Building the Perfect Swing with Dr. Luke Benoit

0:00Before this... There's this! As you celebrate the game, take a deeper look at its roots. The people grow in the grass, they've in the lots, weld in the goalposts, inspecting every football. The hardworking people that make every Sunday possible. Carhartt is proud to outfit the crews behind the game. Visit carhartt.com slash join the trades to learn more. Having uncontrolled eels in a villacus suffigitis or EOE can mean your stuck in many ways, like cutting your food into tiny pieces. Or stuck chewing food for a long time. Do you pick some deppilla map? A prescription medicine for patients one year and older weighing at least 33 pounds can help with that. It's a breakthrough treatment that can reduce inflammation in the esophagus and improve swallowing. How about this? Do Pixins is not a steroid.

1:01It proactively treats EOE so you can get ahead of it. Severe allergic reactions, including skin reactions, can occur. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or wheezing or swallowing of your face, mouth, tongue, or throat. Tell your doctor of newer worsening joint aches in pain or a parasitic infection or asthma. Don't change your stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Feeling stuck with EOE? Start treating with Do Pixins. Talk to your gastroenterologist or allergist today about Do Pixins. Learn more at dofixin.com or call 1-844-Do Pixins. I do think you should chase the perfect swing. It's kind of like you're building your dream house, which is the perfect swing. But don't move in until the new swing is done. So you can play with your old swing, calibrate it. Meanwhile, we're just going to go to town and work on the new swing. And that's where once the new swing is looking pretty good, you're going to have to calibrate that thing too. Today I'm lucky enough to have Dr. Luke Benoit, who is the founder of RIPP golf, and is one of the top instructors in the country and one of the top instructors in Minnesota,

2:02and the head pro at Interlock and Correct. Director of Instruction, so more on the teaching side, but yeah. Awesome, and a Minnesotan. Yes. So when we have, I went to college there, so we have that a little bit in common. So thank you for being on today, Luke. I appreciate you're doing it. Yeah, excited to chat a little bit. And right away, Minnesota is such a cool place to be from. So you know, your story of McAllister, it brings back a lot of memories of how I started the game and college golf and all that stuff. Well, it's funny. I was reading and I'm going to give away a little bit of your back story before we get into your back story. But I played a McAllister team at McAllister. I was not within 15 strokes of as good as you were. But you played because Division III golf in 1985 was a very different. Yeah, animal that it was, I think, in 2000, the early 2000s, until you were there. Yeah, I'm almost embarrassed now that the one thing I do recall is playing in a tournament in St. Cloud on the opening day of duck season.

3:02Wow. And all of a sudden, being from Chicago, hearing a million guns firing in the back. Wow. In the back story. Not traumatic. I was just like, it's like holy crap. I'm like, never mind to go, you know, play. So anyway, but so it was interesting. I was reading up on you and you talked about how I think your grandfather taught you how to hit slices and hooks. Yes, early. Yeah. You know, I think that's something, at least for me, I'm like an 11-ish handicap. And that is something, you know, that I have never really practiced and I've heard a couple people talk about, you know, learning. How to do that early. Talk about what impact that had on you. It was huge for me. And I started almost every golfer with just making sure they can curve it both ways and understand the physics of it. So, you know, you scale the task to the level of the player.

4:03That's a core part of my teaching. And as we get into the book and we talk about that, you understand that like even a beginner, if you put the ball on a tee, they can hit some solid shots and they can observe the spin of the golf ball. And if you've got a sports background with ball spinning, it comes a lot easier. But you could pick it up pretty fast. And so, to me, it's kind of like the language of the game is spin. And you better at least understand how the Magnus Effect works, you know. So, I explained that to people. And now it's surprising how well they can problem solve right from the get go. Otherwise, they tend to hang on to fundamentals of the past, past thinking like, okay, if my setup's great and if I have good posture, I'm going to hit good shots. Which is extremely misleading. They don't really understand the physics. Is that such a big missing piece for people that you get there and you say I can hit, you know, because I'm like, I can hit the ball. Yeah. Consistently and solidly and usually, generally with towards the target I'm hitting it at, what are people like me missing about that?

5:04Well, so the best analogy is like I always say if, let's say we go in the backyard or playing a game of bags and we're tossing the bags here and my three-year-old walks up. And he wants to play bags with us. And he's tossing that bean bag at the hole and he keeps missing right. What would a three-year-old do? Throw to the left or just keep exactly. And that's how humans just self-organize around this idea of trying to find the outcome they need to. And it's really obvious in life, right? So if you stick your, if you're trying to open a door knob and you stick the key and you miss the key hole to the right, you'll adjust and figure it out. Right. So it seems like this is a really simple thing but golf doesn't work that way. It's so much more complex. So if you go to the average driving range and you're seeing a bunch of, you know, 15 handicaps or beginners, you don't see a center dispersion like you'd see a three-year-old tossing bean bags. You see them fighting a shot. They see them missing right.

6:04You see them missing left. And you might see them fighting the same mis-pattern of topping it or shaking it. And all these things are really easy to fix if you decide I'm going to learn how to do the opposite of these. I can do the opposite by closing the face or hitting the toe. And I call this calibration. But the problem with golf is it happens so fast you have impact and you have path, face, contact, low point. And if you're hitting the ground, you might not even know where you're hitting the ball in the face. And so many golfers spend their whole life just hitting it off the heel or toe and I don't even know. So it's all about understanding what's going on. Yeah, no, it's actually, it's funny. I got fitted for new clubs for the first time and I got new clubs for the first time in like 16 years. And I got fitted and I had this problem with when I didn't get it right, I was slicing. And now they give you compared to last time I bought clubs, you're getting tour level data and everything that's happening.

7:08And the one thing I realized was I was like, oh my god, I'm hitting everything. I'm not hitting it on the face consistently. And in the sweet spot, I'm hitting it just towards the toe. Right. And so for a while, I just started lining my shots up on the heel. Yep. And all of a sudden I was hitting the ball a lot more solidly because my swing path was obviously doing that. You know, and so that was my way of correcting that. Right. Other than the ability to shape shots, what do, what does a golfer gain from knowing how to do? Yeah, the biggest thing is the correction element. And so you're understanding at a physics level how to just be able to control the ball. So if you can hook it and slice it straight becomes much easier. You know those days where you're hitting the heel or you're missing right, those days become very infrequent. You don't fight your swing and it's almost like if you're driving a car and the car has bad alignment it keeps pulling.

8:10Yeah. If you're fighting your car or your golf ball the whole day, you can't put a whole lot of attention into anything else. You know, so basically we need to learn how to calibrate or the machine we have. And if you think about the history of the game, we've had so many players with wacky swings. But they're calibrated. You know what I mean? And so the bar to be a professional golfer and to control your golf ball with a wacky swing is extremely low compared to what most people think. You need to do a lot of skill work and you need to calibrate what you have. But there are so many patterns that work. It's unbelievable. I know you kind of talk a little bit about how people chase this elusive perfect swing. Yeah. How damaging is that for golfers and what's the way to fight against that if you're somebody who's got a funky swing? So first of all, I do think you should chase the perfect swing.

9:12And you should always work on it. But what we're going to is this idea of like being able to put it in different bins. So if we start out what should a beginner learn to do or any novice, like the entry level is learn to calibrate, like learn to deal with what you have and be able to not miss right or left. If you've got a heel bias fix it, right? So now you've got the most important toolbox out there which is like to be able to play with the swing you have today. Right. And by 3pm, you're a little better if you use some of those drills. And I will typically break them down into little chunks. So I talk about the attentional bucket which is like how much you can think about it one time. And if we go to the range, Josh, and you're like, hit missing a little right, we'd experiment with some ideas to get the club face closed and you figure that out. But now that you have that tool set, now you have this unbelievable gift. You can go work on your mechanics and you can try to build a perfect all swing. And while you're going from and motor learning to talk about like a phase change, you know, it's kind of like everything's kind of working together with your old swing.

10:14Even though maybe it's not perfect, you can play your little fade and it kind of works. Right. But you don't want to live there, you know. And so I use the analogy, it's kind of like you're building your dream house, which is the perfect swing. But don't move in until the new swing is done. So you can play with your old swing, calibrate it. Meanwhile, we're just going to go to town and work on the new swing. And that's where once the new swings looking pretty good, you're going to have to calibrate that thing too. You're going to need those tools. Right. I'm as stupid of a golfer as you will ever find. I do all kinds of dumb stuff. We all do. But you know, one thing, you know, from, you know, some of the golf digest articles, you know, about, you know, your, your various programs that I thought was really great was, you know, this idea of not to chase perfect on the range going. Oh, that was a crappy shot. Now I got to hit a good shot. Right. Right. And just kind of if it's just a terrible shot, it's just a terrible shot.

11:18And you just go back to what? Yeah. It's just data and it's, and it can be just an anomaly. And it's really more important to be focusing on actually practicing and not just hitting balls and going, oh, that was a bad one. I got to hit a good one. Yeah. So most golfers, they kind of spend a lot of their time, I call it the messy middle. So they're going to the range and they're, they're divided between a goal of hit a good shot, which feels good. So you get that feel of dopamine when you hit the lottery. And you know, once while you strike a good shot. So you're trying to find that while you're also trying to work on your swing mechanics. And because there is a divided focus of attention, you probably don't do either very well. Right. And so this is where again, the most important kind of concept to you is to understand how to do the different toolboxes and own both of them. And what you're going to find is personality and certainly training and culture play a big role in your priors that lead you towards certain types of practice.

12:20So let's say you were a self-taught player and you went to McAllister. You didn't have maybe great coaching because at that time it was just get the ball in the hole, you know, and a lot of times. You know, a lot of us, and I was the same way. My grandpa taught me how to calibrate and I could basically dial in my ball flight. But I looked so bad at impact, really bad early extension and just really poor mechanics. So to learn how to kind of build that swing is a completely different toolbox. And you need to learn how to be a total engineer. And that's where the golf ball is going to pull you away from those goals. Because what you will find is that there's a big difference. If you go to the ranch and you kind of look at all the golf swings. The golf swings that are the best usually are the best players. Typically. Yes. Right. So there's kind of an, you know, inter individual like between individuals better swings produce better golf shots. But if you go select one single golfer and you say, okay, I want you to make an unbelievably technically perfect golf swing.

13:21This is like make it look like Rory. And they somehow pull it off. They will hit a terrible shot. Why? Because they haven't calibrated the new machine. So if they do hit that terrible shot, what's the feedback from the ball tell them? Well, that can't be good. Let's go back to what worked. So that's why the driving range is the worst place to practice if you try to work on your mechanics. Don't go to the range because you will be pulled in two different directions. You've got a dual task problem and you won't learn very fast. Right. The ball. I love the idea of practicing without the ball. Yeah. To learn. Talk about that process. It's a total game changer. So when I started this project, it was literally about three or four years ago where my idea was to just write basically a manual for my students that would help them is onboarding students. So if they're going to come take a lesson, this is what we can expect. And this is kind of the stuff you should know. And it turned into a 600 page book on how to learn golf because it was really fun.

14:24And the mindset of learning how to train without a ball, I took to the most extreme degree. I said, OK, I've got 20 years of teaching golf. But now what if I applied every bit of science of motor learning and tried to create a system and a process that would be foolproof and be able to confront the priors of anybody. And the priors that people come into are super varied. So you might have golfers that were kind of like self-taught. They don't really believe in working on mechanics. You know, if they just like, OK, I'm going to get the ball in the hole. I can calibrate just like I was, right? And then you have people that maybe took a ton of lessons growing up and they work on perfect mechanics. But they can't let go and just play golf. So they're always in their head. So you find that there is this continuum between what I call engineers and artists. And between the two, there is no right. It's just where should your mind be in the time of your training and you should be in both.

15:24You should learn how to be an engineer, get rid of the golf ball, get in the backyard. And you can learn really fast and new movement pattern. Talk about the progression you use with starting with no club, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so if you think about it, most amateurs have a really poor pivot. They do not know how to use the ground. They can't shift their way. They don't understand the ground forces. And actually, I'll take this back a step. Some of them actually do understand this because we got a lot of people that jump on YouTube. And they probably at a cognitive level, declarative knowledge is probably pretty high for a lot of 15s. Like a lot of people that are listening to the show, they already know a lot about it. They have no idea how to do it. Procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge are very different. And so what I've done is I said, well, this is something that's important, which it is if you have a good pivot. You have a much better chance to be a good golfer. Why are we not building that? You know, like if you went out to the swim team and you're in eighth grade and you didn't know how to kick, what would you do?

16:24You would get a kickboard and you would learn how to kick. Right. So we teach a pivot. And it's unbelievable how effective that is for like building a much more effective sequence and so many things fall in place. If you do it the other way and you let golfers just go work on trying to hit it straight, they never develop a pivot. So everything is built on a house of cards. Right. Is there too much? I mean, obviously there's too much information out there. But even before the internet, you know, I, it's funny. I try to avoid it, but you know, if I go into the comments, like you go on Reddit or something, right? And you get all these people. Well, you know, he's got a reverse C going and he's doing this and he's doing this. And he's doing, there's all this terminology that was learned from various arrows of instruction. Is it as complicated as people make it? Because I think it begins to get really complicated. It's incredibly complicated.

17:25And that's why we, we understand how to manage your, what, attentional bucket. And so if you think about like an influencer on Instagram, they're going to be like, okay, I want you to, you know, shout out the club and then get your chest down and then rotate. Their skill level is their plus two. So that's pretty easy for them to think about. Plus they've done it before. So they demonstrate it. And then the average golfer is like, oh, I got to go try that. But they never break in their chunks. They never get the kickboard out. They never develop a pivot. And they don't learn sequentially. So they actually really don't learn anything at all. And if they do, if they do try to, you know, apply it, it's very poor feedback because they're hitting a bad shot. So why would they want to keep doing that? So then they go back to what they used to do. So can I share a screen for a second here? Yeah, of course you can. I think I can show you. So this is an example in the book. So this is called Forward Cheaning. And I want you to think of this as like the X-axis on the bottom is your sessions over time. And where your mind is. So external load means your mind is devoted to trying to hit a good shot.

18:28And you're trying to execute maybe impact location, face angle, club path. And then you're thinking about your backswing, your swing plan, your pivot. And you're going through this session kind of randomly searching for these cues. And this is how most people go to the range. So as a result, they don't really develop a good pivot. They really don't understand where the golf ball is going. Other than, you know, sometimes they hit a good shot, sometimes they don't. And they don't, they can't really tie in why they hit good shots, right? Because the sample size is so small that there's no orderly way to say, well, this works and this doesn't. So that's kind of the traditional way of learning golf. And then this is how I prescribe it, which begins with calibration, which means understand path, face, impact location. And you need a golf ball to do that. But we don't care very much where the ball is going. We're just trying to do some opposite. So if you hit it right, you're going to go left. We use a T to make that as small as we can. And we use a center. So once you're calibrated, now we go to town and work on your pivot.

19:31And that might take a day for a high level player, probably more like a week or two to really getting a good spot. For an 18 handicap, that might take two months. Sure. And then you can start adding arm structure, swing, plane, back swing. And now you're starting to go on to use a real ball at the end. And then you bring back your calibration tools. And now you've got an engine that works, but you also have the ability to kind of like steer it. Every week on Golf Smarter, I get to talk to some of the sharpest minds in the game. And I would love for you to join the conversation. If you've got questions you'd like to ask an instructor, a tour player, or one of our other experts, send us an email at golfsmarterpod.com. And we'll try to ask it on the show. While you're at it, please follow Golf Smarter on Instagram and TikTok for game-changing tips and lively debate about the sport we love. Even if it's sometimes driving, it's crazy.

20:31Before this... There's this. As you celebrate the game, take a deeper look at its roots. The people grow in the grass. They've in the lots, weld in the goalposts, inspecting every football. The hardworking people to make every Sunday possible. Carhartt is proud to outfit the crews behind the game. Visit carhartt.com slash join the trades to learn more. Having uncontrolled eels in a villacus suffigitis or EOE can mean your stuck in many ways, like cutting your food into tiny pieces. Or stuck, chewing food for a long time. DuPix and Depylamab, a prescription medicine for patients one year and older weighing at least 33 pounds can help with that. It's a breakthrough treatment that can reduce inflammation in the esophagus and improve swallowing.

21:32How about this? DuPix and D is not a steroid. It proactively treats EOE so you can get ahead of it. Severe allergic reactions, including skin reactions, can occur. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or weasin or swelling of your face, mouth, tongue or throat. Tell your doctor of newer worsening joint aches and pain or a parasitic infection or asthma. Don't change your stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Feeling stuck with EOE, start treating with DuPix and talk to your gastroenterologist or allergist today about DuPix. Learn more at duPix.com or call 1-844 DuPix. So talk about that five step process for practicing that leads to using the ball. Because you have freezer swings which I think is such a great idea. Yeah, freezer is basically learn how to make a really good downswing. And it's so much easier if you don't have to complicate it with a back swing at first. So we just get to the top. We get you in a really good position. So therefore we take care of like there's no sway. Like you are a dialed with your pelvis, your sway gap is tilt, you know, like your spine is tilted.

22:34Everything's dialed there. And then we focus really hard on basically from there moving the weight down and forward to your lead toe to rotate. Because one thing we know about almost every amateur, amateurs are very late in the recentering. They don't get to their lead foot very early. And they don't know how to use their lead foot, their left leg to rotate and push off the ground. So we turn that, turn that skill into an asset for them. So now their sequencing is completely different. And I actually have them working on turning their shoulders more as they start. So they freeze at the top and they continue to turn as they're going down and forward. So it's like this, which is the move that Rory does. And you know what? It's actually pretty trainable if you know what you're doing. People look at Rory swinging like, oh, he's such a good athlete. You don't need to be an incredible athlete to turn your shoulders while you're re-scenter. You've just never been taught. You've never had the kickboard. So that's the pivot.

23:34Right. Now talk a little bit about hitting foam balls before you hit real balls. So yeah. So if we say the pivot's the first step, then the next thing is we would add a backswing. And the backswing starts very slow. And you have to confront this problem of what we're learning called open and closed loop learning, which is really key to understand. So closed loop is where we're driving our car down the road and we see a dump truck coming and we can swerve. We can adjust. Right. Open loop means there is no time. And golf is basically open loop. And my example would be like, let's say we go to the range gosh and I say, all right, you got a hundred fifty yard shot. And I want you to try to change your swing and maybe shallow it a little bit and you got to hit a decent shot. Your swing would not change very much if there's any sort of intention to hit a good shot. So you don't have time. That's the open loop problem. Right. And the entire golf swing takes one second. So what we do is we know the freezer can look really good and I could make your downswing. The freezer look really good within 20 minutes.

24:35You can get people to shallow it. It looks really awesome. And then what we have to confront is how do we get that freezer to connect to full swing motion with the backswing? Because we do want to use a backswing long term. Right. So we go very slow. We go 10 seconds. We go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, go. And then you attach the downswing you built. And it feels like a very big jump at first. But once people can go from a freezer to a 10 second backswing and you see success on video, then you go to nine. Then you go to eight. Then you go to seven. And you go to six. And you start to bridge that gap between closed loop and open loop learning. You know, your background is a PhD in kinesiology and motor learning. So what is it about the way we learn motor skills that does not come naturally to us when we play golf? Yeah, I grew up playing like you, you know, tons of ball sports, right? And nobody taught me how to catch a baseball.

25:38And he figured it out. Yeah, totally figured it out. And to the point where we're even in almost 60 and I was 15 years ago as coach in my kids baseball team and some get in a line drive. And I didn't even see it coming right at me and somebody said, look out. And I just put my hand out and come. And I'm not a great athlete necessarily. But that instinct is in me from the age of six. Right. Right. But why do we freak out when we put a club in our hand? So you have to understand this idea of an attractor state where you find a way to get the ball to do what you want it to do. So like let's say you give a kid a club at age three and they decide to hold it cross handed. So the first couple of years of their life, they're holding it the other way, right? Right. And so they build a pattern around that and they have success with this pattern. And they might have a lot of compensations to the move. Maybe because the club face is open, they hang back on their trail foot and they flip it.

26:38Right. Or for a lot of golfers, maybe the first time they go play, the ball is going to the right. So what do they do? They get over the top and they try to pull it left. So this is a common kind of, it's the most common attractor state flaw in golf as people coming over the top to try to get it going left. But that makes the face open, they get steep and they hit cuts. That's why most people slice. Right. And they find a workable matchup. And the other thing about a slice matchup is you actually improve your low point so your iron game gets better because you can actually trap the ball if you're over the top. So if you think about if we all grew up on a different world where every single shot was hit off the tee, people would not slice the ball nearly as much. So the ground is a constraint on our motor pattern inability to trap it because if we have a crummy sequence over the top is more effective for trapping the golf ball. So that's why golf is so much more difficult because we find these complex and and unhelpful attractor states.

27:39And the thing about how we all learn is that once we have something that kind of works, we just think, we'll just go do it over and over and over. So we build this trench in an analogy I use in the book. It's like we're building this motor pathway. It's like the Colorado River is the Grand Canyon. And it's very uncomfortable to try to form a new pattern. A new pattern is a flood. It's high variability. And if you want to change your pattern, you're going to go have to disrupt it and you're going to hit a lot of bad shots while the motor pattern is learning something new. And so as a result, most people really don't know how to change their swing and that's what the whole book is about. Well, let's let's talk about the book. So talk about what made you decide to write it and what the main things you wanted to communicate to golfers originally the goal was just again kind of a manual for my students. And then as I got deeper, I actually really enjoyed it. And I started I just did a ton of research. I'd stay up late at night every night. And it's put probably a 15 to 20 hours a week to write this book for the last two to three years. Like it was just a fun project for me. And the deeper I got, the more I started to see maybe some flaws in the research, which is really some of the interesting stuff.

28:52And I don't know how deep you want to get, but there's there's one about it. So the research is built on this idea of doing research in short little chunks. So like let's say we wanted to go do an experiment. We'd get a couple college kids or couple golfers. And we would go give them a cue. And then we test them the next day or maybe two or three days later and see what happened. And the reason we do these short chunks is because it's not practical to give them six months or a year of training to do it. It is so expensive to do long term research. Nobody wants to do it. Nobody does it. So all the research is built on very short term timeframes. And so what you find is everybody every academic admits this is a flaw, but they haven't done anything about it. And they forgot they did not nobody's really looked at the systematic bias it's created. So the systematic bias of short term research is very much skewed towards ecological approach. And what that means is you finding out how to solve for organized is the best way to solve the problem short term.

29:59And when I mean by that is like if we're in the backyard and the bag is missing to the right. The best way to do it is change your external cue and be like, okay, aim left. That's calibration. And so that's that's the best way to solve it. Now if I said, all right, Josh, this pattern for you is not functional. You should actually not be holding the bean bag like this. You're holding it the wrong way. And I want you to change your release pattern. And this is going to take you three months, but I'm very confident will make you better. We could run that experiment. Nobody's run that experiment. There's very little evidence for actually changing technique. So what it comes down to is the coaching and what's called the ecological dynamic standpoint is built on solving problem with the easiest external cue possible. So let's say your jump shot is too low. You can't get it over the front of the ram and they're coming into low. The ecological approach is simple. Put Wembe in front of you. Why? Because you have to shoot it higher so your shots get blocked. So let's say you go to the range and you're not trapping your irons and your contacts real fluffy. What could we do? We could go put you on a downslope or put you in a bunker. And you could learn how to trap it from there. You would get steeper. But you would learn how to trap it.

31:14Okay. So that is where all the research has gone. It's solving problems with what we call constraint let approach. And it's brilliant. That's calibration in my view. So that's kind of like the jumping off point. The problem is it doesn't change your pattern. If your sequence is really poor, that's not how to change it. That will take weeks or months or years. And how many golfers want to pick up the game to be better in three days? Right. Well, we all want to be better as quickly as we can. Yeah. And so that's great. We use calibration. If you're hitting the heel, hit the toe. Right. But if you want to change your motor pattern, we're going to break into chunks. And we're going to learn how to move your pelvis properly. Get some good arm structure, get the left wrist flat. And you're not going to find that probably is a study anybody can do in three days. That's going to take you weeks or months. So that's the problem. I think on your website, you said something about how you know one of the things about golf instruction is it's this combination of history, science, art, and all of these things that people see is on to.

32:16Yeah. How you know, talk about how you deal with that in your book, you know, in terms of just your how your book deals with the fact that we, especially now, are just so inundated with information. Right. Right. How do people cut through that, combine all these things? Yeah. And and and get better. Yeah. I mean, the big thing I would say is like, if you read the book, which is 600 pages, you're going to find that there's a ton of science here. Some of it is very quick and actionable, but at least at least now you have a little bit of a blueprint. And I'm not saying the book is perfect because it's always going to get better and we're going to get more information. But at least we're following the science and we're not just picking 15 second tips from Instagram. And that's where golf has gone. And it's really unfortunate. And I don't, I don't necessarily blame the instructors. I blame the algorithm. Because let's say you do put a nice 10 minute piece on understanding ground forces and developing your pivot and you put that on YouTube. Nobody will watch it. So why would you do that? Right.

33:19Because everybody wants to hit the law far at the ball straight. Right. It's kind of a common problem with with where we're at with our, I mean, this is modern times of AI and everybody's looking for the quick fix. So instructions got much, much worse at some levels. At sometimes we're actually getting better. The top instructors are getting better rapidly. So if you look at like, I know everybody likes tigers, you know, swing early 2000s. It was great. No, there's better swings out there. You can develop better golf swings like we know the physics and how we should train Tiger probably should have hit it harder than he did. He probably should not have been running five miles and Navy seal training. Like the training is way better than it was 20 years ago. Right. The average golfers stuck in this popery of old stuff, new stuff, different viewpoints. And there's very little science to back it up. Who and just to digress for a second. Who do you think has both currently and historically the better better swings and Tiger. Tiger's not listening. So you can say. So there's a couple things that I would say like I think Rory's got probably the best model for the average golfer to chase. And I know people are like, well, Rory's a beast and his pivot and sequencing our heart.

34:32That is probably what we should be trying to develop for the average golfer with understanding you're not hit an athlete like Rory. Right. But that would be the most effective sort of like, let's get going with that. Now I don't love Rory's release. I think it could be slightly better, but it is a very good model to start with. And then you look at Scotty Schuffler in his face control and you see he has a lot more with with as the club is out in front. Right. And so the game has definitely moved towards we're getting rid of lag if you have a good engine and you can really pivot and rotate. You don't need to have crazy angles in your downswing right and a lot of interest think I just got a lag the thing to trap it. But if you have a good pivot, you actually want with and that's where we're going with the game on that side is there. It's funny I had to do a video of my swing and I the face on the face on videos. I was like, oh my God, that's my swing.

35:32And then the ones from the back, I was like, yeah, that's my nice. So one of good ones did not. Right. So what matters aesthetically that impacts what you do. Yeah, there's a lot. And that's where again, if you it's kind of like if you trust a coach, that's a good coach, they'll they'll get you in much better positions. But what we see is where the spine is where the hip rotation is in the kinematic sequence of when you accelerate and decelerate your pelvis. Those are some things that we see big difference between amateurs and pros. Right. So we all know kind of where the club needs to deliver. You want between depending on your speed, seven to 12 degrees of shaft lean with a seven iron on a sandwich. It should be 15. We want the low dynamic lion goal, which means the handle is low. If the handle gets high at impact, we see more face closure. So these are the things that we're kind of building towards. And then you kind of work backwards from that. But this is where good coaches can tell you a lot of the important things. And then you build from there. And a lot of amateurs are looking at stuff that doesn't matter that much like a bent left arm.

36:38It doesn't matter that much. I actually played better when it's bad. I tried to bend it. Right. So. And how about flying elbows? Yeah. I mean, look at Scotty. Right? Have you seen that? Right. Jack. Right. Yeah. I would say like that that is probably one of those things that we're definitely seeing a difference of people used to like do a lot of towel drills and tuck the head cover under and yeah, no, it's like get that elbow wide and get the lead arm on a chest. And you create a lot more width and the hands will come closer to the body impact. So it's not like any of these things are necessarily wrong for everybody. But generally we're chasing the wrong stuff. So what's the right stuff to chase? I mean, the right stuff is understand how to create good width in the in the downswing and have a great pivot and then be able to control those impact variables, the calibration stuff, that's the stuff. So talk about how you approach that in the book in terms of helping people understand how to because I love the approach that I've read in your stuff.

37:41I just kind of, you know, not having it be where people are completely reliant on going to see somebody three times a week or whatever they're doing. And I know you've talked about how you actually feel like you're more effective in video lessons, right? When people just or, you know, online stuff or somebody just sends you. Right. Let's win. I just, yeah, I don't really do in person lessons unless they're members, unless there are somebody's invested in a 90 day plan. Because frankly, like the old method of going to see a pro and then going to work on it, it doesn't make you invested in the change. And you don't have assurances that you're going to kind of execute the change very well. So if I, if I design a 90 day plan for somebody, I expect videos to be sent, you know, especially the first week or two almost every day. But you can do it in small chunks do 15 minutes, but I'm going to try to train you every day what the video needs to look like for you. And we do it all without a golf ball because there's no reason to add a ball until your swings looking good, you know. Right.

38:45So it's just breaking it down into small chunks that all make sense from the science. And the people that I've jumped in and done this. And it's, it's honestly like a title wave like my business is as people start to I think get frustrated with the old way. They're ready for something new and I get all these people that are just kind of like golf junkies that have been frustrated with their swing not changing. And so now we're changing a lot of these patterns and we're seeing a lot of speed better sequencing. And it's kind of like we don't have to work as hard at compression like that just happens when you have a good pivot. All that stuff just flows. So that's the change is the video feedback constantly. How much? Yeah, I've found in my own swing that and it's a dichotomy I think in terms of I remember taking a lesson with guy one time and I said, well that feels incredibly uncomfortable. And he said, well, you know, imagine telling that to Bobby night if you were playing. Right.

39:48Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'd have a clipboard stuck in your forehead for the rest of your life. Right. Yeah. So, but there's also the sense of and I know you, you know, you have to work on something to get comfortable with it. Right. But where is the balance between comfort and and ease of motion versus technical correction? How do you balance that? What is emotion and feels for what feels comfortable is the most misleading thing possible. It just it just means nothing. You know, like you might you might be you might be holding the golf club. Oh, is that feel good? Cool. We're not doing that. We're not doing it. We're not holding it backwards. So if you think about where now you have to consider a little bit of the practicality of the change. And then the next year or golfer, for instance, do I want to switch you over to left handed? Probably not. Right. Sure.

40:48But let's say like I had a professional hockey player who came in who had a lot more speed left handed than he did right handed. And he was golfing right handed. So we switched him over and he's like 25 year old NHL guy, you know, making $15 million a year. And with any year, he was better the other way. So you have to choose what's your timeline to make that change. And that's the hard part because as a coach, I need to find out how invested are you. And if you just want to play better on your mentally going to stay, we might not change as much. But right. I do always train people at two levels. Like I would say I'm going to give you some practical stuff to make you a little bit better right now. And then we're going to try to change these patterns and these patterns get better and better. That's like the new house, right? That's that's the dream house you want to live in. And those patterns get better. Some of that will naturally filter in slowly. And then at a certain point, you will be like, man, that new swing is better. I'm 20 yards longer. I compress the golf ball. And I can start to use it on the course.

41:49So I have people create what I call firewall, meaning like don't use the new stuff on the golf course other than simple cues. If you're miss hitting it on the golf course a lot with the new stuff, then it shouldn't be out there. And that way you can kind of ease the change. Meanwhile, you're doing really aggressive work at home. You're learning to use the ground at a ton of speed. But you don't have to worry about a golf ball at first. And you don't have to worry about your buddy telling you that it's looking bad. And you don't even have to go to the range and have other people watch you hit that shots. You know, a lot of people don't want to go to the range and hit terrible shots. Well, don't just go in the backyard and learn to change your swing. Before this. There's this. As you celebrate the game, take a deeper look at its roots. The people grow in the grass. They've in the lots, weld in the goalposts, inspecting every football. The hardworking people to make every Sunday possible. Carhartt is proud to outfit the crews behind the game. Visit carhard.com slash join the trades to learn more.

42:57Having uncontrolled eels in a philic esophageitis or EOE can mean your stuck in many ways like cutting your food into tiny pieces. Or stuck chewing food for a long time. DuPixen, DuPillumab, a prescription medicine for patients one year and older weighing at least 33 pounds can help with that. It's a breakthrough treatment that can reduce inflammation in the esophagus and improve swallowing. How about this? DuPixen is not a steroid. It proactively treats EOE so you can get ahead of it. Severe allergic reactions, including skin reactions can occur. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or wheezing or swelling of your face, mouth, tongue or throat. Tell your doctor of newer worsening joint aches and pain or a parasitic infection or asthma. Don't change your stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Feeling stuck with EOE? Start treating with DuPixen. Talk to your gastroenterologist or allergist today about DuPixen. Learn more at DuPixen.com or call 1-8-4-4 DuPixen.

43:57What percentage of people that play that are not scratch players that are not five but above that actually understand a really applied ground force with any intention? Yeah, 2% maybe. It is so rare. I can't even tell you how unathletic golf can be. Let's say you do some TPI power tests. We do a med ball test and overhead toss on your vertical. Let's see your vertical is 8 inches and you have average upper body strength. You have all the physical components you need to play scratch golf. Absolutely. Everybody knows this because they know somebody in their life that maybe they don't work out. Maybe they haven't even played much golf in the last 20 years but they were very good at one point. Maybe they're shell of their former cells and they can still rip a 75 pretty easily. The physical constraints to be really good at golf are extremely low compared to what people think.

45:00There's this entire fitness industry and fitness is great. I would recommend getting in better shape but the bar to good golf is mostly more to learning. So talk about why aren't we getting the motor learning part right and talk about how your book helps people understand that. The biggest thing is we've been pulled into thinking that going to the range and trying a tip from Instagram is going to get us there. And systematically you just have to go learn these patterns at home. You need regular practice. You need feedback from a coach because they are very difficult to learn if you're trying to do all of them at one time without good coaching. But a coach would say, all right, go get your kickboard out, learn how to get your pivot working. Now we're going to apply the arm structure. We're going to make the down swing look perfect. We're going to put a backswing on. And once you have that, let's start hitting foam balls. And a foam ball weighs one fifth of a real ball. And the reason that's important is because when you hit a bad shot with a foam ball and you hit a window, you don't feel that bad. And you won't regress your old pattern. Right. So that's the beauty of the foam ball is it's like a marshmallow with low consequence. Therefore we can change the pattern because eventually you do want to use it on a real ball.

46:09I think it's so interesting the idea of not first that using the club to work on stuff. And then I love the sequence of breaking it down, then working up to using the ball. How do you get people accept that? Because that is so hard for the because all anybody wants to do just go hit balls. Yeah, the range and be great on the course, right? Yeah, it's really kind of a question of like some people have the personality where they just want to understand how to do it. Right. And they're just kind of like. And frankly, like, you know, most of the people that come find me are very high achieving in certain parts of their life. And they have that sort of will to get good at it. Right. But the other thing is just the frustration. You know, there's so many golfers that have felt like they've been spending their wheels for years and years and years. I am almost always between the fifth and 50th coach they've had. They have tried so many things, you know, so I don't really get beginners. I can teach a beginner and I feel like I can get a like let's say you have an average athlete come to me at age 40 that has never played golf within two months.

47:19They can have a really good looking golf swing. Like that's about how long would take they won't be good at hitting it because it takes reps. But they will have a mechanically efficient swing where if you put them next to a five handicap, you'd be like, oh, that's probably as good as a five, you know, like that's how long it would typically take. Right. And so that's a very different process and a lot of people just need to hit frustration before they kind of hit that exit button be like, okay, I got to break this thing down. Right. And it's interesting because I think people really, if you don't get the instant gratification. Yeah. It as somebody talked me once about random reinforcement. Yeah. Yeah. And the idea that you know, you know, it's, you know, you hit the one good shot. Yeah. And you think, oh, that's me. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. And all these other things are anomalies or that's who I should be all the time. Right. What? How much is that screw on us up? I mean, that's the whole deal. You go to the range and you're chasing, you're chasing random effect.

48:20You know, like, of course, you can make a hole in one and, you know, like if I take you to TPC 17 and you get a bucket of balls and Scotty Shaffler gets one ball and you get a hundred tries, you will probably hit it closer than Scotty. Right. Right. But that doesn't mean you're also things any better. And so that's the ineffective learning we've had is we're chasing just dopamine of random samples of, you know, lot of shots. And we're thinking and connecting that to learning and performance and learning are completely different. So it's building a swing. And then once the swing is pretty good, then you can start to see much better results if you can calibrate it. So, so if I'm somebody who's who's picking up your book, talk to me about how you would want me to approach my game from reading your book and when the steps that takes me through, yeah. So the first thing we do is what like we do is think all the practice DNA test and you answer a few questions about how your practice. And this is where it's really striking for a lot of people because they they look themselves in the mirror and they're like, wow, you know, first of all, I'm really bad at changing my swing because I've been playing for 30 years and it still looks crummy on video.

49:33Well, let's not do that. Let's learn how to be effective at changing our swing. You know what I mean? So now we learn learn the tools and I call it the Batman effect. So Carol Carol, do I did this research on the growth mindset and you did this. They did this really interesting experiment with with like seven year olds, I think, where they said, okay, you got to do this hard thing. And maybe it's like clean up a bunch of toys or I forget exactly what it is, but it's very it's a very common effect. You can do this and all. And a bunch of kids were told, okay, you got to do this and you got to do the best you can. And a bunch of kids were told your Batman and Batman needs to do this. You know what they all did. They were really good at the hard task. And so the way I wrote the book is actually to lock into that that that effect. So when you are an engineer, when you're working on your swing, you are going to do this very precisely and you're going to make sure your swing is perfect and you're going to work on it step by step. And there's no golf ball. So you don't have to worry about pulling back into the dopamine and intermittent random reinforcement cycle, right. So I box the entire thing so that anybody can be successful with it because if you follow the plan, you're not allowed to chase ball flight.

50:45You're just working on video. At the same time, if you are working on learning how to play on the golf course, that's where I want you to not think so much. And some people are really bad at that. So the practice DNA test reveals your priors from the past and how you think. And the slight bulb comes off for a lot of people in their lives. Wow, I'm really stuck. I'm a really engineering mindset. I just don't have the tools because I've been trying to use a golf ball while I'm trying to change it. And then some people are like, man, I'm just an artist. I call it like a scrappy gamer. Like I can get it in the hole, but it's not pretty. I don't know how to do any of the technical skills at all. Right. And so we find out who you are. That's the launching pad. And once we know who you are, now we can teach you how to be productive in all these zones. And you use Batman, you're an engineer. And then you're a scientist, calibrating ball flight. And then you're a warrior, which is transfer training and understanding how when you go train to get ready for the golf course, you want to make practice hard, not easy. Instead of hitting one shot after another, we're switching targets a lot, we're adding consequence, gamifying. And then on the golf course, you can trust in basically be much more of an artist. That's the goal.

51:53Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I've just in my own practice this year is really the first time that I started saying to myself, okay, you're going to hit it targets instead of just try to make good swings and feel like my tempo and my rhythm are good. Right. I started saying, okay, and it was funny because I was reading your stuff. And I was like, wow, this is actually I'm this one piece I'm doing. Yeah, is I was like, you said, you know, hit hit at hit at different targets and hit at different targets with different clubs. It's simple. Oh my god. And it's it has been, you know, I'll hit it a target, you know, 110 yards away. And I'll hit it with every single wedge in my back. Nice. And that makes that has made such a difference. And it's so simple. And I what I mean, no, I don't see people doing it even hitting a targets. Most people are in the messy middle where they're they're trying to work on swing mechanics. They're hitting kind of mostly at one target.

53:00And they're trying to hit good shots while they work on swing mechanics. And I call it messy middle because again, you're not really changing your swing. You're also not really activating the part of your brain that's best at performance. So, you know, I go back to like the beginning of the book. I have an example of like, you know, if you think about what ours are a brain developed to do and from an action standpoint. It's literally to be able to go out in the wild. And we see that there is a threat. Maybe it's a saber to tiger. We have one rock to throw that that saber to the saber life. Do you want to be thinking about the angle of your all their aviation? You know, and so golfers are so used to thinking about their golf swing. And you you found out when you unlock and you actually train without thinking about your mechanics. And you switch targets a lot. You will find much better results overall in the golf course. So and this is nothing news. Sports psychology and mental performance is all over this. Pobrotele started this stuff. And you know, there's vision 54 and Raymond prior like all that.

54:04There's so much good stuff out there. What nobody's in my opinion done a very good job is be able to explain that's how you think on the course. And this is how you train your swing and understanding how to switch mindsets. That's Batman. That's learning how to switch mindsets and be an engineer and artist. So what I just had a curiosity what percentage of I mean, obviously people are most likely falling somewhere in not at the ends of the spectrum between engineer and artist. Right. But where is the dispersion? Yeah, I think it's pretty wide. And I think you will see it. You know, we're doing correlations with the ocean personality test. Now personality is interesting in a psych from the psychological perspective because it is it is not consistent throughout a lifetime. And you know, how you feel in the moment. Let's say you go shoot a 62. Your personality is different than if you shot a hundred and two. Do you know what I mean? So I know the 102 side of that. I don't know. It's not it's not state consistent. But there are some lingering effects there.

55:05And we find it's correlated a lot with really your personality. So people that tend to be. You know the personality that the over engineering analytical neurotic people. They tend to want to do the same thing over and over and over expecting it to work and they they're very poor at switching mindsets. Okay. This is my interpretation. I do not have any evidence yet. We're building it. And then there's people where like they might have ADHD and they're all over the place and I have ADHD and I like my mind tends to be running. You know, and I'm pretty good at solving problems, but I can be pulled off. So I tend to operate with a lot more of the mental space. But I tend to be much more open to trying new things. So I'll go work on something and I'll go try something else. And we call that the danger zone. That's where you're basically you're thinking a lot, but you're also trying to heat good shots. That's a bad spot to be. But there's some people that don't want to think about mechanics at all. And they just want to go get them all in the hole.

56:07Right. So there's a wide variety. Right. I love the idea of externalizing. First of all, of thinking on the range, but simplifying your thoughts by externalizing them on the course. So that you're not thinking, oh, is my, you know, how's my pivot and my using my feet correctly. But it and that I think you're the first person I've read right about this where externalizing and I want you to explain the externalizing piece. But that puts you in a reactive state. Like you're an athlete playing a ball sport, not someone who's has to make everything happen. Yeah, I mean, it's literally brain structure. So if you think about a mammalian brain, we have a cerebellum, which is the high in brain. And we have the motor cortex. Those are older features of brain evolutionary psychology.

57:11And that's where we operate when we're trying to, you know, of course, you're using part of your front or brain too, but a lot of it is just much more reactionary. And a lot of the people that are thinkers and engineers, they spend all their time in the prefrontal cortex and they don't even know how to go back to that like reacting. And if you think about, you know, Anthony Edwards or Steph Curry, like, are those guys when they have half a second to release a three pointer at the buzzer, are they thinking about their mechanics? Of course not. Right. We shouldn't be either. But because we have trained on the range to think, we're not very good at turning it off. So by focusing on, say, the target, that takes us out of that. That takes us out of it. And the interesting thing is the more stress I put on you in your training to hit good shots, the more likely you are not to think about your swing thoughts over time. So it's kind of like if you've been a 60 year old golfer who's thought about your swing over and over, you might use a swing thought like a security blanket.

58:14That's part of how you play, right? Right. But if I can change you so that half of your time is just going to the range switching clubs, trying to hit good shots, playing holes in your head. And we, we build that ability to be externally focused and see targets and try to hit shots to those targets. You will find you'll perform much better because now you're using your whole brain focused laser on what you're trying to do versus make a good swing again. You were before in the messy middle. How much does the idea of perfection screw people up? Yeah. I mean, certainly the engineering mindset where they're trying to be super perfect out there trying to create perfect swings is a problem. But to really play golf or any sport at a high level, you have to be pretty good at understanding, you know, the entire bell curve of performance. And you cannot control every single outcome. And if you're trying to control every outcome, it will totally debilitate you. Right. All you can do is control the process.

59:14How hard is that for people to get their mind around? Because that is probably the most helpful thing I ever did for my game was not trying to control outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. And just have good swings that are aimed at the right place. Yeah. I mean, I mean, that's part of the training is like understanding how to be Batman and kind of let go. Right. So we have to train in a mindset on the range and in kind of practice rounds on the golf course. Where we see targets and we are okay with whatever happens. So we have an acronym in that part of the book we call it. This is called the score acronym, which is strategize score stands for stands for strategize. And then you commit to your target. And this is going to draw on, you know, performance psychology vision 54 stuff of you're just going to see what you're trying to do and you commit. And so that routine should be pretty tidy and short. Then you observe what happens up. Broke a window ball went 80 yards right hit a, you know, beautiful being glass window.

1:00:14So you observe that without judgment is like what happened. Well, okay, the face is wide open and this happened. And then you have to reset in the resets the most important part because you're going to feel that and you're going to you're going to attach your ego to the shot that was just hit. But that's the past. It doesn't exist anymore in the present. So how are we going to reset whether it's like you know rip the glove off clean the club. We need to be able to find our homeostasis and get ready for the next shot. And then so the last one is e which is engage which is a good way to just think about engaging your environment walking down the fairway pulling yourself back because if you're you know that round of golf where you're like thinking super hard about every shot. You're concerned about the outcome ever every shot. You'll burn yourself out. Awesome. Luke, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and I look forward to talking to you again. Super fun. Appreciate it. Before this.

1:01:17There's this. As you celebrate the game take a deeper look at its roots. The people grow in the grass. They've in the lots. Welled in the goal posts. Inspection every football. The hardworking people to make every Sunday possible. Car heart is proud to outfit the crews behind the game. Visit carhard.com slash join the trades to learn more. Having uncontrolled eels in a villacus suffigitis or EOE can mean your stuck in many ways like cutting your food into tiny pieces. Or stuck chewing food for a long time. DuPix and DuPillaMab. A prescription medicine for patients one year and older weighing at least 33 pounds can help with that. It's a breakthrough treatment that can reduce inflammation in the esophagus and improve swallowing. How about this? DuPix and is not a steroid. It proactively treats EOE so you can get ahead of it. Severe allergic reactions including skin reactions can occur. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or wheezing or swelling of your face, mouth, tongue or throat.

1:02:24Tell your doctor of newer worsening joint aches and pain or a parasitic infection or asthma. Don't change your stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Feeling stuck with EOE? Start treating with DuPix and talk to your gastroenterologist or allergist today about DuPix. Learn more at duPix and dot com or call 1-844 DuPix and