Use technology to help improve your game!

The use of technology to help golfers is amazing.  Some of these technology tools can shorten the learning cycle significantly.  When I started teaching golf video analysis was just becoming popular.  Some instructors embrace new technologies and many prefer to teach using minimal technology.

Even with the best technology an instructor or coach needs to be effective at teaching.  Low-tech items that are important include taking a TPI screening to see what your body can and can’t do.  Don’t try to swing like Tiger unless you have a similar body makeup, an unbelievable work ethic and the time to commit.  Learning how you swing best can be greatly helped with good technology and a great instructor or coach!

As a student here is how technology can help you.

1. Video analysis can take what you think your golf swing looks like and change that perception to what you’re actually doing.   This provides instant feedback and helps you observe any swing changes or habits you might be working on.  Remember, rarely is what you feel real so video brings reality to your motor patterns.
2. Launch monitors like Trackman, Foresight and others provide you with mostly accurate data that can really help you judge and assess your performance. The different companies use doppler, light or cameras to track club and ball data and provide great data to use.  These typically provide you with club and ball speed, launch angle, carry and roll out distance, spin rates back and sideways along with a lot of data most people rarely use.  These are great tools to help intermediate to advanced players.
3. Simulators are a great tool for teaching and for home use. These use a large screen combined with a launch monitor and provide pretty accurate data.  Simulators vary in price, features and quality.  Most provide a practice mode with automatic video replay to review your swing while looking at the data.  These units have improved significantly over the past decade and are great fun for the golfer along with helping you to improve.  Many of these simulators also provide other games like soccer, softball and more for the whole family.
4. Pressure plates and mats are a recent phenomenon. Swing catalyst and BodiTrak are the two leading providers of force measurement.  Swing catalyst is typically a permanent indoor pressure plates while BodiTrak is a portable map.  Swing catalyst provides a little more data than BodiTrak.  These both measure your foot pressure during the swing along with vertical force.  Some units measure both feet independently while measuring foot torque. These may seem like frivolous units but they are seriously important in helping players understand how important your footwork and body pressure is to make a repeatable, powerful swing.    These units are largely responsible for why so many younger players that grew up with these tools hit is so far.  Vertical pressure does absolutely relate to the distance you hit the ball.
5. 3d swing analysis is the newest to the table of great tools. Originally these units were very expensive and difficult to use.  There are different levels and prices for those in the field.  K  vest is a relatively inexpensive 3d tool that measures your kinematic sequence quickly, (wrist, arm, upper body and pelvis.)  Dragon fly is more extensive by using a suit the player wears during the swing and provides tons of data that you cant see with the naked eye.  There are bigger better systems but they are significantly more expensive.  The new trend with a few companies is to capture your swing on your iPhone and it then creates an avatar and measures tons of angles.  This is where golf instruction is going.
6. Putting also has some great tech companies like Sam putting labs and Quintic provide high-speed camera analysis of the putting stroke and ball data. These are great for measuring your putting stroke speed, rhythm, path, spin rate, center and off-center hits along with charts and graphs to help you understand the tremendous data they capture.  For a college or tour player, this is a necessary tool to remove doubt and bad theories and work on proper mechanics which will then provide better results.

One of the dilemmas of receiving all this new data from these tools is how to discriminate, decide and implement the changes needed to improve your game.  Ideally, you want to know how to make your swing work and not how the swing works.  Every golfer has different attributes and deficiencies.  Much like a good doctor that gets data from an MRI we typically need someone to interpret the data and suggest a course of action.  Find a good teacher with good tech and avoid overthinking if possible.  If your thinking your stinking.

The steps to learning are

1. Receive the new information
2. Understand the new information
3. Implement the new information
4. Practice extensively on the new motor pattern
5. Forget the new motor pattern
6. Play better

Rarely are their short cuts to this learning cycle but at least when employing a good coach and good tech the instruction is focused properly to help you get better as soon as possible.  So find the right person for you and improve your game

Jim Hartnett, PGA