Sunday, February 28, 2010

Understanding the Unorthodox Swings - Part 2

In Part 2 I will look at perhaps the golfer with perhaps the most unorthodox swing of them all, Jim Furyk.





While Furyk's swing is very unorthodox in its own right, I find his double overlap grip even more unorthodox.


In TGM terms, Furyke uses a reverse loop shift, taking the club very upward and vertical and then shifting to the elbow plane.

What I find neat about Furyk's swing is that in the transition he immediately drops the club almost perfectly on the inclined plane of his downswing.



Some will call this as 'laying off' or 'dropping in the slot.' I do think there is some dropping of the club initially in the startdown for Furyk. Then from there he just pivots well thru impact. Look at all that saved right arm at impact.


One of the things I think you will see with these unorthodox looking swings is most of them have plenty of right arm at impact and post impact. I think that it usually means that their swing is very pivot driven and that allows them to control the clubface and path which would probably be very inconsistent if the 'ran out of right arm' and relied more on their arms instead of their pivot and hands to swing the club.

In fact, I believe PGA Pro and Manzella Certified Instructor, Kevin Shields, has mentioned that Furyk has the best clubhead dimensions thru impact of anybody on Tour according to Trackman.

I think it's beneficial to look and study at Furyk's swing because it shows that there's so many imaginable ways to swing a golf club effectively and how his incredible pivot is that allows him to hit the ball so well.




3JACK

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kevin's a rock-star so I trust his opinion, but what does "best clubhead dimensions mean"?

Rich H. said...

It's not Kevin's opinion...it's Trackman's opinion.

Clubhead dimensions on Trackman mean things like horizontal swing plane, club path, attack angle, clubface angle, etc. My guess is that his face angle and club path are consistently close to zero than any other golfer on the PGA Tour.

Ronnie Martin said...

Great work Rich. However I think that Trackman has been overhyped a little bit. While Dr. Tuxen's science is solid and based on empiracal theories. Trackman, like every other technology, including AGL's 3 trak technology ( which is the most accurate LM technology available today becausde it is the only technology able to provide RAW data derived from RIFLE spin)uses calculated data. Trackman openly metions it. What they don't mention is that this business of "measuring" clubface angle is based on the POST IMPACT horizontal plane angle. That's right... Trackman can't measure clubface angle. No doppler unit can. It just can't do it. Doppler measures the fastest moving object and that's the toe of the club.

So since it can't actually derive RAW data from the clubface it uses the horizontal launch angle as the the "true face angle" Not a lot of truth IMO. On top of that we now know that the balls horizontal launch angle is only 85% of the total equation. So what do we do? Just let the other 15% slide by?

There are some teachers out there that proclaiming that zeroing out the golf club is the new "next big thing" in instruction. I don't disagree because I use LM technology myself to teach with. But the new NEXT BIG THING is called 3 dimensional machine vision. Not Doppler. Doppler in genera, and Trackman in particular hangs it's hat on some very fuzzy math. Like I said, the D plane science is solid, but the method of data aquisition is a far cry from accurate. About as far from accurate as the old ball flight laws are to the new.

Again, love the site. Keep up the good work.

LON