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Dear Geoff, My name is Tim Sheredy and I am currently Assistant Director at the David Leadbetter Golf Academy in Bradenton, Florida. I find your info very interesting. Where did you find the pictures of the all time great putters and what in your mind makes up a solid putting set-up (elbow position, ball placement, etc). Thank you for your time and I'll talk to you soon. My email address is tdjsheredy@yahoo.com. Tim Dear Tim, Thanks for the note! and the questions! I love getting questions like that. The pictures come from my research. I've read everything significant about putting from the 1880s to today, and of course I've also read a lot of other golf books. As I come across photos that illustrate an important point of technique or history, I keep a record and usually scan the photo into a digital format in my computer. That includes other golf teachers. (I've got two of you!)
Tim Sheredy in Las Vegas
Korean IMG Academy site - is this you? I've also written a book on Golf on the Internet (it's a lot better than Hunki Yun's old book), so I probably know more about golf via the Web than anyone, including Mark Reid (who knows about my stuff, too) ! :-) I do all my website stuff by myself and always have, so I come across tons of great digital pictures. And I also take aloing a digital camera when I go to pro events. If you need some of these photos in your instruction, you can get them fairly easily here: http://www.google.com This page has a choice for search the Web and another one for searching for Images. For example, if you want a photo of Ty Tryon putting, go to the images page and type "Ty Tryon" and see what you get.
As to setup, speaking about a conventional putter, I build the setup from the stroke ideal back. So, I want a straight back, straight thru (for at least 1' either side) path with square impact and dead fingers hands and arms and shoulders that sends the ball square out of my setup exactly the same every time with a nice roll. This ends up being something like the following, but it actually varies somewhat with the putter, the build of the golfer, and the actual stroke dynamics:
In the above, the distance of the ball out from the stance is determined solely by the body -- the distance from the pupils to the shoulder sockets with the head above the ball and the gaze straight (about 8-9 inches from almost all golfers). With the chin and forehead at the same height and the gaze straight ahead, there are certain perceptions and relations that converge that are not otherwise available. This is also the ideal expert pattern up until about 1975 and among some of the top putters even today (e.g., Faxon). If the golfer sets up a little farther from the ball than his body, he will have to have his face tilted up (forehead higher off ground than chin). This almost always requires the golfer to direct his gaze down his cheeks (often as much as 30 degrees), and this causes targeting problems. An important safeguard here is to make sure that IF the golfer has to have his head up, this does not necessarily mean he has to have his gaze angled down. And it is really the gaze angle, and not the face tilt, that causes the biggest problems. So, keep the gaze straight ahead no matter what the ball-eye relation, and you can avoid most of the misperceptions. (The flat face is still better, though, for other reasons.) Faldo has a pretty good setup. David Gossett does not.
Faldo 2001 British Open
Faldo in 1999 Faldo's head is fairly flat above ball, but not totally.
David Gossett at John Deere Classic Gossett's face is tilted about 25 degrees up and his gaze is a little down the cheek (not too bad, though). He's currently 120th in putts per GIR, which ain't good enough in the long haul. This is what a flat head ought to look like with a straight gaze:
Billy Casper, early 1960s Notice Casper's bill pointing straight down vertically. Here is Jim Flick with a flat head turned sideways to look at the target.
Notice Flick's glasses frame - the line across the top of his glasses is now vertical, indicating he was able to make a smooth head turn to the target without eye muscle changes or odd head motion compensations. So, that's what a "straight gaze" is about -- optimal targeting by eliminating extraneous eye and head movements to allow vision and body position-sense to teach the golfer the true location of the target. There is a lot more to putting than setup. It's mostly how a consistent setup and stroke technique can be aimed as a whole movement in 4 dimensions. Most of aiming boils down sooner or later to tempo, which ought to strike you as a fairly novel notion. (Pelz is VERY wrong on tempo, by the way.) I would love to drop by Bradenton some time and make a presentation to you or anyone else serious about putting. Over the past ten years, I've covered a lot of ground, and most of it is not represented in the conventional lore. I teach golf professionals for free so long as I can get there, and in the case of Florida I go there fairly frequently. I'll be in the La Quinta area later this spring, and then I'm coming to the Jacksonville-Daytona-Orlando area in June for a week. Perhaps I can get over to Bradenton then. Let me know if you're interested. By the way, I'm a regular reader of the Bradenton Herald! and a friend of Robert Winters from NBC Sports' Golf.com, where I wrote putting articles. I also met Jonathan Yarwood at the PGA Merchandise Show this past January. (Swing gurus don't seem too interested in putting, as a class.) :-) Hey, does this look familiar?
Katke's 15th
Marc, the American Panda Marc uses a Rossa these days! Like Ernie. Cheers! Geoff
Mangum
518 Woodlawn Ave
Geoff, Thanks for your time and email, I have more questions since I am enthralled about learning all there is about putting. What is straight gaze? What is Pelz wrong about with tempo, please explain? Do you believe the longer the stroke the more it will eventually go inside? What do you think about Dr. Mann's putting model and tempo thoughts? It would be great if you could stop by Bradenton in June to speak to some of us. A Saturday around 12:00 would be perfect, you could speak for the afternoon. If you need a place to stay I could set something up with IMG. Let me know the date and if you can come. We have had Scotty Cameron, Dr. Craig Farnsworth and Tony Kiew from Maya golf here to give putting presentations, so yours would be great. My golf background is as follows; Graduated Ferris State with a PGM degree, then worked at Grand Cypress Academy of Golf for two years. I was Phil Rodgers assistant in his short game schools. After Grand Cypress, I began working for David, I have been with him for the past five years. I was in Las Vegas for DLGA for one year and Austria for one year, the remaining years I have been in Bradenton.I am a Class "A" PGA Professional. I work with some of the top junior players in the world. We have over 180 full time students here at the academy. It is very exciting to work here. I am extremely enthusiastic to learn and I am a sponge to knowledge about the game of golf. So, I greatly appreciate your time and efforts. Mark Reid and Jonathon Yarwood both work at this academy. The images you sent were not available, there were no pictures. Thanks again for your help, let me know about June and next time I will discuss some of my views, but I am off to the lesson tee. Thanks, Tim Dear Tim,
A "straight gaze" is what you have when you stand with good posture on the shore and look to the ocean's horizon at a ship. Your two eyes are pointed directly out of your face, so that your line of sight is parallel to the ground and perpendicular to a true vertical and also perpendicular to the "plane" of your face (so to speak). By far, most golfers over the ball at setup have their gaze directed at an angle downward, like when you are reading a book. The gaze runs down somewhat across the cheeks. When the gaze is straight out of the head, straight ahead, your dominant eye's field of vision is framed by your nose and your eyebrows and only the merest suggestion of cheek. Here is a graphic I drew to illustrate the point:
You can notice that if you wear glasses, the aim spot of a straight-ahead gaze passes thru the lens in only one spot, and this spot is always the same. You could paint it with a magic marker as a training aid. If you setup by placing your head above the ball looking thru this aim spot, you will not see the ball unless your head is positioned the way Billy Casper, bobby Locke, Bob Rosburg and most great putters position their heads. That is, with the back of the head flat, the forehead and chin the same distance above the ground. If you wear glasses, the side frames would be perfectly vertical. In the above drawing, imagine peering thru a drinking straw held parallel to the surface and then keeping the straw at this orientation to the face and head as you bent the head over to look down at the ball. You will not get the ball into the straw until your head is flat. Why is this important? Again, imagining the straw held to the pupil of the dominant eye, but this time the straw is angled down a bit (say 20 to 30 degrees down from horizontal). Now, when you bend to "look at" the ball, the ball comes into view before the forehead lowers to the same height as the chin, and the head is not flat but tilted up (also about 20 to 30 degrees, the same angle as the straw). Keeping the straw ay this orientation, turn towards the target to "look at" the hole off to your side. Watch what happens to the direction of gaze thru the straw -- it runs hard off to the left in a curling manner. This is why golfers with this setup have a targeting problem. I strongly suspect the recent "fix" of Charles Howell's putting setup was not a good fix, but I would have to see exactly what he is doing. Golfers with the gaze angled down the face at address cannot simply turn to the target and observe the "line" along the ground with a quiet, still eye position. Instead, either their heads are constantly adjusting or their eye muscles are constantly adjusting or both, to compensate for the curling off line of the gaze due to the angle down the face. It is possible to look straight out thru a straw as described and stand back from the ball a bit, and then bend the head until the ball comes into view. This also results in a tilted face with the forehead up a bit, but this time there is a significant difference: the gaze is straight out of the face and not down the cheek. This time, when you turn the head towards the target, the gaze moves straight along the true target line on the ground with relaxed unmoving eyes and without odd head position compensations. So, it is not the face tilt that is causing the poor perceptions; it is the angle of the gaze. I have a scientific paper on this gaze business now pending for publication with the World Scientific Congress on Golf and the paper goes into this issue somewhat deeper and discusses the related neurophysiology of perceptual processes, especially visual and proprioceptive processes of spatial cognition. Pelz's tempo teaching is to place two bean bags about two feet apart and make strokes between them to a metronome that is initially set to your "walking pace". The "walking pace" is supposed to reveal something about your "characteristic" personality and movement tempo. (There is no theory here; it's hooey.) Most people instructed to walk while counting paces as someone times 60 seconds worth of walking end up with about 75 or more steps. Pelz believes this is a standard "gait" as if this is a "natural" tempo. Baloney. Even worse, he sets the metronome TO START WITH at this walking pace (about 75 beats per minute) and then advises the golfer to keep bumping the metronome's rate UP 5 beats per minute at a jump until the stroke "feels right." What vague garbage. The end result is that golfers end up with a stroke tempo of 85 to 95 beats per minute. This tempo relates to a total stroke time of something like 1.5 seconds from start to finish. Way too fast! Top pros have been timed from start to finish, and it's a lot slower than this! Nick Price was timed at 1.85 seconds and Chip Beck at 1.92 seconds from start to finish (I'm slower than that). Price's metronome setting would be about 65 beats per minute. Gravity moves the putter at about 60 beats per minute, and my tempo is close to gravity's. Pelz is off by at least 25% of the total timing of a good stroke, in a game where a 5% error in your timing consistency is HUGE. Pelz's approach is completely wrong. The better approach is one that recognizes the fact that the cerebellum controls timing and fluidity of motion (or smoothness) and not the basal ganglia as Pelz suggests. The cerebellum can handle a wide range of tempos, and there really is not a natural tempo in the sense of a "main" tempo that one uses every day that is most suited for putting. That's why some "rap" putters are very good! The real question instead is what is a good tempo to choose and why. The way to sort this out is to pay attention to the physics of the stroke and to the processes of perceptions and movement control. Each of these areas of concern (physics, perception, and movement motor control) are intimately understandable as matters of timing. In physics, a slow tempo is better because the starts and stops of the putter are more gradual and less prone to jerkiness or snatching. In perceptions, visual processes require at least 1/4th of a second to get a good registration of objects in motion (as a pitched fastball in baseball). And in a 1.85 second / 65 beats per minute stroke like Nick Price's, there are really two separate parts (from ball to top of backstroke, and from top of backstroke to impact). Of these, the important one is backstroke to impact, and this is only about 1/4th of the total stroke timing. For a 1.5 second stroke like Pelz's, you have no more than 3/8th of a second as the putter comes into impact, and most of this is outside peripheral vision. Once the stroke gets well into the field of view, this 1.5 second stroke allows less than 1/4th second for error correction. This effectively eliminates hand-eye coordination in the downstroke. This is not a good thing. So, for perception, slower is better, too. And finally, in motor processes, there is a huge difference between "ballistic" motion and controlled or "smooth" graduated motion. A ballistic motion is totally controlled by the firing of agonist muscles from the motor cortex control centers. A smooth move, however, is a finely timed matching of agonist muscle activity controlled by the cortex with the braking antagonist muscle action controlled by the cerebellum. The timing is the key. For this, the cerebellum relies heavily on input signalling from body parts (proprioception) as the movement progresses and upon cross signalling with the cortex firing of the agonist muscles. Again, for the move to be coordinated well, slowness is prefereable. In summary, a SLOW tempo is much better for distance control, solid square impact, and other key aspects of putting. Pelz does not in the least understand this line of approach to tempo. Yes, the stroke eventually goes inside, and I always teach that you want a stroke straight on either side of the ball, but beyond about 1 foot either way I don't concern myself with the straightness of the stroke. I need to stop for now, but let's continue this later. I would certainly love to visit with you and others in June, and I will go ahead and start making some plans. We can discuss staying overnight later, since I can usually travel about 300-400 miles in a round trip without too much of a problem. Hey! I knew about your background Tim! :-) Cheers! Geoff Geoff, Thank you very much for coming down, we really enjoyed it. All of the instructors names on on our website, imgacadamies.com. Then click for our academy. One thing we did not discuss when you were here was; How would you train these juniors concerning putting? They are here for nine months. Where would you start? What would you do each month? What drills and exercises? How does motor learning factor in to the equation? We would like to hear your response. Thanks again for your help, talk to you soon. Tim Child / Adolescent Development and Motor Skills TrainingDear Tim, In response to your question, I am replying 1) in general about child development, especially neurological and motor development; 2) psychological and brain-based theories of learning and education, especially as they relate to the nurturing of motor skills expertise; 3) what my neurophysiological studies of putting suggest are the key skills to inculcate in your golfers; and 4) an integrated plan of instruction that is tailored to the child's stage of development and existing skill level. Or, in other words, theory and then application. 1. CHILD DEVELOPMENT Brain research indicates these points as important for trainers of child athletes:
General neuroscience resources that might interest you are:
The stages of child development in terms of neurology and developmental psychology are fairly well defined. The central figure in child developmental psychology is Jean Piaget. Most theories of early childhood learning and development view Piaget's ideas as central, and then qualify or expand those ideas.
One of the principal investigators of early childhood neurological development is Dr. Peter Huttenlocher in Chicago. His studies of the growth of brain connections in early childhood have rather convincingly proved that programs like Head Start offer interventions very late in the process, and that better educational planning would focus upon the first three years of life. Early Childhood is typically considered to span the years 1 to 5. These years see the foundational development that largely determines latter functioning. Other stages of childhood development are less critical but still important for various milestones. Developmental Milestones: Gender: Infancy (1-3):
Early Childhood / Preschool (4-5):
Middle Childhood (6-8):
Late Childhood / Pre-adolescence (9-12) :
Teenage Years / Adolescence:
Some typical developmental diagnostic and therapy tools that are available to the pyschology profession include:
Most of these are for early development, where felicitous adaptation is more problematic. Physical development in terms of basic neurology, musculoskeletal tissues, and motor coordination and development proceeds from basic survival-related core behaviors (e.g., reaching, grasping, rolling, sitting up, swallowing, looking) to more stimuli-related elaborations of behaviors (e.g., following the flight of a bird, knowing when an object that moves out of sight will reappear, intuitive notions of gravity) to more fully developed expressions of physical control (e.g., walking, running, throwing, catching).
2. LEARNING THEORIES Most theories of learning come from the Education field of universities, and this is a serious limitation because these theories are usually jargon-bound and light on sound theoretical bases in child neurological development and cognitive theory. In the past two decades or so, however, coincident with the great advances in neuroscience, child educational theories and general learning theories have become meatier and more pragmatic as they have gained a firmer foundation in developmental and congnitive science. Theories of learning today are based largely upon the neuroscience of development, cognition, and memory.
Standard sports psychology approaches to developing motor competence and expertise can be seen in:
There are a half dozen or so current main theories of learning and education or training, out of several dozen distinct theories:
Some of these theories focus upon early childhood development:
Most learning theories are concerned with general educational settings (elementary through secondary school):
Some learning theory focuses upon special aspects of development. Key to golf skills would be motor development, perceptual control and spatial awareness.
A few theories focus upon brain development and modular functioning to enhance learning:
Some of the best, most practical uinformation comes from military and industrial training:
Generally, traditional sports science treats the "motor skill" as the basic unit of learning. Golf putting, for example, is considered a "closed skill" whereas hockey puck passing is considered an "open" skill. This approach is outdated, if not to say sophomoric. In the neuroscience of sports, the essential unit of study is "action." Action is the integrated sequence of perceptions and movement in the context of environmental stimuli and behavioral objectives. This approach places motor control planning in its proper functional context, and incidentally eliminates a lot of vague and senseless claptrap about how motor control actually happens. This approach also respects the modularity of mind and how the separate modules for perception, cognition, emotion, intention, attention, and movement are interrelated. Sports science speaks of "muscle memory" but the phrase is utterly unknown to neuroscience. This gap between sports science and the real processes of the brain and body infects most of golf science from the 1970s onward. The "action" of putting is only partially a matter of engrained patterns of movement. It is also a process that must be regenerated in each instance, that is conditioned and influenced by habitual patterns of movement from other contexts, and that is critically dependent upon cognitive and emotional components on each occasion. Modern learning theories take account of this cooperative mixture of motor, cognitive, and psychological aspects of sports "action." For similar reasons, the rudimentary notion of "feedback" so prominent in the 1970s in authors like Dave Pelz is equally limited and limiting. Typically, "feedback" in putting is treated as little other than objectification of the physical aspects of a putting stroke -- putterface tape to see whether you are hitting the ball with the "sweetspot" of the putterface; a stroke "track" to "engrain" the "muscle memory" of a supposedly ideal stroke movement; and a "laser" putter to determine whether the golfer can successfully align the putterface to a target. This is a stunted notion of "feedback" that ill-serves the process of learning the "action" of putting. For example, in the action of putting, most of the process of aiming the putterface is simply not taught today by anyone. The laser putter simply shows a result from however the aiming is performed. By the same token, while it is true that "sweetspot" contact is important, it cannot be separated out artificially from the action of putting. Today's "feedback" tape hardly teaches the optimal way to make stroke impact in combination with sound biomechanics or to promote sound biomechanics that also enhance the targeting process. And obviously the "stroke track" is not integrally related to setup and biomechanics and aiming at a target, and hence is mostly useless if not an influence that harms optimal performance. The time course for mastering an expertise domain usually begins with cognitive instruction (lecture, explanation, study) and then progresses to physical demonstration and emulation (demonstrating, mentoring, exploration, experimentation). Once the action is sufficiently comprehended and the student equipped with appropriate practice behaviors for mastering the skill, skill development shifts from the cognitive arena to the physical. (This is mirrored in brain imaging studies of what areas oif the brain are active during the learning curve, showing that thinking and analysis of the left hemispehere is heavily active in the early stages of learning but subsides as the skill becomes more physical and active in the motor control areas -- so that the brain becomes much more efficient at controlling the action.) At this time there are different instructional patterns to promote speed and efficiency of learning as well as the consolidation and transferability of learning to novel contexts. At each stage of the learning process (cognitive, physical, and practice), the instructor may take advantage of the theories of instruction. For example, the "active learning" theory emphasizes the value of individual students exploring suggestions about the proper way to perform the skill. Another theory emphasizes the consolidative value of one student assuming the role of the teacher or mentor to another student. Learner-ceneterd theories emphasize the characteristic preferred modes of learning of the individual (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). Theories based upon brain processes emphasize those brain modules that are key to the specific skill, such as spatial analysis for targeting skills and proprioceptive and kinesthetic modules for movement skills. A well-designed mixtures of approaches within the overall pattern of the learning curve for a specific individual is probably best. Other important principles of instruction are:
3. KEY SKILLS FOR PUTTING ACTION The fundamental neurophysiological "skills" for putting action are:
The more important cognitive skills are:
The more important psychological skills are:
Beyond these, some additional skills have more to do with mind-body integration. Currently, these mind-body integration techniques seem to be comprised of a heterogeneous collection of skills from different approaches. Some of the more prominent approaches include:
Each of these skills in the above categories requires separate attention in an instructional program. Especially problematic for kids are all of the cognitive and psychological skills. In my experience, however, the soundest approach to improving these skills lies through teaching the neurophysiological skills. In effect, the cognitive and psychological skills are subservient to the neurophysiological skills, and mastering the latter brings about the subordinate mastery of the lesser skills. For example, teaching control of the gaze is really what makes for good attention control. With attention comes concentration and focus. These skills allow superior neruophysiological performance with perception and movement, so gaze control engenders good targeting and stroke behavior. Tempo and sense of timing work essentially the same way. Once this pattern of mastering the neurophysiological skills is established with the young golfer, the necessity of arousal and emotional control become apparent and desirable. It's all downhill from there. The cognitive, psychological, and mind-body techniques fall naturally into the learning pattern. 4. A PUTTING SKILLS PROGRAM Assuming that most DLGA students are in the 13-18 age range, then these kids have already displayed superior motor coordination skills in the process that "selects" them out from the general population for attendance at the DLGA. The main task at this stage is to lay the foundation for a permanent process of excellent putting action. That is, the kids should be taught the principles of accurate perceptions and movement control in an overall "routine" for the total action, with the other subordinate skills being incorporated into the basic "action" model. The end result is a procedure that the golfer believes is the best they are capable of performing to give every putt its best chance of sinking or stopping close, and one that becomes steadily sharper over time. Also, the golfer should so understand the basic physical principles of rolling a ball straight across the green to a target that he or she is able to diagnose developing flaws and to critically appraise the suggestions of others. Month One
Month Two
Month Three
Month Four
Month Five
Month Six
Month Seven
Month Eight
Month Nine
Some specific problems that one would anticipate for this age group include:
Specific advantageous opportunities I would anticipate include:
For general principles of optimizing or enhancing human performance, these additional resources may be of interest:
I realize all the above must seem disjointed and overly complicated, but I know you are a sponge of knowledge and your mission at the DLGA is undoubtedly one you wish to carry out with the highest degree of effectiveness you can muster. In that spirit, I hope to suggest to you that the unique parameters of the Academy presents a valuable opportunity to bring to bear the highest arts in instructional theory with the highest arts in putting knowledge. I believe that an educational psychologist would likely agree with the overview I've outlined here, but you have to go beyond the basics of educational theory to application of theory in the task of teaching golf (and specifically putting). I believe that requires a careful analysis of the elements that promote optimal putting or golf, and then creating the instructional program around that content. I ask that you view the above as something of a rough outline of how to attack the task, and not at all as a detailed battle plan. I know from principles of effective training that real lesson plans and objectives are much more detailed and specific. If you would like to pursue any of this in greater detail, please know that I stand more than willing to lend whatever talents I may have in that endeavor. Cheers! Geoff |
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