Happy Hour
The science behind swinging faster and holing more putts, according to Dr. Sasho MacKenzie
You step up to a wide-open par 5, tee it high, swing as hard as you can and what happens? The ball spins off to the right and flies 30 yards shorter than normal. That’s because when many of us try to increase distance, we don’t understand the moves necessary to crank up clubhead speed.
A similar misunderstanding occurs on the greens, when we hit a 5-footer off the toe or the heel and miss the putt. We might obsess over fixing our stroke path and finding the center of the face, but science says another thing is causing our misses.
That’s what we discussed with Dr. Sasho MacKenzie during our Golf Digest Happy Hour: The science behind swinging faster and holing more putts. The live webinar was offered exclusively for Golf Digest+ members, who asked questions throughout the hour-plus chat.
Scroll on for our key takeaways and the complete recording of our Happy Hour with Dr. Sasho MacKenzie.
MacKenzie has a Ph.D in sport biomechanics and has long studied the disparity in movement patterns between the best golfers and the rest of us. He is the co-founder of The Stack, a popular speed training product and system that is especially popular on tour, including with 2022 U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick.
MacKenzie is a professor of sports biomechanics at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and also an engineering consultant for Ping. Outside of golf, MacKenzie has worked with MLB teams, including the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, as a biomechanics and bat-fitting consultant.
More recently, MacKenzie has researched putter fitting kinetics and the movement patterns of the best putters. His findings shed new light on the relative importance of face angle, stroke path and impact location and provide a blueprint for what we should be focusing on.
Key takeaways
- Overload and overspeed training can help increase clubhead speed. By training your body to swing at faster speeds with lighter objects and training using heavier objects, you can increase swing speed.
- There are two common “speed-killing” mistakes: Casting from the top and overusing the body in the downswing.
- The most important factors in putting are green reading, speed control and face angle at impact. Research has shown that stroke path and impact location are not nearly as important as face angle in determining whether a putt starts online.
