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

Interview with RotarySwing founder Chuck Quinton and Evan Singer of the ParTrain Podcast about the research Quinton has been doing during Covid on high hands vs. low hands.

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This whole COVID chaos has given all of us pause, you know, 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, you know, because I couldn't do anything else, you know.

And so one of the things that I was dealing with is where's Rotary Swing going?

And really, 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, Never done a DVD in my life.

Like, what are you talking about?

I've never been in front of a 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, I don't know, 2,000 videos or however many later, we're still here.

But it grew very organically.

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, 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 a city anymore, which obviously didn't know COVID was coming.

But for me, I just, you know, I saw riding on the walls with things that were going on with the economy and politics and all of that stuff.

And I said, man, I just 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 just sit back and say, you know, What does 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 biomechanics stuff and anatomy and hitting gazillions of golf balls and giving, you know, tens, you know, I think we've done almost 80,000 online golf lessons now and 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 labrum, tears or back.

And because I was injured all the time when I was taking lessons as a young playing professional, trying to make it, you know, on the tour and playing the mini tour events and I was just hurt all the time.

And I would go from one instructor to the next.

I would, you know, Spend a year with this guy and then I would get worse and 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 ed 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 thinking, stepping back even a step further, like, you know, now 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, the next 20 years of my life, what am I really trying to do with with golf instruction, with my business, with my own swing and my mechanics and all of those things.

And it came down to something you and I had started to discuss is 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 one percent short game, right?

If I actually cared about my score, it would be 90 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, Man, that three-foot putt I made to save Parrish today was huge.

That doesn't stick out of my mind.

It's the 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.

And it always has been.

So this year, when I started playing, I really was.

Thinking through all these things in my head about what do I really want to do?

You know, what am I going to do to take Rotary Swing to the the next 20 years?

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, 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, 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 this.

I haven'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.

I've just been so busy with moving back here, starting my academy teaching, you know, the teaching business stuff has been keeping me extremely busy.

And 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 I, you know, within establishing my handicap in the first month or whatever, I was the plus 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 cement on what I've done.

Yeah, I can take two years off.

Yeah, 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 for me to do that, it was awesome.

It was to 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.

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 and my leg and my hand.

I have 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 I was doing all these testing was in the mid to low 120s.

Like on the course, I don't know if you're like this.

I tend to swing harder on the course than 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 121, 122 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 length.

I'm going to, I automatically step it up without thinking about it.

And then I swing like 125 on the course.

So at 44 years old and having scoliosis and nerve damage and broken bones and all this stuff, all these surgeries, That's a pretty good benchmark for being able to even be being able to play at 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 great.

But it's still, there's always been this one nagging thought.

I don't know if you have anything like this, but in the back of my head, there's very few dates in life 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 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, been married since 01.

So, you know, almost 20 years, been married the same thing, you know, like my life is 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 Briar.

We're just talking about our labradoodle.

I remember his birthday, I remember my wife's birthday, I remember my birthday.

Uh, you know, and I remember certain events and experiences.

But from Out of all of these important dates and things in my life, I still have one day on the golf course.

Actually, it wasn't even on the golf course.

It was on the driving range that I still remember.

And it's like from 20 years ago.

And it was a day, it was my first time ever going to the PGA merchandise show.

And I did an Orange County National and they have all of the equipment, guys are on the driving range.

And I'm a 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.

That all just kind of clicked and 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 it just is one of those things where I couldn't miss.

Like every shot was just pure out of the center of the face.

And it felt like I was swinging at 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 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, yeah, I keep doing this and I'm like, I'm gonna grab a longer club, so I grab like a.

Like, a Mizuno, you know, forged blade, little, tiny two iron out of their bucket of of clubs.

And I just start roasting this thing and I'm like, Oh, 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, you know, 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, I've shot 64 twice, shot tons of rounds in the 60s, but my low score is 64.

I can barely remember the course that I did them at.

One was in a tournament and one was a fun day.

But I remember that day, that ball striking day, as clear as day.

And it's two decades ago.

So as I was reflecting this year and thinking about 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 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 a swing that allows me to take.

A year or two off and then come back and like, Yep, I'm still shooting around par.

That 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.

I wouldn't care because I'm in the longevity stage.

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, but I don't really.

I'm not competing.

A long drive association, you know, like, I'm never going to swing it, you know, 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, I love it.

I love being the longest guy in my group.

I always am.

And I love walking past my buddy's ball and being 50 yards behind me.

I'm sorry, but I do.

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 my students who I've been able to help.

Be able 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.

And it started with.

My arm 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.

They have the greatest range of motion.

You can create all these different angles by doing tiny little intricate things with your hands.

And it's what kills golf for most golfers.

They don't know how to coordinate their arm swing 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 struggled in making changes in your swing and trying to understand all this stuff.

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 face, 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?

First of all, you got to figure out what you're looking for.

If you're wanting to be the longest driver in the world, then you have to do certain things with your arms to create tons of speed.

you only need to hit one ball out of six in 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.

And this is, again, the challenge, The thing that I've kind of always fought in the golf industry is that there's considered no wrong or right way of doing things, right?

You look at, like, take the golfing machine, for example.

I read that book a long time ago.

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 variations in the golf swing.

And now it's just up to you to figure out how to put them together.

I'm like, well, wait a second.

There are thousands of combinations here.

And so I looked at that book as 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 a 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.

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 about how can I effortlessly hit the majority of my shots.

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.

Imagine swinging a golf club in zero gravity, right?

It doesn't work.

If you're just suspended from there, you have to 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 Love III 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 in years past, right?

And the golf swing has morphed throughout the years in lots of different ways.

Back in the 70s, we had big lateral drive, big high hands.

That lateral drive helped shallow out those high hands and so on.

And you had the Hogan era before that and then Norman after that and everything in between.

So I said, OK, let's take it to the extremes 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 in my own swing.

So I said, OK, 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 lab, my studio, which is where I've got 300 frames per second cameras, launch monitor, force play, all of that stuff.

And I would spend eight, 10 hours a day hitting balls on the plate.

and measuring and looking at it, reviewing it and doing this all day.

It was a bit obsessive when it comes to this stuff.

So this was like seven months full-time hammering this stuff out.

Sounds awesome to me.

What's that?

Sounds awesome to me.

Well, it is and it isn't.

And we'll get to that because 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.

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, because that's subjective to a degree, looking at it on video.

But when I see what the ground is experiencing and what the force is in, this thing is super sensitive.

When I see that, I know what kind of things are really happening, 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 70s, low 70s.

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 without thinking about it come out of your mouth?

What would they be?

Slice, big miss.

Okay.

So you got over the top sliced, right?

Yeah.

What else?

Inconsistent strikes.

So chunks, skulls.

Or contact.

Yep.

And lack of distance.

There you go, 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, it'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 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 wrong parts, the wrong sequence.

Those three things plague golf, right?

If you had a pandemic- The funny thing real quick, Chuck, is 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 in my friends in their low to mid thirties, a lot where these are like fit.

Strong guys, and some of them just because of the flaws in their technique and their arms.

They can't hit it, they can't hit a driver more than 230.

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 long.

I guess I'm not a long hitter, right?

But in actuality, it's so.

These simple things you're talking about that could make them drive it to 90 easily.

110.

It's completely.

I'm he's He's going to be in his fifties and still doing the same thing.

She's going to 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 just searching for bandaid fixes, I watched a guy.

Yes.

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.

Just send it to me.

I could have used it for our Instagram.

So here I am.

You know, if I hit balls, typically people, you know, they'll stop and they'll watch and stare at me or whatever.

Because if I'm out, I was at a public course.

And so, you know, the average guy, they stink, 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?

And so they kind of pay attention.

And so I'm hitting balls next to this guy.

And he's really, I overheard his conversation because 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 to play golf because that's his swing lube, 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 he 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 sand wedges 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.

I'm like, God, I want to help this guy.

This is not my place.

I'm not going to just go and step over there and give him a lesson or anything.

God, I feel so bad for this guy.

So many guys are exactly that.

He's going to powder puff it 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 striking round and go out and shoot 76.

Then a crappy ball striking round where I 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 gravitated to me.

They're obviously more analytical and really like to understand things there.

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 like all the details of the swings, you know, and has a PhD in physics.

I'm like, those are the people that kind of are attracted to what we do.

Cause 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.

to be slicing it.

You know, you can't override these movement patterns.

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 them right on the head.

And I looked at the, 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 steepen it, right?

If you have high hands, and then you push from the top to steepen the shaft even more, you're completely screwed.

It's done, right?

There are things that you have steepening moves.

And most golfers instinctually, because they're right-hand dominant, right-sided dominant, because they're right-handed, this side of the body, 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 because 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 to, you know, kind of a throwing motion to get the club to shallow out and things like that.

It's effective for some, it works.

I, you know, I had a video on the side I did 15 years ago called the throw the ball drill.

And I thought that's the panacea.

If I can just get everybody to understand, you know, everybody's throwing, they know how to throw, right?

No, they don't.

People do not know how to throw, especially people not from the United States.

We have a lot of members from Europe and things like that that come over.

I'm like, oh, you know, you throw to baseball when you're a kid, right?

And they're 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.

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.

All right, just go to the top.

And I want you just to take this ball.

Don't think about it.

And I want you 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 them throw it across the range.

I 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 it.

That's why, again, you can't rely on these feel 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 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 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.

Remember, and again, I'm doing this as 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 lies 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.

Now, why would you think that would be?

Was it just your angle or your compression?

Compression, basically.

It's more solid contact.

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 could 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%, and now mind you, Rory McIlroy swings with really low hands, But I can't assume that the average guy is going to have the athleticism and body speed and strength that 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.

His swing speed has gone down, right?

He's 117 now.

Still good, plenty of club head speed, right?

But he's not swinging at 124 anymore.

So I went from 122 average to 119.

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'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.

In your great shots, you want to be really good.

The higher hands, the higher variability is the way I looked at it.

The higher your hands, I have higher potential club head speed, but I have higher complexity in the swing.

And so I have a higher chance of mishitting it.

And mishitting it sucks.

I don't want to mishit it.

I'll accept a certain level of humanism and lack of perfectionism because I'm an imperfect being.

But I want to get as many as I can on that effortless, high up on that effortless scale.

For me personally, I 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 speed.

Now, I 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 that you're nowhere near.

Realizing where you should be anyway.

So I, 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 two, 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 110 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 110.

And I've always believed that.

And 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, you know, he's a good handicap.

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.

And he's swinging like 102.

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 110.

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.

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 at least over 110, it's 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 improve it, right?

I love what Bryson DeChambeau is doing, but that's not real for the average guy.

Right.

It's not, it's not even a point to it.

It's fun.

I love watching.

I totally support everything he's doing because 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 at three 50, but I could also miss it 50 yards, right.

Or 30 yards left too.

So, 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 170, 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 perfecter, right?

There's no such thing.

The word doesn't exist because there's no point.

You hit it perfect.

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 because you're getting better contact.

You're hitting the better part of the face.

Your angle of attack shallows out.

That's a really big one for me too.

So we mentioned one of the three things was 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 super shallow.

You're not taking a dip at all because 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 start coming in really steep.

And then now you've got to time this steep angle of attack with a.

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 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 as, 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 of 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, it was an interview with Gabrielle Reese.

She used to do the show on Fuel TV.

You remember Fuel TV before it got bought?

It was kind of like a- Actually, yeah, I think I do.

They did like a lot of surfing, snowboarding, adventure sports stuff.

But they had this show on there where Gabrielle Reese would go and interview different people in different sports.

And she interviewed Butch Harmon once.

And she talked to Butch about how he teaches, because obviously Butch is famous for teaching tons of tour pros.

And she asked him, well, do you teach a tour pro differently than you do an average amateur golfer?

He's like, oh, yeah, completely.

You know, the Tour pro, he's 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 feels, subjective stuff.

You just got to get them out there so they can bat the ball around kind of thing.

And I'm super paraphrasing, there's been a long time since I've 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, with the average amateur, they're, they're, they're still going to, their wife is still going to 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 shit on the wall and see what sticks.

That to me is horrible.

It just, I was, I was appalled when I heard it and I'm sure he probably didn't mean it.

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, that'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 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's the one that you can maintain for the rest of your life.

Because it's supposed to be a game for a lifetime, right?

I mean, it really is that it's 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 be like, This is the greatest thing ever.

Because they're so frustrated, because they can't get to that point where they can consistently hit the ball because they can't get the right information, right?

I'm sure there's tons of instructors out there that can help them by giving them these random band-aid fixes to glue it all together.

But one, it takes maintenance.

I mean, how many times you've gone to the course and been like, I don't know how I'm going to 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 got to get there early and just, I got to find something that's going to work, right?

That feeling of desperation is one that has to be erased.

I haven't felt like that in years.

Like I go to the course and I know I'm going to hit the ball well.

Is, you know, because I don't practice that much, you know?

Making all these swing changes this year?

Is it going to be like?

I'm going to just nut it?

Every single shot, every no, 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.

It reminded me of, like, gosh, I gotta play in, like, 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, yeah, Most people never get to the point where they groove it because it's just they don't know.

It's too complicated.

It's too confusing.

There's too many options.

There's too many variables.

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 want to make the wrong one.

I don't know if that's the right thing and so on.

I've always liked, you know, with rotary swing with what I've done, I'm like, here's the ideal way biomechanically 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 joint alignment, you're going to tear your labrum eventually.

And you're going to get sciatica and you're going to have low back pain.

You're going to herniate a disc.

That stuff I can say definitively, but I wanted to be able to do the same thing with the arms and be like, here's the ideal way, but not just about speed production, you know, and doing it safely.

It's about efficiency.

You know, I want a beautiful effortless swing, Not a swing that takes a lot of work.

And you look at these guys today, like, you know, like Jason Day, right?

He's literally talking about retiring at 40 years old because of back issues.

How many guys on the PGA Tour 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, so I would take.

Like, Kevin Na back injury.

I didn't know if Kevin had back injuries.

I don't follow the tour closely, right?

I'm like, I'm just going to take some random guy.

And the reason I did him specifically is I have his swing catalyst data.

I have his data 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, what I'm calling them in the vertical force.

And I see it in Justin Rose's swing.

I've seen it in a lot of different players' swings.

And then I started looking at their data and seeing, and then I was like, okay, I'm going to see if he's ever been injured.

Sure enough, Kevin Knox had serious issues with his back for a long, long time.

And I can watch, he hangs back and then pushes up and then has this double spike in the ground force.

I'm like, man, this is really important.

We can finally have the tools and the technology to quantify and measure.

Stuff that leads to injury.

Now, you can't do this definitively yet, I don't think, you know.

I spent a ton of time 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 happened too late in the swing, and I would notice that my rotational torque, 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 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 will 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 kind of how it started.

When I got the swing catalyst installed at 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 long term, right?

And so there were a couple things that I found in how that I released the club, how I swung the club, how I shallowed the club.

Like Kevin Na is a great example of this, right?

So Kevin Na is a very short hitter relatively.

And he hits kind of like this weak.

pull slappy cut, but I mean, he hits a 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 guys.

Right.

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 move down, even with like a short iron, is to drop his head back.

Which creates this side bin, and then he, and then he creates a lot of vertical force, and then he double peaks, right?

I've tried it, 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, I now have this kind of this thesis statement of where I want to go with rotary swing over the next 20 years.

And 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?

You know, if 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 vision of a perfect day on the golf course is 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?

I think that's really what's inspired so many people when he was in his prime is just how effortless he made it look, right?

And he got on the course and then he'd swing out of his shoes and they'd look a little different, right?

But there is a reason that so many people that became a thing like Tiger Woods on the range, Tiger Woods on the course, two 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 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 the stuff that I've studied so far.

And as I've been going through and starting to write down my observations, and again, I made it as objective as I can, but at the same point, I'm not sitting out here writing a dissertation paper because nobody's going to read it.

Right.

I need this 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 and 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 become the core, the hub?

Which rotary swing revolves around, you know, like now we we've taken, and 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 feel 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?

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 rotary swing.

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, oh, 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.

And a lot of people think that, you know, I used to love reading a lot of books on the mental game because when I was younger and trying to make it as a pro, I read I really struggle with the mental game.

I was.

unbelievable on the range.

I 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?

I made me very uncomfortable.

I just didn't know how to deal with it.

So I started reading like Bob Britello's books and all of these things.

And I actually did really spend a lot of time studying Zen 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.

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 bullshit.

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, you don't have to know the swing to the level that I do.

I mean, 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'm obsessed with it.

So I really understand the mechanics, but 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.

Next thing you know, 20 years have passed and you're still the exact same golfer that you were 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 gear head.

You can build a really complex engine that can generate tons of power, but it grenades half the time.

Well, it's not very productive, right?

I don't want an engine that produces a thousand horsepower, but grenades.

On lap six, I need to finish the race.

So golf swings are are like really complex engines.

I mean, there's thousands of potential moving parts and variables and all of these things.

And and then you're dealing with people's mobility and flexibility and strength and coordination, and and mindset, all the stuff that's 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, you don't realize it, but you're thinking things or 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 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, it'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 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 arms 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 in those two perspectives.

Is that a steepening move versus a shallowing move?

And do I need steepening or shallowing 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 get to use my arms less.

There's all kinds of discussion about is the golf swing more left-hand dominant?

Is it more right-hand dominant?

Is it more body dominant?

Should your arms feel passive?

Should they feel fast?

You could probably rattle off 20 different things about the arms, and all of them could be correct in the right context.

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 brush my teeth?

Why is it so hard?

Like, I don't, I don't need 4 000, right?

And so.

The same thing is true with the arms.

Like I've always tried to knit my, my goal has always been funneling down the swing to get it to be like, okay, minutiae BS, nonsense, dumb, hurt your back, hurt 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 shallower 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 Finau's, the John Rahm's, the Rory McIlroy's, 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 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 your body is in a really vulnerable position when it happens, right?

So, your first vertical force happens when your lead arm is about parallel to the ground or a little bit below that, maybe pocket club parallel to the ground, give or take a little bit.

It's a little bit different for most people, but it's happening.

Thousandths 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 the, you know, a lot of side bend and 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 some of these players, like even a guy like Kevin.

Nah, 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 leg's locked out and your body's in this twisted side bend position.

Doesn't seem ideal.

Again, it's all anecdotal at this point, but I hope in the future we'll have the tools, The technology to start to quantify the stuff so that 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 simpler, better way to do it that's safer, right?

When it comes down to it, I think that most people will see that while it's polarizing, like 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 because it's bastardized a lot, but a little bit more synchronicity in the swing is going to be, where people migrate to over time.

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, Yeah, 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 kind of makes me think of what's worked for me over the last few years.

Around the greens, where I think amateurs.

Uh, 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 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 100.

I mean, well, we have so many guys who I.

This little drill on the 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 going to happen.

And then what inevitably happened is that, you know, the nine to three is really just the club parallel to the ground to parallel to the ground.

It's a really short swing, right?

But it's the stuff that matters the most when it's happening.

And then people, I would 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 swing, but it's just, you know, they're going 100 yards with a seven iron.

How do I add it up?

From there, all you want to do is just add a little bit of wrist cock.

That's how I would tell them.

And by doing that, that little bit of wrist cock 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 wrist set.

The momentum of your hands that you got to here will 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 lose that sense 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 maximize.

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.

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, 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 thing should I do?

Right.

Should I feel like I have different fields that I have, which fields should I do?

Right.

So like, that's the, I think the hardest part about golf, but.

hopefully through this awesome research you've done, we're 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 I was talking about on the range, he was just.

Casting the club as hard as humanly possible halfway down.

He has no idea that he's doing that, nor does he 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 transferring, there's always.

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 to work in the mirror and get these mechanics right in slow motion.

But the 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 at 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.

Because 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 got 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 feel because nobody's feeling really 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 feel phase.

It's much faster because you're no longer thinking at a, you know, analytical objective level in your brain at a, you know, really high conscious level.

Cause you can't process your conscious level thinking can't process stuff fast enough.

Subconscious can 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 shallower hands.

I was able to relate things to feel much faster.

Whereas when I'm going high hands, 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 than being shallower hands, and you kind of get to that feel stage a little bit faster, I think.

Yeah, 100%.

So, well, I'm excited to see this stuff come out.

I'm excited.

Yeah.

Well, for sure.

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