Entry 25.12

“Rotation of the body is your enemy right now.” I actually wrote that in a post lesson wrap up in CoachNow recently. And yes, I was talking about the golf swing. This entry may be another repeat from a previous entry, I have no idea. I purposefully choose not to go back and read prior entries just so every single one is written in the moment and a reflection of what is in my head right now. The idea when I first started writing these was to get thoughts out of my head. The other thing I eventually want to use them for is to right a book. So, I’m going to write entries and then one day, I will pull them out, group them together, reformulate them into coherent chapters and BAM, I’ll have a book. But back to your enemy. I know I probably sound like a heretic and some of you will start chanting the cries of “Heretic!”, and images of an angry mob throwing vegetables at me will go through you head or maybe even worse, images of me burning at the stake. How can someone who loves to teach golf, a rotational sport, believe that rotation is the enemy?

Let me begin my stance on the matter in this way. When we take video of a golf swing and analyze it, how do we do it? Fairly simple answer. We use lines. But why do we use lines and not arcs since it is a rotational sport? That one is a little harder to explain. The easy way out is to just say that it is much easier for us to comprehend lines than it is for us to comprehend arcs. If we drill down to the bedrock of rotation, we find that it is defined as “an isometric transformation that turns every point of a figure through a specified angle and direction about a fixed point” (CalcWorkshop). Let’s break that down. Don’t get confused about the term isometric. If you have every done a workout program, you may have been giving some isometrics to do. In that case, we are starting about muscular action without contraction of the muscle. Not the definition that we are looking for here, but that would be an interesting topic to write about someday. Let me tuck that away in my mental notes for future entries. We want the other definition: isometric in math means “having equal dimensions” (Oxford Languages). We will also use the mathematical definition for transformation: “a process that manipulates a polygon or other two-dimensional object on a plane or coordinate system” (Tutors.com). This is important because we are talking about video.

In video, something that is typically three-dimensional has become two-dimensional, in this case, the person swinging the golf club. Put them together and we see the person and club are now a two-dimensional object with equal dimensions that turns. From here we only need a few more pieces of information, what direction are they turning, how many degrees did they turn and what is the fixed point that they turn around. This is where we really start to see why focusing on rotation requires the use the lines. To answer how many degrees did they turn, we have to know what makes up an angle. An angle is the intersection of two lines. The definition of transformation gave us another very important piece of information to consider: what is a plane? In geometry, a plane is “a flat two-dimensional surface that extends infinitely in all directions having zero thickness” (Cuemath.com). We have all heard about planes in the golf swing. The most basic plane is the swing plane. We could get into Jim Hardy’s “one-plane swing” versus a “two-plane swing” but I’m trying to keep this focused on rotation, so we won’t go crazy there. But there are other planes in the golf swing: the elbow plane, the turned shoulder plane, the squared shoulder plane, the turning shoulder plane, the hands only plane, the sweet spot plane… The list goes on. It all comes down to this: at the end of the day, we are all trying to stay on plane throughout the golf swing. Which means we are all trying to stay on a flat 2-dimensional surface. Another way to say it is that we are trying to keep everything in line.

Now some of you are probably thinking I’ve gone all whack-a-doodle because there are definitely arcs in the golf swing. You are one hundred percent correct. We have the hand path arc, the club head arc, the arc of attack and the arc of approach and more. When we look at how all those are measured, we once again come back to lines. The arc of attack and arc of approach are typically referred to with another term: angle. And if you remember from earlier, an angle is created where two lines intersect. But what about the hand path arc and club head arc? When we look at how they are measured in the golf swing, they are measured linearly. We measure them using terms like sway, lift and thrust for direction, and miles per hour for speed. These are all linear terms, not angular. So once again lines are the answer and not rotation.

But so far all I have talked about is how we describe (also known as analyze) the golf swing. Not how the motion is actually made. For that we have to look at the incredible piece of machinery we call the human body. First, let’s talk about the soft structures underneath our skin. Muscles are the first thing that usually comes to mind for most people. Here’s where most people get it wrong. Let’s think about your leg for a minute with that joint in between called the knee. To flex your knee, you need a host of muscles to be involved: the hamstrings, gracilis, sartorius, gastrocnemius, plantaris and popliteus (try saying that ten times fast). All those muscles just to make your knee move. What does your foot do in response? If you lift it into the air or are sitting down and you flex your knee it moves in a line behind you. Or does it? Go ahead and try it and watch what your foot does. We are all going to get a slightly different answer, but I’ll tell you right now that my foot doesn’t move in a straight line. I even tried the other one to see if I got a different answer. And guess what? I did! My feet move differently in response to me trying to make one motion. Now for me, that is a result of injury and life. I’ve broken one of my femurs and had a reconstruction of my ACL, MCL, PCL and a repair of the meniscus (two different incidents separated by twenty years). So, my feet definitely move differently when I flex my knees. But now I’ve brought a new structure into the conversation: bones.

Now we have a bunch of different bones, 206 to be exact for the typical human adult, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Now bones are the real structure of the body; without them we would just be blobs on the floor. I’m ugly enough as it is so I don’t even want to imagine what I would look like if I didn’t have any bones. Wouldn’t be pretty that’s for sure. Now bones are more than just the structure of our body, they have all sorts of important jobs. Bones like the cranium, ribs and vertebrae protect different organs and systems in your body. Most bones also contain marrow which is where red blood cells are made. When I first think about bones, the first thing that comes to mind is the skeleton often hanging in classrooms or pulling up bones on an archeological dig. Long straight bones. But those bones aren’t actually straight. They are twisted and curved. The next thought is the idea that we need to drink milk which leads to the idea that bones are nothing more than calcium. Actually, they are connective tissue reinforced by calcium and specialized bone cells. Poor concepts of what your body is made up of has been proliferated for years. But wait! Didn’t a bunch of super smart doctors research and dissect a whole bunch of people to come up with those ideas? Yup, and guess what, they were wrong.

That’s a bold claim for a person who is not a doctor to make, but it is fairly logical. Go back to the flexing your knee idea. How do we know those are the muscles that are involved? Well, go back hundreds of years to when doctors were figuring all this stuff out. How did they do it? They took a body, laid it on a table and moved it around and looked at what the underlying tissue did. Then they wrote down that this is what causes the knee to flex. And because they are doctors and most of us are not, we believed them. But these are the same guys and gals who defined anatomical position as a person standing upright, facing forward with arms at the sides and palms facing forward, feet together or slightly apart and head and eyes directed straight ahead. But how many of us stand with our palms facing forward? Quick answer, not many. So why is that “anatomical neutral”? If you figure out why, let me know. It doesn’t make any sense. Anatomical neutral is equivalent to "cadaver neutral." Well, I am a living human so is defining me from what you figured out by studying a dead person really doesn’t make sense to me. Where am I going with this?

Stand up with your feet side by side. Now take a step forward with your right foot and stop. All you did was move in a straight line right? Nope. As Shakira said, the hips don’t lie. By taking a step forward your right hip flexed (the angle between your femur and your sternum got smaller), it adducted (moved closer to your midline) and internally rotated. Your left hip did the opposite; it extended, abducted and externally rotated. All by taking a step forward. You didn’t have to think about it, it just happened. All at the same time. This is where those doctors got it wrong. They described motion by breaking it up and figuring out which muscles made it do that one direction. So, muscles make you move in one specific direction in their minds. But your muscles are omni-directional. They move in every direction. They also described the action that your muscles make. But you didn’t have to tell your muscles to act, they actually reacted to the movement you made. If they didn’t you would be picking yourself up off the floor because your muscles are what decelerated your mass and momentum against gravity using ground reaction forces to keep you up.

Now most of you probably read the first sentence as “Rotation is your enemy right now”. But I said, “rotation of your body”. When we see purposeful rotation of the body in the golf swing, we tend to see an over-the-top movement, early extension, swipey fades, hosel rockets and more. When we see reactive rotation, we see force properly directed and better ball flights. We get reactive rotation when we work in lines. I work harder to get players to rotate less than I probably do anything else when I teach. It’s something I’m currently working on in my own swing. Well maybe not less, maybe later is a better term. I do that by getting players to think in lines. The arms go up and down, not around. Think about a kid on a swing when they are at the top of the arc. They free fall, straight down, before that linear force is captured by chain and pivot and they swing on the arc. That is an important thing to remember in the golf swing. Energy in the frontal plane is captured and transformed by the transverse plane. This allows the sagittal plane to stay constant. Super geek speak for working in lines allows you to stay in posture. But if you work in rotation, that energy is captured by the sagittal plane, so you have to fight to stay in posture. No one wants early extension or an over-the-top move but since all they do is rotate, they continue to fight those demons. So don’t work on or worry about rotation, think and move in lines and let rotation just happen.