Let's bust a long time putting myth

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Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of Golf IQ.

I'm Luke Kerdanine and I'm really excited today because I'm really getting the master's

edge.

I'm sitting here in front of me with my master's cup filled with iced tea because I'm

just I'm constantly thinking about the master's now it's only a couple weeks away.

I've got my Riviera t-shirt on because I was just there and this is the campus t-shirt

I earned.

So I'm in a really good head space right now, which is good news for you because I'm in

a good head space to talk about, put it specifically with another clip from Phil Kenyon.

So yes, there is another video component to this podcast you can view it all on Spotify.

Don't worry if you're listening to this not on Spotify, it's all going to make sense

without it because this is just an interview clip unlike the last one, even though I think

that one made sense too.

But anyway, I enjoy doing pods this way and I think they're informative because it allows

me to kind of unpack what someone really smart in the game is saying about golf and what

the rest of us can learn from.

And specifically in this case, we're going back to Phil Kenyon, who again, I just worked

on this big story with Phil about his part of the principles and also how he came to be.

You can see it on golfdigest.com, you can see it in the latest edition of golf digest.

I'm really proud of it.

I'm really excited about it.

So make sure to go check it out.

And this clip, he is busting one of the biggest myths in golf.

And one of those myths is that you need to rapidly accelerate the potter through the

stroke.

That decelerating, it's really bad.

So anyway, I'll just leave it there and let's get into this clip and I'll just be kind

of jumping in and out.

So here it is.

Here's Phil Kenyon talking about this myth.

Yeah, I think that's a myth isn't that again, there's been perpetuated that you need

to accelerate through impact.

So just to be clear, what he's saying the myth is is this rapid acceleration of the potter

head through the ball.

So you know, we're standing over ball, we're making a potting stroke, the ideas that you

cannot decelerate, that's terribly bad.

So you've got to make sure to make a slow backswing and then accelerate through the ball.

And that is just a myth that has been long busted, but it's just kind of lingered around.

A lot of amateur golfers think decelerating is really bad.

And the origins of this myth come from kind of Bobby Jones, well-meaning all those years

ago, even though he didn't quite say this, but basically they, because greens used to

be so much slower.

The potting stroke used to be more like a chipping action.

And of course you don't want to be decelerating on your chips and much like your full swing,

you want to be actually being pretty committed to accelerating the club head through.

But then as green started getting faster and potting strokes became less like chipping

strokes and more like potting strokes with less wrist hinge and all that stuff, people

still held on to this idea that the key to good potting is to accelerate, to avoid deceleration.

And it's just not true as Phil's going to kind of unpack here.

And golfers, if you give them an idea to work towards, they're very good at getting

there and going beyond it.

So very often this idea, you have to accelerate.

You see players develop these strokes where they're really accelerating through the ball

and in order to help them do that, they get very short in the back swing and they might

be very slow to then feel that change of speed.

Yeah, see there's a couple interesting points here.

The first thing is one that maybe the rest of us sleep on a little bit.

And that's the idea that golfers are actually pretty good at making changes.

That's not the hard part.

The hard part is making sure to not overdo it, not to overcook it.

Now if you're out there listening, this is something that you've probably know intuitively,

right?

That you go to a coach, your swings in kind of rough shape.

He says, hey, make sure to take your club away on the outside, on the takeaway, for instance,

you're taking away to inside.

Now, generally speaking, it starts working great at first because you're like, wow, this

feels great.

Now the club's like not going as inside.

But then you just keep doing this and it stops working and all of a sudden now you're

taking the club away outside.

You've over corrected.

The same is true in the potting stroke, as Phil's saying, that golfers, when you tell

them to do something, they can generally do it.

The problem is knowing when to stop doing.

And this is how it ties into this whole acceleration deceleration thing.

Because when people say, oh, you should accelerate the putter head, what ends up happening

is that it may be well-meaning advice to start.

But now their backswing starts getting shorter and shorter and shorter and they start really

hitting the ball through the potting stroke, that's really accelerating.

And this is just no good for a bunch of reasons which we're about to do.

Through impact.

And if acceleration's picking up very quickly, speed is increasing, an important point

on that.

The reason, the core reason why this you must accelerate the putter head through the stroke

is bad.

It's because for every little bit that the putter head ticks up in speed, the ball speed

is ticking up too, obviously that makes sense.

So that starts to get really tricky when you start getting on parts of varying speeds

of putting surfaces that can be really fast because you don't necessarily want the ball

speed to be this really big variable in your putting stroke because the difference between

a 10 footer and a 11 footer and if you can make the same stroke to those 10 feet and to

that 11 feet, if you make the same putting stroke, but the putter head's moving at different

speeds on each of those strokes, sometimes that 10 footer could roll 11 feet, it could

roll 8 feet.

And it starts getting all over the place when you're starting to add this other variable

into your putting stroke.

When you're just trying to pick up speed, you're not going to be able to accelerate the

putter head in exactly the same way, exactly the same time, every time.

It's just not going to happen.

It's just another variable that you're balancing.

And on the greens, margins can get really tight because everything changes and margins matter

on the green.

So it's basically avoiding rapid increases in ball speed, rapid increases in acceleration

in your putter head.

It's just something you want to avoid.

If you wanted speed to be constant, you'd have zero acceleration.

So I think it can be very hard to actually time your intended speed impact.

Timing the speed is the hard bit.

And if it's increasing, if the car is driving in a straight line, but it's accelerating

the entire time, it's really hard to be able to pinpoint the spot in which that car

is traveling 69 miles per hour versus 70 miles per hour versus 71 miles per hour.

Whereas if that car is just cruising at 69 miles per hour, obviously, it's pretty easy

to pinpoint when that car is traveling at 69 miles per hour.

Same concept as true in the putting stroke.

You want the putter head through the ball, as it's hitting the ball, you want that putter

head to be traveling at a very constant speed.

You don't want to accelerate rapidly.

That's bad news.

Well, again, if you look at great putters, great players, and they've never been told

this, if you measure them, they actually do the opposite of that.

They'll be closer to decelerating than they will be having this huge increase in acceleration.

Two putters that come to mind, two great putters, legendary putters come to mind, Cam Smith,

who would say often, there's a few tips out there floating around you to where he says

that he likes to feel as though he is hitting the ball on the back stroke of his putting

stroke.

So he's setting up to the ball.

He makes a back stroke.

That's where he feels like he's hitting the ball.

And then after that, the putter just kind of guides down slowly.

Another great visual for this.

I always love Justin Leonard's putting stroke.

David Tom's is another one, Ben Crenshaw's another one, and I'm pinpointed three guys

here who have very long, luxurious putting strokes.

There's no rapid deceleration or acceleration.

They're just, it's very constant speed, and it's very kind of long and slow.

Again, there's no forced hit into this putting stroke.

It's a smooth back and smooth through, specifically smooth into the ball.

But ultimately, the club doesn't know acceleration, deceleration, or the ball, sorry, I should

say, it doesn't know acceleration or deceleration, it just knows speed.

But for me, you want minimal acceleration and around impact so you can create a fairly

constant speed.

All right, so we're about to get into it now, but he's saying, you don't, first thing,

it's a myth.

You don't want to accelerate your putter through the ball.

He makes ball speed and makes distance control, a headache, you don't want that.

So now you're probably out there asking, okay, well, this is good.

That's helpful in itself.

But how do I actually do that?

How do I actually get this putterhead constant speed through the ball?

We're about to get into it.

So were you excelling, decelering the stroke becomes important?

And when you look at a lot of great players, the peak acceleration is actually at the top

of the downswing.

All right.

So there it is, where do you want the putterhead to be accelerating?

Because obviously, you need to accelerate the putterhead somewhere, otherwise the putterhead

is not going to move.

And we've already established that we don't want the putterhead accelerating by the time

it hits the ball.

So then the question is, okay, well, then where do I accelerate this putterhead?

Where do I actually get it moving?

You get it moving into places, you set up to the ball, clubs behind the ball, you need

to accelerate to get the putterhead going, right?

And then you take it to the backstroke, you just hit the top of your backstroke.

Now the peak acceleration, which means the most you should feel the putterhead moving

forward, is at the very top of the backstroke, okay?

So you get your putterhead, you take your backstroke, you start the putterhead down at that

moment where you start the putterhead into your downstroke.

That's where you want to feel the peak amount of acceleration.

That's where you're trying the hardest to get the putterhead going towards the target.

And then as soon as you get it going towards the target, then you want to hit cruise control.

You want to accelerate the car right as it's starting to downstroke.

And then you want to take the foot off the gas and just let it coast into impact.

Now this is kind of a core foundational principle of Phil's putting philosophy.

And one drill that he uses to do this, it's a great drill.

I highly recommend I do it myself all the time because of Phil telling me to do it.

You put a coin on the back of your putterhead, right?

So you have your putterhead, you place a coin on the top if you're using a mallet or

in the cavity if you're using a blade.

And then what you want to do is you want to make a putting stroke, but you want to throw

the coin off the back of your putter at the top of your backstroke, right?

That's the sign that you're accelerating in the right place.

So you take a stroke, top of the backstroke, the coin should fly off by the top of the

backstroke, then you come in coast into hit the ball.

If you're accelerating in the wrong place, you're going to put that coin at the back of

your putter.

You're going to take a backstroke and then the coin's going to stay on and then it's

going to fall off when you hit the ball or close to when you hit the ball.

That's the sign that you're accelerating the putter in the wrong place.

I'll be sure to include a clip of this in this Spotify video of this podcast, but it's

pretty simple.

You just put a coin on the back of the putterhead and then you make a stroke.

And if the coin falls off at the top of your backstroke, good news.

You're accelerating in the right place.

If it stays on at the top of your backstroke and falls off instead closer to the ball,

you're accelerating in the wrong spot.

That's where they create the peak acceleration to then allow the kind of club to coast in

and have minimal acceleration in the round impact.

That's kind of the key swing thought here is that you want the club head, you want the

putterhead to coast into the ball, right?

You don't want to be feeling like you're hitting the ball with your putterhead.

You want to get the putterhead moving on the backstroke and then coasting into the ball.

It should feel like kind of effortless.

And the fact is that when the putter is doing that, it does mean the putterhead is slowing

down.

It is actually decelerating.

It's getting slower.

But that's the key to better distance control, which is pretty much the opposite of what

you say on the Pro Am on a Wednesday on the PGA tour.

Exactly.

So just leaving it there kind of a recap of all of this is that when somebody says to

you, you don't want to, I decelerated on that one, don't, don't listen to them because

that's not evidence-based advice.

You've got the best putting coach, maybe ever, certainly the best putting coach on the

planet right now, putting coach to the star saying that when he looks at actual intense

data about putting strokes, what he sees is that the putterhead speeds up at the start

of the stroke and then slows down, then decelerates into the ball as it's hitting the ball.

Now the reason why this is good as we established earlier, it's because that when you have the

putterhead moving at a constant speed, like a pendulum, that's how you control ball speed

the best.

That's how you control distance control the best.

When the putterhead is picking up speed really rapidly, when you're speeding up the car,

suddenly you may hit a little too hard sometimes, a little too soft other times, distance control

starts to suffer and you're going to be missing parts of all different kinds of lengths

in that habit.

A good filler-proof drill to do this, to get this feeling of accelerating at the top of

the backstroke and then coasting, put that coin on the back of your putterhead, right?

And throw the coin off on your backstroke.

If it stays on your backstroke, then that means you're accelerating in the wrong spot.

And yeah, you can't put all these things together, and suddenly you've got a putting stroke

that's actually working towards you, that's moving at a more constant speed and it's

mirroring what the best putters who've ever played this game.