Now here is Rahm at 2 points before impact, beginning with his hands at his right hip, somewhere in the vicinity of where he would be beginning his orbit pull, if I am not mistaken.
In the left column, you can see the measurements of the angle of his right elbow.
It is moving toward ZERO (straightening), with a smaller number at each point as the hit nears impact. It actually begins straightening a bit before this.
The actual measured degrees are, in order, 52, 32, and then 28 at impact.
I am pretty sure any golfer on the planet including Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, George Knudson, Wild Bill Melhorn, and Joyce Weathered would have their right elbows straightening as well.
Angle just after impact is just fractionally more straight than at impact. By the time he is at club horizontal, post impact, he’s down to only about 12 degrees of right elbow flex.
Nobody ever claimed the right arm was fully straight at impact. He has right lateral bend and would bury the club in the ground behind the ball if he fully straightened the right arm earlier. He’s managing lots of things…impact location on the face, dynamic loft, dynamic lie, AoA, his hand path, the face angle, and the swing direction.
So we are using the intransitive verb here. I’ll use it in a sentence: “In all golf swings, the right arm is in the process of straightening at impact.”
I really wonder if people actually read the posts.
Nobody is saying the right arm should be staight at impact. Nobody disputes that it’s a mark of elite swings that the right elbow is still bent/flexed at impact.
What is being disputed is that the right elbow is frozen or locked, and that the club is being moved only by the pivot or the orbit pull or whatever it is. The right elbow is straightening out. It starts straiightening around the time that the club head arc gets outside the hands. In all elite swings.
Except if you are wedded irrationally to some cognitive dissonance-avoidant dogma that something you theorize from looking at 2D stills or grainy video is actually true, because you think it’s what you feel in the swing…I mean the hit.
I think getting measured on a system like GEARS is dangerous, because you can get sucked down a rabbit hole just like you can with video or books or whatever…
And the point of golf is to produce good shots. If following ABS intentions is producing good shots, then there is no need to measure - as a student, anyway, and meaning there is no practical need to do so.
But if you are a teacher, and you want to learn as much as possible about the swing, I think it’s essential. Maybe you’d learn something by using the system that would inform and enhance ABS, or whatever system one might use to teach.
There are many products today which are simply orders of magnitude better than what we had 20 years ago with regard to understanding golf.
One of the most eye-opening ones is the Hack Motion wrist sensor, that shows you what your lead and trail wrist are doing in the swing, in 3D. It is amazing how quickly you can, for instance, diagnose and fix a face angle issue just by doing a session with this device and studying the data. (Hack Motion doesn’t cost $40,000 like a GEARS system, either…I think the pro version costs about $800).
I really wish one of you guys who are high level golfers and use ABS would do GEARS. And share the data openly, and discuss what it all means.
ABSers will be maintaining shaft flex longer than most have a bent right arm longer than most. Because we do thousands of reps training to do these things.
Here’s my five cents on the situation contained in the thread:
I’ve been to five different teachers in the last 20 years so that I can get rid of the periodic hook. I hit great shots while with them because I’m raking balls at the range. Nobody had the ability to pin-point the issue. So I revamp completely.
By the way the lessons started with my desire to learn how to draw the ball, and I ended up hooking. I used the power fade across-the-board rather successfully prior to the lessons.
I’m skimming through YouTube and I see John on Be Better Golf. He immediately resonates because he teaches things from an era in which I know the guys hit it straighter, because the pros that I personally know said so.
And I end up hitting a straighter without fearing left.
Part of my reticence in publishing any data, is that it implicates the guys who I went to seeking help. They didn’t necessarily do anything wrong, they just didn’t know what John knows.
By the way last time I checked you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar…
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. You can compare yourself to other measured swings on GEARS…you can overlay the images, you can isolate pieces, or you can compare the raw measurements.
And you don’t have to care. Nobody does. This thread isn’t about that. This thread is about the science, what really happens, and moving past the seems as if in favor of reality. For instructors it’s beneficial to know what’s really going on…how they get their students to do it is a different issue altogether. If you have to use a drill, a feel, an exaggeration, or an intent that’s different from reality in order to move the needle then so be. Everyone has to do those things. But sometimes the intent is the problem. If you are trying to do something you think you’re supposed to do you’ll often get pretty good at it…and if that thing is producing something else or is adding an undesirable force or torque into the club then you can go down a bad road that you may never recover from.
