questioned Kelley and the more Kelley revised his work. In the meantime my game rallied and in 1982 I finally made it onto the tour.
I did fine for a while but in 1984 I began to struggle. I couldn’t control my distances, which is everything in golf. Finally in desperation I gave The Golfing Machine to my friend and assistant, Zaven Manjikian, and asked him to take the book apart. Zaven is a dentist by profession, but he is a scholar. By the end of 1984 I had won enough to keep my card- barely- then Zaven and I went to work on his findings. It took me a few months to adopt the changes, but once I did I was on my way.
In short we came to realize that while The Golfing Machine is valuable in some areas, it is tragically flawed in others. We kept what worked and refined the rest. Along the way we formed MORAD (Manjikian O’Grady research and Development) to continue the research along ‘the principles of neurobiological studies’.”

Not complaining- not pointing fingers- just showing the facts… I have the magazine right in front of me and copied it word for word
Seems to show there is always room for change- if Mac thought it was flawed and Lag thought it was flawed and even Clampett thought some parts were off the mark……

Sorry, may be off a little with the sequence of things here. I posted this somewhere else, wanted to post it here for reference. Thought it was very telling

1 Like

Thanks Twomasters for posting…

No one gets thrown off here for being a TGM contrarian! If so I might have to slit my own throat. I remember reading that article on Mac back then when I was also jumping ship from TGM, but I thought at the time that Mac was referring to “swinging as being flawed” and didn’t realize until a re read this year that yes it is tragically flawed on several issues in both hitting and swinging. I have addressed a lot of these issues earlier in this thread, and like Gerry Hogan have been sent packing from the general consensus of golf swing thinking.

For those of you tuning in here from iseek, “two” is the man formerly known as “showmethemoney” and we are blessed to have him here as an active contributor to this forum both in the public and private areas. Greg Norman was quoted on ABC as saying he is one of the finest ball strikers to come out of Australia. I also support Norman’s assessment with full conviction.

macs…
Thank you for the welcome.
I’m very happy to be here and hope that we can all park egos at the front gate and pool our experiences and intellectual skills towards a common purpose.
I’m delighted that you are a Doctor of Medicine. As such, you may know, or know of, a very brilliant man named Professor James Lance, Neurologist, who once held the Chair of Neurology at The Prince Henry hospital, Little Bay and also the Prince of Wales at Randwick. He also held the chair at (I think) the University of NSW (either that or Sydney). He was twice awarded the International Gold Medal for services to Neurology.
He treated me for many years for severe brain trauma and severe cervical spinal damage which finally resulted in a multiple Cervical fusion performed at the Prince of Wales by Dr Anthony Hodgkinson. According to Dr Hodgkinson it was the first time that a multiple cervical fusion had been performed, anywhere. He told me that he had submitted a paper to Lancet on the extraordinary speed and fullness of my recovery. I’m sure that you can check all of that out.
In many ways Prof. Lance was a mentor and enabled me to make the transition from a Police Officer, smashed to hell and finally pensioned, to what I became afterwords. It was he who kept pushing me to write the golf book that I wrote, which I dedicated to him and two others, it was he that listened patiently to my way out of the box ramblings and was always there to study thesis that I put together and even involved colleagues and his own research people to test everything that I came with related to Neurology and Anatomy, in those earlier days. I got to love the guy and called him as late as late last year, just to say gd’ay.
I would be very happy to share some answers that I have found that you can test which are very far out of the mainstream but also very provable. Perhaps we could set up a special little section for Neuormuscular studies, brain/ body control, both sensory and motor nerve systems.
Thanks again
Gerry Hogan

Welcome Gerry,
I am sure you will find this a much better forum to share your thoughts on golf, the swing, or other relevant points of interest, certainly free of intellectual censorship here.

I am glad you brought up this point, and I’m sure once I dig into your other posts, which we might do well to drag them over here to contemplate, I’d like to kick off with this one…

As a fairly good ball striker myself, I have been keenly aware of the pull of CF in the golf swing, and surely can relate to the numbers you have put up there as very real. One of the things that I know puzzles many including myself, is this notion that the golf swing is in anyway effortless. I can only see this as possibly a perceived value from the vantage point of a good player, if they are not striking the ball from near full capacity. If I back off a shot and hit say a 3/4 butter fade 5 iron into a slight right to left wind to a tucked pin, I might use such words as smooth or silky feeling. But this would only be in relation to what I might normally have done if I simply rifled a 7 iron at it with full aggressive intentions. A weight lifter who can press 200 pounds might feel like doing 50 pounds is like lifting a feather.

Let’s look at these two just post impact… Ben Hogan, Moe Norman. Two obviously VERY different intentions going on here.

hitter_swinger.jpg

I am certainly not one to dismiss either technique. In fact my personal belief would be that high end ball striking mastery would actually lie out at the ends of these extremely different protocols or intentions. I played with and observed and talked, and learned from Moe during my 7 years playing on the Canadian Tour from 1987 through 1993. Personally I have never seen him miss hit a golf shot… at least not by my standards!

The other methodology I see with Hogan is clearly a deliberate pulling of the golf club out of it’s natural orbit, packing the upper arms tight onto the body, using contracted muscles and rotating in as tight an arc as possible. The only other player I have seen do this as well as Hogan is Peter Senior…and what do we have there? FLUSHER!

Because our arm is fixated at our shoulder socket, and not our belt buckle, if we look at these photos, we clearly have two legs of a very large rainbow.

Moe always talked to me about dead hands. passive hands… Hogan talked about Hitting with the hands.

If I relax my arms and wrists, and swing the club through the ball, my arms separate from my body, and seek an inline position as only CF would have it, and I end up like Moe. On the other hand, If I contract my muscles with great tension, preserve my wrist cock, fight the daylights out of the 90 pounds of force that Gerry talks about, fire my hands from a cocked and loaded shaft angle down near the bottom of my swing, and keep my pectoral muscles contracted with a firm cohesive body tension grounded all the way down through my right foot… I can change the path of the clubhead from it’s outward orbiting intentions that wants to fly away from me, seeking that inline shoulder relationship. (from a DTL view)

Certainly a curious pic here of Hogan…with both arms bent at a point in the swing were there certainly is a lot of CF pull happening… this screams resistance.

DSC02082.JPG

Or this pic I captured of Senior at his peak back when I played on the Australian Tour

bentlfsenior.jpg

My take on this not just from observation but as a practitioner of this technique myself, is that this PULL should be welcomed, for the simple fact that the resistance puts a tremendous amount of feel in our hands, and actually aids a good player in their ability to fine tune what is going on through impact, because ultimately golf is a game of feel, and what we feel through impact ultimately guides our ability to sense, experience, and learn through accurate feedback…

What are your thoughts Gerry? Feel free to tell me I am completely out of my mind! :open_mouth:

scan0023.jpg

hogan5.jpg

No walk in the park here… grimace on the face,
flexed muscles in the left arm… when I’m over there in my swing it’s all about proper muscular application.

With what you are saying, I wouldn’t be so timid to try and go down the road Moe left for us to examine. Relaxed arms and hands love an inline feeling with the left shoulder through impact. Why not? The guys that set their hands low, and do the same thing are dealing with a lot of extra movements.

Homer in TGM was certainly aware of this in 2-J-3 much to the apparent denial of his devout followers…

“With the angle of approach delivery (swinging), momentum carries the club above plane after impact.”

My question is… why is this desirable? and why is this standard protocol with every TGM instructor I have ever heard of?
I say, go with Moe’s method for head hand swinging.

As far as the footage I have of Moe, I am glad to share it… so come visit me in San Francisco and I’ll toss it up on the flat screen.

I love the vids you posted of Moe, my stuff is much better than all the footage that was taken in the later 90’s … I mean age was catching up with him,
and I heard that towards the end, he wasn’t able to do it every time. A diet of Fritos" and Pepsi for 60 years maybe didn’t help?
But I don’t think my footage looks as strong as what you posted. That’s great… somewhere in between. Moe was overlapping his grip.

Hitting or swinging, anyone moving a golf club around their body is using CF. If you let go of the club and it moves away from your body at any point in the golf swing… CF is very much alive… at least by any definition I know of… maybe not in quantum physics, but for us normal golfers, it’s very real.

Moe showed me his flipbook, and I don’t remember if it was the exact photos from power golf, it might have been, but I think the flip book was it’s own published thing… I think Ben Doyle had it too. Probably as rare now as a Honus Wagner baseball card.

Welcome Gerry - we are in agreement on the basic point of a good golf swing being a flowing athletic motion directed by the subconscious mind. This is one of they key foundational principals of the Balance Point method. I still respectfully ask you to clarify your 2/10 of a second figure. That is for sensory nerves that lack a myelin sheath, ie about 4 meters per second. Not what I am talking about. I am talking about proprioception, exactly the kind of muscles or body part awareness you said we need not be concerned with here. Why not? My post referred to hand awareness - not butt end of club awareness. 120 m/s is the upper end and this is the feel sense I am referring to. And you referred to 76 meters per second corresponding to 2/10 of a second. If the distance from the hand to the brain is about one meter or a bit more, how can a nerve impulse travelling at 76 meters per second take almost a quarter second to finish? I dont see the math here. Perhaps I am wrong but it would seem that at that speed, a quarter of a second would be 19 meters, and we know the nerve is not 19 meters long. I understand how it might take 2/10 of a second to finally respond to the pain signal of a hot stove by contracting the muscles to pull your hand away, but that is a two step process - first the sensory nerves must tell the brain of the hot stove, and then the motor nerves must tell the muscles to contract.

And the figures you gave of .89 are for takeaway to impact. Thanks for clarifying that. I had thought you said the swing takes .89 second. The swing is not over at impact, but rather at the Finish. And as I said, from top of backswing to impact, is “roughly a quarter second”.

The Time Delay is a major part of my teaching so we are on the same page here. The interesting thing is how this understanding can and should revolutionize how the golf swing is taught. It means that the body is always a little ahead of where the mind’s feel sense “feels” it to be. WIth meditation training, the golfer can learn to keep this feel sense awareness for one body part “seamless” - meaning no loss of focus on the body part and no other interrupting thoughts. Training your mind and body to move at the “same speed” (even though not literally true from a neurological perspective) is one of the fastest ways to improve your golf shotmaking. We do this in various ways, starting with Super Slow Motion swinging- 30 seconds from start to finish of swing, then Half Speed swinging. And swinging with the eyes closed to maximize the feel sense channel.

Macs - you are onto something. I have posted in this thread one of my discoveries along the same lines of your thinking. I have no idea where in all these pages that post is, but perhaps Arnie knows how to find it. It was about why Lag and many others believe in the “heavy hit” or compression idea, and why even though the science seems pretty clear that there is no mass transfer during impact, it is vitally important to feel like there is and to intend it. I talked about the three different processing speeds of the auditory channel (sound of impact), visual channel (seeing the blur of impact) and the kinesthetic channel (feeling impact) and how the feel channel is the slowest of the three and thus you feel impact a tiny bit later than you see it (fastest) and hear it ( second fastest).