Pinpointing The Perfect Golf Swing
An engineering professor at the University of Surrey claims to have found the key to the perfect golf swing.
Professor Robin Sharp suggests that the answer is not to use full power from the start, but to build up to it quickly. His analysis also shows that while bigger golfers might hit the ball further, it is not by much.
“Surprisingly, the wrists do not play a critical role in the swing’s outcome,” he stated.
Swinging harder to hit farther is not as straightforward as it might seem, as Sharp’s results indicate that how – and when – the power develops is the key to distance.
Sharp’s work is based on a little-used model in which a golfer employs three points of rotation: the shoulders relative to the spine, the arms relative to the shoulders and the wrists relative to the arms.
Most golfers maintain that the timing of these rotations relative to one another is the key to a long drive. However, the new research is the first to optimize those timings and how the power of a swing is developed as they play out.
Golf swing models of the past assumed that the torque – the power in rotation – was applied at its maximum from the backswing, or that it ramped up throughout the swing, reaching its maximum at the point of impact.
Sharp first used a computer model to fit to the swing styles of three professionals whose swings were measured with high-speed photography in 1968: Bernard Hunt, Geoffrey Hunt and Guy Wolstenholme.
According to the model, the club-head speed, and thus drive distance, of these professionals could have been improved by increasing the torque quickly to the maximum value and maintaining it throughout the rest of the swing.
"Generating too much arm speed too soon causes an early release, with the club-head reaching its maximum speed before it arrives at the ball," he said.
Sharp said the key is timing which torques are applied and when and also it is not "all in the wrists".
"In the expert swings studied, control of the arms and not the wrists appears to be the priority.
"The optimal strategy consists of hitting first with the shoulders while holding back with arms and wrists and, after some delay, hitting through with the arms. At release, the wrists should hit through."
Also, height is not much of an advantage in a long-distance shot.
"A 21% bigger player can be expected to have just a 10% advantage in club-head speed," Professor Sharp said, which accounts for the fact that "good little ones are often not so far behind good big ones".
Simon Wickes, operations manager and biomechanics consultant for the Human Performance facilities at QinetiQ, has a different method for improving a golfer’s swing.
At the company’s biomechanics lab, visitors don a tight-fitting suit covered with reflectors that are tracked by 12 infrared-sensing cameras.
The team can analyze in detail any number of motions by tracking the independent movements of all the limbs and the club itself, including golf swings.
Wickes acknowledged that they aren’t golf pros. "We just show them where we think the problems are occurring."
"There’s this feeling of trying to keep everything in alignment, and by doing that you stiffen up because you don’t want to have the variability you get if you loosen up your grip and loosen joints."
While Professor Sharp’s results may be useful, it seems the perfect swing is not just a matter of the mechanics.
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