RotarySwing Natural Putting - Intro

The year was 2007. I still remember it like it was yesterday. A young kid reached out to me named Blake Adams. I guess he wasn't a young, too young of a kid, but relatively young back then and said, Hey, I just got my tour card for the nationwide tour. I just made it through Q school for the first time. I would like for you to look at my golf swing and help me rebuild it. Strange requests from somebody who just got status on the nationwide tour and somebody who I'd never worked with before. But you've been following me online for several years and said, I like what you're doing. And I have a lot of back problems and I'm having some swing problems and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Can you help me rebuild my swing? I said, well, come down, let's take a look.

So I came down, he came down to Orlando, we went through his swing. I said, all right, here's like a nine month process of what we need to do in sequential order to tackle these things piece by piece because it's January and you've got a tournament first nationwide event coming out in March. So let's just not take the whole bottle of aspirin. Just do one thing at a time. And at the time Blake, if he was trying to hit it straight down the line, he would aim over here and then he would smother it that way and hit like a 30 yard screaming, low hook, and he'd hit it miles, but it was low and left all day. And so it's obviously pretty limiting out there, but for such a, you know, for such a, an interesting swing characteristic, he made it through, through, on the tour.

So as I decided to help him rebuild his swing reluctantly I didn't want to throw the whole apple cart out, but he was very adamant, determines I want to take it piece by piece and we'll do the whole thing and I want to do it right now. All of it. I don't want to do it piece by piece. I want to do the whole stinking thing. The whole kitten caboodle, as you can imagine, I was pretty terrified was completely against this. But he said, that's what he wanted to do. So the next day I take him out to the range and said, okay, I've got to give a few lessons, but I'll, I'll devote the whole afternoon to you. And I'll kind of keep an eye on out of the corner of my eye and just, you know, take it piece by piece.

These things we talked about, I look over at him in between my lessons and in my lessons. And I'm watching him in complete horror as he is doing everything that we talked about all at once, different setup, different swing, plane, different grip, different posture, the whole nine yards. And I was just mortified. I'm like, I've just ruined this kid's career on tour. Well, luckily for me, it turned out he was actually one of the best ball strikers in the world that year. If you go back and look at his stats on, I think it was oh seven. He was one, you know, top five or top 10 and driving distance, driving accuracy, greens and regulation, fairways hit, et cetera. He was one of the best ball strikers in the game. Why didn't he keep a status that year? This guy now, Blake had an interesting dilemma when I met him.

Now you guys know for many, many years, I am not a putting coach. I've never been a putting coach until now slowly but surely reluctantly coming along. But during that time had a long putter and he putted brilliantly. And I said, no matter what you do, there are three things in life that you don't give up. Once you find one that works first, a good wife, you find a great wife. You keep her forever second. You're three. Would you find a three-word that you like don't ever change it. And third and most important, you find a putter that you can roll putts like that and have that kind of confidence in never change your putter. He didn't listen to me on that one, either change his putter there last year for an equipment deal. And he went from being one of the best putters I had ever seen to losing a status on the tour.

And it really, it came to a head north about three quarters of the way through the season. You know, Blake and I are texting and calling back and forth and emailing as he's out on tour. And we're working through things on his swing. And I said, man, Blake, I'm looking at your stats. Like you're number three in driving distance. You're number one in driving accuracy. You know, all this stuff. I'm like, what's going on out there. And he's like, I just can't take it anymore. Like what I said, I got all the way to the 17th hole on Sunday and didn't hit a single chip. Now you can think about that for a second. I mean, he hit every single green and regulation or was just off the green enough where he could actually putt for three days in a row, four days in a row, 71 holes on the nationwide tour.

And hadn't had to hit a single chip. That's some pretty darn good ball striking. But the thing that killed him was there was a kid that he was playing with a guy that was playing with on nationwide tour, who was hitting it all over the place. He'd hit it into the trees left, he'd hit it into the trees, right? He'd hit it short. He would skank when he hit one off a port-a-potty, it didn't matter. But this kid shot 64 to Blake's 70 that day. And Blake was crushed. He is, I don't understand I'm hitting the ball so well, better than anybody out here. And yet this kid's hitting it, scraping it from all over the place off the cart path. Doesn't matter out of thick, rough, and making every pot that he looks at simple truth of the matter is I should have listened back then would have saved me a lot of trouble, but I've been petitioning the PGA tour for years to band putting and just make it a closest to the pin in the fewest amount of strokes contest, but nobody has signed on unfortunately.

So I have to give way and learn how to putt. Now my putting woes have been no secret either because like Blake, I tend to hit a lot of fairways and a lot of greens and hit the ball a long ways. And still as of recently, two weeks ago, I was averaging, wait for it, 38 putz around. Yep. And I'm gonna plus one handicap with 38 putts around. So that should tell you something about my ball striking. But I finally gave up and said, you know what? The reason putting has been so frustrating for me is like the golf swing was for me 20 years ago, there was no right or wrong way. Right. That's how golf is taught. Oh, you just find your own swing. I think about that for a second. You guys know that I don't believe that at, we all have the exact same muscles that attach at the exact same point and move the exact same bones at the exact same joints.

And the golf swing really doesn't require that much movement. It just requires proper sequencing and understanding of what you're doing. So if we should all swing the same way, in my opinion, then why shouldn't we all put the same way now for, for the full swing? A lot of people we'll argue that and say, no, no, you just, you just find your own way. I think about that for a second. Realistically, there are 40 million golfers in the United States out of each golfer. How many different possible variations do you think each one golfer on the planet has a hundred, 1,005 thousand. Think of how many golfers you've ever seen in your life and how many of them swing the exact same way. Now, as the talent gets higher, you start to see more and more consistency, especially in the younger players coming up who are learning proper mechanics in their swing.

But the reality is that every single swing can have thousands and thousands of errors and you have millions and millions of golfers. So how on earth would you ever teach anybody that has potential to have millions of different variables? Everything that you do would be different single day. Of course, it doesn't make any sense. Putting has always been taught the same way as the full swing. Now I've had a, hopefully a positive impact on the golf industry by teaching people a simpler understanding of the swing and a simple understanding of swing mechanics that we should all actually all swing, essentially the exact same way. It's the simplest most efficient way to do it. When you watch people in the Olympics, you watch somebody do a clean impress, they're all doing it the exact same way because it's mechanically biomechanically, anatomically the most efficient, powerful, and safe way to do it.

That's what rotary swing is for the golf swing. I now have turned my attention to this little devil because I believe that the putting stroke, the mechanics should be there should be a simpler most efficient way to consistently produce the two things that matter most in the putting stroke that I'm gonna talk about in just a minute. But at the end of the day, what I'm trying to do is the same thing I've done with a full swing. Here is a paradigm. Here is a structure to work within that. If you do these things from a setup perspective, a grip perspective, a stroke perspective that you can dramatically simplify your putting stroke. And as I always said, I've always been a big believer that you can't do it. You can't teach it. So the way that I understand the golf swing so well is because I have struggled with the same swing flaws that many of you guys have struggled with.

I've taught over 10,000 in person lessons, hundreds of done tens of thousands of swing reviews online. We've seen a lot of stuff, but understanding the golf swing and the putting swing, the putting stroke, how they should be so similar in ways in terms of mechanically structurally sound to make them simple is where we're going with this. So there are a couple of parameters that I'm set for myself and trying to build a simple, efficient, repeatable putting stroke. And that is, first of all, that what we're trying to do is make the putting stroke natural. Now there's so much stuff out there I'm putting can probably read 50 different books or online websites about the putting stroke and the mechanics and the all be different, just like the full swing stuff, right? Nobody seems to agree on anything in the full swing. Why would the putting stroke be any different, but it's such a short stroke.

How can we not agree on anything on here? Well, for me, I wanted the putting stroke to feel natural because I look at the best putters of all time. The Lauren Roberts, the Brad, Faxon the tiger woods, Jack Nicholas. These guys don't look rigid and stiff, but that's how I've always felt when I putted, because any less than I've ever taken from somebody else or even working on my own putting stroke, I felt like if I just lock everything in, let's got to keep the putter from doing a bunch of crazy stuff. So that's gotta be the right way to putt, right? There's guys that talk about putting locks and locking your joints and all this stuff. That's not natural. It's not repeatable. You're not gonna have distance and feel and speed control when you're tight and rigid. So the first parameter that I'm setting forth is I want the putting stroke to feel natural.

It needs to, I need to feel relaxed. I can feel confident over the ball so that I know that I can make a good stroke repeatably. The most important thing I mentioned. There's two things that matter most in putting, and that's what we're going to talk about today. The first one is the be all end, all of putting, and that is the face angle at impact. And I had, let me pull this up again real quick. So I can put this back on the screen and we'll talk about this in just a moment, but I did a baseline with my own putting stroke. And the thing that I found at impact as I was 1.4 degrees closed. Now, of course, I didn't know this. And I also didn't know that I was 1.1 degrees closed at address. And you're probably thinking yourself, well, gosh, one degree on a, but that's 15 feet away.

That seems really small. Why does it even matter at one degree? How can you even see that? Well, you hardly can. That's why you need one of these guys. And more importantly does one degree even really matter. It matters more than you can possibly imagine because by setting up one degree close and by being 1.4 degrees closed, it impact on a straight 15 foot putt. I will completely miss the hole by being off one degree. That's how precise putting has to be. One degree on a 15 foot putt is a missed putt. I had no idea that it was that critical to be that precise on every single shot, every single stroke. But the reality of it is the SA the guys at science and motion who built the putt lab have done the studies on this, done the research on it, and it's unequivocal.

We can measure it. We can quantify it. And we can know that if you're one degree off, you're missing a putt. So now you can imagine all the putting strokes you've seen out there in the world, right? Crazy stuff, taking it here, rusty stuff, shoulder tilt, shoulder, turn everything under the sun. How hard it is to bring that putter face back to square in relationship to the path that you want the ball to travel on your target line, how difficult it is to do that. When you have a bunch of variables and you're putting stroke. Now it mean necessarily that you're going to have no variables in your putting stroke. There's going to be stuff that's going to move around. It has to the putting the putter face is going to open and close throughout the stroke. We're going to get into the details of that and show what's more consistent or less consistent, but we're going to talk about that in later videos.

The first thing I want to do is beat home. The idea that the face angle is the most important thing you have to focus on. It's as much as 90% of the ball direction. Now you've probably heard me talk about other stuff like that. When we're talking about launch monitors and how important the face angle is versus the path. And so on the same is true in putting an even more so the path relatively doesn't matter, compared to the face angle, the facing go has to be square less than one degree off on a straight pot or on any point that you're trying to start on a specific line. Obviously it has to be very, very square. The second thing that matters and is the be all end, all of golf putting number two, and that is consistency. And that's these bars that you see in a Sam PuttLab report on the right hand side, that is your consistency score.

So in other words, it doesn't mean necessarily that you have to set up dead square. We're going to test that too, and then have a stroke that is dead square to your feet or dead square to your shoulders. You can set up open. The most important thing is that you repeat the same stroke and get the putter face back to the same angle at impact every single time to the highest degree possible most tour pros will tend to be in that nice mid 90 percentile range. So in this case, I'm 94% I'm well within the tour range, consistency here, but I'm just 1.1 degrees closed at impact, which means I'm pulling all of my putts and had no idea that I was just shutting the face down that much. Interestingly enough, in terms of re returning the club face back to impact I'm 99% consistent to give you an idea of what that number means tiger woods during his oh 6 0 7 run was only 98% consistent.

And most people aren't even near that. So I've always considered myself a horrible putter, but looking at it objectively, I've always had just a couple of really simple, small things going on in my putting stroke that have plagued me for years that are not really visible, very easily with the naked eye, even using high-speed cameras. This makes it instant five putts. I know exactly what I'm doing. It's totally quantifiable and measurable the results game-changing for me, I went from 38 putts to 33 putts, which is still crappy, but I had a lot of green. So I'm going to have, tend to have a little bit higher putting stroke average than, than the average guy. But the simple fact of the matter is five strokes by just making, just recognizing and realizing that I was setting up closed every time. So I had to make a little adjustment.

I use this for feedback. I know that what looks open to me is actually a square face. And again, we're only talking about one degree, but that's all it takes to miss all those points. It's just birdie putts after you hit a great second shot in there. The second thing is because I've always thought I'm a horrible putter. I always blamed it on my stroke. I must have a crappy stroke cause I miss putts left. I miss putts, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The simple truth of the matter is I'm a shockingly consistent putter. You may be as well. You won't know until you start working through these things mechanically and start eliminating variables. Well, and you're putting stroke, which we're going to talk about. We're going to look at every single aspect of it. Even weight distribution, we'll quantify, we'll measure it with a force plate.

We're going to look at grip. We're going to look at shoulder position, arm position, different putters, different putting strokes. Should it be straight back and straight through? Should it rotate on a certain level of arc? What should it be? The only thing that matters at the end of the day is that the putter face is square to where I want that ball to start at impact. And then I repeat that same stroke. Every single time you get those two things, right? And you're going to start to understand why you're missing putts. If you see that you're hitting putts left, you're hitting putts, right? You're doing all kinds of crazy stuff. The first thing that you need to look at is what does that face doing? What am I doing with the club face, the putter face. That's the first thing you have to look at and fix and start understanding that that if you don't have that right, and the putter is doing something different every time through the hitting area, it's not consistent.

And if you can get access to a Sam putt lab and get your data, that will really, really be a game changer. An eye eye-opener would come to us obviously and get on the putt lab. If you can't vote, still start working on, get it, paying attention to what the face is doing. A lot of us don't really have any clue. Is it open? Is it closed? And now, you know how precise it has to be just within one degree. Now I want you to start paying close attention to what your face is doing at a dress. Are you sloppy and lazy? Like I was and just kind of letting it set up shut because that felt comfortable. Are you doing something goofy, having it open at address? Is there something you're doing at set up and then is there something that you're doing at impact that you keep shutting the face, opening the face, whatever it is, no that facing goes a top priority.

Once we have that, we're going to start teaching you how to build a stroke. That's going to consistently lead to you, bringing the putter face back to square every single time. So yesterday I went out and played and I only had 30 putts. Now the tour average is 30.1. So I'm not calling it an average yet. Cause it was the first time that that's happened in a long, long time. But just by being cognizant of what my face is doing at setup and what it's doing through the stroke, coming back to impact and practicing, bringing it back to square and finding a way that feels natural and relaxed intention free in my putting stroke to allow that to happen consistently has led to well in just two weeks, eight strokes total, but again, not average yet. We're going to, I want to prove it out over time.

So first things first putter face and consistency. What we're going to start to talk about in these upcoming videos is how to start setting up the structure, setting up your body in a way that feels relaxed. It's tension free, but allows you to make a consistent putting stroke, which obviously I've learned at least how to do that. Very, very consistently just with a bad face at address. And I blame myself for being a horrible putter. It was just one simple thing so far. So I'm really looking forward to showing you the ideas that I have of how to build a simple putting stroke. So stay tuned to these upcoming videos. We're going to talk about this. I'm going to talk about this report in the second half of this video coming in just a second, cause I want to start helping you understand the things that matter. So if you do get a chance to get on a putt lab or you get some other putting data that you're, you know, some other app or something, something attached to your putter face, how to start looking at the things that matter most. So let's look at the second half of this video where I'm going to walk you through how to read a puttering report, to know what really matters most in your store. All

Right. So let's take a look at our first report whether you get a chance to be on a Sam putt lab, whether with us or somebody else, or even if you don't helping you understand, what's really important. The putting stroke by reading through those reports, even if you don't ever get on a pet lab will be very, very helpful to understand what the best players in the world tend to do. And what's cool about the pet lab is they've measured 150 different tour pros from tiger woods at his peak Brad facts, and you name it. They have data on all these super pros and they've created averages so that you kind of have a good baseline to say that, well, if you're below these numbers, you're not within a tour spec you know, putting stroke or a piece of the putting stroke, like timing or consistency, whatever it may be.

And so the, it makes it very easy to say, okay, you know, there are things that I need to focus on. Am I putting stroke now in this case, I'm using RSD instructor, rotary, swing, rain, man, Craig Morrow and myself. Now, the reason is that Craig is one of the best putters I've ever seen. I worked with Greg when he played professionally many, many years ago and never did a darn thing with his putting. He was a great Potter and you're going to see some very, very interesting stuff, because even though we're both, you know, scratch or plus handicap golfers, we get there two very different ways. I do it, the Blake Adams way where I hit every fairway, hit every green and then just try to minimize my three buckets. And then Craig, you realize on the putter more too for his scoring, but what's going to really blow your mind is when you see some of the things that each of us are doing our stroke.

So I would say Craig has far fewer putts per round on average than I do. And that starts to show up right from setup. So in this case, you can see that Craig is actually 0.6 degrees open and I'm 1.1 degrees close. Now, is that good or bad? What have you? And you can see like for each stroke, these, we did five putts each on the pudding lab. And you can see that Craig, every single time was under one degree. I had one where I was a little bit inconsistent 0.6, three, but for the most part, I was over one degree closed at address now tiger woods in oh 6 0 7. Where do you think he aimed knowing now how important it is to be precisely on the target? Less than a degree off on a 15 foot putt tiger actually aimed 3.1 degrees, right.

Of his target on every single pot when he was putting at his absolute best. So it's very interesting as you start looking at the tour pro data, it's not necessarily that they're all perfectly squared address, perfectly squared impact and straight back and straight through. You're going to see a lot of different things and they way that they accomplish things. But when I talk about facing goal in relationship to plane, in a moment, it'll start to make a lot more sense, but here Craig and I, you know, the big issue for me is that I'm setting up close. I'm hitting a lot of pulled putts. At impact, we start to see a really big difference again, where now I'm actually even more closed 1.4 degrees and he's actually just slightly less open and he's doing it really relatively, very consistently. You can see that my path is hard left.

I am the over the top full slicer putter. If there is such a thing, that's basically what I'm doing because my face angle in relationship to my path is open. I'm taking the club outside, coming over the top, swinging hard, left again, it's only 2.4 degrees. You can hardly even see this stuff on video, but you can see it in the way that the ball is reacting off the face. So you can see my face angle gives me a very low score, even though I am incredibly consistent at doing the same wrong thing. So I think one of my live lesson guys, it told us saying, I think it was Martin and said you don't want to keep practicing the wrong things. You keep, you get really good at mastering the wrong stuff. He said it way more eloquently than I did, but that's what I've done.

I've gotten really good at being really bad. I think that's what he said. So I'm super consistent at yanking pull over the top slice putts. So you'll notice that most tour pros is a start going through and sharing more data. You'll see that most of them tend to set up open with the face a little bit and release it a little bit more through the hitting area to square it up an Integris case, releasing it a lot. So here we can see path and path is important, but not nearly as important as facing go. You can see that we have two very different ways of accomplishing a similar thing. Well, actually not the same thing. Craig made every single putt during this session and I missed every single putt during this session. So that should tell you something. And he's going to really seem funny.

And when we look at the next next piece of the report, but you can see that I'm actually taking the putter outside, just like in a golf swing, taking it outside and coming over the top, coming back across with a face that's relatively open and I'm swinging hard left, and then you can see Craig's face is much more straight back and straight through. In this case, this one was really, really quiet, a very simple stroke that is very easy to repeat and become very consistent. Now let's look at the funny one. So again, Craig made every single putt. These are all 15 foot putts. He made every single one. I missed every single one. My grouping is very tight, very consistent. His is horribly inconsistent yet. He made every single putt. So this should tell you something else where you hit it on the putter face.

Not that important. Of course you want to try and keep it as consistent as humanly possible, but it's not as important as facing angle and repeating the same stroke over and over again. So that's a really, really big eye opener. When you start to understand what's really going to impact impact your scores and the number of putts that you're actually dropping. Yes, of course, we want to try and hit it in the center of the face and keep a tight grouping, like what I have that higher consistency. So we start getting more consistent distance and so on. But at the same point, it's not going to necessarily make you or break you as a putter. Craig made every single putt that he looked at and they were all right in the heart. I'm launching. I'm not going to get too much in depth on this stuff right now.

Obviously it's, it's important to understand that there is a little bit of an upstroke kind of like in your drivers, you're catching a little bit on a positive upswing and the putting stroke most, all the tour pros on average catch the ball a little bit more on the upstroke and have changed the loft angle dynamically to impact. We'll talk about that kind of stuff in the future. That's the type of stuff you cannot really work on without being on a, on a putting device like the Sam PuttLab face rotation. This is something that I wanna, that I'll talk about in upcoming videos. But one thing that you'll notice is that Craig, even though he's a much better hotter than I am and made all these putts, he's rotating the face far more than I am. So you would, I think, again, this is where golf is.

Just if you just do the exact opposite of what you think you should do, you're probably going to be on the right track. You've guys have heard me say this a lot. You know, so many golfers who slice, they tend to take the club face back, really shut it, really hooded going back. Cause I think, oh gosh, if I don't open the face, going back, I'll stop hitting a slice. But the opposite is actually true. When I want to hit a draw, I actually rotate the face open more during the backswing. So it inherently wants to close more in the downswing and you'll hear most tour pros will do the same thing. If you want to, if I want to hit a cut, I actually take the club face back more shut. It makes it easier to hold the club face off through the hitting area.

Now in my putting stroke, my, you know, subconsciously in my head because I miss so many putts and I, you know, feel that I'm such a terrible putter that I'm trying to keep that face from rotating as much as humanly possible now in relationship to the path I don't, I don't rotate it very open much at all. And then it's closing 2.3 degrees on average through the hitting area. And then it's really close on the fall through and you can see Craig's matches up a lot more symmetrically he's 6.6 degrees. Open 6.2 degrees closed has a pretty constant closing rate. Even though our scores are very much the same. I am again, swinging across it and hitting these pools with a shut face and he's going more or less, more straight back and more straight through, but he has way more face rotation. So this is what, when I was talking about tigers, putting stroke earlier, he has a tremendous amount of face rotation, an insane amount compared to a lot of other tour pros, but through the, in relationship to his swing plane, which I'll talk about later when I introduced you to the 3d putting report of Sam putt lab, that in relationship to the plane, it's always square.

And so this starts to help you start to understand the importance of the arc and the way that the putter is working and the way that the stroke is working. Here's what we really are concerned about is keeping that club face square to the arc, not square to the path. So that's a very important thing that you'll want to understand as we go through these videos and you can see a big difference in, in what Craig and I are doing and we get, we can get really deep into those reports and we will in the future, but I'm not going to spend a ton of time going into every single detail. This is just a basic comparison report, but I want you to see that you don't necessarily have to have a perfect putting stroke at the ball, dead square in the center of the face and be a great putter.

Craig's a phenomenal putter and he hit it all over the freaking face and everywhere. Right? I hit it pretty much in the same spot, relatively within a couple of millimeters here and there. And I missed all my putts. Another thing that I think you'll find interesting, that I've seen a lot of different tour pro data that we've been looking over is that there's an actual deceleration just before the strike and tiger woods himself also does this. You can see a little drop off of my acceleration right before the strike, which is represented by this vertical line. And Craig does the same thing. We have different acceleration profiles in terms of how much we're accelerating the putter through and more confident putters who feel that they can be pretty aggressive. What I've noticed is a little bit higher acceleration, cause they're not tentative.

They're not, you'll see a steeper curve on his where mine looks like I'm a, I'm a chicken because I am. And because I have the kind of slow gradual acceleration, I'm like, oh God, just don't screw up the stroke. Come on Chuck, you can do this. And I'm just barely accelerating the putter because I'm afraid I'm going to screw it up. And Craig has the confidence to know that he's going to be able to accelerate pretty aggressively because he knows he's doing the same thing and returning that face back close to square every time. So another interesting tidbit to, to realize that there's actually some slight diesel right before the strike timing and tempo and things like that. You know, this is something we really need to measure on a sandpit labs. I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this report, but this is at least an introduction to the type of data that you can get from the PuttLab.

It gets far more in depth, but these are kind of the big things that I want you to start out understanding his face angle is everything repeating that same face angle is also everything. There's two everything's. The face angle has to be square to the path that you want the ball to start on at impact within a degree, or you're going to miss a lot of putts. And so that's what we're going to start focusing on. When you start showing you what I've done to create the ability for me, this is before I started working on my putting stroke. Obviously I wanted to have a baseline of like, how crappy am I? What have I been doing wrong? And it was so revealing and actually kind of inspiring to me to realize, gosh, I'm actually super consistent, but I'm just super consistently doing something bad and that's an easy fix, right? But here, I got to know that I'm doing this first. I have to know that my face is closed at address or yours might be open at a dress or whatever it may be. And the new technology and stuff that we have available in San pet lab is going to make, figuring out the putting stroke and understanding what you're really doing and lead to a lot lower scores, making that a lot easier process to develop a proper putting stroke.

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