The Measured Golf Podcast

From Feathery To Force Plates: Why Today’s Swing Must Evolve

• Michael Dutro, PGA • Season 6 • Episode 13

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The swing most golfers try to copy was built for a different ball, a different driver, and a different course. We open the hood on modern golf and explain why the urethane revolution, 460cc “10K” drivers, and longer, lusher setups flipped the problem you’re trying to solve. If balata demanded de-loft and spin control, today’s game rewards height, speed, and tight face control—backed by measurement instead of myth.

We dig into the big pivot points: how TrackMan corrected ball flight laws so you can finally aim your fixes at face and face-to-path, not old path-first dogma; why force plates reveal the real engine of speed and consistency—timed ground reaction forces and a strong lower-body brake; and how proper sequencing lets different-looking swings share the same efficient blueprint. Along the way, we unpack the injury equation: you can only accelerate what you can decelerate. Without braking, those “send it” swings load your wrists and elbows instead of the ground.

This is a practical guide for fitting your motion to modern gear. Expect clear takeaways on launching it higher without losing control, choosing loft that helps carry, and training where changes stick best—away from the range, in the gym and PT space, where patterns and tissues adapt. We also look ahead: records should fall, AI coaching will improve, and the smartest players will blend classic craft with present-day science.

Ready to play the game that’s actually on the course today? Subscribe, share this with a golf friend who’s stuck in 1974, and leave a quick review telling us the one swing myth you’re retiring next.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Measured Golf Podcast, where you, the listener, sit down and join me, Michael, as we discuss all things golf. And it's a holiday episode. We just celebrated Thanksgiving at the Dutro household. Uh, my wife was a phenomenal cook once again, uh, kind of serving as the host for our family. Had an amazing time, we're able to survive Black Friday, uh, got the family back on the road before the big snowstorm hits here in Michigan, and it's time to get back to podcasting. So a little bit of a delay on this podcast. Hope that's okay. I do apologize, but family comes first, and I hope that your family also had a wonderful Thanksgiving and is looking forward to a wonderful holiday season. But today we are going to talk about golf, how it's evolved, and how the golf swing has had to evolve with it as well, because I think a lot of people are quite frankly stuck in the past when it comes to the golf swing and how they go about trying to disseminate information that's going to be relevant to the current game. So gonna be a fun conversation today. Uh, looking forward to this one. I really enjoy talking about this. I think I've probably hit on a few of these points before on previous episodes, but we're gonna dive deep today and we're gonna talk about how golf is a very old game. So a lot of people uh are new to the game of golf that have come since COVID uh in 2020, 2021. And I think a lot of people think that you, you know, YouTube started golf, but golf is much older than that. Uh, it's been around for a very long time, and depending on which source you use, golf kind of goes back somewhere between the 1400s and the 1600s and was a very, very, very old game uh that generally was started as something to do. Uh, there wasn't a lot of organized sports back then, as you might imagine. We didn't have modern health care, and a lot of the lords and ladies got tired of being holed up in their castles drinking and smoking all day because that's what you did back then. Because I would imagine without modern health care and without dentists and things like that, there's probably a lot of pain involved. So, you know, a lot of these people were sitting around uh day drinking, if you will, uh smoking heaters and really looking for something to do, and they started whacking around uh rocks with sticks, and that was kind of the first iteration of golf. Uh, there's some of that recorded going on uh over in Asia, there's some of that going on over in Europe, and a lot of what was kind of going on in Scotland, which is kind of deemed to be the home of birth, is that uh, or I'm sorry, the home of golf, is that there was uh on the Lynx land, uh close to the ocean, there were these kind of paths and and and these kind of areas that had been worn down by time and people out uh with their animals and things like that. And they started kind of you know looking for something to do. And you know, they got tired of beating rocks around with sticks and started fashioning these sticks into clubs, and then balls kind of started being introduced to this, and they weren't like the modern ball now that's very hard, they they actually were quite soft, and uh, you know, it was just the way it was, and they kind of did what they could do, and it kind of evolved and picked some up picked up some popularity, and in the set in 1744, the honorable company of Edinburgh actually made the first set of rules. I believe it was 13 rules, uh, and they started kind of having competitions and games, and anytime you have that, we need some rules. So the first set of rules is uh credited with the honorable company of Edinburgh back in 1744, and once again, this is a long time ago. This is before a lot of the modern things that we currently take for granted even existed. So, golf's been around for this very long time, and as it's kind of aged, it's also evolved like most things. And we now find ourselves in this big uh technology uh kind of infused world of golf that we now kind of exist in, but we have to understand where we came from to understand where we're going, and more importantly, we have to fact-check some of this information because if you have played golf, if you are a golfer, you know, a lot of the things that you've probably been told to be true about the golf swing, about the game of golf, are regurgitated pieces of information. And how many times have they been regurgitated? How many times has this same information been passed down generation to generation? And in a lot of cases, I think it's a lot. Um, and I don't think very many people think about the fact that a lot of the things that we hold to be true about the game of golf and about golf equipment just simply aren't relevant to the game anymore. So we know that golf's very, very old. I gave you a very short, very uh nondescript kind of history of where we're coming from, but a lot of things have changed. And if we get a little bit more current and we get a little bit more modern, obviously we're not playing with a feathery anymore. We're not playing with a gutta percha, uh, we're not playing with persimmon uh heads, we're not playing with hickory shafts. You know, we all kind of know that that golf has evolved and now we have titanium and carbon heads with tungsten interlaced into them. Uh, we know that we have these composite shafts, uh, and and we've got a whole lot of tech. We've got a lot of ways to track things, we've got a lot of things, a lot of ways to measure things, but we have to understand kind of where we're coming from because a lot of people still kind of are very traditionalist when it comes to the game of golf. And what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of people will come and take a golf lesson and they'll start talking to me about things in their golf swing, and they'll go, oh yeah, you know, I I read this in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, or I read this in Jack's Play My Way, or something like that. And I'm I'm not here as a golf instructor to say that Jack Nicholas was incorrect or Ben Hogan was incorrect because they were having to solve problems that were relevant to the game they played. And one thing that I think isn't getting looked at very much is the sizable change that happened about 25 years ago in the game, and that was the kind of introduction of the Eurethane golf ball. So, for those of you who are newer to the game of golf, pre-2000 we played with what was known as a Balada and or a Wound golf ball, and that's kind of an important piece of information to know. So if you're like me and you're kind of a junkie when it comes to the clubs uh and you like the old stuff, which I certainly do, if you go back and find titaless first titanium driver, which was the titleless 975D, it's very difficult to find one that has more than eight and a half degrees of loft. It really is. Um, you might find a nine and a half here and there, but good luck trying to find a ten and a half because A, nobody really used it, and B, if you did, you were considered to be like, you know, not a very good golfer. And a lot of the older drivers, if you go kind of pre-2000, you're just not going to see more than nine and a half degrees very often. And the reason for that is because of the ball we were playing, and that balotta slash wound golf ball only wanted to spin and only wanted to go to the moon. And it's really interesting because a lot of golfers that are currently playing the game don't necessarily understand what that was like because they weren't playing the game then. Uh, as you might see if you're watching this on our YouTube channel, I've got a few gray hairs starting to show up in the beard. I haven't had hair on the top of my head in quite some time. And I did play during that time. And I remember, you know, you would go get a driver and it'd be that eight and a half, nine and a half degree option because the golf ball just spun so much and wanted to go straight up in the air. I happened to grow up playing golf at a public golf course uh that was the highest point in the county, and it was always windy. And honestly, like you were just trying to keep this ball down out of the wind because if it got up into the wind, it just went absolutely nowhere. Now, you might be asking yourself, why does he keep talking about the past? Well, the reason I'm talking about the past is a lot of people and a lot of coaches still hold these books written pre-2000 in a very reverend space. And a lot of people out there are Ben Hogan fanatics, which is great. Mr. Hogan was one of the most iconic golf American golfers to ever play the game. Um, and a lot of people really worship the words that he said, but he was once again trying to solve for the riddle that was golf at the time, and at the time it was a belotta game, and a lot of people don't understand that not only did that golf ball want to spin, but it also had a theoretical limit in terms of ball speed. So we love to talk about ball speed, everybody's obsessed with it, and the theoretical limit of a Ballada slash wound golf ball was somewhere between 163 and 170 miles an hour. Now, why that's important is that's all the harder you could hit this thing and predict what it was gonna do. We didn't have long drive back then, and it didn't matter if you were big and strong, if you were a little bit smaller, because you could only hit the golf ball so hard. So back in the day, the mission wasn't to hit the ball as hard as humanly possible, which is why I believe Corey Paven, who wasn't a very big person and didn't hit the ball very long way, was able to win a US Open. Because if you go back and you watch some of the old footage of golf pre-2000, what you're gonna see is that the players are hitting it out of one another's divots all day long, every tournament, every week. The only time we really have players hitting it out of one another's divots these days is when they have an event at Pebble Beach. And the reason for that is because the way that Pebble Beach is broken up, there's a lot of kind of um areas that are almost determined to be where you have to hit it to, and you can't really just send it off every T out there because of the way the course is broken up. So it kind of forces the players to kind of lay back a lot, and the more players you have landing it in the same area, the more divots are gonna be created, and that's why these players find themselves hitting it out of each other's divots. But back in the day, this was a common occurrence, and a lot of the players pre-2000 would practice hitting it out of divots because they knew it was going to happen a few times during a round of golf, and now we just don't see that very often. When a player has to hit one out of a divot, it's almost like a rarity these days. So the reason for a lot of that is once again, we had this theoretical limit of 163 to 170 miles an hour of ball speed that we could produce and predict what the golf ball would do. And when you're playing at the highest of levels, like the PGA tour, we need to be able to predict where that golf ball is going to go. So, long story short, you know, I really feel like back in the day pre-2000, that we had better golfers because back then there was a premium on controlling the golf ball. Now, since 2000, since we came out with the Eurythane golf ball, I would argue that we have athletes playing golf. But a lot of the skill that the golfers pre-2000 had, I would say, is generally at a higher level. But today, because of the Eurythane golf ball, which actually has a theoretical limit of closer to 230 miles an hour, now of a sudden these guys can just gouge it out there, and I'm sorry, they can just bomb it out there and they kind of just gouge these golf courses to death, and they're playing a different game. They have way more opportunities with short clubs in their hands, and they're able to attack these golf courses in a completely different way. If you kind of listen to any of the guys on the senior tour when they're asked about the current game, they're all just kind of in disbelief because they're playing, I'm sorry, they're currently playing a lot of the same courses that they played back in the day. And, you know, back in the day, these guys remember having three, four, five irons into these par fours. And now a lot of the current players have nine irons and pitching wedges and things like that because they're hitting it so much farther off the T than we used to. Now, this isn't only a function of the golf ball. It is helpful that we can hit the golf ball harder and predict what it's going to do. But it's also with the fact that we now play with drivers that are 460cc and are very forgiving. And we're kind of in the era of the 10K driver, which is very, very forgiving on off-center hits. So people are more incentivized to swing harder at the golf ball because the driver's more forgiving. The ball flies straighter, it doesn't want to spin. So now all of a sudden they can kind of be athletic and hit the snot out of this golf ball as hard as they want. So I think that's really the big difference in the distance debate is is it some of the ball? Of course it is. You know, if we went back to a Balato Wound golf ball, which I don't recommend, you know, a lot of guys would have to try to slow it down, launch it lower, and control the golf ball a little bit more. But that's not the game we're currently playing. And that's where I think a lot of golfers are really disserved by their coaches and by the people that they're trying to help them with their golf game. Because by and large, what I tend to see is a lot of monkey see, monkey do, and a lot of copycat stuff. Um, one thing that, you know, kind of inspired this podcast a little bit was I, and I've had this happen before, but recently it just it really kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. But one of my players, uh, she plays on a small college team, nice little player, but she had, you know, come in and was working with me, and she was talking about one of her teammates that was really struggling. And I was like, Oh, that's you know, too bad. And hopefully she can get some help. And she goes, Oh, well, she doesn't take golf lessons, so I've been helping her. And I go, Oh, that's amazing. How how have you been helping her? What have you been saying? She goes, I just tell her a lot of the same things you tell me, and you know, I'm hoping that helps. And it's funny because, you know, we tend to repeat the information that we've been told, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, and maybe it's relevant to that person and maybe not. But there's a whole lot of this kind of passing on this information in the golf industry, and we kind of hold these things to be truths. You know, there's a lot of people out there that are still telling people to keep their head down. There's a lot of people out there still saying to stay in posture. But now that we have all these tools and this ability to measure and kind of understand what should be happening and have a better understanding of the physiology, we know those things not to be true anymore. But they're still being perpetuated. That information is still being shared. And it's not out of malice, it's just people don't know a lot about the golf swing. So anything they do know, they just tend to share. And then the crazy thing about golf that makes golf kind of difficult, I think, is that for the most part, when we're out there hitting balls, doing our thing, trying to work on our own personal golf games, we may tell ourselves to do something, may or may not actually do it, but then we see the golf ball fly better and we go, oh, see, if I just keep my head still, I hit it way better. Now, whether they kept their head still or not is very subjective because the person is dealing with their feelings and with the outcome. But what we can do now is we can actually measure these things and look at what the best players, men and women, do in the planet and go, hey, based off what we've measured, what we've seen, the head actually moves some in the golf swing. But a lot of people are holding on to this old information. And I think it's very detrimental to the growth of the game, to people getting better, because a lot of this stuff, as I said earlier, is almost treated like it's written in the Bible. And it's not, it's it's very subjective information. I've got a list here of five books that I'm sorry, four books here that really get mentioned a lot to me. And I also have the dates they were published. And I think this is important. So, you know, at the top of the list, probably the best-selling golf book of all time in terms of instruction has got to be Ben Hogan's Five Lessons. And wouldn't you know it, that book was published in 1957. Harry Harvey Pennock's Little Red Book, 92, Sam Sneed, How to Play Golf in the 1940s, Jack Nicholas Play My Way, 1974. And the thing is, is every one of those books is pre-2000. None of those books are dealing with the current game. And I'm not saying that there haven't been books written recently and since 2000, there have, but you don't see a lot of golf coaches really putting up the pictures of those people. They still have Ben Hogan's swing sequence and Jack Nicholas's swing sequence. It's all over their academy and it's worshipped. But it's not the current game, it's not how we currently play golf. And more importantly, a lot of this information that has been shared over the decades does not really line up with what we now understand about the ball flight. It doesn't really line up with what we understand about the physiology or the biomechanics, and it's really not information that is going to be helpful for the current game. So I think it's really important that when you're looking at trying to get better at golf and you're looking at trying to improve your golf game or maybe seek instruction, you have to understand who is instructing me and what information do they have that they're going to share with me and isn't relevant to the modern game. And I'm not saying that every old golf coach, right, and I say the word old, you know, as nicely as I can, but every old golf coach isn't necessarily teaching these old things. Uh, there's a lot of coaches who are older who are just absolutely enamored with the golf swing, have a launch monitor, have force plates, have 3D motion capture, and are really trying to update their knowledge base. But there's also a lot of golf coaches out there who think they know what they know and they're not really interested in measuring anything or learning anything new. And they just kind of run with what they have because, you know, they've had some success with it. And I think that's a very dangerous place to be. And I don't think it's very fair to the consumer or the person trying to get better at golf because when that coach decides that they know everything they need to know and they've got it all figured out, you know, they're not sharing that with the person that shows up to the lesson T. They're just saying, hey, I'm gonna help you play better golf, and this is what we're gonna do. And and generally the person showing up to the golf lesson doesn't know any better, and they go along with it. And maybe some of those things help, but I don't think that's the quickest way to getting people to play better golf. So, you know, a lot of people are probably gonna hear the first part of this and go, well, Mike's just blasting, you know, the the way the industry was and where we're coming from. And I'm not at all. I'm just trying to point out that golf is a very old game, and a lot of the information that's shared currently is very old and maybe doesn't relate to the current game due to the fact that we had this massive ball change. The other thing that I think is very interesting that a lot of people don't consider is that pre-2003, a lot of golf coaches thought they understood the ball flight laws. And guess what? When Trackman came out in 2003, it was kind of the great awakening for golf coaches because we now could measure what the club was doing. We can now measure what the ball was doing. And what we found is that what we believed to be true about the ball flight laws maybe wasn't so true anymore. And you know, having a path to the right and a closed face, that's not going to work because what we found out is that the face tells the ball where to start, and the path relative to the face tells the ball how to curve, and that's very important stuff to know. And a lot of people out there are still teaching that path is generally what tells the ball where to go, because there's a lot of literature out there that still says that it hasn't been updated, we haven't burnt those books, and a lot of coaches still have it at the top of their bookshelf and still reference it when it comes to coaching. But in reality, the ball flight laws are now much better understood thanks to having a launch monitor. Um, track man came out in 2003, really was this great awakening and really better helped us understand how the golf ball actually moves and why it moves the way it does. So, you know, did everybody that was a coach kind of run and go, hey, I need to adopt this new information and I need to learn this to help my players better? No, because that's not naturally what people do. You know, there were arguments, there were fights, there were, you know, we didn't have um, we didn't have Twitter as much as we do uh back then. I don't think Twitter existed in 2003, but if we had, you know, you can imagine the kind of fights that would go on. And it's kind of funny because I feel like we're currently kind of going through something similar as the force plates become more popular. And as many of you know, I'm known on social media as the forceplate guy, and there's a lot of people out there who don't see any revelence, relevance in the force plates or the data they provide, but how could you not? All it's doing is measuring how the body is moving in three dimensions, or I'm sorry, why the body is moving, the way it moves in three dimensions, in real time. And I think the force plate data is great. Now, the issue with the force plate data is that it's quite a bit more difficult to understand than just let's say a launch monitor and how the club moves and how the ball moves. Because when we start talking about the body, a lot of golf coaches don't have a background in understanding the physiology or the kinetics or the kinematics or how those are tied together. And that's where all of a sudden golf is really morphed from a game that we kind of play and was started a long time ago, and people just kind of figured it out and beat rocks around with sticks to where now it's more of a science. And if you really want to understand what has to happen in the golf swing, I think it's important that instead of looking at the golf club moving around the body first and foremost, I think we have to look at how the body's trying to move. And once we start understanding these movement patterns, it's much easier to get the person to kind of move in a different way, then add the golf club to it. And now it's much easier to manage this golf swing versus trying to make a golf swing work with a very inconsistent or a motor pattern that doesn't really line up with what we need the golf club to do. And that's where I think it's really gotten a lot easier for me as a golf coach to help people. Because if you watch people swing a golf club, it's not hard. I think most people can do this, but you know, with everybody having an iPhone or something similar in their pocket that has a great camera on it, you know, we can film these golf swings at ease. We can kind of look at it and go, oh, well, the club's too steep here, the club's too shallow here, or the body looks like this, the body looks like that. But we don't really understand why this is happening. We don't understand the sequencing required of the human body to make an efficient golf swing. And if you don't understand those things, it's very easy to kind of point and shoot at all these problems. But generally speaking, and in my opinion, I believe that a lot of the things we see happening in the golf swing are a reaction. And if we get to the core issue and we get to, let's say, the mouth of the river and we start cleaning there, eventually the river will start clearing up and get clean. But if we start trying to clean the river five miles away from the source or the mouth, then all of a sudden it's never getting clean because it just keeps backfilling with dirty information or dirty water. So all of a sudden, it's really helpful to have an understanding of how the human body interacts with the golf swing, because obviously the human body has to move the golf club. It's an inanimate object, it's as plain and simple as that. A lot of people are still debating what moves what. Does the body move the club or does the club move the body? Well, like I said, it's not much of a debate because there's not a golf club that can swing itself, not yet. So if there's not a club that can swing itself, well then the body has to move the club. Now, once we move the club, because the club has mass, when I move it, I could call that acceleration. Now the club creates forces that do act upon the body. And guess what? I have to use my internal forces or the forces that I create with my muscles pulling against the bone, those internal forces, those have to be used to counter the forces that the golf club is enacting onto us. That's really, really important. So you can do a good job of this. And I've seen a million, not a million, but I've seen a lot of golfers do an amazing job countering the club. I'm sorry, yeah, countering the club with their internal forces. And they tend to be people who hit the ball pretty straight and play at a fairly high level and can kind of get it done. But a lot of those golfers also can't hit it very far because they're busy countering the golf club and don't understand the critical piece for speed development when it comes to this, which is adding the ground force component. Now, we can use our internal forces and we can use the forces created by the club to make play really nice golf, hit it straight, kind of keep it in front of us, all those things. But if we want to learn how to add the speed to that, well then we have to start looking at the body and how the body is leveraging against the ground. And a simple way that I could say that is ground reaction forces. And when we start taking advantage of these ground reaction forces and we counter the golf club with the forces that it's trying to enact onto us, now of a sudden I can be accurate and I can hit it far. And that's what we see at the highest levels anymore, is that so many of these golfers are unbelievably accurate, even as far as they hit the golf ball. And that's really what it takes anymore because the game has evolved. We're not playing on Lynx Land anymore where the ground is very hard and the ball runs a long ways. If you're playing golf here in the United States, the golf courses tend to be very green and very plush, and the ball doesn't roll out much. So if we're going to play on that type of golf course and it's 7,200 yards, you're gonna have to be able to carry the golf ball a long way in the air. And they've made it harder. It's not like it was with the Balata Wound golf ball that only wanted to stay in the air. We now have this Urethane golf ball that doesn't want to spin very much. And more importantly, even though we've made the drivers so much more forgiving and we've made them so much easier to hit, a lot of the times when we miss strike a golf ball that's a one of the modern clubs with a modern ball, it tends to underspin. And if it's underspinning, that's when it's falling out of the sky. It's not staying up there and it's not covering a lot of the ground with carry. So now all of a sudden it's a different game almost altogether than the one that they used to play back in the day with rocks and sticks. So what we have to consider is you know, if we've entered into this game of carry instead of roll, you know, what are the factors that go into that? And if the ball isn't wanting to stay in the sky, how do I create distance and carry? Well, I have to launch the golf ball higher in the sky, which is why it's become commonplace for modern drivers to have nine and a half, ten and a half degrees of loft. You know, it used to be if you had a senior come in for a fitting that didn't have much speed, you know, you'd recommend him a 12 degree driver and he'd laugh at you. He wouldn't do it. But now it's very easy to talk somebody into a 12-degree driver. It's very easy to talk somebody into a mini driver that tends to have more loft on it. Like these are easy conversations to have now because we're starting to understand that the game has evolved and how we have to attack these golf courses has evolved. So, interestingly enough, you know, we we can use more loft, okay? We can swing it harder, actually need to, because of the way they've kind of tiger-proofed the golf courses since you know 96, 97 when Tiger came out. So now all of a sudden, what do we need to do with the golf swing? Can we do what Sevi did? Can we do what Mr. Hogan did? Can we do what Jack and Sam Snee did? No, we can't because they were modeled and trying to solve for their problem, which was the golf ball only wanting to go up. They also couldn't hit it that hard. So they would counter the forces that the club created with their internal forces, but then they didn't need the ground reaction forces because the ball couldn't handle it. So that's why you see back in the day a lot more style with the body kind of at impact. You'd see Sevy with the legs all over the place, you'd see Ben Hoke. With the legs all over the place. There was a lot more style to the golf swings back in the day. A lot of golfers and golf coaches are still thinking and teaching that the right leg banks in and the right foot doesn't come up off the ground. Well, that's crazy. Watch somebody try to throw a football a long way and watch what their right foot does. Watch a pitcher throw a baseball really hard. If we're trying to accelerate this golf club as much as we can, we've got to understand that the legs work in an AP or anterior, posterior, transverse plane, and that right leg banking in or that trail leg banking in for a right-handed player, that doesn't work in the AP plane. That's working more in the frontal plane. So we've got to kind of understand through measuring and through the physiology what has to happen in order for us to create more speed. Back in the day, it made a ton of sense for the right side or trail side of the body to kind of fall down and kind of really lower the golf club. And then I could lean it, lean the handle a whole bunch, which would de-loft the golf club. And like I said, the Balata golf ball only wanted to go straight up in the air. So if I can de-loft the golf club, I can launch it lower and then it would climb as it went because of all the excessive spin. But now we've got this golf ball that we have to launch up in the sky because it doesn't spin. So we're actually trying to not de-loft the club anymore, which is why we're playing with more loft. And you don't see a lot of golf coaches talking about that because they're not keeping up with the evolution of the game of golf and the evolution of the swing that we need to play the current game of golf. And that's just what it kind of is. And it drives me a little crazy from time to time, which is probably why I'm sitting here waxing into this microphone about it. But I think that we have to understand that the game of golf has evolved and it's largely in part to, you know, technology, it's largely in part to Tiger Woods coming out in 96, 97 and bring athletic and bringing athleticism to golf uh and really changing the game. And now when you look, you know, every player is working with their PT, they're doing their muscle activations and things like that before they go out and play. They're in phenomenal shape. You know, they're 6'2, 6'4, long levers, the whole bit. And they are just absolutely knocking the daylights out of the golf ball these days because that's the way we play it at a high level. And the way that they're setting up these golf courses, there's no way that you're gonna be able to short game it enough to keep up and to make up the discrepancy between being a bomber on the tour, which is why, you know, we see the average clubhead speed on tour now is up to 117 miles an hour. And I strongly feel like that's only going to continue to go up until they do something about the design of the driver. Um, even if they make the ball spin a little bit more, that's not going to incentivize people to swing the club head slower. What's going to incentivize people to swing the club slower is by giving them a smaller sweet spot and making the misses have a larger discrepancy. But as long as they have one of these 10K watermelons on a stick, they're going to keep swinging hard at it and they're going to keep hitting the ball as far as they can. Now, if they're going to do that and they're going to stay healthy, then that whole ground reaction force creating leverage against the ground scenario is going to have to be better understood. And that's where I feel like, you know, as a current golf coach, you're going to have to have access to force plates. You're going to have to have access to a launch monitor. You're going to need access to 3D motion capture because the game has changed and we have to be able to keep up with it. And a lot of people out there, you know, play the game of golf as that, a game. But for those of you that are wanting to get better or wanting to hit the ball farther or wanting to be more consistent, this information is key because without it, we're guessing. And when we're guessing, we're kind of relying on maybe old information that isn't that relevant. And even if you do some of that stuff, will you hit the ball a little straighter? Probably. But you're more than likely not going to be the longest hitter in your group without understanding how to create that leverage against the ground. So, you know, if you're somebody that is interested in getting better and is seeking instruction, you know, one of the big things that I would be looking at when I look at a coach is A, who have they worked with? B, have they gotten any better? And C, where does their information come from? Are they staying up to date? Are they going to conferences? Are they learning uh from other coaches and other professionals? You know, for me, um, I'm I'm I'm I'll be upfront about it. You know, I haven't been to a golf continuing education in quite some time. And the reason for that is, you know, I have a fairly good understanding of what the golf club needs to do with this current ball. What I do attend a lot is medical conferences, and I tend to wind up with a lot of like surgeons, and they're like, wait, wait, you don't you're not a surgeon, like you just teach golf. Why are you here? And it's because I want to understand the physiology that goes into this so that when I see a golf swing misbehaving, instead of thinking that the golf club has, you know, decided to have a bad day, now I can actually understand, well, the body is stuck doing this or doing that, and I've got to work the body in a different way to get the club to behave how I need it to behave, to be delivered in a way to where this player can have some consistency or stability within the club face and be able to create speed without potentially hurting themselves. Because that's what's the scariest part about all this is golf has become much more athletic, as I said earlier. People are hitting the ball way, way harder. And the big thing that we're seeing more of than we've ever seen before is we're seeing more injuries that are golf related. And the reason for that is because a lot of the old modeling, as I said, doesn't account for the ground reaction forces. Now, one of the big ground reaction force kind of scenarios or principles that we have to think about is we have to think about how we slow this club down. If we're going to accelerate the club quicker, because we can with a 10K watermelon on a stick and a urethane golf ball and more loft in our hands, well, we have to keep in mind that from a physiological perspective, I can only speed something up as much as I can slow it down. The body's not going to let you tear yourself apart or hurt yourself. But when we start trying to send it anyway, and we don't have a good grasp of how to create a strong break with the lower body, what ends up happening is we put a lot of undue stress onto other joints, which leads to injury. So a lot of people out there that are suffering from golfer's elbow or tennis elbow, or they're having like wrist injuries or things like that, they tend to be people who are maybe using some modeling that's a little bit older, isn't very relevant to the modern game, and or they don't understand the physiology of how to create a good break, which allows for a seamless and efficient transfer of energy from the ground through the body out through the club without putting undue stress onto the joints. And that's where I think a lot of people are really missing the mark and why you're seeing such high injury rates. I also think that there's a lot of people out there who have their children playing golf, young people playing golf, and they keep telling these young people that they got to hit it farther, they got to hit it farther, they got to hit it farther. Well, as a young person who hasn't fully developed yet, you are really at risk of injury when you start chasing speed because you potentially don't have everything developed yet that you need to be creating maximum speed and safely slowing down that golf club. And when you can't slow it down, like I said, it puts a lot of undue stress onto these joints. And for young people, these joints aren't fully formed yet. They're kind of rubbery or gumby at the ends because they're still growing. So when we start putting all this stress on a not fully formed joint, not only do we potentially cause injury, but we also start seeing developmental problems down the road. Because as we all know, golf is a one-sided rotary action, and we're not generally doing anything to offset that and doing work on the other side of the body. Once again, a lot of people haven't adopted and understood that one of the best things you can do for your golf game is to be physically fit and to be mobile on both sides of the body. And that's where I think you see that the tour players and the high-level athletes that play golf are really way more conscious of doing the work in the gym, which isn't just lifting. There's a lot of mobility and kind of PT style stuff going on out there, but that's where we're seeing the evolution of golf really, in my opinion, the most, is that so much of the golf training is now happening away from the driving range, happening away from the golf course, and happening more in a gym PT type space, because that's where golfers can really train the motor pattern. That's where they can make the change necessary to make it. Because the minute we go to the driving range and put a golf club in our hands, that's when all of a sudden, like we kind of go back to what we know how to do because we're worried about what the ball does and we feel judgment. So I think it's really interesting how golf has evolved, how it's changing. Um, I just in my career, you know, being I just turned 41 years old, um, you know, I've been playing golf since I was six or seven, and kind of going back and thinking about what we used to do and what we tried to do, and now kind of how the game has evolved and and what's kind of been blown out of the water, so to speak, and and what isn't what isn't considered factual anymore, it's really surprising to me. And then every day when I come in and and I'm I'm privileged enough and and have the honor of coaching people, getting people on force plates and and track man and and 3D motion capture and looking at how they do it, and you know, the body is always full of surprises. Uh, so it's a constant learning, it's a constant evolution. And I I don't think that there is a way to swing a golf club. I think there's a lot of different ways to swing the golf club and get it done at a high level. But I do think there is a way to move the human body, and I think that's pretty well understood at this point. That's why we have, you know, a hip surgeon. He understands how to fix a hip because hips are supposed to move a certain way. And he's able to go in there no matter how you play or how you do your thing, and able to fix your hip because he has this understanding of how hips work. Now, I'm not saying that I'm as smart as a hip surgeon, but I do understand the sequencing of the body. I do understand how the muscles and ligaments contribute to the golf swing and how the myofascial system kind of transfers that load through the body uh from the ground out to the club. And when we start understanding some of this from a physiological perspective and we start kind of checking the box with the movement, like I said, the golf swing becomes much more manageable. So I think that's cool. I think it's really exciting. You know, as somebody who never played at the highest level that he wanted to, um, you know, I don't have to rely on my shortcomings or my lack of understanding that I'm gonna pass those on to my clients because now having a better understanding of what can and will happen, it's much easier for me to be a better coach than I was a player. And I think that's amazing. That's I love it. Like if you made me pick uh between playing golf and teaching golf, I'm teaching all day long, man, because I love it. It's really what I'm passionate about. I still love to play golf. I still can play golf at a fairly high level. Um, and I've gotten better. You know, that's that's the interesting thing as well. You know, they say you shouldn't teach yourself golf. Well, luckily with this technology, the force plates, the track man, the 3D motion capture, you know, it's I'm able to coach myself and I've gained speed. Uh, I hit it straighter. I probably two summers ago had one of the better summers of my life playing golf, uh, broke par a whole bunch, um, hit it farther, you know, just really enjoyed the game a lot. Last year wasn't my best year, but it was also one of my busiest years coaching. Uh, so I just didn't have the time to put into it as well as kind of dealing with some other things. But, you know, I'm excited about where golf is going. I know there's a lot of people pushing back against a lot of the technology and things like that, but that's always the way it is. You know, the the old guard always kind of wants to be right and wants to, you know, be able to kind of ride off into the sunset and doesn't want to invest. And I love investing in this. Like, you know, I have multiple sets of force plates, which you're never going to make a return on your money with. I have multiple track man units. You know, we're talking about bringing in another 3D motion capture system. I love investing in this because I want to measure, I want to not rely on what I think I know. And it's very important for me and for anybody associated with measured golf to, you know, get it right for the client in front of us, however, they need to do it. But at the end of the day, there is a lot of overlap in what we say because everybody that we coach golf to is a human being. And as I said, while there are different ways to swing a golf club, there's really only one sequence that works really well for the human anatomy. And if you can get people in a better sequence and kind of understanding their internal forces, counter the golf club forces, and then getting them able to take advantage of the ground, this whole process just gets a lot easier for the golfers. So I think it's cool. I think it's interesting. Uh, I'm not sure if you will feel the same, but at the end of the day, I got some great advice um not too long ago, and somebody told me they go, if you try to make content worried about what people are gonna like, it's always gonna be bad content. But if you make content that you find interesting and like talking about, generally there's an audience for it. So I'm hoping that that uh advice holds true here. So been a fun episode. I've enjoyed this conversation. I I love looking back at golf and seeing how far it's come. Um, you know, football doesn't have that history. Um, you know, a lot of sports don't have that history, but golf does. And, you know, it comes from a very primitive place. And to see how much it's evolved and how much it's changed, uh, I think that just speaks to the that kind of itch that we all have as golfers. And I've said it before, but I definitely think golf is more of a religion than a game, especially if you've been bitten by the bug, which is most people who play it. So um really cool. I love it. I think it's great. I think it does a lot of wonderful things. It teaches us a lot of skills that we can transfer to other parts of our life. But I also think that we have to keep up with it and we have to grow and we have to evolve, and we have to recognize where it's been and honor our tradition, but we also have to recognize what our potential is with this. And I think golf can continue to get better. I think the players are gonna continue to get better. Um, I think the scoring records and the and all the records really should be broken. The problem is that you know, the people that are in power are doing everything they can to kind of protect the record books, in my opinions. But I think records are meant to be broken. I think it's gonna be very interesting to see where golf is in another five to ten years. Um, I obviously with all the AI stuff that's out there and the apps that you can submit your golf swing to, and AI kind of tells you what to do. I, you know, while I don't necessarily agree with that right now, it will get better. It will evolve. And I think there's a lot of application there for a lot of people to get better at golf. And once again, you know, if I had to pick between the kind of old school driving range guy that's standing out there with his arms crossed and just looking at it with his naked eye and feeding your golf swing to an AI app, I'm gonna pick the AI app just because at least it's based off of more relevant information for the current game versus being stuck in the past and going, well, this works and it worked for me and it'll work for you. You know, it's not that's not really the way it goes. So I'm excited. I think it's gonna be interesting, I think it's gonna be fun. Hopefully, we're still doing the podcast in another 10 years and we can look back and go, man, look at how much it really has changed. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, uh, was able to take advantage of some of the Black Friday sales and are looking forward to the Christmas season coming up and hopefully your family's there and lots of gifts, lots of family time, uh, lots of whatever brings you joy. So thanks again for listening. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to this podcast. That helps us out tremendously. We have both the podcast, which you can find anywhere you download your favorite podcast, or you can also find the video feed of this podcast uh by going to YouTube, searching measured golf, and you'll find our channel there. We have lots of golf swing videos as well. So if you are interested in getting some more relevant information for your golf swing, you can find plenty of that there. We are expecting in the new year to get the YouTube channel back up and running from more of an instructional side, uh, which we're very, very excited about. But we also have social media as well. So you can find us on social media at measured golf. You can also find me at the forceplate guy. And if you can't remember any of that, you can always go to our website at measuredgolf.com where everything is linked. So thanks so much for tuning in, and until next time, keep grinding.

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Michael Dutro, PGA

Host