GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT!
Hitting high feedback blade irons…
The brain can only respond to the information it receives, RELIABLE FEEDBACK is everything. PERFECT feedback comes to your computer (brain) from the sweet spot, through the shaft, through the grip, through your hands and sends a vibration to every cell in your body whether you like it or not.
If you hit the ball 1/2 inch off the sweet spot with a blade iron, you get great NEGATIVE feedback… we know that we must have educated hands, where do you think this education is coming from? From both hitting the sweet spot and NOT hitting the sweet spot. Trial and error over and over……
Now if you think you are getting ahead of the game by diluting the purity of the sweet spot, I can assure, you are doing yourself no favors by not giving your hands the proper education through reliable feedback. Hopefully you are here to improve in the most efficient manner possible… and personal mastery of your own golfing potential is on your compass in this great quest.
Now if you insist on slowing your progress down to better G.O.L.F.
keep using those perimeter weighted clubs, or game improvement irons…
If you apply the right physics and geometry with properly educated hands, you can master the art of fine ball striking, I have no doubt…
and you don’t have to hit 500 balls a day to do it. The proper drills and body training can be done (a lot of it at home)… But let me warn you, do not think you can cheat the “sweet spot/ computer interface” that supplies the brain with what it needs to give you PRECISION!
FEEDBACK IS PARAMOUNT
If you want to improve the precision of your swing, you need to be getting true feedback to educate your hands… it’s all they have…
garbage in garbage out…
The good news is, the better you get, the less this is really an issue…
For me, it was all about the pristine pursuit of highest excellence.
Here is a quick story,
I was in College when the Ping Eye 2 came out. Our coach ordered a set for everyone on the team and believed we would have an advantage on the competition if we used them. This sounded good to all of us… so I played and practiced with them for a month. I wasn’t really sure I was hitting them better, so I went back to my blades. When I did, I couldn’t hit them at all! It was shocking, and I thought, what the hell did I do? The pings were not telling me where dead center was, my swing therefore got somewhat sloppy, and I didn’t feel this was the right direction for me to go. Other’s felt the same way, and a few of the guys stayed with the pings… the one’s that stayed with the pings were not the best strikers I can tell you that… I would say with some certainty that cavity backs hurt the pure strikers, and help the not so pure strikers. So from the tour perspective, I would again guess that it didn’t change the winning score each week, but it brought a lot more guys into the battle to make the cut on Friday.
For me, the choice was easy…
If you were my student, and you said, “John, I want to be a fantastic ball striker within two years and I am ready to do the work, drills, and give it my all” we would be in my garage fitting you with a nice set of blades, adjusting the lofts and lies, blow torch and all…!
The modern swing is geared at best for wedge and short iron play.
The advances in equipment have changed the game so much it is not even within the realm of comparison with the greats of golf’s golden era. I find it ludicrous when people start talking about comparing the scores or feats of any of today’s players with Nicklaus, Hogan, Watson, Player, even Norman. It really is such a different game it wouldn’t be unreasonable to even call it something else. Soccer, football, Aussie rules, all are similar, and probably branched off from one core game…
soccer maybe? Golf reminds me of that kind of progression… it has developed and changed and is almost unrecognizable to me in many ways. It is not wrong or bad by any means… but for me a big part of the game has been the introspective journey created by the clear and constant search for a more practical, simple, and repeatable motion to consistently hit a golf ball with all the clubs in the bag.
The biggest reason for me to still play older equipment is not in any way nostalgic, but grounded in practicality. An enlarged sweetspot
is actually a diluted or watered down version of the smaller one.
By perimeter weighting a club, it would appear to be a good thing at first examination, but the brain does not get the reliable feedback from a slight miss hit you would from a more traditional blade iron.
This in turn creates a situation where there is now a lack of discipline
and the swing itself can lose an element of accuracy and precision that was once required. If my goal is to have as pure and precise a swing as possible, still with an eye on “old man par”, the modern gear would not be consistent with my PERSONAL goals and objectives.
Another key observation from my perspective is that by putting the weight around the perimeter of the club and not directly behind the sweet spot, it is really suggesting that I either won’t or can’t hit the center of the club with the ball. I disagree with such an assumption,
and I find it to be very negative. If I hit the sweet spot 8 or 9 times out if 10, I would most certainly want the focus of the club’s mass directly behind the sweet spot, not out on the edges.
This also applies to your average golfer. If the objective is to learn to ride a bicycle, it might make sense in the beginning to ride a tricycle to make the trip from point A to point B…. but at some point you must learn something more difficult if you wish to master the greater discipline. If you choose to stay on the tricycle, then it really becomes something else. It’s not riding a bike, it’s riding a trike.