What are you typing into your Google searcher…I can’t seem to find him or her.
Dr. Jaan
But what are your golfing qualifications? Handicap? Lowest round? Professional experience? Tournaments? Not necessarily right now, but through the course of your life. I’m not knocking your ideas, but you’ve posted a lot of long informational posts and before reading them I want to have a handle on whether they’re based in practical knowledge or a theoretical understanding of abstract concepts…
Thanks in advance
Good question Bgolf…
The only thing Dr Jaan can teach us based on his qualification so far is… whether hitters are more prone to injuries than swingers.
Unless, he also happens to be a golf pro or an accomplished golf teacher .
Jaan,
You posts reminded me of one of my first posts on another forum many years ago, in which I also played around with the idea of giving up control and letting inertia be the master. Golf is a however probably more a game of paradoxes than a matter of cold logic and sophisticated theories.
We all like to see our golf swing to be machine like, precise, repeatable, no disturbing emotions etc.
The paradox is indeed that by giving up as much as feasible all control and letting inertia guide the swing we are approaching a machine as close as we can. Quite contrary to intuition. True ?.. Not quite. The problem as Lag has mentioned in various posts is that, another paradox, doing little or nothing is the most difficult thing to do, especially when being in the pressure cooker of competitive golf.
There is another approach to precision golf and that is - fully taking into account that the brain cries for action when nervous to relieve pressure - simplifying and tightening up the swing to primarily a rotation of the trunk and keeping arms and club close to the body throughout the down swing, including though and past impact.
This also can be considered to approach a machine like swing by reducing independent motion/rotation of peripheral parts to a minimum. Moreover due to a tight structural integrity required to keep fighting centrifugal type forces through and beyond impact it is more natural for the mind, more comfortable with action when being nervous.
Hence feeling tight when nervous and feeling tight when swinging a club, playing competitive golf, is a better match than trying to be spaghetti like when feeling very anxious pondering over a very delicate shot in a tight situation. 
Great post Mandrin - very eloquently stated.
I for many years was a CF swinger. If you are standing on the range hitting balls you might be able to reliably repeat CF type of action. But in any kind of competitive situation at all that kind of swing action is very difficult to maintain. It requires that there be no outside interference with the pure CF build up of forces as you move towards impact. In particular no change in grip pressure at all - no disturbing the natural orbit of the club or you are dead! The problem, as you said, is that any nervousness or anxiety always produces some level of muscular tension - and tension is going interfere with pure CF action causing you to yank on the club or alter your grip pressure or something. So you miss a shot or two and then you really get anxious and you just have no way of regaining your composure. I like your statement about the brain screaming out to do something when you are under pressure - right when you need to be calmer than ever to produce a CF swing. No thanks - give me a hitter’s action - at least I’m trying to give it a whack with some exerted force when I’m nervous instead of trying to remain all syrupy and smooth!
dinkbat
I searched for the swiss research about subconscious anxiety and the swiss airforce and it all came up from there.
I’m not going to give the a full name though. They can chose to if they want that.
Now, as far as what else Dr Jaan has said. One point was conveniently glazed over, and that was that the research cited was old, and flawed.
I don’t know how many psychologists/psychiatrists we have on here, but if they are there they are probably contorting a few muscles in a complex and repeated movement pattern.
I’m not a psychologist (as a caveat), but I spend the large majority of my day utilising the psych literature. I’ve not seen subconscious anxiety as a variable in any research. Indeed, a google search brings up your paper, buddhist teaching, and pages from hypnotherapists (that aren’t doctors mind you, which scares the crap out of me).
What you have stirred in me is effectively my BS meter. However, you could say that I’ve used my central route in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (you can google that one btw, it’s well known and used, especially by marketers), or any one of a number of other ways of saying that I read what you said, concluded it was not something I put any faith in, and have a reason why.
Moe ‘clearly realising’ is a hell of an assumption…
As for the lack of comparability of kissing and swinging - you’ve not actually provided evidence there. All you’ve done is changed the target. Originally it was all about how many muscles you move. Now it’s just ‘take my word for it’. 
Logic and simple… 
Using logic, and a simple thought process, bumble bees cannot fly. But they do.
As for your qualifications, they add nothing to the argument. Not least of which because they show that you have very little right speaking as an authority on some, if not most, of the things you’ve been saying. In fact, expert witness or not, injury specialist does not make you an ergonomist. That word has a very specific meaning and training (which you’ve not stated you have). My Occupational Health and Safety person at work calls them-self that. They don’t have the training either, so I quietly point it out each time. It would be like me telling people that i’ve treated hundreds of people for sports injuries, so I’m a medical doctor.
What you say, what you’ve said about who you are, and what is out there on what you’ve said in the past have lead me to figure that I’m not going to be paying attention.
If you were a psych with a biomechanics background, who used good research, I’d pay attention.
I really think the “what holds up under pressure” argument is a reasonable one.
Being a tour player myself who has won events using both methods… I can attest that the mental prowess needed to win
as a swinger far exceeds that of a hitter. Keeping the body’s internal workings in order such as blood pressure, breathing, heart rate, muscular relaxation are paramount for a swingers success… Can it be done? of course it can. If you have the skills to do so and a strong mind… sure.
However, as a hitter, you can actually embrace tension within the body in a much more visceral way, and I found I would often hit the ball better once I started to get a bit nervous, tighten up, and so forth… because it was working into everything I was already doing… firm grip, tension in the body, connection, the impulse to hit…
Typically the only adjustment I would have to make was the adrenalin aspect of going to a shorter club, and then staying aggressive.
I once had a conversation with Jack Nicklaus Jr… who was a contemporary of mine, and he told me about the time he was caddying for dad at The Masters, and how Jack handed him back the driver on #10 on Sunday, and said “give me the 3 wood, let’s stay aggressive.”
Top post mandrin.
I like the philosophy here at ABS of start
There is no reaction to my post mentioning some apparent contradiction re to what is considered hitting in the golf swing. Nick’s answer makes sense but does not, imho, explain away the contradiction floating around through various posts in several threads. BPGS1’s opinion, above, is very clear, thrusting with the trail arm is an absurd concept. But yet there are other posts, like Lag’s below, in which this same thrust is invoked as being typical for hitting.
Hitting and swinging have been for ever the favorite subjects of discussion on many golf forums and I found Lag’s approach refreshing and interesting, distinguishing hitting from swinging by, for instance, focussing on the hands, instead of implying the usual arguments of centrifugal force and trail arm thrust. But simply reading in one sweep through two threads it just struck me that there is some potential for confusion for anyone trying to understand hitting from these two threads.
Hi Mandrin,
Not sure I see the contradiction. You can:
- straighten the right arm quickly from the top of the swing to the point where the club is approximately parrallel to the ground but the right arm retains a 120 degree angle. So it straightens quickly but it is still bent and hopefully retains this “frozen” position through the impact zone as much as is possible. Establishing the club on an elbow plane early in the downswing allows the player to turn through with flat shoulders as they don’t need steep shoulders to help them get down to the ball. I remember Lag saying that Mac O’Grady was big on this move and I have seen some other instructors who have been in Macs program using this when teaching their students.
- this is quite a different move from the right arm thrust at the ball that BP is describing and that Lag so dislikes in the way that “hitting” is taught and described in some TGM circles.
Thanks,
Arnie
Arnie,
Thanks for the clarification. It makes sense indeed. Nick said about the same but your post made it even more clear.
I did not notice in those threads anywhere that it was meant to be a quick vigorous short duration thrust from the top.
Either the information is there and I need glasses or it is simply taken as common knowledge and I have to do some more reading. 
The MORAD concept is about how early and how much the right arm angle is moving toward “straightness”. I don’t agree with Lag on this one, ie in terms of this preventing an OTT move, I worked with Mac and never heard him say tbis. If anything, a too early and too fast right arm angle straightening will actually contribute to an OTT tendency. This is a fatal flaw if done to fast/too early - called “casting”. It is one way of succumbing to the Hit Impulse.
The positive side of this move is to avoid the flaw of losing your width. If you keep the 90 degree or so right arm angle all the way to P3 and almost all the way to impact as Furyk does, it can create a too steep angle of attack into the ball. The modern swing is about maintaining a moderate degree of width on the downswing ( it is certainly possible to have too much width!) while still achieving SuperConnected upper arms at P3 through impact. At Balance Point, we teach a right arm that gradually and gently straightens almost from the very start of Transition, and achieves a 45 degree angle at P3, and a 15-25 degree angle at impact, for most of our students. Spin Style golfers can use the Hogan pure frozen right arm until just after impact of 45 degree angle. Geometrically and Laws of Physics-wise this is the optimal way to do it. BUT - it is very difficult to learn how to do well for average golfers, and requires superior Core strength and flexibility, a very strong and injury-free lower back, great body awareness, a ton of hand and forearm strength and the complete mastery of the Hit Impulse. It is very tough to blend a frozen right arm 45 degree angle with an active firing of the hands as Hogan did. When the hands fire, the right triceps has a very strong tendency to fire along with them. Plus when the hands fire, CF tends to pull the right arm angle open from momentum.
Our new Swedish doctor friend has failed to tell us precisely how he defines “hitting” and that would be very useful to know since there are so many different meanings for that term floating around in cyperspace. It very likely could be that he was suffering from the Hit Impulse since it so common and so little understood.
Excellent post, Mandrin. You should talk like a golfer more often instead of a scientist… very good insight and nicely put…
From BPGS1
I think straightening the right arm out but maintaining the wrist angle would distinguish this move from true casting. It certainly does require a lot of strength and limb dexterity to master though…
Bom - correct, but as you know, for average golfers especially, when they “cast” the right arm angle away too early, the wrist cock angle is instantly thrown away as well.
I think Mac may have been referring to the direction that the right arm angle should straighten to prevent an OTT move. We call this “going East, young man”. If the ball is North from the point of view of the golfer at the Top, the target is West, then you want to feel/intend that the gentle straightening action of the right arm angle is happening toward the East direction. OTT is when the direction is toward north or even worse - northwest!
One of my own personal biggest swing light bulbs was this “going East” idea. It helps a lot of our students with OTT and early release. And prevents a too steep angle of attack into the ball. Gives you the proper shallower angle of attack on the downswing. Keeps your width.
The Right Angle is a great training aid for this move - a lot of tour pros use them on the range. If you hear the clicking sound softly and continuously, you are doing the right move of gently straightening. If its loud and short - too fast or casting away the angle. If no sound at all - you are holding the arm angle ala Furyk.
BPGS1 and Bom: Nice discussion gentlemen: I really like the “go East” picture…very clever!!
I need to check my maps because I go SouthEast on the way to the elbow plane 
RR
BPGS1… yes, that is a fair point, it’s tough to have that subtlety of awareness. You’ve mentioned the hit impulse a fair bit and it seems to me that it’s contained within the hand, is that right, or is it just a general go at the ball urge? I ask in relation to that casting idea because I get the sense that the elbow straightens out due to the early casting of the wrist from the hands urge to hit the ball, as opposed to the other way around. It seems like a subtle difference but one I’m sure you’ve contemplated.
I really like the ‘go east’ idea… it’s similar to a discussion me and RR were having recently. He talks about the club traveling longitudinally at the start down which is a very similar idea but in different language.
I think for swinging I’m primarily going East with the shaft from the top on a longitudinal axis by way of pulling it with minimal drop and hold with a snap release. For hitting, I think I’m dropping the shaft more downward/vertical from the top on a Southeast direction by way of a large drop and hold perspective so I can hit with the R hand. Both ways with loaded wrists of course to the elbow plane. Time for my warm milk and cookies later RR
Ultimately hitting and swinging is like right and wrong- there’s way too much grey for me ever to believe in either. I’m not a polarized thinker. The golf swing is much more about relationships than concepts.
Mac was talking about the right elbow straightening on the downswing… but NOT the wrists uncocking… you straighten the right arm out, keeping the wrists cocked… then you hold the angle formed by the right arm… and the angle of the shaft maintaining the wristcock rotating the torso flat through the hitting area…
This is what he was teaching back in the late 80’s… he might not be teaching this now… I really don’t know… but he was playing his best golf then certainly.
The look is that the right shoulder is coming over… almost at OTT move… but the right arm straightens downward quickly to keep the shaft on or under plane… as it the hands are moving straight down into the right hip pocket, holding wristcock.
When I think of this move, Hal Sutton comes to mind… it looked like he was coming right over the top of every shot but he would just hit these arrows… It was the weirdest thing I had ever seen… but it worked…
I have Mac on a video discussing and demonstrating the concept… showing how if you keep the right arm bent with flat shoulders moving through the ball… you will come right over the top… but if you straighten the right arm quickly in a downward way… then it’s impossible to come OTT no matter how flat you turn…
It’s a viable concept I feel… but this is more for those who like more plane shifting in their swing…
The flatter you swing, the less you have to worry about this…