10/4/08 Robert Grober - The Physics of Golf

today we are fortunate to have Professor Bob Groberg who's going to talk about what he calls a collision of two obsessions his obsession for physics because he's a fantastic professor of applied physics here at Yale he's also aficionado so tell us about this morning do I need this because it's my boys good luck hey Chris yeah can we turn this down with it because right it's going to be definitely right all right good morning and and welcome here as thank you for inviting me so I'm going to tell you today about my two obsessions and they are physics and golf and I just want to give you a little background so when I was a kid I grew up with the goal of being a golf professional and I've played a lot of golf and then I even went to college with the goal of being a golfer that's what I always wanted to do and and when I got to college I was fortunate enough to go to a place where they actually made me study and and I figured out that actually I really really also loved physics and so I gave up my notion of being a golfer and then went and did physics and physics is way fun we build all sorts of crazy experiments and sometimes even blow things up but you know you never lose the love of what you do when you're a kid and in my case it was golf and so I've always done in physics and golf and part of that is building little experiments that go in golf clubs so I've been doing this for a long long first off let me ask so uh I want to understand who we have here so tell me how many kids are in elementary school what grade fourth grade third grade sit okay so how many men in middle school let me see middle school good and this is sixth seventh and eighth grade right right and then how about high school all right okay so who here can tell me what physics is anybody know anybody wicked yes come on Marcus go ahead let me hear what's that study of energy good that's really good because once that's really good let's hear another idea whoa did everybody hear that the science of moving objects that is great man I'm going to we got to get him a t-shirt that was great go ahead get it up did you ever hand up you're going to say the science moving off okay good so physics is a lot of things but today let's just talk about physics in terms of the science of moving objects because in the end that's what a golf ball is at least when you hit it and and everything the golf club does before you hit it hopefully it's a moving object and so we're today we're going to talk about the science and what I love that the science of moving objects so in this golf club is a little experiment and I just want to show you there's a little experiment in here and you know I'm a physicist so my whole my whole view of the world is that we should really take data and understand really how things are moving and it turns out you can get sensors to measure how things are moving all over the place so it turns out I took a sensor that's used in your car so everybody who has a car how many people have airbags in their car good so it turns out your airbag has a little thing called an accelerometer that's a fancy fancy name but can anyone tell me what it's so it's something that measures acceleration and does anybody know a simple way to describe acceleration what's acceleration that is really great the increase or decrease of the speed of a moving object so if something is speeding up it'll give you a big measurement and if something is slowing down it'll give you another kind of measurement and what will it give you of something just moving at the same speed if it's not changing speed just moving at the constant speed zero what grade are you in seven K you know this is really great mind talk is usually focused on I give this talk to golfers and you know adult golfers but I may have to pick the level up for this group yeah okay so there are accelerometers on here and accelerometers are great because they tell you when things are speeding up and when things are slowing down and in particular I have two accelerometers on here I have one accelerometer all the way down at the end and I have one accelerometer all the way up at the top and I'll show you why that is and so there's a nice little experiment people up in the front can seen you come down later and look there's a little circuit board that we made and has a little microprocessor on it we programmed that to communicate with the sensors and then it has a little wireless transmitter on it just like the Bluetooth that you use for wireless for your phone it's a very similar thing and and so it's a little experiment built into a golf club so physics and golf so now let me show you how this experiment works and now this is always the very exciting point any talk so you know you put these systems together and then you push the button and and you hope that the whole thing works whoa it's not all on the screen is it yeah but that didn't do it I lost the bottom part what's that okay so I'm going to have to this is the beautiful thing here properties that bear with me here we're going to get this to work you know why because we're scientists ah okay alrighty so what you see on the left is what we call a little chart recorder and you can see that in fact I can turn it off and I can turn it on so it really is working if anybody says they're doing an experiment live ask them to turn it off see if it's really working okay and you can see that in fact this is a measurement that measures something about my golf swing and in particular if I'm swinging slowly you have a small thing and as I swing faster it's bigger and bigger and I can make it really really big and so let me just increase the gain a little so we can see all of it there we go alrighty so we are so it's little measurement now it's a it's a fancy kind of measurement because first off it's measuring acceleration so let's see we have a couple people in high school might have taken high school physics so first off note that it doesn't measure that and note that it doesn't measure this alright everybody see that what it does measure is this right so the way these sensors are put up it in here I measure what kind of motion so this is called rotational motion the measure motion in a circle I don't measure motion in a straight line and the reason is because in the golf swing what is the golf swing mostly about mostly about motion in a circle so these sensors are arranged in a particular configuration that allows you just to measure circular motion does anybody know what kind of acceleration that is does anybody remember that term and Euler acceleration how about the word centripetal people so that's called centripetal sometimes people call it centrifugal but we prefer to call it centripetal good so it's measuring centripetal acceleration now you might say well how is that going to be useful to a golfer right because you know if I swing a golf club I can't really look and see what's going on there so we had to figure out a way take this data and make useful to the golfer so who can guess what we did I recorded it and mate okay good so maybe I recorded it could build a head set display into my glasses I gave it a sound so you know when you're hitting golf balls your eyes are preoccupied because you're looking at the ball and taste well it's kind of hard to change the taste and you could have like electrodes electrodes and do some electroshock therapy but we didn't do that instead what I did was the following turn it into something that you can hear because when you're hitting golf balls for the most part your ears are not being used and the ears are really really good at hearing things in picking out patterns so in order to get the data to the golfer we turn it into audio and in particular it's low pitched and soft when you move slowly the faster it moves higher the pitch and the louder the sound right so now you have a way of getting data immediately from the golf club to the golfer and you don't even really have to tell the golfer that it's centripetal acceleration or that there's two accelerometers and a microprocessor and a wireless transmitter you can just tell them what you're hearing is the motion of your golf club and even golfers can understand that everybody good with that any questions about that okay all right so it okay so so I want to explain so now you can ask well how is this useful to golfers and so let me just give you a couple of examples so the first example is that the golf swing it turns out the golf swing of really great golfers and I'll tell you about that in a second golf swing a really great golfers is rhythmic that there's a particular rhythm to the golf swing and it's not so different than the rhythm of the pendulum so this is a pendulum and it turns out the rhythm of the golf swing is pretty much the rhythm of the pendulum you'll hear the similarity there and rhythm in tempo it turns out is very important in the golf swing for reasons of having to do with what makes you consistent and we're going to talk about that in great detail later but I just want to motivate it so with beginning golfers you get tempo which is not rhythmic so that's a rhythmic tempo right so here would be a typical beginning golfer okay not very rhythmic don't understand that it has to be rhythmic but all good golfers swing with a rhythm with a really good rhythm here would be another one so why don't I hit the golf ball far golf ball and go very far right you want to hit the golf ball far if the swing of the hive faster pace right so being able to hear the difference in speed is a big thing being able to hear that there's a real rhythm in the golf swing and what by the end of this talk hopefully you'll all understand why you really want to real rhythm in the golf swing there's another really fun thing that you can hear you can hear when the club gets to its maximum speed right you hear that maximum speed down here right down at the bottom you hear the highest pitch down by the bottom it turns out in many many golfers especially the poorer golfers you'll hear this you hear that was way back here and you hear that so they get their maximum speed way before the golf ball and then even in the very best of golfers sometimes you hear this can you hear it out here you hear the the maximum speed beyond the ball now where where would you like to have the maximum speed who can tell me right at the ball but it turns out almost never ever do people get their maximum speed right at the ball so just something as simple as that is really useful to listen to everybody good with that so far any questions Iran fun yet get enough food so you know so as an inventor you know you spend lots and lots of years of doing all this crazy stuff so I've been putting sensors in golf clubs since 1993 how many of you were not yet born yet in 1993 right right so I've been doing this for a long long time and it all seems kind of crazy but you know you just keep doing it because that's really what science is about you just do what you think is really interesting and hopefully it turns out I'll have application and this summer we were very very lucky in that some some of our so we started make taking it from something like this it's something which is a real product and we've had people all around the really great golf pros use this recently so I just want to give you one example our best example you know in science we always give our best example so does anybody recognize this person Vijay Singh right so of the many people who've been using our stuff the person who's used it the most as a scout Vijay Singh and actually before the 17 months prior to starting to use our stuff he hadn't won a golf tournament and he started using our equipment and about a month later he won three out of five tournaments in a row and he ended up now he's number one on the money list and he's and he just won the FedEx Cup and he has widely claimed that in fact this was due in part to our stuff and I want you to read the quote because the quote is going to be what we're going to talk about for the rest of this talk we're going to explain why it is that this is all the case so I think it's helped me tremendously so I've always had good rhythm but I never had consistent rhythm that making my swing a lot more that it's making my swing a lot more consistent not just with my driver the whole game it's one rhythm for the whole game instead of having quicker rhythm for different shots so remember that it's the same rhythm for the whole game so we're going to talk about why that is and what kind of experiment that we did to understand why it's one rhythm whole game and and then the next line is it's making me more consistent and so we're going to talk about why why what it is about the golf swing and the golf swing being rhythmic that makes you more consistent there's two things we're going to talk about today why it's one rhythm for the whole game and why swinging with that rhythm makes you more consistent okay alrighty so now comes the science part good with it not going to do any more demos any questions people are going on Science Park anybody sleeping yet if they're no yeah yeah so the USGA will not let you use any external means to hit a golf ball if you're playing in a tournament so they use these mostly on the practice range and sometimes if you are if you're trying to take what you're learning to the practice range to the golf course then and in a practice round I'd be you can take them on the golf course during a practice round but if you're playing in a tournament you can't use any external means though you can take data if you don't use it immediately I mean people take video that's data okay so I want you to get used to what this golf swing looked like so there's a back swing here's the back so here's the data that we were looking at before here's the back swing the extend triple acceleration in the backswing and then you get to the top of the backswing and then you come down into the ball and then you follow through right so you have a back swing top of the backswing down into the ball after swing foibles gotta look cool all right so now these are 20 swings of my nephew that's what when this was taken a Jeff with 16 years old and he played on his high school golf team and he didn't know I was taking data at the time but I was and what you'll notice is that every one of his golf swings is a little bit different so right we trigger from here everything is the same at this point that's how we line everything up but if you go into the backswing or if you go into the downswing everything every single swing becomes a little bit different and in particular he has two different kinds of back swings it's got a long back and he's got this short backswing when he thinks he's hitting it hard okay this is what you see for seven swings of a tour pro this is Pat McGowan who I used to watch when I was growing up he was the 1978 PGA Tour rookie of the year and if you look at these seven swings what do you notice they are very nearly the same in fact if you know the error bars associated with these things are measured in terms of tens of ten ten milliseconds so a hundredth of a second that means each swing is pretty much the same to within a hundredth of a second I mean that's pretty incredible but it's typical of what you see of golf pros that is that swing to swing to swing if they're very good golf pros it's always exactly the same and Pat's swing was kind of interesting this is the back swing this is the down swing anybody want to make a guess at what that is so his golf swing is always like this every single time it gives it that little thing what's that Hey so we can yep there that's impact so at impact you get a little shock and the sensors are not fast enough to measure the full dynamic of the shock so just look like random spikes the impact in this case happens here and then the next data point used to see a couple of shocks through the system then it follows there yep okay so let's take some so let's take some data let's try to really understand how precise this guys swing is and in particular we're going to look at all sorts of different swings and we're going to measure the length of the backswing so how many seconds did it take for the backswing and we're going to measure how many seconds it took for the downswing and we're going to do this for all sorts of people and we're going to collect this in this so this is a graph how many people know about graphs good good okay so this is the amount of time for the backswing and this is the amount of time for the downswing and each one of these dots is a different person so this person here took just over a second for the downswing a backswing and just so just about two hundred fifty a quarter of a second for the downswing so we plug back swing versus downswing for lots and lots of different people and we divide them into different groups Tour Pros and really good golfers and just average golfers and what you find if you just look at this group of Tour Pros so this is a whole bunch of different Tour Pros they all pretty much swing exactly alike that is the total amount of time for the backswing in the total amount of time for the downswing is pretty much the same for all of them pretty incredible the other thing you note here if you look at these others let's see how their error bars they're our error bars here so each dot represents one person and each dot represents maybe like 20 swings or thirty swings for one person because as a scientist you don't just take one data point you take lots of data points and then you can take averages you can say what's the average backswing and how much does it vary and the error bars or how much they vary what do you notice about the error bars for these people very very very small error bars which means they're very consistent every swing from swing to swing the swing is almost exactly the same and if you and the other thing so very small error bars all pretty much exactly the same timing or rhythm of their swing but if you look at these are now golf professionals who don't play for a living they give lessons and they run golf courses and they used to long ago maybe play for a living and what you see first off is that the error bars get bigger for these people right from swing to swing they're not as consistent and the other thing you'll see is that from swing to swing they're slower so this group here would be right about there so as they start to get slower what you see is the error bars start to get bigger nobody's faster than the Tour Pros those guys swing as fast as anybody even though they appear to be swinging slowly and then here's the rest of us I used to be much better now we can talk about asking me that at the end of the lecture I can show you how I've improved so I had the date on that but you see forever so the Tour Pros you hear everybody else is slower and much more inconsistent and now you can ask the question why is it that these people are so consistent what is it about the physics of how of the science of how they move this object what is it that makes them so consistent and there are a whole bunch of things that we'd like to explain why are they so consistent why is it that they all swing roughly with the same tempo what I haven't told you yet is whether those data were taken for a 5-iron or a driver or a 9-iron or different shot in the answer is it doesn't matter it's all pretty much the same whether it's a 5-iron or a driver whether it's a three-quarter shot or a full shot it's all pretty much the same and so you can ask what's the science of that there are two different groups very good and I don't know why that is I don't know if that's just because I didn't take data on enough people or if there really are two different groups good good notice good observation okay so so now who can tell me something which is really ready so we want to do this from a science perspective can we make a model of the golf swing which really has all of this science built into it so who can tell me something that's real that science thing or a physical thing that's really consistent has exact tempo or it keeps time the same way every single day anybody go ahead a clock exactly right so you can ask the question you can maybe rephrase this and to say you know these golf pros kind of behave like clocks in the sense that they always have the same tempo so you can ask the question well what's the physics of a clock what's exactly the physics of a clock so it turns out the physics of a clock is something that we call we have a big fancy name for it in science we call it the harmonic oscillator and a harmonic oscillator another way of so that's a big fancy word and we use big fancy words as a means of job security in this field but really it just means a mass in a spring and and and a mass so you know if you have like a slinky with a mass attached to it you'll know that this you the slinky you'll bounce back and forth exactly and it'll go back and forth sort of always at the same tempo now a spring is something as it is a just an image for something that always pulls you back to the origin so you can start at the origin and go away and pull and the spring just always pulls you back so it turns out the model of the harmonic oscillator or the mass and a spring is a pretty good model for almost anything that once you pull it away from the origin wants to come back so for instance the pendulum so what pulls the pendulum back to the origin gravity exactly man a kid gets two t-shirts so gravity pulls the pendulum back to the origin so you can model this is just a mass in a sprint the mass is the mass of the club and the spring is gravity pulling it back now one of the properties that you notice about this is that this has a peer up tempo that it wants to go at and the tempo is defined by it by its mass and by how hard gravity pulls back and it really it's its length but we won't go there but it turns out it has a particular frequency that it wants to go at we call this the resonant frequency this is what driving it at this frequency is what we call resonance now I can drive this at a different frequency I can go much much much much slower but you notice I have to grab on with my hand to do this it takes a lot more energy to drive it really slowly and you'll notice that it isn't as regular as it if I just drive it at resonance because when it goes at resonance it just goes at the frequency that it wants to go at and I can do this today and I can do this an hour from now and I can do this next week and I can do this when I'm in a good mood and I can do this when I'm in a bad mood and when I'm tired and went on and when I have a lot of rest and it will always go back and forth at this pace because that's what it is to drive it at resonance I can always drive it above resonance and that looks horrible right when you drive it at resonance it actually looks pretty smooth and it doesn't really look like I'm working hard and in fact the way you find resonance is simply figure out where you go back and forth putting in the least amount of energy that's so I can do this with two fingers but if I try to move slower than that I can't do that without holding on with my whole hand takes a lot more energy to do this takes very little energy to drive something in resonance so resonance is really neat in that you don't have to use a lot of energy to drive things at resonance and and it'll always be very very very consistent do you have a question pretty good really good so alright so the harmonic oscillator now it turns out we tell our students in introductory physics you can model almost the entire world using the harmonic oscillator in fact you can spend your whole life as an engineer or scientist and know no other model than the harmonic oscillator in fact I would argue it's one of the few models that we really know how to solve exactly and so it's a wonderful model for the golf swing you can ask yourself the question are golfers clocks in the sense that they move the golf club like a harmonic oscillator like a mass on a spring okay so what would be that what would be the model of how a golfer swings a golf club so you can imagine this is the golfer and this mass here includes not just the club but also the strength of the books the strength of the arm the arm the mass of the arms and the torso and the whole thing and the spring is a combination of gravity and the muscles pulling back and you can imagine that as you wind up the golf swing that it's like compressing a spring and you push back with a force and then when you come down the other way you turn the force around and push the other way right so that's my model for the golf swing you push back initially and then you push down now does anybody see that there's what we call an asymmetry here if you look at the first time you're pushing are you compressing the spring or expanding the spring so to begin with you're pushing against the spring and then afterwards you're pushing with the spring right and so let me do that again so initially you push against the spring you compress it and then you expand it you push with the spring and so that's very different thing in one case you're compressing another expanding and so it turns out you would expect that there's a difference in the amount of time to go back and the amount of time to come right if one case you're compressing the spring in the other case you're going with the spring there'll be a difference in time and it turns out we can calc I'm not going to show this turns out we can calculate that and it turns out that if you push back with exactly the same force that you push down that the back swing will be twice as long as the downswing and it turns out that if you push back with half the force that you pull down and pull down twice as hard as what you pull back the ratio of backswing to downswing will be about three to one and it turns out three to one is the ratio that we see for good golfers that in those graphs that I showed you earlier the amount of time to go back is about three-quarters of a second and the amount of time to come down is about 1/4 of a second and there's a ratio of three to one and it turns out the harmonic oscillator model says that if you pull down twice as hard as what you push back you'll get this the ratio of three to one so it actually looks like it might be a pretty good model so we have reason to believe that it's useful but we had to go measure that oh so I started talking to people about this model for golfers and Springs and a lot of golfers said that was crazy in fact I had one golfer look at me and say a really really great teaching pro looked at me and said look no spring right he was right I mean that's pretty distressing I got this big model for how we're a mass and a spring and everything goes back and it goes back and says look no spring pretty hard to argue with that right so I went and started talking to lots of people about this and in fact some professors here and here's the thing we're how many people here are athletes okay so here's here's the lesson I want you to take from this lesson from this lecture is that the thing that make that's different about elite athletes the best athletes from everybody else is that they learn to use their bodies as Springs that is they learn to drive their bodies at the natural resonances of their body it doesn't matter what your whether what you're doing is running or jumping or swinging a golf club that elite athletes the best athletes work right at resonance and they work right at resonance because it's the most efficient way to work and everybody and that's why they always looks a smooth and they always look so graceful because they are because they're working right at resonance and everybody else looks klutzy because we're doing this we're trying to go fast and we're doing this and really what we should be doing is this and that's what you see in in great athletes that they all move resonantly I do have an answer I do have an answer you bet so so let me just show you that in fact you know we're scientists so we have this idea that the body works like a spring but you really want to prove that that's going to be the case so you have to go back and figure out how to make a measurement to measure to determine whether that's really how the body moves so that's in fact what we did and I'll just show you the example so here is my laboratory at one point in time it was all filled with lots of wonderful optics and we did all sorts of great optics of quantum mechanical systems we had lots of big words that enable job security all of that stuff but ultimately we decided we had to make some measurements related to the golf swing and so I moved all that fancy equipment out of the way and put up a golf net and okay I kind of got away with that so here's a golfer this was a golfer from the Yale golf team and we conceived of the following experiment so if you're really a spring if they're golf if torso really is a spring let's apply a force and then watch how that spring moves right so if this is a spring I can apply a force and watch how it moves so we did the same thing with the golfer we asked the golfer to apply a force back but we had to measure that force first so we attached a rope to the golf club and it had a little sensor that measured how hard the person pulled back and then while that person wasn't paying attention we cut the rope and so they'd be pulling back and pulling back and pulling back and all of a sudden they'd move because the Rope would get cut and then we put a sensor on his back to measure how his body moved nothing you can't do with duct tape so this is a sensor that's called a gyroscope and a gyroscope measures how things rotate so we had a little gyroscope on his back and we had several people do this over and over again we'd ask them to apply a force big four small force we didn't care we measured how big a force they applied and then we watched how their body move and and if it behaves like a spring what do we know the figure the force what will happen if you apply a little force how far will you move a little bit right if you apply a bigger force what will happen bigger right so the bigger the force the further of the body would move but what about the tempo should the tempo matter whether it's a little force or a big force if it's really moving in resonance no exit well great you in you are good you're good so right it shouldn't matter whether you apply a big force or a small force if the body is really moving at resonance then then it should always be the same amount of time to go back so that's the experiment we did and I'll just show you here's some data so this is the rotation of the body this is standing still and this would be in the back swing as it winds up and this is the number of degrees so this torso wound up about 70 degrees and then it started to come down and all we did first off is measure how far back does it go remember the more force the further back it should go and the other thing we measured is how long it took to get all the way back now how long it should always take the same amount of time to measure how much force you apply and so this is the amount of force we apply and this is how long it took them to wind up and what you see is as even as you change the amount of force by a factor of five or six really make the force much bigger that it always takes them out about the same amount of time for them to wind up and that's a pretty good indication that they're working just like a spring because that really is a property of the swing spring does another how much force you apply it's always going to take the same amount of time to wind up and the other thing you learn is that the amount of time to wind up is about three-quarters of a second which is what amount of time for the backswing in a good golfers backswing so pretty good indication that in fact when a golf but when a good golfer makes a backswing really what they're doing is they're winding up the spring resonantly and then we can then this curve is how far the torso moves depending upon how much force you apply and what you see here is that in fact the if you start with little force and then start applying more force the torso winds up further and further but there's a limit to how far your torso goes right you can't wind up all the way around that would be a nightmare so in fact what you find is that it kind of falls off here now biomechanics people have measured this they invented these torture devices which they use with their graduate students and they seek the graduate students here and then they start to apply force and they see how far the graduate student winds up as a function of how much force they apply there are some grad students back there so I just want to show you this data so this is how much force they apply and this is how far their torso rotates and this is measurement done by you know real biomechanics people and in fact we you can use that data to explain our data in fact how the torso really winds up but to first order the torso really does behave like a spring and and we believe in fact that's why it is that got that really great golfers and great athletes generically are good at what they do that in fact they learn to operate resonantly and in the case of golfers really great golfers they learned to drive their golf swing resonant with their resonant frequency of the torso the arms the hands the whole thing as a common resonant frequency and that's where they drive it now as for the question of the answer to the question of my friend look no spring the answer is you know I can do that with this too I can drive this resonantly or I can hold it here right you can teach your body to drive the body resonantly or you can do all sorts of things and have muscles fire in all sorts of crazy ways that don't drive it resonantly and you end up with stuff like this and that's what most people do most people never are never in touch enough with their body to actually drive it resonantly that is pushed back when it wants to wind up and push back down when it wants go the other way most people push back and keep pulling and stop and then come down in some sort of crazy fashion that isn't resin that doesn't lead to consistence he was exhibiting non-resident behavior and I actually but and so we've shown that this is true for the golf swing we've also shown that this is true for the putting stroke that the best the very best putters in the world drive their putters resonantly at the resonant frequency of the putter in a very specific way and in fact you know there's a whole community within golf they call it Zen golf and they live by these principles which is you know your body knows what to do get out of its way stop talking to yourself get all the Fox out of your head just let your body do what it's supposed to do and you know I really argue this is where physics and Zen come together because what the Zen people have been trying to get you to do but haven't been able to say is drive your body resonantly that's really what they're trying to get you to do but they've never studied enough sine it's actually to understand that those are the words so I think actually if physics goes far enough out to the deep end comes back in Zen okay I can talk for hours on golf and science and I can talk about all sorts of more things and I can tell you lots of stories but I'm going to stop now and entertain questions and let's see and at people and so let me just tell you some other things so people want to stick around I'm happy to talk for as long as you want to listen I can talk about how we generate power in the golf swing why it is that great golfers generate more power and hit the ball further than other people we have that data I can talk about what it's like to take an invention and try to turn it into a little company I can talk about all sorts of fun things

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 67,733

Rating: 4.7944665 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, Science on Saturday, Science Saturdays, Robert Grober

Id: MRnjedSebWY

Length: 40min 29sec (2429 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 10 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/ShooterMcGerin]

Very interesting. I feel my tempo is better when I'm walking rather than riding. Something about walking up to your next shot keeps you more focused and on pace with your play. Anyone else feel the same?

[u/menevets]

This is a talk using golf as a vehicle to teach physics concepts, not to teach golf. You can have great tempo, but if you have a poor, improperly sequenced swing, all the great tempo in the world isn't going to help.

[u/[deleted]]

There's a LOT of things that separate the pros from the rest.

[u/[deleted]]

Balance and tempo are the two most important traits towards being a good player. You can even overcome bad mechanics with superb balance and tempo.

[u/mstrymxer]

This is why you should listen to podcasts and not music on the range. The music will literally affect your tempo. Spoken word wont. There are also tempo trainers out there for iphones/android.

[u/CTRL_ALT_DOWNVOTE]

Jack Nicklaus has a tip at the very end of Golf My Way where he says that the best swing tip he ever got was to try to make your downswing the same speed as your backswing. It's a thought that helps create good tempo.

[u/Joker0091]

Dude needs to clean up his desktop

[u/BaseballNut13132]

I take a cart ....but usually walk here and there throughout the round. Plus drives me nuts when my playing partner is not talking golf but telling me about his crappy week!

[u/[deleted]]

I typically split the cart cost with friends when we play, but I will just strap my bag to the cart & walk to my shots. You alleviate the stress of carrying your bag and becoming fatigued, yet still are indeed walking the course.

Edit: I guess I'm lucky that I have lazy friends who will always ride in a cart, so I always have this option lol