Long hitters, particularly small people who are long hitters, are fascinating however. I once had the opportunity to see Sergio fairly up close…he was small, and did not seem to swing any harder or faster than most people I play with. But he can move the ball a very long way.
One wonders if part of the secret to their long hitting is somehow explained by this…
in otherh words…little bits of energy, efficiently created and added along the way during the journey of the clubhead, that augment any harmonic frequency that may exist.
I agree, this is a good analogy to a golf swing. The key why some players harness this while other don’t would have to do with creating the proper cohesive tension throughout the body. Without that… the wave of energy will not flow through the body and ultimately into the ball.
Another advantage of a hitting procedure because it is more tangible and more repeatable for most.
Ok…so it looks like it did strike a note, and this makes sense…if Tesla didn’t securely connect his oscillator to a building or bridge or whatever, he couldn’t shake it down.
It is a stretch to compare the golf swing to oscillation. A golf swing isn’t even one full cycle, while (catastrophic) oscillation builds on numerous (10s, 100s, 1,000s, etc.) cycles. The latter is achieved by timing applied power to the system’s natural frequency, over and over. Power in the former (the golf swing) is achieved by optimizing power application during the downswing: I hesitate to call the golf swing about one half cycle, because there cannot be a half cycle when there isn’t a full cycle! I can see value in the previous posts, but a comparison of the golf swing to oscillation isn’t right.
An example of oscillation: Put a small child on a swing-set and stand to the side. Start the motion by pushing him/her forward a bit. You let him/her come back, and when he/she comes forward again, you add a little push, increasing the amplitude of the swing. Next time, he/she comes forward, do it again. Etc… It might take 10-20 times before you start to worry about his/her safety.
The golf-swing: One move back. One move through. And you better get it right the first time!
Speaking of oscillation…
I don’t buy into frequency matching shafts for this reason. The golf shaft does not oscillate like a guitar string until after impact. The shaft loads and we should strive to maintain that load all the way down to impact. Frequency matching is based upon oscillating the golf shaft which is not what we need. Shafts should be matched by stress deflection. That is a much better way to set up your gear so that the shafts react consistently from club to club.
Agreed. Sorry for the misunderstanding. What was similar was not the oscillation, which a golf swing lacks, but rather the way the small amounts of energy can be efficiently accumulated. The other critical thing pointed out was how the energy was transferred, but only with connection via cohesive tension.
i’m no rocket surgeon, but i believe there is something to this discussion of small amount of energy being effieciently accumulated.
I’ve always chalked it up to really good hand eye/natural talent etc. but i have never took time to understand the science behind it…
nevertheless i wanted to share an experience i had with it many years ago…
i grew up with a guy that was a really good amateur raquetball player, in high school thats all he did sports wise. i remember
one day we were playing a game of pick up baseball during lunch and he came up to bat holding it about waste high, kinda in
front of the right hip, bat practically pointing at the ground…seemingly in no position to hit the ball at all…as the ball approached he would take the bat
back a little -very similar to how he would do it in rquetball i suppose but then he would knock the crap out of it. i mean real hard base hits and a few
long fly balls. all from a swing about a quarter of the size of a traditional baseball swing. the football coach was hanging out nearby and yelled at him “why are you not playing baseball??”
it left a few jaws on the ground as most of the guys didn’t know he had an inkling of athletic talent. i knew he had freakishly good hand eye
skills from his raquetball background but the amount of speen he generated in a short amount of time and effort was
just awesome. i played alot of tennis with him and he was a very strong player although he never worked at it. he could also chunk a
football a really long way.
had raquetball not fallen off the face of the earth i’m sure he would have pursued it for a living, but he saw it coming and went to law school,
became an attorney and i hear he’s really good at that too…
I agree with the points made regarding efficiency, but I object to the suggestion that small amounts of energy add up to much in the golf-swing. That is where the comparison seems a bit off. In a true oscillation you have the luxury of accumulating energy from an unlimited number of cycles, so small amounts can add up to a whole lot. In the golf-swing you load up one half cycle with as much energy as you can control: Because that half cycle has finite length, with a finite number of steps along the way, small amounts of energy won’t necessarily add up to a large number. Of course ‘small’ is a relative term, but I think a golfer would do well to maximize the energy added per step wherever/whenever he/she can do so efficiently.
I think the previous post about the short, yet powerful baseball swing illustrates this. If that swing was really short, then the amounts of energy added along the path of the swing were not ‘small’.
You may be right, but I think Archimedes might argue with you if he were alive. Our body is a system of levers, and can multiply energy…maybe making them “add up to much.”
Levers multiply force, not energy. A lever allows you to do a certain amount of work with less force, but you must apply that force over a larger distance when compared to an unlevered system that requires more force. In the previous sentence work is energy, and it is equal to the product of the force and the distance over which it is applied. If you are limited in the amount of force you can exert then a lever is a useful system, if there is space available for the increased path. This is indeed used in the golf-swing, notably when a golfer moves the clubhead deep behind him/her on the backswing and leaves it there into the downswing, so I think this supports your point. Small amounts of energy are indeed added along the path of the swing. In contrast, with the oscillator small amounts of energy are added with time.
Been years (decades) since any physics instruction for me, and I am prone to believe “everything applies to golf.” So thanks for keeping me in bounds. I’m glad we have some knowledgeable folks here. Saying "…energy is created… " violates one of those fundamental laws also…so sorry about that. I was just thinking outside the box.
Someone sent me this link about a trial with an oscillator and a bridge. You can fast forward to see the result. It is just for interest.
However, if you read the fourth paragraph of the introduction of the following wikipedia article, you will find that physics instruction isn’t all that it is cracked up to be!
No single push or pull in our body is enough to make a full swing but an organized and sequenced collection of relatively weak pulses through each of the many joints may accumulate as one powerful golf swing cycle. The correspondence with the Tesla Earthquake Machine may not be exact, but for me it’s close enough to motivate questions like what damping factors besides magnitude prevents Mythbusters from crashing a bridge with a 6 pound vibrator and what flaws (too many) might dampen the efficiency of my swing. Good one eagle.
