A reasonable explanation for “golf head moving down but hands moving up” would be the fact that the shaft becomes more vertical post impact. And since the hands do not move up to a significant degree, rather, we see the club head dig out the turf.

Listened to S2 ep4 of the Chading Scratch Podcast today and could not resist checking out Adam Young yt chanel ! Such an interesting podcast

What would you do for a heel striker?

Adam, have a look at the success Dan Grieve's has had filming himself playing actual rounds IRL and running through strategy, technique etc. I think you'd have great success doing something similar. Being based in the US, you'd be able to play some well known courses too. Definitely worth the investment.

I am really happy I stumbled on this video. I have a tendency to hit the ball on the heel. If I were to spray my face, I would have a beautiful cluster of strikes, but they would all be on the heel side. The 2-5% or so that are on the innermost side of that cluster are shanks. Last time I played I had 2 penalty strokes because of shanking the ball into a hazard. To fight this, I have been practicing the 'technique' to keep my hands closer to my body, and just hope the strike favors the toe. Like you said, there is nothing necessarily wrong with trying that, but it really wasn't doing it for me. After watching this, I decided to just ignore everything, and just give my brain the task of hitting the ball on the toe. I see where the ball is and I see where the face is relative to that ball, and I was able to hit the toe on the first swing. The funny thing is, I already did this playful training with club-face angle. I don't know why I didn't do it with strike location. I can't wait to go shank and toe a few on purpose. Thanks for being a breath of fresh air in this industry where it seems like every diagnosis is "you are over the top" yet my trackman path is .9* left.

I can also clearly see how much weight he was on his leading leg. Very good analysis

Most importantly the hands are ahead of the club head! Nobody every says this!!!!

The line on the ball can be adjusted in or out to provide a great visual aid to the driver swing path. With irons, find a spot just in front of the ball along the line you want to swing. This also helps with ball-turf contact.

Almost holed the elder man arm flail

Any recommendations on speed drills?

Left is heel, since the pevis moves towards the ball and takes up space for the hands.

people mistake compression with deformation, they're is always deformation but the diff betwen compress or not is: down att° hit down part of the ball first then the high part and then the hight part leave the face first. not compressed upw or not down enougt att° hit low part of the ball first then high part then the low part leave the face first. and yes you have back spin in both.

Simple but effective description of swing path , completely useless as anything more than that . Clubface and shaft lean or wrist cock/ release add the next two dimensions that make the variations of output practically infinite and almost baffling . But as a means of first understanding your natural swingpath and low point possibilities this is a great start point 👍

Extremely intuitive way to think about the golf swing and all of its combinations and permutations. Thanks for sharing.

An interesting follow up video would be showing Hogan's foot placement chart at the end of five lessons and how he moves his trail foot diagonally back as the clubs get longer to keep the arc square to target.

Nice concepts, and understandable even for a Neanderthal like me, but what happens if the club face is open or closed

The issue with this board is it's 1cm off the ground it surely needs to be level with your stance to get an accurate reading.

Who am I best buying this from? I'm based in the UK. A lot of them look like they're going to break after a few swings but this one looks really durable. Thanks

Which one took the least number of takes?

Show it with a 3 iron, that's a 60 degree wedge. Nobody says they compress their wedges.

I think compression is a very misleading word in golf.

Andrew Rice has a drill that you put a tee pointing out between the fingers of your lead wrist. And, you are suppossed to pretend that tee is shooting lazers and you want to keep it pointing away from you at all times. This encourages the player to start the swing thinking about flattening that lead wrist early in the swing like Adam was saying that John Rahm does.

KZbinr "askgolfnut" hates the word compression. I cant remember his exact reasoning. I think to "compress" you need to squish between to objects. Thank you for showing that one deos not pinch the ball to the ground.

Nail, nail, nail.. nail nail nail

As a righty who has a tendency to slice, would trying to drive the nail slightly to the right not open the face up and make it slice more? Honest question as I love this concept but am curious about your insight. Subscribing to your drills after listening to Chasing Scratch for first time this month!

Everything said here is true, but I think it is worth pointing out the biggest variable in compression of a golf ball is strike force which increased exponentially with velocity. The reason pro compress the ball better than recreational players is that pros learn how to stay in balance while generating the force needed to get the maximum compression the USGA allows in a golf ball. What does balance have to do with compressing the ball you ask? Accuracy. There isn’t much point in hitting a ball 350 yards if it slices two fairways to the right is there? The USGA doesn’t limit compression via duromenter or how much the ball changes shape, it uses an ‘Iron Byron’ robot to whack balls which are at a temperature of 75°F room at 120mph in with a 360cc Driver and measures how far they fly, deeming any which fly 317 yards, with a tolerance of +3 yards per lot of 12 tested to be conforming. The difference in flight time between the lot of 12 must be below .4 seconds. You can find the details at: www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/2019/equipment-standards/TPX3006%20Overall%20Distance%20and%20Symmetry%20Test%20Protocol.pdf I started playing in 1983 and have experience hitting the old wound rubber Balata balls that dates back to the 1950s when I found my grandfather’s bag of hickory clubs and balls in the basement, managing to break the shafts on all the clubs then cutting the balls apart to wrap the mile long rubber band around trees and get to that super bouncy oil filled ball in the center. In the early 2000s, retired - a career that involved process control and materials testing - and worked as a starter where I amassed a collection of over 5,000 found ball and for grins and edification would take them out to the course on evenings I closed the place to comparison test different types of and brands of ball. By then I had enough game to fully compress a ball on an iron with falling on my ass in the process and hit fade, straight and draws with a high degree of consistency in my swing speed. My testing protocol was to take an iron or wedge and a dozen balls of each of two different balls out to a fairway and aiming shots at the center of the green with one the balls always being Pinnacle Gold as the comparison baseline because I found so damn many of them in the woods. In addition to comparing balls my goal was to determine my straight, fade, draw carry and roll with each of my clubs. I didn’t test with Driver for distance like the USGA because criteria for a superior golf ball is the ability to shape shots and control spin and control the angle of flight into angled greens where it goes after landing on a green. I want to be able hit a shot to the front of the green and control whether it bounces and rolls 45° to the left (draw) or 45° to the right (fade) after landing on the green, which increases the odds of keeping the ball on the green and rolling it closer to the hole on most green shapes and back pin placements. When hitting and evaluating STRAIGHT shots there really wasn’t a huge difference in CARRY distance because all balls, cheap or expensive. The reason for that is simple: all non-range balls, from the cheapest to the most expensive are limited by USGA to 317 yards + 3 when tested on its robot. Range balls are designed to fly about 80% as far so driving ranges can be smaller and really a waste of of time hitting, why I spent more time on the course playing solo practice rounds with game balls than on the range; the best perk of working at a course for min. wage and no tips, It is possible to design a golf ball that would go further than 317 +3 when tested and some like that are sold, but they are not conforming and can’t be used honestly in competition. There was more variation in my swing than in the balls between the two-piece and premium multi-layer balls in straight shots hit with irons and wedges. The premium balls did go further, but not by more than 1/2 a club length in the approach shots I was hitting to the greens. The biggest difference I found between the less expensive two-piece balls vs. the three-layer ProV1 and four-layer ProV1x and similar ‘Premium’ balls was the ability to shape them, which is affected by how much the spin axis tilts as it comes off the face of the club, spin rate, and the aerodynamic properties of the ball (lift and drag created by the dimple pattern). My test for shaping was to increase my stance angle to the right and left incrementally until I could no longer coax the ball I was testing back to the center. The most the stance can be opened or closed when hitting fade or draw and get a ball back to center is 45°. By adjusting face angle nearly as much it is possible to open stance 45° with a ProV1 and coax it back to the front left edge of the green were it will kick hard to the right towards the hole. Granted it is not a high percentage shot but is about as much fun a person can have with a golf club and ball. Just ask Bubba Watson or Phil Mickelson who are Zen Masters at shaping shots. By comparison two-balls can’t be shaped so extremely. For 99.9% of recreational golfers today who only ever try to hit dead straight shots thats a GOOD thing because it translates to less dispersion. What I concluded was the biggest difference between premium balls and less expensive mid- and low-cost ones was the coefficient of friction of the outer layer. A thin urethane cover over a hard mantle layer which is the design of PRO V1 stays on the face of the club better, all other factors being equal and comes off the face with more spin and rebound velocity which is why they can be shaped more. Instead of focusing entirely on COMPRESSION one needs to consider the RATE OF DECOMPRESSION. Just consider it is possible to compress a foam ball more than a regular one, but it doesn’t rebound off the face after compression like a real one with greater speed than the club head that hit it. That was the HUGE difference in the ProV1 when it hit the market. Two piece balls were introduced by Top Flight in the 1970s. I played mostly Top Flight two-piece in the 80s because Balata balls were expensive, got cut, and would go out of round badly if a hit snapped one of the rubber bands inside the cover. The inside layer of a ProV1 is a similar polymer but is is surrounded by a thin layer of hard plastic (like a milk bottle in hardness and thickness) and then by an even thinner, very grippy (high friction co-efficient) cover. That combination makes the ball compress and rebound differently than a two-piece ball and causes the rate of compression and decompression to change more as striking force varies in partial vs. full shots and putts. Someone who tracked tour stats for % puts holed from various distances noticed that after the pros switched from Balata to ProV1 they started missing more putts > 10 feet. Why? That hard plastic mantle under the cover has very little compression at low velocity impacts with a club head mass. The solution? Add soft polymer inserts to the face of the putter, which is why if you game a 3 or more layer ball you will control puts better with one of those. There was an interesting period on the pro tour after the switch to Pro V1 where winning scores were always 20 or more under par because pros discovered the could just lob a shot 20yards over the flag on front pin placement and spin it back to the hole. That led to the 2011 rule change for groove shape to take some of the spin off the ball and make it more difficult to keep a ball on the green. The change in ball tech along let to changes in course design. Not just moving the pro tees further back, but making greens smaller and on the top of steeper hills, making the target smaller and a missed green more punitive. But it also negated the advantage of being able to steer the ball in the air left to right for a green angled / with a fade or a green angled \ with a high draw which is why few outside of the advanced amateur and pro ranks bother to even learn how to to shape shots.

Maybe another way to say it: I will just swing to make contact with the ball before the ground, but importantly with my hands in front of the clubhead at impact

Skills training advocated by Adam is so underappreciated that to me it’s almost an intentional omission by the golf instruction community. It’s not to say that it is a magic pill, but the fact that it is not emphasized is baffling given that almost any other sport relies on skill building rather than technique. Technique should come into play in the very beginning to build basics, and then towards the later stages to fine-tune your game. Imagine the absurdity of a basketball player spending hours working on jumpshot mechanics without a ball in his hand. Or a football quarterback, spending hours in front of the mirror, perfecting his throwing technique without a ball. It will not translate once the ball comes into play. The image of tour pros being given elite instruction in their younger years is not necessarily an accurate one. A lot of these players simply learned to hit the ball in the center of the clubface when they were young. For three years, I have used Adam’s instruction, and it has helped immensely. I will admit that every few months, I get enticed by a swing or technique tip, and I vow to find a way to make it work on the course. But then I always come back to focusing on the skills, and lo and behold, the ball just flies better. Also, you hear a lot about not thinking about anything when you’re actually playing a round. The hope is that your hours of practice will take care of your swing on the course. That is all fine and well, but when you hit that first bad shot, followed by a second, especially if it is like a shank, most of these “no thinking” players start panicking because they have no clue what the next shot will be like. This is when you get into your head and the round goes to crap…. because you feel you have no control over what you are doing after your hours of practice have failed you. But imagine the confidence you will have if you shank the ball, and then know instantly that you will be able to avoid it on the very next shot. Sure, you may overcompensate on the next shot, but the feeling of control you have will give you more confidence. If anyone is in a rut by endless swing thoughts or technique obsession, I would strongly recommend to give this process a try.

Why is it when I use the Matt Wolff / Juju swing I smash the ball ? I feel like it automatically gets into the slot. As if the club had such a whip on it. When I swing a traditional swing my sequencing is always off. One day it’s good then the next day I can’t find that same swing. But when I try to mimic this swing I hit it my best. Any advice is much appreciated. I’m 50 y.o. Been playing 25 years.

LGLG.

A question on the Diver board Adam. Does practicing with the board run the risk of messing up your Arc depth as it is sat 1/2 inch above the mat

Excellent presentation in physics of ball compression results. Will try it today. Thanks.

What’s really interesting is that you can take a divot with a 0 angle of attack. The club deflects down after the strike so if you launch monitor measures AoA at impact you can have 0, thr impact deflects the head down, and you take a divot. Lots of times when you see large divots it’s coming from soft ground and the head deflecting not really from a downward chop.

I bought the Strike Plan a few months ago and these skill training ideas are so good that I am absolutely not telling my golf buddies about them.

Left is heel, right is toe. In the right deeper hips and more turned. Slightly more upright on the left with hips towards the ball

Everything looked identical, only thing I can think of is ball position.

The X strike explanation was a huge “a-Ha” moment for me. Embarrassed but relieved to say a stupid mistake years ago thinking the white coloured groove at the base of my irons was the sweet spot has had me using the wrong mental model for years. The difference instantly from adjusting to that thinking and ball striking close to the centre of the face is unbelievable. Thanks Adam. Love your book too

More on course strategy. Tell us more! You’re the man!

This was fantastic. Going to buy a whiteboard to do this on my sim when playing

I tried hitting down on the ball. I ended up chopping wood! I like to take a thin divot.

Just a few rounds played at the Wynn on your simulator pays for the simulator!

Great to have you talk through the game. Very interesting. Keep these videos coming.

Adam - awesome content as always. Would love to hear more about what’s an acceptable shot, and which you correct for mid-round. You mention that within 20 yards (offfline raw) for driver is fine. And within 7 mm face contact is acceptable. What about 7 iron offline raw, HLA for putting, etc. Love this type of content.