This is the thing that really aggravates me whenever I hear about a kinesiology or biomechanics specialist who is working in the field of golf – they are always looking at golfers’ swings and telling you what the swinger is doing, but they never tell you what the golfer should be doing better or what the optimal mechanical action is or should be.
Thanks to David D. for sending this to me – more bad news for the Modern Golf Swing industry, as it seems more medical researchers are catching up with the snake-oil and bad science of restricted-hip back-torquing.
Well, I had just told Mr. McJohn in a comment yesterday not to hold his breath on any major golf publications or channels discussing the results of the so-called “X-Factor” study we read about in the BBC…
And lookie here, friends – Golf Digest through GolfWorld courtesy of Joe Beall has just published a piece online doing exactly that:
Thanks to everyone who emailed/messaged about the following news piece, as I hadn’t yet seen it when I began getting your forwards! Once again, WAX Golf readers are on the ball.
While the title actually says, “X-Factor Golf Swing Linked To Back Pain,” you can’t have pain without damage, and if you’re damaging your back doing something repeatedly over a period of years – you’re going to destroy it.
If you are a Tiger Woods fan, better to skip this posting, because watching golf today had me shaking my head.
By now, I’ve probably said it a million times – how does Tiger Woods wonder why he’s always hitting the ball left when he has a “swing left” move and also takes the club back with a closed face?
If I’ve learned anything about models and motion in my near-14 years of research and analysis on the golf swing, it’s that the simpler, the better, with one caveat – retaining mechanical soundness or correctness.
Which means, the less moving parts you have in the model, the better it will function, until you remove too much and make it mechanically-unsound.
This wouldn’t be the 1st thing that has Tiger Woods double-crossing himself – the whole “swing left” move where you’re coming down on plane and then trying to yank the club left at impact.
How can anyone be surprised when the ball goes left?!?
I like to share the feedback I get on the MCS videos and the blog in general from time to time, and thanks to those of you send me this affirmation, it makes it all worthwhile to know that what I work on has an impact on others.
First, “W”who contacted me recently to share his thoughts, being a brand-new reader and who had been searching for a way to swing in his senior Continue reading
I wrote about Francesco Molinari’s great Classic Golf Swing model when he won the Quicken Loans last summer and then in the same month, the Open Championship, and while I’ve never heard anything he has to say about the swing…
I wrote a post about Cameron Champ’s prodigious length last week and made the point that he could indeed get even more distance out of his swing with better impact conditions.
However here is a point un-made that I think is even more valid: he doesn’t really need more distance, but with an improvement to his impact conditions (and shall I say, swing model), he could get the same distance with less effort.
