A Yale physics professor named Dr. Robert Grober put sensors inside golf clubs and studied hundreds of golf swings to see what made them so consistent or so inconsistent.
This was a years-old study all about tempo in the golf swing, but what's cool is that his findings, which were a big deal at the time, have had a renewed life online. Clips from his lecture have been making the rounds on social media.
So that's what the most recent episode of the Golf IQ podcast is about.
You can subscribe to the Golf IQ podcast here, and of course, watch Dr. Grober's lecture in full here.
There are a few key points in Dr. Grober's lecture that we can learn from. Here's a rundown:
- Like the pendulum swinging on a grandfather clock, there is a natural pace at which golf swings move where they can perform the most consistently.
- Think about it this way: If you were to forcibly try to slow down the pendulum to a certain speed, then forcibly speed it up again, you would be spending a lot of effort moving the pendulum rather than allowing it to move at its natural pace.
- That's the mistake a lot of amateurs make in their golf swing: They manipulate the tempo and the movement of their swings in a way that makes them worse, and pros don't.
- Often, it's because golfers equate smooth with slow, so they work hard intentionally trying to slow down their backswing then work harder trying to rapidly speed up their downswing.
- Smooth in reality means evenness, and a 3-to-1 backswing-to-downswing ratio is the sweet spot.
- This three-to-one ratio was a concept first coined in the book Tour Tempo by John Novosel, and it shows that the ideal tempo is one where the backswing is three times longer than the downswing. This is true across short and long golf swings. The time it may take to swing may change, but the ratio stays the same.
- Amateurs often fall outside this three-to-one range by intentionally trying to slow down their backswing. They manipulate their key muscles to be too slow on the backswing, and then have to manipulate them again to be too fast on the downswing.
- Instead, by quickening up your backswing your muscles are loaded, and now like a coiled spring, once you get to the top, can just unload. It brings your tempo into the ideal range.
- In all, chase evenness in your golf swing tempo. You want a more even, 3-to-1 backswing to downswing. That's how you'll perform at your most consistent.