Interview with Chuck Quinton - High Hands vs. Low Hands Research

This whole virus chaos has given all of us pause time to think about stuff. And something I've been working on for, you know, long before COVID came out. But once COVID stuff really hit, I really started, I had time to think because couldn't do anything else, you know? And so one of the things that I was dealing with is where's where's rotary swing going like w w w what, what's the whole point, you know, there's when I started this, it was so different, right. There was a discussion forum. And I had guys who liked what I did, and they said, you should do a DVD. And I'm like, I never done a DVD in my life. Like, what are you talking about? I've never been in front of the camera. Speech was my worst class in college. Why do you guys want to do this?

To me? It sounds like torture, you know, but now we've got, I don't know, 2000 videos, or however many later we're still here, but, but it, it, it, it grew very organically and, and, and it's always been like that. Right. You know, you and I have talked like we've never done paid marketing. It's just all been word of mouth and organic growth, but it's really also, you know, it's left me to think, where do I really want to take where we are now and where I want to go in the future. And as I mentioned with the COVID stuff, like we've all been kind of forced to stop and think about our lives. Look at all the people like leaving cities and going into rural areas. I did that like three years ago, because I didn't want to be in the city anymore, which obviously didn't know COVID was coming.

But for me, I just, you know, I saw the writing on the walls with things that were going on with the economy and the politics and all of that stuff. And this matters, I want to get out away from stuff and return home to Colorado for me, which, you know, the mountains have always been my, my number one passion. So, so anyway, I did that and, and, you know, had a lot of peace and quiet out where I live. We live in a very rural areas, less than a thousand people here. And it's awesome. It's just big, huge ranch lands and mountains. And so I really started having time to, to just sit back and say, you know, what is all of this stuff mean for me? Like all the stuff that I've done, all the work I've done, all the research, all the bio mechanics stuff and anatomy and hitting gazillions of golf balls and giving, you know, tens of, you know, I think we've done almost 80,000 online golf lessons now, and, you know, 10,000 in-person lessons, it's a lot, you know, but, but at the end of the day, when I step back and I think about what I'm trying to do, like it's, it's morphed into trying to create a golf swing.

That makes sense. You know, there's so much conflicting information out there. And, and I really wanted to take a very black and white, hard and fast line in the sand. This is the ideal way to do it because the, of XYZ, you know, it's, it's safer for the body, or you don't put these ligaments at risk or labor of tears or back. And because I was injured all the time when I was taking lessons as, as a young playing professional, trying to make it, you know, on the tour and playing the mini tour, rents some, I was just hurt all the time. And, and I would go from one instructor to the next, I would spend a year with this guy and then I would get worse and then I would be hurt and nobody could ever answer these questions. So it really turned out as my own pursuit of how do I get rid of my own pain that I'm experiencing in my swing, but really, and that's kind of what rotary swing has been is all about.

Like, how do I biomechanically safely produce good club head speed that lets me play at the highest level that is going to help keep me from just getting injured all the time. And really when I started this thinking, stepping back even a step further, like, you know, now I'm, I'm 44 years old. I've been playing competitive golf for 30 years. And I look at, you know, the next, I like to look at things in big picture stuff. You know, I'm always thinking 10 steps ahead. And so I'm thinking now then the next 20 years of my life, what am I really trying to do with, with golf instruction, with my business, with, with my own swing and, and, and my mechanics and all of those things. And it came down to something you and I started to discuss is, you know, the purpose of playing golf for me has never been solely about shooting a great score.

If it was, I wouldn't spend 99% of my time ball striking practice in 1%. Okay. Right. If I actually cared about my score, it would be nice 80% short game and 10% ball striking, but that's not, you know, if I'm just totally honest with myself, it's just not the part of the game that I'm the most excited about that I wake up in the morning and I think, oh gosh, and that three foot putt I've made to save partially was huge. Like that doesn't stick out in my mind, you know, 330 yard drive that I hit right on the screws right out of the center of the face that flew perfectly true and felt effortless. That's the stuff that I'm addicted to. And I have been, since I picked up a golf club, that is the fascination with the game for me, there always has been.

So this year when I was, when I started playing, I really was thinking through all these things in my head about what I really want to do, what am I going to do to take rotary swing to the next 20 years? And we've been in, been doing this online for 15 years now. I've been teaching for 25 years. And that's a long time to kind of be able to look back and reflect on and say, I've done all these things, but what's next. And most of you know, a huge part of what's driven rotary swing and all the stuff that I've done has been my own swing. Right? It's been the things that I want to feel in my swing that the experiences that I want to have. And so when I went out to play this year, I actually, a lot of people don't know.

I hadn't played for two years. I played three rounds of golf in the last two years. One of them was at Augusta. One of them was at a charity event and one of them was for business. So in two years, three rounds of golf and just been so busy with moving back here, starting my academy, teaching the teaching business stuff has been keeping me extremely busy. And so I've just been too busy to play. And so when I came out this year, I had no idea what I would shoot, but, you know, within establishing my handicap in the first month or whatever, I was the plus 1.4 or something like that. So to me, that was kind of like the, I don't know the word I'm looking for here, but it was like cementing, what I've done. I can take two years off without validation.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like here, I can take two years off, not play at all and come out and still be a plus handicap. That's the whole point. It should be low maintenance. It should. And I mean, zero maintenance. I haven't done anything other than ice climbing. I don't think that helps my golf swing. So, so for me to do that, it was, it was awesome. It was, you'd be like, okay, this is the validation that I've been looking for. I can take all this time off. I can still come out and play. And that's huge for me, but it's still, you know, it's more about my students on how do I get them to achieve that. And more importantly, like, again, the long-term bigger picture perspective for me has been, how do I maintain what I'm doing right now for the next 20 years? Right?

Like I'm not getting any younger. And my body is wrecked from all the stuff that I've done. You know, don't break your neck. It's just a terrible thing to do and breaking your back. And my arm, my leg and my hand, I have a broken, so much stuff and had so many surgeries that, unfortunately, I now feel all of that every day I wake up and I'm in pain from all the other stuff that I did. And so I think to myself, like, okay, I can swing my average driver speed this summer, when a specialist's doing all these testing was in the mid one, 20 mid to low one twenties, like on the course. I don't know if you're like this. I tend to swing harder on the course and I do on the range. I don't know if you're like that, but because there's a purpose to it, right?

Like if I'm on the range and we have a launch monitor out there, I'm like 1 21, 1 22, every single swing. And I got on the course and I'm like, oh, well, you know, I want to, this is a hole where I can really take advantage of my link. I'm going to automatically step it up without thinking about it. And then I swing like 1 25 on the course. So at 44 years old and having scoliosis and nerve damage and broken bones and all this stuff, all these surgeries, I, you know, that's, that's a pretty good benchmark for being able to even be being able to play it all after going through what I did in five years of physical therapy and still swing at that speed and hit the ball really straight and really solid is, is great. But it's still, there's always been this one nagging thought.

I don't know if you've had anything like this, but in the back of my head, there's very few dates in life or, or events in life that really stick out as you get older. Right? Like, and that's really what you kind of start living for is these experiences that, that you look back because at some point, you know, work and money and all that stuff, like, you know, I've been married for, gosh, I better remember this. I've been married since oh one. So almost 20 years have been married. The same thing, you know, like my life pretty much settled, right? Like I'm past that point of trying to go up the corporate ladder, trying to achieve all these things. So I just really want experiences. And so I look back the things that stick out in my mind. Like I remember the day I got married.

I remember the day that we got our puppy Brier. We were just talking about our labradoodle. I remember his birthday. I remember my wife's birthday. I remember my birthday. You know, and I remember certain events and experiences, but from the out of all of these important dates and things in my life, I still have one day on the golf course, actually wasn't even on the golf course, it was on the driving range that I still remember it. And it's like from 20 years ago and it was a day, it was my first time ever go into the PGA merchandise show. And, you know, they did an orange county national and they have, you know, that all of the equipment guys are out on the driveway and I'm a young, young guy just turned pro moved to Florida and I'm trying to make it out there playing these little mini tour events and stuff.

And I, and I'd been working on my swing and I was working on these things and that all just kind of clicked and fell together in this unbelievable day that allowed me to achieve like golfing Nirvana. I stepped up there. I still remember the weather. Like it was a cold January morning, it was windy. And I wanted to go and try all these new clubs out. And so I stepped up there and I remember stopping at the Mizuno tent first and grabbed a seven iron and just started making swings. And just, it was one of those things where I couldn't miss, like every shot was just purely out of the center of the face. And it felt like I was swinging like a quarter speed, but the ball was just rocketing off the face. And every ball was flying like perfectly true. And then had like a little tiny little draw on it, the best, right.

It was just like, this is, this is so easy. It's so fun. This is the best feeling in the world. So I keep doing this and I'm like, Hey, I'm going to grab a longer clip. So I grabbed like a like a Mizuno forged blade, little tiny to iron out of their bucket of clubs. And I just start roasting this thing. And I'm like, dude, this is so fun. It got to the point where like the Mizuno rep started walking over and watching me hit balls. And then people were like standing around me watching me rip these two irons off the deck. And I'm like, I couldn't, I couldn't do anything wrong. Like just every shot was pure flying high and straight. And so I actually went around like the whole giant orange county national range and was just hitting clubs at every single spot and just ripping them.

And it was just like, this, this to me is why I play golf shooting, great scores. Like I've shot 64, twice tons of rounds in the sixties. My low score, 64. I can barely remember the course that I did a mat. One was in a tournament and one was a, you know, a fun day. And, but I remember day that ball striking day, as clear as day, you know, and it's two decades ago. So as I was reflecting this year and thinking about like how I'm playing now, and obviously I'm still playing to a plus handicap after a big break, I'm hitting the ball a long ways, but I'm like, can I swing like this for 20 years? Obviously I'm not injured or anything I'm still able to play, but you know, I want it to feel like that that day I want those effortless shots to where I just can't miss.

And I don't want to have to spend eight hours a day, grooving all of these technical complications and compensations in my swing. I want a really simple swing. I want to swing that allows me to take a year or two off and then come back and like, yep, I'm still shooting around park. Didn't change a thing, you know? And so that really started shifting my focus as I was thinking about this. I'm like, okay, you know, biomechanically, there's, there's an ideal way to swing to allow you to optimize everything, to create maximum club, head speed and maximum consistency and all of these things. But is that the most effortless way to swing the club? Like if you ask me, would I be willing to give up five or 10 yards off the tee to be able to feel like that day where I could just step up there and do no wrong?

And it just feels so good how solid I hit it? Of course I would. Right. I wouldn't care because I'm, I'm in the longevity stage. You know, I, I want to be able to do that for the longest period possible. And I still hit tons of shots like that, but they're not as effortless and consistent as I think they can be, or as I would like for them to be, because that's not what I've been searching for. I've been searching for how do I optimize everything and make sure that my back and my hip and my shoulders and my wrists are protected. And what's the, you know, and how can I create the most speed, you know? And I'm like, well, I don't really, I'm not competing a long drive association. You know, I'm never going to swing it 150 miles an hour. Like these monsters out there.

And I don't even care about, I love hitting the long ball. I, I admit to being a total, a distance addict. I'm not going to deny it. I love it. I love being the longest guy in my group. I always am. And I love walking past my buddies ball and being 50 yards behind me. I'm sorry, but I do it. And anybody who says that they don't love that. It's just because they've never been able to do it. Everybody loves crushing the ball and hitting these pure shots. And so I started shifting what I was thinking about to, well, how could I shift from being like, obviously injury prevention is still number one for me, especially with all my injuries and, and, and my students. Who've, who've, I've been able to help be able to, to play after being injured and having hip replacements and all of these things.

That's still number one, but how can I do it so that I can consistently pure the ball as often as possible while feeling absolutely effortless? That has been the shift that I started thinking about. I was like, and it started with my arms swing, right? The arms are the most complicated part of the swing. There's no way around it. They move the most. They move in the greatest distance that have the greatest range of motion. You can create all these different angles by doing tiny little intricate things with your hands. And that's what kills golf for most golfers. They don't know how to coordinate their arms swimming and the club with their body and getting that stuff to work. And it's just a challenge, right? There's just a lot of stuff that you're trying to glue together. And I know that you've, you know, you've struggled and, and, and making changes in your swing and trying to understand all this stuff. And, and again, there's so many different ways to do it, but

That's why one day you can hit it amazing. And the next day you can't find the space. Right?

Right. It's the most frustrating thing in the world. And so where do you go to look for answers? What do you need know, first of all, you got to figure out what you're looking for. If, if you're wanting to be the longest driver in the world, then, then you, you know, you have to do certain things with your arms, create tons of speed, but you only need to hit one ball out of six in a a hundred yard, wide fairway. Right. We need to do a lot better than that because I'm not interested in that side of things. So, and this is, again, the challenge, the thing that I've kind of always fought in the golf industry is that there's, there's considered no wrong or right way of doing things, right. You look at like, take the golf thing machine, for example, right. I read that book a long time ago.

And when I read it, I thought, man, this is a great study of somebody who's taken a lot of time to figure out all the possible variable variations in the golf swing. And now it's just up to you to figure out how to put them together. I'm like, wait a second. There are thousands of combinations here. And so I looked at that book is a giant bucket of parts. And I look at them as a bucket of parts. Like if you've ever worked on a car these days, you can't interchange parts from one to the other. Right. But back in the day, you could take some stuff off of Ford and throw it in a Chevy and you could make it work right. Nowadays there's no chance. And that's kind of how I look at the golfing machine. And a lot of the teaching methodologies are out there.

Like, it's not that they don't necessarily work. Right. But you have to figure out the right variations and the right combinations of all these thousands of different parts to figure out which ones work with all the things that you have going on in your swing. And that's an exhaustive task. I mean, you need a ton of time to sort through all of that stuff. So I've always kind of joked, like I do that work and research. So you don't have to, because there are things that work together and things that don't. And so that spurred on my approach this summer, or starting back in March, like, okay, I want, I now have a new directive. It's it's about how can I effortlessly hit the majority of my shots. And, and in doing that, I wanted to just start with the arms, because again, it's the most complicated part.

So I thought to myself, okay, well, let's take it to the extremes. And then we're going to measure everything on the swing catalyst, 3d motion force plate, because there's things that I can look at in the data, both from an efficiency perspective, in terms of how efficient my sequencing is and the force that I'm generating, because at the end of the day, it's what you do through your feet. That truly gives you effortless power or not. If your feet aren't working or the force that you're generating through your feet, that the ground is experiencing, you can't hit the ball anywhere. I've imagined swinging a golf club and zero gravity, right? Like it doesn't work. If you're just suspended from there, you have to use leverage the ground. So I said, okay, armed with this 3d force plate. I want to take it to the extremes and just look at arms, should your arms be really high in the backswing like Nicholas or Davis loved the third, or, you know, lots of different players.

You can obviously play phenomenal golf with really high hands in the backswing, or should they be really, really low, which I think is a trend that you see more happening on the PGA tour now than, than in years past. Right? And the golfs, the golf swing has morphed throughout the years in lots of different ways. So back in the seventies, we had big lateral drive, big high hands that lateral drive helps shallow out those high hands. And so on. Then you had the Hogan era before that, and then Norman after that and everything in between. Right. So I said, okay, let's take it to the extreme with my own swings. I always use my swing as a Petri dish, and I never teach anybody to do something that I haven't personally done felt experienced demand, swing. So I said, okay, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go really, really low hands and see what the data shows and see what kind of forces that I'm generating and what the efficiency, what the effortlessness scale, if you will, what does that feel like in my swing and what does the ball flight do?

So I would go in and I would make the changes in my, my, my lab, my studio, which is where I've got 300 frames per second cameras launched, monitor force, plate, all of that stuff. And I would spend eight, 10 hours there a day hitting balls on the plate and measuring and looking at it, reviewing it and doing this all day, right. It was a bit obsessive when it comes to this stuff. So this was like seven months, full time, hammering this stuff out. And then once I, once that sounds awesome to me, well, it isn't, it isn't, and we'll get to that because there, there were definite findings that made stuff really, really clear as to what you would want to do and what you wouldn't want to do. So I would get it to where it looked reasonable and I could see like a substantial difference in what I was actually doing.

Right? Like you can look at it on video and say, oh, well, this swing looks good or doesn't look good, but I'm really concerned about what I can measure and really quantify. Cause that's subjective to a degree looking at it on video. But when I see what the ground is experiencing with the forces and this thing is super sensitive. So when I see that I know what kind of things are really happening, what, what kind of forces I'm really creating. And once I had that, I would take it out to the course and I would play. And sometimes I would play with the change for a week. Sometimes it would be a day. Sometimes it would be a month. It would just depend, but I would do that and I would go out and play and see what my scoring average was. So long story short, you can score great either way.

My scoring average remained almost exactly the same for the entire season. Like literally within like a half a stroke. So the argument that one is better from that perspective. Yeah. You can play great golf either way. Honestly, it's not really that big of a deal. You can score great with high hands, low hands, whatever, what I did notice in terms of performance, when my hands were lower, I felt certain things. And I really, I'm very careful to talk about things that I feel because it's so insanely subjective. But I got to the point where I felt like I was objective enough that I can at least share some of these observations and then people can go and experience it, try it for themselves. Right? So with the lower hands, obviously your swing feels much more connected. If you're swinging with higher hands, your arms have to move in this plane while your body turns in this plane.

So they're kind of opposites. It's like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. It's not easy for the average guy. And that's really my focus. I want to know how do I take the 15 handicap and get him down to a two as fast as possible, right? That that's kind of the, my end goal is taking those guys and helping them play consistently in the seventies, low seventies. So when I look at what these guys typically struggle with, they really struggle with getting their arms, to play nicely with their body at all. Right. And so when you're asking them to blend this vertical motion of the arms with the rotational movement of the body, it's a challenge for most people. Not that you can't do it. I played great with it, but it's just harder. The things that most golfers struggle with, right? If you just take, if I asked you to list three things that the average golfer struggles with, what would the first three things that I'm thinking about it come out of your mouth? What would they be?

Fleiss big miss.

Okay. So you got over the top slice right up. Yeah.

What else? Inconsistent strikes. So chunks, skulls

Or contact. Yep. Yep. And lack of distance there. Yeah. Number three. All three. Without saying, I would say the same thing, right? All three of those things can be completely resolved very quickly when you shallow out your arms, because most of those things are caused by not coordinating the movement of the arms, right over the top slice that's right side, push ripping the shoulders around the club comes over the top. You can't square the face, no brainer. You're slicing. Right? Poor contact comes from that steep angle of attack. That's generated by you. Steeping in Crow, steepening moves in your swing. And then the same thing with distance. You know, you start casting the club because you're accelerating the club at the wrong time, the wrong way with the parts, the wrong sequence, those three things, plague golf, right? If you hadn't

Okay. Real quick, Chuck is you're, you're probably working with more, you know, mid to older, you know, guys predominantly that have those issues. The funny thing is I see this and my friends and their low to mid thirties, a lot where these are like fit strong guys. And some of them just because of the flaws and their technique and their arms, they can't hit it. They can't hit a driver more than two 30 because it just comes in the face is wide open and it just pops up. They have no compression at all. And it's funny. They just assume that, oh, I just can't hit the ball on, I guess I'm not along hitter. Right. But in reality, it's some of these simple things you're talking about that could make them drive it to 90 easily,

110%. It's completely, I'm five, nine, a hundred sixty five pounds. And I can carry the ball consistently three 30 in the air. Right. So why I'm not special. I have mechanics that I understand how mechanics work and I've worked them. So you're right. I mean the younger guy who's in his thirties, who's he he's, he's never going to change. He's going to be in his fifties and still doing the same thing. It's just gonna hit even shorter. Right. Because the guy in his fifties started out that way. You know, if you don't ever fix the problem and you keep searching for bandaid fixes, I watched the guy yesterday, not yesterday, two days ago on the range. And it was, it was, if you had to create like a cartoon about golf, the golf swing, this guy, was it right. We're out on the range together. And I'm hitting what's that

Send it to me. I could have used it for our inferior.

So here I am.

You know, if I hit balls, typically people will they'll stop in the watch and stare at me or whatever, because if I'm at a, I was at a public course. And so, you know, the average guy they stake, right. They're just not any good out there. And so they see a good ball striker and like, oh wow, what does he do it? And so they kind of pay attention. And so I'm hitting balls next to this guy. And he's really, I heard overheard his conversation cause he was right next to me about how he's playing all the time and how he has to get drunk before every round of golf. And that's why he didn't play in a tournament this weekend because he had a tee off at 10. He didn't think he could get drunk enough, like, because that's his swing Lou. Right. And I've heard a lot of people say that.

So I'm not just totally poking fun at this guy. Like if you're swinging, you know, if you need to be lit up before you can play golf, then there's some serious problems. So he's out there grooving what he's doing, right. And every swing exactly the same. He's making practice swings, doing all this goofy stuff has no idea what he's really trying to do. But every single swing, he goes to the top and then just throws it as hard as you can and then scoops it through. And this guy's a big guy, right? Much bigger, much stronger than me. And I'm literally, and I'm hitting pitching wedges and sandwiches that are going further than his drives. And he's looking over at me like, and I know he's thinking to himself, what the hell is this guy doing that I'm not, and he's dumbfounded. Right. And I feel terrible.

I feel bad because I'm watching this guy and I know how bad it sucks to hit bad shots and not know how to fix it. You know? And I'm like, God, I want to help this guy. But this is not my place. You know, I'm not going to just go and sit over there and give him a lesson or anything. I, God, I feel so bad for this guy. It's so many guys are exactly that. Right? He's going to powder puff that for the rest of his life. Golf is not fun when you can't hit the ball. It's just not, I would take a great ball style striking round and go out and shoot 76, then a crappy ball striking around rush shot 66. But I just got up and down from everywhere any day of the week and twice on Sunday, I just, I have a better feeling when I hit the ball better.

Right. It's just that simple. I'm the same way. Yeah. I think the people who follow me, I think they're the ones who are gravitating to me. They're obviously more analytical and really liked to understand things. I think we have some of the sharpest members on the, on the planet. These guys really like to study things and understand, and we have a gal who's on our Facebook group. She's a physicist. And she's really wanting to understand where like all the details of the swings, you know, it has a PhD in physics. I'm like, those are the people that are attracted to, to what we do because they really want to understand the truth of it. Not like, oh, just feel this just swing out to right field. If that crap worked, then nobody would be slicing. You know, you can't override these movement patterns. So, so long story short, I looked at the three most common problems that all golfers, the average golfer struggles with and you, and you nailed them on, you hit her mind on the head.

And I looked at the shoe, the lower hands. And I said, well, if your hands are lower, you know, you're swinging over the top. Stuff happens when you can't, you don't shallow out the club, right? You actually, you steep in it, right? If you have high hands and then you push from the top to steep in the shaft, even more, or you're, you're completely screwed. It's done right. There are things that you have steepening and most golfers instinctually because they're right hand dominant. Right-Sided dominant because they're right handed. This, this side of the body of this arm is really good at adding steepening moves to the swing, right? Pushing them with the right shoulder, pushing the club, casting, all that stuff. That's all it can really do. Cause it's loaded up in such a way that that is normal. And so most golfers do that and they add steepening moves to their swing naturally.

But if you have high hands, you can't put any more steepening moves. You've already added all the steepness. You need to your swing and you need shallowing moves. That stuff is not natural to the average, Joe. They just don't get it. And I used to teach guys know kind of a throwing motion to get the club to shallow out and things like that. It's effective for some that works. I had a video on the side I did 15 years ago called throw the ball drill. And I thought, that's the panacea. If I can just get everybody to understand, you know, everybody's thrown. They know how to throw it. Right. No, they don't. People do not know how to throw, especially people, not from the United States. No. We have a lot of your members from Europe and things like that that come over and I'm like, oh, we know you've thrown a baseball when you're a kid.

Right. And I'm like, what? Like, no, I played cricket. I'm like, well, how the hell do you play cricket? I don't know how to do that. Like, yeah. So I always tried to relate it to like a throwing motion, but that doesn't work. I had guys literally who I would do the, throw the ball drill with like just standing here static, or just go to the top. And I want you just to take this ball. Don't think about it. And I want you to, just to kind of lightly throw it at a ball, sitting on the ground that it would be at address. It's kind of teaching you how to aim, throwing the club at the ball to get you to shallow out the club. And I had guys hit themselves in the foot. I had him throw it across the range. He couldn't hit the ball.

It was shocking to me. But it's just, if you don't have that built-in movement pattern from throwing stuff. As a kid, you can't use that. You can't rely on. That's why you're getting, you can't rely on these field things. So as I was messing around with this stuff, shallower hands, there's less work to shallow out the club right now. You're also giving up leverage, right? Because your higher hands, you have more time to accelerate your hands. You have more leverage potential energy in the higher hands. So you have to take up, you have to make up for that somewhere. So if there's a benefit to having shallower hands, because it's easier to shallow the club, but you're not necessarily addressing the, the distance issue. Right. So how do you accommodate that? Now, in my experience, going through this, going from my really, really high hands position to my really, really low hands was you remember? And again, I'm doing this as the extremes. I'm not trying to do it in the middle because I need to kind of see on either side of the spectrum of where one lives versus the other. I lost about three miles an hour, average club head speed with my driver. Now it's about 2%, but my ball speed, average ball speed went up by about one mile an hour. Why would you think that would be,

Was it just your angle or your compression? 

Compression basically, it's more solid contact right now. My peak speed with my higher hands is definitely faster. I can hit it further with my higher hands, but I'm already, you know, I'm pretty close to like maxing out as fast as I really want to swing. Cause again, I'm more on like, not how far can I hit it, but like how, how easy can I swing and how hard can I hit it? Right. So can I swing at 130 miles an hour? Sure. Do I know where it's going? No, no clue. And it's not going to feel very good on my body. Right? So, so by losing that 2% now, mind you, Rory McIlroy swings is really low hands, but I can't assume that the average guy is going to have the athleticism and body speed and strength Rory McIlroy does. Right. So sure he can swing with really low hands at 125 miles an hour.

But does that really apply to the average guy? Probably not tiger woods. Same thing. He's gone to much lower hands he's swing speed has gone down, right? He's one 17. Now it's still good. Plenty of club head speed. Right. But he's not swinging at 1 24 anymore. So I went from 1 22 average to one 19 and I felt like, but again, my ball speed, average ball speed went up one mile an hour because I'm hitting it more consistently, more solid. And that's really what I started looking at. It it's the averages that matter at the end of the day, if you're really just wanting to go out and play good golf and have fun doing it, you want your average crappy shots to still be pretty good and your great shots you want to be really good. But the higher hands, the higher variability is what I looked the way I looked at it.

You know, the higher your hands I have higher potential club for, but I have higher complexity in the swing. And so I have a higher chance of miss hitting it and miss hitting it sucks. I don't want to miss it. Like I'll accept a certain level of humanism and lack of perfectionism because I'm an imperfect being, but I want, I want to get as many as I can on that effortless high up on that effortless scale, right? For me personally, I've found that that was much easier to achieve with lower hands giving me higher ball speed. So I actually picked up distance overall as an average, even though my peaks weren't as high, right? So to me that was a trade-off that I was willing to make. You know, I don't mind losing 2% club as we now know a lot of guys out there, they would hear that and be like, oh dude, I'm only swinging at 95.

You want me to swing at 92, forget you. If you're swinging at 95, you're doing so much crap. That's so wrong. Nowhere near realizing where you should be anyway. So I S as I was developing this test, I kind of started giving myself a set of requirements. Like, what am I, what am I really trying to measure here? Obviously, number one is injury prevention. Like it has to be the safest way for me to swing to. It has to be effortless. I have to use biomechanics, leverage, ground force, all of these things and start experimenting with different ways to see what the ground forces affect based on what I do with my arms and my body. And I also set a benchmark for club head speed. The minimum has to be at least one 10 for the average guy. Now, if you're more coordinated or more athletic or whatever, you can swing faster.

Sure. But the average guy should be able to swing at one 10. And I've always believed that I've always been able to achieve that. Even with my older golfers, I had a guy once come to me at castle Pines, like 10, 11 years ago. And he is a good handy. He's a four handicap golfer. He's in his sixties at the time had just had a hip replacement coming back and lost a ton of speed. These swing at like 1 0 2. Now he's been a good golfer, like his whole life, right? So here's a guy who knows how to move, how to swing really well. And he said, listen, I'll double your lesson rate. If you can get me over one 10. I said, yeah, sure, no problem. Give me 20 minutes. You'll be there. And we did, I got into 112 miles an hour and as a 62 year old guy, right?

So you can do that. And if you're not consistently hitting those numbers, there's just so much inefficiency. So you don't have to worry about that 2% loss or, and again, that's my personal 2% loss, but you don't have to worry about that. If you're not already at least nearing your potential for speed. If you're not, you know, at least over one 10, it's not an, not an issue, but that was a benchmark for me. So injury prevention, consistency. I need to be able to do it the same over and over again. Golf is one of those interesting sports to me that it's the only thing that you want to get to a certain level and then just maintain you don't want to try and prove it right now. I love what Bryson Dushanbe is doing, but that's not real for the average guy. Right? Right.

There's not, it's not even a point to it. It's fun. I love watching. I totally support everything he's doing. Cause he's a swing science geek like me, I'm all for it. Right. And I did that stuff when I was in my twenties, you know, I got to the point where I could carry the ball three 50, but I could also miss it 50 yards, right. Or 30 yards left to, you know, there's no point in that. And when he's my age, he's not going to be doing that. It's just not going to happen. Right. So enjoy it now. It's awesome. But I'm looking at it as like, how can I just consistently do the same thing if I hit my seven iron perfectly pure and consistent straight at one 70, well, why hit it 180? You know, there's no point to that. But I think that a lot of golfers keep trying to like, oh, I hit it.

Perfect. Let's hit it. Perfect. Or right. It doesn't, there is no such thing as a word doesn't exist because there's no point you hit it. Perfect. That is, that's what we're really striving for. And by swinging more effortless by feeling like you're not swinging out of your shoes because your arms are out of sync and out of control, you start being able to more consistently hit those effortless shots because you're under more control. Right? And then you start getting everything. You start getting more consistent. You start getting better trajectory. Cause you're getting better contact. You're hitting on the better part of the face, your angle of attack, shallows out. That's a really big one for me too. So we, you know, we mentioned one of the three things was, you know, poor contact typically that comes from people swinging too steep. Now of course you can flip it and scoop it at the bottom that you know, will cause you to have these issues to where, you know, you're, you're super shallow.

You're not taking it at all. Cause you're flipping well, you got to stop flipping. Once you stop flipping people tend to start really driving hard with their arms and hands. And they, you know, they start coming in really steep. And then now you've got a time, this steep angle of attack with with catching the ball just right. And it's hard to do. You either hit it, just a hair chunky, or you get the divot too far out in front and you're catching it a groove low. All of that stuff leads to feelings of, you know, doesn't feel very good. You didn't hit it very solid. And again, that's really what we're what I'm trying to do. So from that perspective, I found again, high hands, more speed, low hands, more consistency. And when I look at what I really want to help my students do, and when I ask them what they are looking for, they all want to be more consistent.

You know, that's the thing, they want those great shots that they hit every now and then that bring them back. They want those more often. And to me, that's the beauty of it. That's really what we're all about. And so that's really how I've shifted this stuff to be thinking, you know, if you think of the swing overall is, you know, steepening moves and shallowing moves, then it becomes a lot easier to understand what you're doing in your swing and what you need to do. But I don't like variables. I don't like saying, okay, there's six different ways that you can do this and you just decide for yourself and just try them all. I mean, you got time to burn, right. Just try them all for a couple years and see which one works best. And that's kind of the approach to golf for most students.

It's like, I listened to this thing once with, with with, it was an interview with Gabrielle Reese. She used to do the shoe show on fuel TV. You remember feel TV got bought. It was kind of like actually, yeah, I think I do. They do like a lot of surfing, snowboarding, adventure, sports stuff. But they, they had this show on there where Gabrielle Reece would go and interview you know, different people in different sports. And she interviewed Butch Harmon Watts. And she, she talked about Butch or talked to Butch about how he teaches. Cause obviously Butch is famous for teaching tons of, to her pros. And he's like, she asked him like, what do you teach a tour pro differently than you do an average amateur golfers? Like, oh yeah, completely. You know, the tour pro has got his life depending on.

And you know, he's got mouths to feed, you know, you can't make these, you got to give a lot of steals, subjective stuff. You just got to get them out there so that they can back the ball around kind of thing. And I'm super paraphrasing. There's been a long time since seen this. But what I did remember very specifically was what he said about how he teaches amateurs and it blew my mind, but it, it perfectly personifies the struggles that the average guy finds in golf. He said, you know what? The average amateur they're there. They're still gonna, their wife is still gonna love them when they come home, their dog's still going to love them. They're not making a paycheck, their livelihood doesn't depend on this. He said, so you just try a bunch of different things until you find something that works. And I thought that was insane.

What do you mean? You just try a bunch of random different things and you throw a bunch of on the wall and see what sticks that to me is horrible. It just, I was, I was appalled when I heard it, then I'm sure he probably didn't mean it in maybe in the way that it came across or what have you. But I, but I think there's a lot of truth in it to the it's a whole lot of golf instruction is like there's 50 different ways. Let's just try all of them until we find something that clicks with you. Well, that'll take forever. I don't have that kind of time. You know, I, I got, I got stuff to do. I have a life I want to be able to go out and play golf, have a really simple swing that I don't have to maintain, hit the ball.

Great. And then go home and move on with my life and enjoy that time. You know? And so to me, that means not having four different ways. It means having one way, here's the fastest way to get you where you want to be. Here's the most efficient way here was the one that you can maintain for the rest of your life. Cause it's supposed to be a game for a lifetime. Right. I mean, it really is what it's known for. Yeah. But I can tell you hands down, I've seen more people who have worked hard, their whole lives to be able to retire, to play and focus on golf who quit the game out of frustration. Then I've seen people who go off into retirement. But like, this is yeah, because they're so frustrated because they can't get to that point where they can consistently the ball.

Cause they can't get the right information. Right. No, there there's, I'm sure there's tons of instructors out there that can help them by giving them these random bandaid fixes to glue it all together. But one, it takes maintenance. I mean, how many times have you gone to the course and been like, I don't know how I'm gonna hit the ball today. I better go like an hour early and start chopping wood, you know, swing thoughts that work only one day and find that thing that's going to work. Right. You've been there. Right. That's a scary feeling. Especially if you're a tournament golfer to be like, I gotta get there early and just, I gotta find something that's gonna work. Right. That, that feeling of desperation is the one that has to be erased. I haven't felt like that in years. I go to the course that I know I'm going to hit the ball.

Well, like, you know, because I don't practice that much, you know, making all these sweet changes this year, is it going to be like, I'm going to just nut it every single shot or, you know, because I'm trying all these different random things. My swing felt like a jalopy. I mean, I was trying, I had to make such huge swing changes so constantly to be able to do this. But I, I was, I, it reminded me of like, gosh, I got to play in like a, you know, a little money game today and I'm playing with high hands today. And I gotta like, I better go groove this before I get out there. You know? But most people never get to the point where they grew it. Cause it's just, they don't know. It's too complicated, too confusing. There's too many options as too many variables.

You know, I think our brain shuts down at three. If you give me a or B, I can make a decision, a, B or C. Well now I'd just rather not even make a choice because I don't know. I don't want to make the wrong one. Right. And I don't know if that's the right thing and so on. So I've always liked, you know, with rotary swing, with what I've done, I'm like, here's the ideal way Bob mechanically, safely, how the body should move. Right. But the arms have always been a variable because I couldn't say definitively one's better than the other. Right. I can tell you if you shove really hard off your right foot and move your hips past neutral, normal, I mean, you're going to tear your label them eventually, and you're going to get sciatic and you know, you're going to have low back pain.

You're going to herniated disc that's stuff. I can say definitively, but I wanted to be able to do the same thing with the arms and be like, okay, here's the ideal way, but not just about speed production, you know, and doing it safely. It's about efficiency. Now. I want a beautiful, effortless swing, not a swing. It takes a lot of work. And you look to these guys today, like, you know, like Jason Day, right? He literally talking about retiring at 40 years old because of back issues. How many guys in the PGH, who do we have massive back problems, man. I, I did a Google search the other day and I just started typing in random names on the PGA tour, on the money list. And I would decide, I would take like Kevin knock back injury. I, I didn't know if Kevin had back injuries.

I don't wanna follow the tour closely. Right? I'm like, I'm just gonna take some random guy. And the reason I did him specifically is I have his swing catalyst data. I have his date on the force plates and I can see where he has these things called double spikes or double peaks. I don't know if that's really what it comes to, what I'm calling them in the vertical force. And I see an adjusted Rose's swing. I've seen it in a lot of different players, swings. And then I started looking at their data and seeing, then I'd be like, okay, I'm going to see if he's ever been injured. Sure enough. Kevin nods had a serious issues with his back for a long, long time. And I can walk. He hangs back and then pushes up and then has this double speak spike in the, in the ground force.

I'm like, man, like this is really important. Like we can finally have the tools to, and the technology to quantify and measure stuff that leads to injury. Now we can't do this definitively yet. I don't think I spent a ton of time, like a gazillion swings doing it myself. And I found that for myself personally, when I would see these double peaks in the vertical ground force on swing catalysts, that I would notice some discomfort or even to the point of pain in my back. If I had vertical forces that happen too late in the swing. And I would notice that my rotational torque, my S my torque would go up to make up for this loss of leverage from my legs. But I would also notice that I was working harder. Right. So my efficiency would go down. My effortless protocol would, would, would go down.

Right? And so I started trying to like, we don't have enough data. And I'm hoping that, like, the stuff that I've done is just we'll act as a catalyst for other people to kind of say, oh, this is interesting. I want to look at this with my students, because this is kinda how it started. When I, when I got the swing catalyst installed in my studio, I was asking them, you know, anecdotally, what do you guys have? You know, you've seen these double peaks. What do you, you know, the tour players that you guys have what have they reported with this? And they said, anecdotally, there's no statistical data for this yet. But anecdotally, they were seeing guys complain about back pain and have injuries when they had these double peaks. So then I started saying, okay, well, is there a difference in what I do with my arms in terms of high hands versus low hands that tends to lead to these double peaks, which could tend to lead to injury over the longterm.

Right? And so there were a couple of things that I found and how that I released the club, how I swung the club, how I shallowed, the club, but Kevin is a great example of this, right? So Kevin is a very short hitter relatively, and it's kind of like this week pool Slappy company. I mean, he hits it solid, right? Obviously he's a, he's a phenomenal player, but in terms of ball striking ability, he's, you know, you're going to put him down near the bottom of the list compared to the modern gastric. And the worst thing about it is that he's been seriously injuring himself by swinging this way. So not only are you short, but you're hurt doing it. Right. Whereas there's other guys who can swing really hard and hit the ball really straight and, and not have these double force, double peaks and not be injured. Right. But he hangs back a lot. He literally, his first moved down even with like an, a short iron is to drop his head back, which creates the side bed. And then he, and then he creates a lot of vertical force and then he double peaks. Right.

What's that I've tried that how'd that feel great. Yeah. So,

So anyway, all of these things started kind of, I started looking at them holistically and saying, okay, now I have this kind of, this thesis statement of where I want to go with, with rotary swing over the next 20 years. And it's, it's all about effortlessness. It's all about efficiency. Yes. I can hit the ball a long ways or further with higher hands, but am I seeing these double peaks that may lead to injury? So what's the point of being able to play golf in my golden years, if I can't play golf, my back hurts. I don't want to take Advil every day. I want to be able to go out and just be like, oh, just butter shot, butter shot all day. You know, my, my vision of a perfect day on the golf courses where every swing I make looks like tiger woods warming up on the driving range.

You know, when you watch him on the range, you're like, dude, how could that guy ever miss a shot makes it, I think that's really, what's inspired so many people when, when he was in his prime is just how effortless he made it look right. And they get on the course and then he'd swing out of his shoes and it look a little different, right. But, but there's a reason that so many people that became a thing like tiger woods on the range tiger woods on the course to different people, right. I want to be tiger woods on the range, but for the rest of my life, every single shot, assuming that that's, you know, more or less the ideal way to swing. So that's really kind of like the foundation, the backstory on how I kind of ended up studying all this stuff that I've studied so far.

And as I've been going through and starting to write down my observations, and again, it's a, I've made it as objective as I can, but at the same point, I'm not sitting out here writing a dissertation paper, cause nobody's going to read it right. I need the stuff to be digestible. So an average golfer would be like, oh, I will actually pay attention to what this guy has to say. I'm not going to go read a 80 page technical document. Right. So I've been trying to write down my, my observations and data in a way that's digestible and relatable. It makes sense. And that's kind of the next step is I want to start looking at this holistically, how do I start sharing this information? How does it the core, the hub, which rotary swing revolves around? You know, like now we've taken, obviously my goal has always been about injury prevention, you know, swinging safely and efficiently.

But now I really want to focus in on that effortless side of things. Like there's, I want to go back to that day at orange county national, where I could just do no wrong. And obviously there are days where you're just everything, you know, your body feels great. Our body changes every day. Our field changes every day. I'm not talking about being in the zone and doing all these mental tricks and meditating and becoming a Zen Buddhist to be able to hit pure shots. Right. I'm talking about it from a mechanical perspective, building the simplest machine humanly possible to be able to replicate and consistently hit the same shot. That feels amazing over and over again. And that is where I want to go with rotors.

Well, here's the funny thing about that point, Chuck, like, you know, a lot of people talk about confidence, right? And when you remember the days that you feel confident you're focused on what you're trying to do, right? That's probably the days that you're focused on, especially for like a mid to high handicapper, you're thinking about where you want to hit it. You're thinking about what you're trying to do, your target. And then you go, it's a lot easier to be confident when you have the context and understanding of what you need to do to make it work. What prevents people from having a clear head out there is because you're thinking about the six different things you're trying to do. Or if that didn't work out, oh no, this, I need to try this. Right. And you never have a concrete belief and conviction in what you do. And I've struggled with that a lot over the years of just, you get a, feel, you ride it out for three to five months, maybe even just a month or less. And then you feel like you need to go back to the drawing board and there's nothing worse than feeling like you need to go back to the drawing board when something's not working and certainty with information and technique is a really good way to prevent that. Right.

Absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, the number one thing that people want is consistency. Once you have consistency, then confidence follows as a result. Yeah. Right. I, and a lot of people think that, you know, I used to love reading a lot of books on the mental game. Cause when I was younger and trying to make it as a pro, I read, I really struggled with the mental game. I was unbelievable on the range. I stepped up onto the first tee and like, my hands would sweat and I'd be looking around and why are all these people staring at me and made me very uncomfortable? I just didn't know how to deal with it. So I started reading like Bob Rotella's books and all of these things. And, and I actually did really spend a lot of time studying in Buddhism because I was like, I have to figure out like, how do I get the guy on the range out on the first tee?

Right. And that was by far my biggest struggling point. I couldn't play to my potential. And so one of the things, one of the tenants of a lot of these books is that they say, oh, well you just have to kind of fake it till you make it. You've got to be confident in your ability before you have any proof that you should be confident in what you're doing. That's. You have to be able to physically mechanically strike the ball consistently with a machine that works in order for you to ever be consistent. And then you will become confident, consistency, breeds, confidence. You can't, you can't just skip that step. And like you said, if you don't know really what you're doing or why you're doing it and don't understand your swing and not like you don't have, you don't have to know the swing to the level that I do that I'm obsessive about this.

I think about it 24 7. And so that's not realistic for the average guy, right. But this is my life. So I pour everything into it and I, and I'm obsessed with it. So I really understand the mechanics, but I, what I try to do is take all of that stuff and explain it in a way that's simple. That is digestible for the average guy who doesn't live, eat, sleep golf, swing mechanics, 24 hours a day so that they can understand how to diagnose their swing, how to fix it in real time and not be chasing all these random things, because you'll just end up chasing your tail. The next thing, you know, 20 years have passed, and you're still the exact same golfer that you were to 20 years, or you're probably worse off, right? I mean, I've seen it happen thousands and thousands of times.

So if your swing mechanics are just too complex to be replicable, right, that's what it comes down to. Like you can build a, you know, I raced cars and a big gearhead. You can build a really complex engine that can generate tons of power, but it grenades half the time was not very productive. I don't want an engine that produces a thousand horsepower, but grenades on lap six, I did, I need to finish the race. So the golf swings are like really complex engines. I mean, there's thousands of potential moving parts and variables and all of these things. And then you're dealing with people's mobility and flexibility and strength and coordination and mindset, all the stuff they're going on in their head. Like if I can just plug into a golfer's head and know the swing thoughts or things that you're thinking, even at a subconscious level, it's hugely helpful because you don't realize it, but you're thinking things are believing things that you believe to be true or correct.

They may actually be the exact opposite of what you really need to be thinking or understanding about your swing. You know, it's, again, it goes back to these, this bucket of parts. Like you're trying to take a Ford part and put it in a Lamborghini. Well, it doesn't work, right. It doesn't, it doesn't mean the Ford part's bad. It just means the Ford doesn't work in the Lamborghini and you have to understand how those things work. And so, as I was going through trying to think about how am I going to help people understand, you know, the reason that I'm going to a shallower hands position in my teaching and in my own swing is understanding the swing again in, in two simple dichotomy, one dichotomy, you either have steepening moves that work in your swing, or you have shallowing moves. And that's it at the end of the day, if that club's on plane approaching on a good path on a shallow angle attack with a club face, that's going to coordinate with that path.

Then all systems are go. And if we can do this over and over again, we're golden. The trick is that last part, doing it over and over again, right? That's the trick. And the more complicated your swing is, the harder it is to do, right? So when you have high hands, you need a lot of shallowing moves and there's lots of options. There's lots of ways that the swing has been taught. That that works in a context that is conducive to what those things are. So for instance, if somebody tells you, well, you know, you should really take this arm and really tuck this elbow in front. That's a shallowing move. I wouldn't necessarily advocate doing that, but it's not that it doesn't work. It's not that it can't work in, in the context of a swing that needs a severe shallowing move like that.

It's effective a lot of secondary axis tilt. That's a shallowing move. It's effective. If you have super high hands, you can't bring your yank your arm straight down and you can't start rotating. Even though rotation can be a shallowing move. It's when that rotation occurs, that allows the club to shallow out. But then that can be too much of a good thing. So it's understanding the swing and those two perspectives is that a steepening move versus a shallow move. And do I need steepening or shallow and moves, right? The way to get past all of this stuff is just to get to that one point where like, okay, I can commit to this, the shallower hands, because in my opinion, so far what I've seen with the data, it's easier for me to reduce those double peaks that I see in the vertical force. It's also easier to produce high amounts of vertical force at the right time in the swing.

And that gives me leverage from my legs. If I'm able to use my legs more, I have to, I get to use my arms less. Right. You know, there's all kinds of discussion about the golf. Is the golf swing more left-hand dominant? Is it more right-hand or is it more body dominant? Should your arms feel passive? Should they feel fast? Or do you feel, you know, there's, you, you could probably rattle off 20 different things about the arms and all of them could be correct in the right context. Right. But it's too complicated because there's 20 different, more things that I got to try out and see if they work in my swing and that's how golf magazines work. They throw you something out of context each month and tell you to go try it. And when that one doesn't work, they'll throw you another one, right?

Like there's golf websites out there that say, you know, they brag that they have 4,000 different tips from different, you know, 15 different instructors to help you with your game. That's, that's crazy. I don't want 4,000 different ways to brush my teeth. I just want one. What's the best way to freshmen? Why is this so hard? Like, I don't, I don't need 4,000. Right. And so the same, thing's true with the alarms. Like I've always tried to knit my S my goal has always been funneling down the swing to get it, to be like, okay, minutiae, BS, nonsense, dumb, hurt your back, hurts your arm, you know, to get down to the nitty-gritty, to like the finest simplest, most efficient, effortless way to do it. Right. And so, in my opinion, doing that with shallow arms, for the average guy, it's going to be the way to go.

I think that you see that on the PGA tour, you see the Tony, Finos the Jon Rahm's the Roy McIlroy as the tiger woods. These transitions away from these higher hands, steepening, you know, naturally steeper swings to a shallower swing with simpler, fewer moving parts. Right. I think that you will continue to see that trend. And I, and I feel like now having at least some data with, with the force plates and the vertical force, I can feel more efficient. I can see it in the data that I am doing. Things that are not causing extra trauma. These double peaks are really bad in my opinion, because the, your body's is in a really vulnerable position when it happens. Right? So your first vertical force happens when you're, you know, your lead arm is about parallel to the ground, or a little bit below that maybe pocket club's parallel to the ground, give or take a little bit, it's a little bit different for most people, but it's, you know, it's happening in thousands of a second.

So it's pretty close to that range. But then the second peak happens about right here when your hands are past the release point, but you're in the point of, you know, a lot of side bend in rotation, right? And your body's in this little kind of delicate balancing stage to where it's just decelerating the club. It's trying to safely decelerate the club, but then all of a sudden, you'll see you, depending on how they pushed up off the ground, their body will kind of land back down. The lead foot will kind of jar. And you'll see a big spike in the vertical force. And in some of these players, like even a guy like Kevin, NA I don't remember the exact numbers, but I can look it up, but it would be like 230 pounds of force going through his leg, going into his spine when it's in this vulnerable position.

Now imagine just somebody hitting you with 230 pounds of force when your legs locked out and your body's in this twisted Seidman positions doesn't seem ideal. Again, it's all anecdotal at this point, but I hope in the future, we'll have the tools and the technology to start to quantify this stuff so that we, we start dropping the injury rates dramatically, as we all can agree on and start to come to some sort of consensus based on data that says here's a, here's a simpler, better way to do it. That's safer. Right. So when it comes down to it, I, I think that most people will see that while it's polarizing, I did a little informal poll on our Facebook group, you know, Hey, would you feel like you're better with higher hands, lower hands, you know, super generic. And it was probably 50 50, right?

A lot of people feel like, you know, I'm all high hands for life. Right. Totally get it you know, and nothing wrong with it. Right. I can't say that you can't swing like that. Of course you can. Right. In my opinion, I think it's easier to maintain. It's safer. It's more effortless. It's less complex. And you can still produce world-class levels of club, head speed with a shallower hands position and getting the arms and body to move a little bit more in sync a little bit more connected. I hate using that word cause it's bastardized a lot, but, but a little bit more synchronicity in the swing is going to be where people migrate to overtime.

Yeah. I mean, it's ironic, we're talking about this right now because I've noticed without even knowing I was doing it, I noticed that when I had lower hands, it honestly, it felt like I was barely swinging it back. I had gone so far over the top for so many years that, and this is to your point when we had you on the podcast, your point of mirror and video is the most valuable tool because something that I felt was a half swing was right at parallel. Me that was low hands compact, naturally that led to better ball striking for me because there was less room for error. I wasn't going way over the top. My hands came down less steep because they were in a better position. It makes me think a little bit, Chuck, I don't know if this is a good analogy or not, but it kinda makes me think of, what's worked for me over the last few years around the greens where I think amateurs when you start out, you know, let's say you're hitting a shot over a bunker, right?

And you don't have a lot of green to work with a lot of guys or gals. Think they need to take this big swing and do this like perfect flop shot that goes straight up in the air. And I've learned over the past couple of years, I can take a little pitch motion and open the face and that ball pops right up. Right. And my, my room for error was very small. And so my, my short game is really all about the smallest room for error to give me the best chance to put it, you know, five feet or whatever, to give me just a chance. Give me a look. Right. I know that if I take a full swing, I just brought a lot of variables into play. And so I think that applies to the swing full swing

A hundred percent. I mean, well, we have so many guys who I, this little drill on a site called the nine to three drill. Right? I've done it for 15 years. It's kind of always used to be like the basis of my instruction. Like, if you can just get it right from here to here, then good things are gonna happen. And then what inevitably happen is that, you know, the nine to three is really just the club parallel to the ground to parallel to the ground. So really short swing. Right. But it's the stuff that matters the most when it's, when it's happening. And then people always say, okay, to make this a little bit like, oh wow, I'm actually starting to really hit it out of the center of the face, doing this little nine to three, but it's just, you know, they're going a hundred yards with the seminar.

How do I add it up from there? All you want to do is just add a little bit of risk. That's how I would tell them. And by doing that, that little bit of risk would make the swing longer in time. Right. Because now, instead of just not really setting your wrist on the real nine to three, by adding a little bit of risk set the momentum of your hands that you've got to here, we'll keep going up because the backswing physically is taking longer in time, dimension of time. Right. So because of that, you're up here and you swear that you stopped parallel to the ground. And everybody's like, dude, I hit the ball further with my nine to three swing. I said, well, did you put it on video? I'm like, no, but it feels like it's right here. I'm like, go put it on video because you'll see it's a full swing, but you can't have that.

If you're trying to move your arms a lot in the vertical space, you, you lose that sense of, of making a small, compact, connected, simple swing. And that's what I started out that way. And then as I started studying this, I was like, oh, I'm going to maximum. I'm going to get as much out of this as I can. And I went to higher hands and then I kind of settled in the middle and I'm like, that's a good compromise, but I still feel, I want my swing to be stupidly dumb, simple. Right. And, and the shallower, I get the, the dumber, my swing gets the simpler. It gets the more boring it gets and the more consistent it gets. And so to me, that's the end game. And I think you nailed it on the head. Like you think you're here, but you're really here. That's the best feeling in the world to me.

I mean, we were talking about this. Maybe we end on this. I mean, we were talking about it earlier this week, where watching your videos and talking with you now I've started to realize how simple the swing really is. The complicated thing is relearning or unlearning what we've been doing to the point about needing a mirror or a video screen. Like you've said, many times you give someone a lesson and they say, well, which things should I do? Right. Should I feel like I have different fields that I have, which fields should I do the same? Right? So like, that's the, I think the hardest part about golf, but hopefully through this awesome research you've done, or at least armed with information and certainty that we're on the right path. And then we can have use video use mirrors to like, as checks and balances to keep ourselves and make sure we're on the right path.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have to know what you're doing. That's the one biggest thing like this guy that was talking about on the range, it was just casting the club as hard as humanly possible, halfway down. He has no idea what he's doing, nor India's have any idea that he should or shouldn't be doing that. Right. He just doesn't know. So you have to see it. But at the same point I transfer. There's always, there's a, there's a two step process that you have to first get in front of a mirror and see what you're doing. And you recognize like, holy crap, I had no idea, right? That's step one. You got to admit that there's a problem. So now we can start to fix it. The next step is starting to work in the mirror and get these mechanics right in slow motion.

But the really important step from that is starting to add pace to that so that you start creating force. You start creating dynamics that you can't feel it slow speed. And a lot of people, they get so bogged down in perfecting the mechanics and slow motion stuff that they don't ever get to the chance of adding speed. Cause then all of a sudden it feels really different, right? So you have to push through that. And then as you start adding speed, you can't see what you're doing. That's when you gotta to go to the video camera and then you got to start eventually transferring that into feel. Right. But your feel has to be right. This is the point you can't just do field because nobody's feeling really what are the same, especially at first, right? But as you start getting to the point where you're transitioning through these phases of getting to the field phase, it's much faster because you're no longer thinking at a, you know, analytical objective level in your brain at a really high conscious level because you can't process your conscious level thinking can't process stuff, fast enough, subconscious and process, tons of stuff, wickedly fast, right?

And that's where we have to transfer all this knowledge to that takes repetition. But if you start my opinion, what I experienced for myself and with the few students that I've done, some testing with this in lessons is getting them into shallow her hands. I was able to relate things to feel much faster, whereas when I'm going high hands and you know, it's really important that you keep your elevation in sync with your body turn and you really need to see that to recognize what that looks like and what it feels like. And it just takes more time to kind of perfect that movement then being shallow, her hands. And you kind of get to that field stage a little bit faster, I think.

Yeah. A hundred percent so well, I'm excited to see this stuff come out. I'm excited testing myself.

Sure. Let's you know, we can wrap this up here and then we can talk about kinda next stages of what we're, what we're going to do next.

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