Golf Science – Putting Numbers that Might Surprise You
The one golf shot everyone can make, and make successfully, is, of course, the putt. As the putter never rises very far from the ground, all a golfer needs to do is make a small movement back and a small movement through, and plonk, the ball is in the hole! Perhaps that is why golfers, from rank beginners to the …
Golf Science – The Ultimate Mind Game
It has often been said that a student is only as good as his teacher. However, it is rare for anyone to actually study how good the teacher truly is. So, it might be of interest to learn more about the man behind much of the success of the current 19th-ranked player on the Official World Golf Rankings. The player …
Golf Science – Physical Therapy and Golf
To the regular golfer, a Tour player seems like someone from another universe, way beyond their own ability to ever hope to play like. However, it takes an entire team to keep these elite “engines” finely tuned and in shape to play their best golf, week after week. Tour players each have a big team that may or may not …
Golf Science – Strokes Gained, Explained
More and more golfers use, or are fascinated by, the idea of using the new “strokes gained” statistics as opposed to some of the more traditional ones. So what are traditional statistics and what are the new ones? Traditional statistics include fairways hit (on tee shots), greens in regulation, short game up and downs, putts per round, and sometimes even penalty …
Golf Science – The Secret to Longevity
What with all the partitions happening in the world of men’s professional golf, aficionados are perhaps left with less motivation to follow any of the tours, as fan loyalty has to be divided across all the platforms. On any given Sunday, a relatively unknown player might heft the trophy that has engraved on it the hallowed names of winners from …
Golf Science – What is Your Go-To Shot?
Golf fans, the world over, often believe that the pros they watch on TV are practically infallible, hitting long, straight drives and possessed of immaculate short games. So, The Genesis Invitational, held at the Riviera Country Club since 1973, was a great opportunity to find out just exactly what the pros themselves think about their ball-striking capabilities. Having asked several …
Golf Science – Avoiding Over the Top
It has always been said that less-skilled golfers come over the top (OTT) while the best golfers, especially the professionals, never do. However, when asked for a tip to avoid over the top, many pros at the recent Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines said they are sometimes OTT, too. For some, like Michael Herrera, for whom the Farmers’ Insurance …
Golf Science – Up Your Endurance for 2023
Happy New Year all. If your goal for the new year is to score better at golf, and if you’d like to work towards that goal by training better and fueling better, here is some useful information from a very recent (published April 2022) review paper titled ‘Competitive Golf: How Longer Courses Are Changing Athletes and Their Approach to the …
Golf Science – Professional Club Fitting for Dummies
It all began when the LPGA Professionals (the teaching and coaching arm of the LPGA) arranged a webinar on club fitting for its members. The speaker gave one of the most clear and meaningful presentations I have ever heard – in golf and in academia. He explained that since he was a kid watching fitters to the Tour players go …
Golf Science – Predicting the Predictions
This article is for those golf aficionados who love to predict eventual winners of golf events and are even, perhaps, enthusiastic punters. It involves a fun “experiment” that was designed to predict (or not) which of a few selected golfers in a four-day pro tour event would have the best scores at the end of it. While there are too …