Swing easy and stay away from fat…

Tyler here with a little break from my norm.  I love a good movie, and this scene from Forgetting Sarah Marshall plays in my head anytime I hear a certain phrase during a PGA Tour Player’s interview.  Refresh yourself with the clip first.

How many times have you heard a tour pro say that they swing at about 80%?  Well, the PGA Tour average club head speed is around 112 MPH.  That means if a player were to swing all out, by basic math (112/.8) They would have a club head speed around 140 MPH, which is a typical output for a member of the long drive circuit.  So either one of two things is going on.  Either the average player doesn’t know how hard he is swinging compared to what he is capable of.  Or Brad Faxon has been really holding back all these years.  To think, he could have been driving par fours all along!

I understand that golf is a complicated sport, but we are at a place with technology where we can put an end to some of these confusing and misleading mantras, and hopefully avoid falling down the nutrition path.  To a novice, the golf swing is as confusing as deciding what is healthy to eat and what is not.  Can I eat bacon?  Whole grains are healthy still right?  Are eggs healthy these days or not?  Think about it, we have the same thing in golf.  I should swing easy?  I should keep my left arm straight?  It’s all in the hips right?  Don’t tell me chubs was lying, I don’t think I could take that one.

Nutrition goes through fad diet cycles just as golf goes through fad swing cycles and to the average consumer this creates a defeatist attitude.  The more complicated a topic is, the more opinions you will find on it.  I haven’t seen a new style of shooting free throws since the great debate between the purist and Rick Barry.

Usually, at the heart of complication is the quality of the data and the size of the sample.  Nutrition problems started by looking at small populations and making the claim that the success that population had will work for everyone.  Everyone should eat low fat because a small tribe in South America did so with success.  Golf was the same way.  Everyone should swing to parallel because Ben Hogan did.  Well, with nutrition, systems of evaluating the person first and then determining the appropriate diet have successfully evolved.  This evolution came from better data collection and identifying underlying critical factors, such as blood sugar, antioxidant levels, or calorie density.  These systems are now being used with great success to create healthy plans while still accounting for biochemical individuality.

Golf currently has 3D technology which can do the same thing which can debunk a lot of these myths.  Golfers are now going through screens before lessons to see what their body can physically do.  Then golf swings are being adjusted for these physical parameters.  The more we use accurate data to get our answers, the better our instruction is going to get.  I’m excited for the next coming years in golf and nutrition.  I’m excited to be able to swing hard…and eat bacon.