The Measured Golf Podcast

Why Chasing Numbers Can Hurt Your Game

• Michael Dutro, PGA • Season 6 • Episode 14

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Snow on the ground, swing on the mind. We dive into how to practice smart on a launch monitor so your game actually holds up on real turf, in real wind, with real consequences. Instead of chasing viral ball speed and “perfect” numbers, we zero in on what travels: neutral patterns, true carry distances, balanced dispersion, wedge control, and putting speed you can trust.

We start by busting two big myths: that every great swing must live in an in-to-out path and that hitting up with the driver is an automatic win. You’ll hear why many elite players live slightly left of zero and thrive with a consistent fade, and how extreme AoA and closed face-to-path can create low-spin knuckleballs that look long on a screen but won’t stay in a fairway. From there, we build a plan for stability—targeting roughly minus two to plus two degrees of path—and show how to balance left-right misses so uneven lies can bend your shot shape instead of breaking your round.

Next, we make carry king. Learn how to map each club’s carry on good and common misses, why draw vs fade affects carry and rollout, and how to use front-middle-back yardages to pick smarter approach numbers. For scoring, we go deep on wedges: use distance ladders, track peak height, center the strike around groove three to four, and flight shots lower with enough spin to stop in a hop or two. Then we unlock putting with data most golfers ignore: face angle rules start line, side spin can curve putts on “flat” surfaces, and 1.68 mph entry speed keeps more of the cup available and beats the tiny ramp around the hole.

We wrap with a pragmatic blueprint: learn what the metrics mean, choose the few that move your score, play the “pins” strategy to avoid short-siding, and study your misses as much as your pured shots. When the snow melts, the golfers who practiced this way won’t just look good on a monitor—they’ll post better numbers on the card. Enjoy the episode, subscribe for more practical coaching, and share this with a range buddy who’s still chasing total instead of carry.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Measured Golf Podcast, where you, the listeners, sit down and join me, Michael, as we discuss all things golf. And it's officially upon us. It is winter here in the great state of Michigan. We've got six inches of snow on the ground, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. And with that said, we are a booming here at our facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Lots of people are coming in, wanting to get that work in and trying to get ready for when the snow finally does dissipate, probably sometime in April or May. So with that said, we're going to dive into a popular conversation and talk about how we can get better this winter and how for a lot of people who act have access to a launch monitor, the search for answers can be very misleading. And how looking at solely launch monitor numbers can lead to a lot of problems down the road when we get back out onto the golf course and we don't have the launch monitor there telling us what's good and bad. So should be a fun conversation. Looking forward to having this one. I've said that multiple times on this podcast. I think we need objective data. It's definitely how we are going to get better versus basing everything off the ball, landing on target, and claiming that we did something, whether we did or not. Having that objective data allows us to look at maybe how we got there a little bit more. But when we talk about objective data, we have to understand that there are multiple lenses that we can view the golf swing from. So when I talk about multiple lenses, what I'm referencing is when we use a launch monitor, depending on which unit you're using, you're getting ball flight data and you're getting club delivery data. So yes, we are getting a better understanding of what the ball is doing and what the club is doing when we deliver it, but that doesn't take into account how we got there and what was used to get there. So if you're really trying to layer in the lenses here, we could maybe use a launch monitor to get that ball and uh club data. But then when we start looking at other things, what about the human being that moves the golf club? How do we get data from that? Well, we could layer in some 3D motion capture. So a lot of people have maybe had a Gears uh coaching experience. Maybe they've used Sportsbox AI, which isn't real 3D, but it is definitely tracking the body as it moves and giving us some numbers on that. So we could look at you know that lens a little bit. We could also look at force plates, as you all know, I'm a very big fan of, and look at how we're generating this movement in three dimensions. So we could really layer in a lot of different lenses to get a more complete and accurate picture of how we got to that ball flight. But for a lot of people that don't have access to 3D motion capture and don't have access to force plates, a lot of us think that the absolute answer and the truth lies in the launch monitor. And that's where I think it's a little misleading for a lot of people out there. And I've seen people chasing track man or foresight or full swing data really kind of destroy their golf game in the process of trying to find better numbers. So I thought it would be good to kind of talk about, you know, what we can do in order to better use this instrument to make our golf games better and more sound for when the snow melts and we get back outside and get playing golf again. So a lot of people, you know, when they go and use these launch monitors, they claim to, you know, really have an understanding of all the numbers and how it all relates. And a lot of people really are using bad information from the jump. And what I mean by that is a lot of people out there believe that an end-to-out path or a positive club path is better than an out-to-end or negative club path. And that's not true. But there's a lot of people out there who think that if their club path isn't positive or rightward or end-out, that they're never going to be a good golfer. And the reference point that I would use is if you look at Scotty Scheffler, he tends to predominantly have a leftward club path and hits a lot of cuts, as do a lot of players on tour. So the idea that we have to have this end to out club path or draw pattern, uh, I don't, I don't buy it, I don't believe it. I'm not saying that there aren't players who play better with a draw pattern than a fade pattern. Of course there is. But at the same time, I don't think we should be going into a session where we're using some of this data and being upset if the data isn't end-out or positive or to the right for a right-handed golfer, because that isn't solely the mark of a good player. The other thing is that a lot of people think that when they hit their driver, that they have to have an upward angle of attack. And I think that this is really detrimental to a lot of people with their driver. Now, if you have amazing face stability and are doing a lot of other things well, can a positive attack angle help your golf game and help your driver specifically? In some cases, yes. Um, I would much prefer to see an attack angle with a driver maybe one or two degrees upward versus three or four degrees downward for sure. But at the same time, I think maybe trying to find neutral is a little better place for most golfers. Uh, a lot of people trying to hit up on the ball end up fighting a massive face closure issue. And we know that when we get the driver moving left in the air, that we're lowering the spin rate and we're creating a less predictable ball flight by by and large. So it's very important that when we're using this data, we're not trying to compare our data to other people. And I think that that's where it all goes wrong for most people is that they come in with these preconceived ideas of exactly what their data should look like, how it should kind of go together, and then they kind of try to chase that, so to speak. But a lot of people are not taking advantage of kind of squeezing the low-hanging fruit first. And the thing that really drives me bonkers a bit is the fact that so many people, when they come in and do a session on a launch monitor inside, you know, when you look at the dispersion of the golf ball, we tend to see that it's pretty heavily skewed, excuse me, pretty heavily skewed either to the left of the target line or to the right of the target line. And there's a lot of players that once again think the draw pattern is the way to go, generally because it produces more distance on a launch monitor when it comes to total. But when we look at their dispersion, you know, 75-80% of the shots they hit finish left of the target line. And I don't think that's a great pattern because what happens when we go out and play golf on the golf course and we have a ball below our feet? Well, a lot of golfers that struggle and claim to not have very good course management and miss a lot of greens, this is for you. Because we cannot force our stock shot onto every shot we're going to face on the golf course. And what I mean by that is so many golfers, when they're warming up prior to playing golf, they go and kind of find their stock swing. And maybe it's a draw, maybe it's a fade, maybe it's fairly straight. But let's just stick with the draw scenario for now. They're used to seeing that ball draw. So now they're out on the golf course and they get the ball below their feet and they're thinking draw, draw, draw. Well, it's going to be very difficult for that player to hit a draw with the ball below their feet because typically that's going to produce more of a shot that fades left or right for a right-handed player. So I think it's really important that we don't fall in love with a particular shape and don't continually reinforce that shape. So where a lot of people struggle, I feel like, in a launch monitor session, is that maybe they hit a few that overdraw the line to start out, but the minute that we start doing that, we have to start balancing out the dispersion. And we want to try to hit a few fades. And what you'll find is that a lot of golfers who have a heavy draw pattern can't get a golf ball to fade to save their life. And this is very problematic because we're going to have to hit both shots on the golf course due to the various lies. And that's where I think a lot of people get misled with chasing data off of these launch monitors because we're always hitting it inside, at least, off of a flat lie. And we're just not going to run across very many flat lies on the golf course. Generally, the ball is going to want to be above our feet or below our feet. And it's very important for us to have a pattern that is neutral so that we can hit really good golf shots off both of those lies. So super important when we go in and are using this information to kind of try to have a more well-rounded and neutral pattern when we deliver the club. So you might be asking yourself, what do I consider neutral in terms of club path? Well, I kind of consider anywhere between negative two or two to the left or positive two, two to the right, kind of falling in that range to be what I would call a neutral pattern. A lot of golfers that come in and use our facility here at Measured Golf, they tend to have a pattern that's a little, or I'm sorry, a club path that's a little bit more rightward or leftward than two degrees. And when we start getting out to five, six degrees either way, we're really forced into a particular shot shape and more importantly, are going to have a very difficult time hitting a kind of neutral and or shot that curves according to the lie. Once again, if I have a pathward as a right-handed golfer that's six degrees to the right, and I get that ball below my feet, that's going to be a very difficult shot for me to manage because my pattern is kind of doing the opposite of what the lie is doing. And now all of a sudden, it's going to be much more difficult for me to start that ball on my target and get that ball to finish on the green. So I think when we go into these scenarios, if we're seeing a path that's five or six degrees to the right, and then we're trying to leave that alone and just match the face up to get the ball to land on the target line, I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors because yes, we now know what the formula is to get the ball to go straight, but once again, that is the formula to get the ball to go straight off of a flat lie and a practice situation. The chances that we're able to figure that out with one chance on the golf course is a lot smaller than when we have a whole hour and we're doing a session in a launch monitor bay. So I just think that's something that a lot of people fall into. I've seen it happen a whole bunch, and I really think that a lot of the reason that happens is because people truly believe that a draw goes farther than a fade. And yes, from a total perspective, that's probably true because we know when we hit a draw pattern versus a fade pattern, the spin rate tends to be a little less, and then we see that the ball runs out a little farther. But one of the other big traps that I see is people coming in and hitting irons and looking at the total number. We don't care about total. And as a matter of fact, all the launch monitors are not doing a great job in the range setting of giving us a true total number because they are assuming that the ball is hitting the driving range ground, not hitting a green. So for a lot of us that are looking at that total number, yes, it makes our ego feel better. Yes, it makes us feel like we're hitting the ball farther, but in reality, we need to understand the carry number because that's the number that is really going to affect us the most on the golf course. How far can we carry that ball? And that's where I think you can really do yourself a lot of favors and start understanding how far do you carry the club, not only on a good one, but on a miss hit. And I'm not talking about the worst shot you've ever hit, but I am talking about hitting one a little on the toe or a little on the heel or a little high or a little low. What is your average carry kind of looking like? What's the minimum? What's the maximum? Because a lot of us are also kind of doing the same thing on the golf course. And what I mean by that is a lot of us play golf with a rangefinder these days. I know I do, and it's certainly sped things up, and I don't have to go looking for sprinkler heads. But when we shoot the the flag with the laser, and then we get a number, it's like, okay, well, what club you know goes exactly that far? But that's a very small piece of information and doesn't really tell me a lot because that pen can be on the front of the green, that pen can be on the back of the green, and I need to understand that I'm trying to get the ball onto the green. It doesn't matter what your handicap level is, we're trying to get the ball onto the green. So, what would be a better piece of information to have is what is it to the back of the green, what is it to the front of the green, and then we kind of more or less play that middle number. So if I have a pin that's at 150, the back and it's on the middle, and the back of the green is 160, and the short and the front of the green is 140, now all of a sudden it's like, okay, let's go back to when I was hitting balls on the simulator or on a launch monitor. And what was the club that I could hit that roughly went 150, but when I missed it a little bit, at least went 140 in the air, and the air being the key. So we're talking about carry. And by better understanding that, we're gonna be able to land more balls on the putting surface. And generally speaking, for most types of players, the quicker we can get the ball into the green, the lower the scores are gonna be. A lot of us don't chip well, a lot of us don't pitch well, and a lot of us aren't going to make pars from the bunkers, which tend to be around the greens. So we need to have a good understanding of our carry number, and we need to understand not only how far do I carry it when I absolutely flush it, but how far do I carry it when I don't hit it perfect, because a lot of us are not going to play golf with perfect shots. As a matter of fact, none of us are, and that's why there's always kind of that feeling at the end of a round to where even if you shoot a low score, it always feels like there was one or two more out there because we don't play perfect golf. So we don't want to go out there and be trying to play perfect numbers, and that's really going to help us find more greens. We want to have a little margin of error. If you think that you're somebody who doesn't struggle with this, I'm more than willing to take that bet with you because if we charted where your shots are landing on the golf course, I would be willing to bet that most of the greens missed are going to be missed short and not long. And this is something that I look at with a lot of our junior players and a lot of players that I coach on the golf course is how many times do we miss one long? And if the answer is never, we're not playing the right number into the in the green. Every now and then, and look, we don't want to arow every green, that's not what I'm going at going after either. But we do want to be missing a couple pins long from time to time. If we're never getting the ball past the pin, then we are not picking a good number from the fairway or from the rough wherever we're hitting that approach shot from. So, similar to how we talked about the dispersion left to right and wanting to have an equal amount of misses both left and right when we're working uh on a launch monitor, we also want to have a similar occurrence to where, hey, you know, I'm hitting an eight-iron. My eight iron, if I hit it pretty well, is like a 155, 160 club for me. Great. Okay, so now when I pick my target on the track man and I set it at 155, yes, I'm gonna see most of the shots that I miss hit a little bit come up short of that, but I also expect to see some of the shots I hit long of that, because that's telling me that I've got a little wiggle room in there, and I'm not simply trying to hit this thing as hard and far as I can every single time to get it to that 155 number. Because realistically, that's not going to happen on the golf course as well. Another nice thing about having a launch monitor is we can start kind of figuring out hey, if I fade this a little bit, how far does it carry? Versus if I draw this a little bit, how far does it carry? And what we're gonna find is when we talk about total, generally the draw goes a little farther than the fade. But when we're talking about carry, generally the fade goes a little farther than the draw. And it's the same reason, right? We know that a fade tends to spin a little bit more than a draw. And when we're talking about carry, we're talking about hang time and keeping the ball in the air. Well, what keeps it up there? That's going to be spin rate. So once again, getting a good feel for hey, when I fade it, you know, maybe it goes three yards shorter. When I draw it, maybe it goes three yards farther. I'm sorry, I said that backwards. When I draw it, it goes three yards shorter. When I fade it, it goes three yards farther. Carry. So when we kind of start understanding these pieces of data, now when I go to the golf course and I'm trying to figure out how to fit it between 157 and 167, now I have a better understanding of, hey, I've got the ball below my feet. This is going to want to fade a little bit more, ball's going to carry a little bit more. And now I kind of can start coming up with a better number to start with. And the more accurate that I can make that number that I'm choosing, the better I can be at picking the correct golf club based off the data that I have. So I think that's super helpful. Uh, a lot of people don't look at that kind of stuff, but generally when we're looking at our dispersion, we want to have an equal amount left and right, and we want to have, you know, maybe 75% of our miss hits a little short, and then maybe 25% that we hit really, really good a little bit long. And that's kind of a good recipe for having a well-rounded pattern. Now, when we're kind of hitting a lot of shots in a simulated environment, like I said, a lot of us start trying to kind of do the same thing. We want to be consistent, we want to be repeatable. But I think when we think of golf, it's very variable and we have a lot of different shots that we have to hit. So, like I said, if you're somebody who goes in and every ball is drawing and over drawing the line, okay, fine. Now let's try to hit some fades and get some on the right side of the line. When we get out onto the golf course, we call that we have a game that we kind of have our players do called pins. And pins is a pretty fun game, pretty challenging game, but it really helps the golfer frame things a little bit better. So the way that you play pins is you start looking at where the pen is on the green before hitting your approach shot or on a par three with your your T shot. But we kind of determine hey, that pen is on the left side of the green, or hey, that pen is on the right side of the green, and or hey, this is short sighted, or there's a big bunker here that I don't want to play around with. And now it's like, okay, well, do we want to keep this shot on the right side of the pen, or do we want to keep this shot on the left side of the pen? And now the game is. Is that we declare which side of the pen we need the ball to finish on. And from there we can go ahead and track that. And what you'll find, especially if you go out in the spring and start playing pens, is that this is kind of tough to do. And this is where once again reading the lie and understanding the shot shape that's going to be created based off the lie is super duper for super duper helpful because we've got to learn how to eliminate the short-sighted miss. So if you're somebody who is shooting in the 80s and wants to get in the 70s, or you're somebody shooting in the 70s that wants to get down closer to scratch, or you're somebody who's just trying to get a little bit better, generally thinking this out a little bit can really save you a lot of strokes because if we can keep the ball out of the problem area around the green, this is going to make the chipping and pitching a lot easier for us. This is going to make hopefully the putting a lot easier for us. And more importantly, this should help us get the ball on the green sooner. So this is a great thing that you can do. Uh, I know Foresight has a range option, trackman has a range option. And the thing that I really like about Track Man is that you can go and start kind of playing some of these simulations on the range and some of the other uh some of the other applications they have, but to where it starts kind of alternating the pin around different greens. And now we can play pins inside. It's like, okay, where's the fat part of this green? Where am I the most safe? What's the distance that I need this ball to go? And then we can try to execute that shot. When we're firing at every pen, we're really taking on the maximum amount of risk, trying to get the most reward and hit it close to the hole. But one of the things that made Tiger Wood so great is his ability to play pens. And he would literally hit one to 25 feet, you know, left or right of a pen, and be fine with it because it was on the green and it was on the correct side of the pen, and it had taken the trouble of that hole out of the equation. And that's called discipline. What young golfers and hyper-aggressive golfers tend to do is they tend to feel like they're good enough to hit it at the pen every single time. But the green keeper isn't an idiot and is smart and sometimes moves that pen left or right towards the trouble. And wouldn't you know it, we get suckered into it time and time again. So creating a good strategy using the data that we've collected is super, super helpful. The other big thing, kind of moving away from the dispersion, is when we're on these launch monitors, where I think we make the biggest mistake is we tend to only look at the good ones and we tend to kind of neglect the bad ones and pretend they didn't happen. But what a launch monitor can really provide for us is a better understanding of our miss. And I think that's huge. Because as I said, very rarely, if ever, are you going to go out and play perfect golf? So we're going to have misses. Now, the thing is, is do the misses make us feel very good about ourselves? Probably not. Do they bruise the ego a little bit? Probably so. But at the same time, if we understand that our miss has something to do with a face-to-path that's too closed or too open, or if we understand that, you know, the strike point on the face tends to move towards the heel or towards the toe, that really starts providing valuable information for what we need to do with our motion to try to clean it up a little bit to where that miss isn't occurring. We have to deal with our misses. And we need to know how far our misses go. We need to know the general shape that our misses have. But more importantly, if we're working on our golf game and working on our golf swing, trying to become more well-rounded golfers, it's very important that we start to understand these misses. And that's where we really can gain a lot of information from a launch monitor and understand the difference between, hey, when I hit one good, these are the numbers it produces. When I hit one bad, these are the numbers that it produces. And now it's like, okay, well, it feels like I'm doing this, but in reality, here's the objective data that shows exactly what happened and how we got here. So I think that's super, super helpful for people. A lot of people don't look at it that way. They generally just want to, you know, come in and get that total number as far as they can. And if they can get a couple of them straight, they feel like they're right right around the corner from being a tour player. But generally speaking, we have to play with our misses and we have to understand our pattern so that when we go out on the golf course and get a lot of uneven lies, now all of a sudden we can really kind of work the ball in a meaningful way that's going to find more greens. So super duper helpful. The big thing, and probably the most important thing that I think we have to avoid when it comes to chasing data is this whole ball speed thing. Um, I'm sure you have an Instagram account, I'm sure that you have YouTube, and you know, there's a million of these videos of people who are hitting drivers uh on a launch monitor, typically inside. They don't even have the shot tracer up, they don't have the dispersion view up, they just have ball speed up, and they're just swinging for the absolute fences, and they're beating and banging on their chest and hooting and hollering and talking about how fast the ball's going. But we have to keep in mind that anytime we're hitting golf balls on a launch monitor, when I have a face-to-path that is closed, I am going to create a higher ball speed. Let me say that again. When I have a face to path that is closed, all else equal, I'm going to produce higher ball speeds. Ball speed is not the king that people keep trying to make it out to be. And what I think would be interesting is the same situation where people were only putting up ball speed on the screen and and care and total, generally, it's like ball speed total. But if they were putting up the tracer, you're going to see that a lot of these super high ball speeds are left, left of target, and they're not spinning much, and they're rolling across the ground a whole lot. And I've talked about this on a previous episode, but generally, if you optimize your rollout on a launch monitor at landing at 38 degrees, which is considered optimal, what we're going to see is that generally it kind of calculates out to about 35 yards of rollout. Now, I don't know where you're listening to this podcast from, but here in Michigan, even in the middle of the summer, you're not getting 35 yards of rollout because the courses tend to be soft because we get plenty of rain here. But most places aren't getting 35 yards of roll. That's not a Michigan-only thing. So my point is that they're probably the guys that are hitting it left going left and a super high ball speed, they're probably getting even more than the 35 because left going left also has a lower spin rate. So generally a lower spin rate means it's not as high in the air. So now we're landing it underneath the 38 degree optimal and it hits the ground and just takes off running. So a lot of these people that are hitting these high ball speeds that everybody thinks is the answer can't put it in play on the golf course. Because as we know, left going left is a very unstable ball flight and tends to wind up finding trouble. It hits the ground hard, it keeps going, generally doesn't stop until we get another ball out of the bag. So I see this not only with driver, but I see this with people hitting seven irons, and I see this with people hitting all the clubs in their bag, and they're just really enamored with the ball speed. And I just don't think it's the king, like a lot of us claim that it would be. So one function that I really enjoy on track man is this thing called the optimizer. And the thing that I like the most about the optimizer is that I can select whether I want to optimize carry or if I want to maximize carry plus plus roll, which is total. And I never really look at the total that much. I generally only look at the carry because as I've said before, carry is our paycheck and what we put in the bank, and total tends to be the interest, and you can't count on that. So I really want to make sure that I'm optimizing my carry and then creating a dispersion pattern that both is a little bit right and a little bit left. That's not a two-way miss. That's just a stable pattern. And I, as a golfer, have to be variable enough to when the shot or I'm sorry, when the T shot calls for a draw, I can get one to fall left. And when it calls for a fade, I can get one to fade. And then one of the big things is when I talk about shapes, if we're really creating stable ball flights and stable patterns or neutral patterns, we should be seeing a 3% or less curve. That's not hard to figure out. All you do is take the carry number, okay? It's in yardage. So we multiply that by three to get it in feet, and then we divide the total number left or right of feet offline by that carry number and feet. And that gives us a percentage, and now we kind of know where we're at. There's a lot of people out there, especially our friends that don't have this neutral club path who are really curving the ball a lot in the air. And we got to keep in mind that when we play outside, A, not every T-box is level, and B, there's this thing called wind. So if I have a right to left wind and I'm used to having a 5-6% amount of curve, that thing is really going to be hard to land in a fairway, especially if there's any trees on either side. So it's super important that we understand where we're trying to work the golf ball. And more importantly, understanding how much that ball is curving. It's going to be a lot less curvature typically off of a neutral club path than it's going to be off of one of these club paths that's five or six degrees left or right. So once again, that strengthens the argument for creating a more neutral club path. So super helpful, something that needs to be looked at uh and definitely applicable to when we go out and play golf. Now, the big thing that's really taken off, I would say, in the last couple years is I've seen some people who, you know, generally are pretty okay with their wedges, and then they come in chasing numbers once again that they believe to be true and trying to force these numbers to happen and have really destroyed their wedge play. And where I think golfers undervalue a launch monitor is we can really do some good things in terms of getting good with our scoring wedges when it comes to using a launch monitor. Now, scoring wedges, distance wedges, kind of the same thing in my eyes, but we need to understand the carry, the trajectory, the spin, and then more importantly, we need to get it online. And I think, you know, it's a little bit older information, but you know, Dustin Johnson was kind of the the poster child for being a great driver of the golf ball and not being able to wedge it very well. Well, then all the commentators talked about how he got real serious into track man with his distance wedges, really dialed him in and went on quite a tear before he left for live. So how do we use track man or foresight or full swing or any of the other units to get better with our distance wedges? Well, the first step is how far do they go? And how consistently can you make them go that number? And like we talked about, having this equal dispersion, we're not going to have a lot of dispersion with these wedges because we're trying to hit them a specific number. And that's hard to do when we have a variable trajectory or have a variable shape. Generally, the more loft on a golf club, the harder it is to curve it left to right or right to left. So if you think about your driver, it's very easy to curve in the air. If you think about your pitching wedge, it's kind of hard to curve it. It's because it has more loft. So one of the key things that we want to look at and think about is not so much the curve or the side to side dispersion, but we want to think about the front to back dispersion. And this is something that you can do with a basic launch monitor is hey, I'm gonna hit kind of my stock shot with my wedge, and I want it to go, let's say 60 yards. Okay, perfect. So how many shots can you hit that are plus minus, let's say three yards or five yards or ten yards, depending on your skill level? How many shots can you hit in a row that are in this plus minus range? And then the other thing you want to look at is how consistent is the trajectory on that shot? What's the peak height? That's another great way because that's kind of the poor man's way of understanding the spin rate. Now, if you're somebody who tends to hit the ball kind of low because you trap it with a wedge, now it's going to become interesting to see what that peak height is and then how the spin correlates to that. Because what you're going to see is that with your better players, they typically are hitting their wedges much lower than an amateur with a high handicap. The reason for that is it's easier to control our distance, keeping the ball closer to the ground than launching it way up into the air. Keeps it out of the wind a little bit more, but generally makes this easier to kind of calculate how far we need to hit it. Now, the difference between somebody who's really good and flighting his wedges and somebody who's not so good tends to be contact. And contact is really king when it comes to creating good wedge play. We need to be able to hit the middle of that face. Just so you know, in case this hasn't been told to you, a centered strike on a wedge tends to be somewhere between the third and fourth groove up from the bottom. That's where the middle of that mass is, and that's where we want to be hitting these wedges. Now, to hit it three, four grooves up on the face, that's where we have to have that descending blow and have to have some forward shafling. Where a lot of amateurs really struggle with their wedge play is that they tend to not create very much forward shafleing, which makes the dynamic loft really high. Also tends to lead to the spin loft being really high, and they tend to launch it too high with too much spin. And then if they're hitting it into a wind, it really gets ate up and it's hard to be consistent with our wedges and the distance that they create. So it's super important that we're kind of looking at that peak trajectory and then understanding if the contact is good enough to create enough spin to where we can hit a wedge in maybe 30, 40 feet of elevation, but still have enough stopping power to get that ball to take one hop and then stop. We're generally trying to get the wedges to stop very quickly on the green, and we don't want to be, you know, necessarily having to learn the fine art of, you know, taking the hands out of it, so to speak, and lowering the spin rate. We're trying to hit the super spinny one that comes back at the hole. We want to kind of have it hit once, maybe twice, and then stop. That's generally what I would consider to be enough stopping power with a wedge, but we want to be able to try to create that maybe between you know 30 to 50 feet of elevation with the shot. We don't want to be getting this thing way up in the air at 100 feet, because generally, A, I'm sorry, generally, that's going to get up in the wind, and now we're going to have a tougher time controlling that distance and controlling the direction. So I think it's super helpful, and we can do a lot of those things. But I think when it comes to walking in and looking at your wedge play and thinking that it has to spin at a certain amount or that it has to launch at a certain number, I don't think that's the way we want to go. We want to understand how we're creating these numbers more so than what the numbers are. And we've got to learn what we're consistently good at doing versus what we really struggle to do. And once again, you can do some really great things. Uh, one of the things that we tend to do here with our junior players uh and our college players is we do a lot of ladders. So what a ladder looks like is we start with, let's say, a sand wedge, and we go, okay, I want you to, you know, pitch this 40 yards. Okay, so the plus minus for a college player is gonna be about three. So they've got to land at between 37 and 43 yards. Okay, let's say they do that. Great. So now we're gonna bump at five. Okay, so now 45 plus minus three. Okay, cool. Then 50 plus minus three. And we go as far as they can go with that sand wedge comfortably, which is generally gonna be, you know, somewhere between 100 and 120 yards comfortably. Okay. So there's a lot of numbers split by you know five yards at a time that we have to hit to complete the ladder with that sand wedge. But we can kind of video game this thing a little bit too, and you give them like three lives or whatever to try to get all the way through the ladder. But this is a way to really start understanding and identifying how hard we got to hit these, how to control these. You know, you can layer in some other metrics, you can layer in trajectory, uh, you can layer in a whole lot of things if you want, but in in simplest terms, we're trying to control the distance this ball is going and getting consistent at that. So the ladders are amazing. You can do it with this lob wedge, you can do it with the sand wedge, you can do it with a gap wedge, you can do it with a lot of different clubs, but these ladders are really, really helpful for developing feel and the skill of good distance wedge play. So I really like that. I think it's a super useful way to come in and use a launch monitor to get better at data, but it's also kind of making the data more actionable versus trying to chase certain numbers that pop up on the screen that maybe aren't as understood as well as they should be by everybody. So we can do a lot of good with the driver by stop chasing ball speed. We can do a lot of good with the irons by understanding the dispersion, we can do a lot of good with the wedges, kind of dialing in how far they're going in the trajectory. So there's a lot of good things you can do there. One of the amazing things that nobody really does, and I'm I'm kind of shocked, is you can do a whole lot of good with your putting using one of these launch monitors as well. So, you know, track man putting uh unbelievable. You know, it's it's really difficult for people to understand why they're missing putts. It's very difficult for people to understand entry speed. Um, I mean, that's a little bit easier because we can see how far the ball rolls past the hole or comes up short, but there's a lot of these finer points that we can understand when it comes to putting. And probably the king, which has been understood for a while, is face angle. And a lot of people don't understand or choose to ignore that a club face is a reaction to a club path, and maybe that couldn't be more so than when it comes to putting. So when it comes to putting, roughly 95% of the starting direction of the golf ball is going to be the face angle. And for those of you that kind of have a more out-to-end putting stroke or end-to-out putting stroke, that is going to start creating twist within the face. And now all of a sudden we start creating a lot of side spin on our putts. So we're very fortunate here at Measured Golf in Ann Arbor. We have a big well-put hydraulic table that we can put on and we can tilt. And when it's dead flat, I will have people and we use the lines, but I'll have people that the ball starts right on the line and is going right in the middle of the hole. And then let's say a quarter to a half of the way there, all of a sudden the ball curves. And a lot of the clients that don't understand side spin will look at me and be like, I thought this was flat. There's a break in it. No, there's not a break, there's just side spin. And where a lot of people aren't necessarily aware, um, is when we hit a golf ball, it's very easy to see it curve left to right or right to left uh because it's up in the sky and there's not much resistance other than air. But on the ground, if we have a path that's well out to end, and then we have a face that's open, guess what? We're kind of getting opposite kind of forces, if you will, going through that golf ball, and it creates a side spin on the ball. This is something that I'm surprised hasn't taken off more, but it is a very real phenomenon. Now, the thing is, is the golf ball is traveling along the ground. Now, because of the amount of friction, generally a lot of that side spin gets ate up with the friction, but on our smooth surface on our well-putt table, it tends to rear its ugly head, and we see balls curving even though it's a flat putt. So by getting golfers to understand the path in the face situation a little bit better, we're able to eliminate a lot of that side spin, which starts allowing for them to get the putt to not only start online, but to stay online. And then we can do a better job of hitting an efficient putt and get better at our speed control. Because obviously, when we hit the putt with an open face versus a closed face, that changes the ball speed. And if we're changing the ball speed, which I think is way more important than and putting than it is driving, when we change that ball speed, now we're changing the entry speed. And for a lot of you that haven't heard about entry speed before, entry speed is basically 1.68 miles an hour, uh, which creates a seven or makes the hole essentially 74% available to receive the ball. Now, we've all heard you want to ferment, we've all heard you want to dye it in, but in reality, we're at best case going to have 74% of the hole available to us at 1.68 miles an hour on a 12-stemp green, that comes out to one foot past the hole. Why is that important? Well, if you've been out putting before and the ball is kind of creeping up on the hole and looks like it's going to go in and then veers off at the very last second, that tends to be because of impurities around the hole. So when they cut these holes, they stick something in the ground and they kind of cut a hole. But then when they pull out the hole that they're trying to make, that raises all of the area around the actual hole. Now, when they go to tamp that back down, it's not an even application of pressure. Typically, there's a metal device laying on it and they walk around it, but that's not creating even pressure. So even though it looks flat to the naked eye, there tends to be kind of a ramp up to the hole. And if we don't have enough speed to carry through that ramp, that's what tends to get that ball to curve away from the hole at the very last second and really frustrates golfers. So that's why we want to have the ball moving at the appropriate speed, which is 1.68 miles an hour. Now, for a lot of you that say, well, when I dye it in, it's got a hundred percent chance. That is 100% true. But the problem with dyeing it in is one, it can find that ramp and it can kind of veer off at the last second. And two, we tend to leave putts short that way. Now, I'm not saying if you're 40 feet away from the hole, it's a bad thing, leaving the ball one inch short. That's a great putt. But when we have these putts that we should be making inside of five feet, generally is a good rule of putts we're trying to make. What we want to do is we want to be trying to hit that putt with six feet of speed because that's going to make 74% of the hole available to us. We're not going to leave any of those putts short, and it's going to give it the best opportunity to go in and fall into the hole versus hitting one of these impurities or hitting the ramp and then veering off. So super cool stuff you can do with the track man putting, understanding the face and path, super helpful. Okay. If you're lucky enough to have a well putt, when you get the speed control a lot better, you'd be amazed at how much better people quote unquote read greens and can get the ball to go in on breaking putts. But that's really a game of speed. So, how do we create the speed and putting? Well, generally, it's created with the loft of the putter and the ball speed. So we've got to figure out a way to kind of mirror those two things together. So super helpful to have some objective data to do that. But generally, where I see people go wrong is they just come in with a bunch of ideas about what's right and wrong. Now, I've never gone into a bank and pretended to know what software I should be looking at and how this all works, because I'm not a finance guy. But a lot of people come in and kind of dive into track man thinking that they understand each one of these numbers and the numbers they don't understand just aren't important. So, one thing I would recommend to people is a lot of the education is out there available to you. If you're somebody that is fortunate enough to have a launch monitor or to have access to a launch monitor, one of the coolest things you can do is, and I know I'm plugging Trackman, but it's because I primarily use Trackman, but you can go to Trackman University and do the education for free. And you can learn what all these different numbers mean and how they relate to one another, and more importantly, whether it's something you should be looking at or something maybe that doesn't apply to the situation you're trying to create. But I think having a better understanding of how to use this data is going to allow you to get way more application out of your sessions when you are using these launch monitors. Most of the people that I see using them are purely looking at distance, and I don't know why, because you can figure out distance without a launch monitor, it's not that hard. So I think getting into the weeds a little bit is a good thing, but we want to not only have objective data, but we also want to be objective in our thinking and try to look at the entire picture instead of just a small piece of it. So if you're somebody that is chasing numbers and think the certain numbers are perfect and ignoring how we got there, I think that's always going to be less than the full story and tend to not lead to much improvement on the golf course. But if we can kind of start tying in the ball flight and what we're trying to create and looking at the dispersion of the ball flight, and then figuring out how we create the mess versus how we create the good one, now all of a sudden we've got a chance of learning and getting better and being able to apply this to the golf course when we get back out there. So if you're out there, if you're wanting to get better, if you're wanting to use some of this data, I think it's great. I think anytime that we have objective data, it's better than no objective data. But once again, we want to keep it objective and we don't want to make it subjective to where we feel like we know what's best and we just kind of chase certain metrics because that's never going to be in your best interest. So hopefully you found this helpful. Um, I've seen a lot of people come in and, you know, in the beginning of their experience here at Measured Golf, you know, they're not getting better. They're not really, you know, understanding how to use this information. And then you go spend a little bit of time with them and you talk about some of these things we've talked about today, and all of a sudden, like things get a little better for them, and they're able to start actually rounding out their golf game a little bit instead of being overdeveloped one way or the other, get the path a little more neutral, understand how the face relates to that, understand kind of the dispersion, and then we're starting to create a way more stable way of playing golf for them. So I hope you found this helpful. Uh, if you're interested in learning more about this, uh, or if you're interested in working with me in general, you can reach out to us uh by going to our website at measuredgolf.com. All of the options are available there. Uh, I've got an education that I do for coaches, and then I've got coaching that I do for players. So if you're somebody who wants to dive into this a little bit deeper, we certainly can do that. If you're interested in kind of checking out some of our videos on this, uh, we've got a video on our YouTube channel of exactly how we look at the track man data and which track man data we think is important. You can find that by going to YouTube and searching Measured Golf. And you can always give us a follow on social media at measured golf or follow me at the forceplate guy. So I hope you found this helpful. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to this podcast. It helps us greatly. And as always, keep grinding.

Head Shot

Michael Dutro, PGA

Host