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A few points about the rate of closure:
- Just looking at the club face angle in the follow through is very misleading.
- Better predictors of rate of closure are
- Timing of the club passing the chest
- Amount of supination
- Timing, and amount, of arcwidth max
- For a given golfer:
- Draws will have slightly higher ROC than Fades
- Irons will have slightly higher ROC than driver
Tags: Poor Contact, Not Straight Enough, Driver, Fairway Wood, Release, Member Question, Concept, Advanced, Intermediate
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This concept video is discussing measured rate of closure.
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Now, rate of closure is one of those hot topics in golf instruction,
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because it seems to be closely tied to consistency,
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or at least that's the way it's being taught.
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That it is more consistent to have a club that has a lower rate of closure
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compared to one that has a really fast rate of closure.
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Now, what we're going to talk about in this video is
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some of the actual numbers that I've seen, either with AMM,
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or I'm going to reference some data from Johnston Claire,
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who's done both AMM as well as gears.
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I think he's one of the bright minds out in golf,
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and he's really, he's unbiased in how he analyzes
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different systems and pins them up against each other,
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just looking for accurate and factual data.
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Okay, so, rate of closure is a little bit more tricky
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than just looking at the follow-through position and saying,
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okay, if the club is there, it was slower than it was there.
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In fact, one of them will show you is it's usually the opposite.
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So, when looking at the data, I look at AMM,
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and I'm going to share my experiences with looking at the axial velocity,
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which is looking at one of the two more common ways
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that rate of closure is measured, which is basically looking at
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how fast the club is rotating like this.
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One other way that gears measure is it, it presents both.
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It'll measure the club as it's rotating compared to the target line.
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You could, there are a number of different other ways that you could measure it,
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but those seem to be the most common too.
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So, either compared to the target or the shaft rotation itself.
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Those two are highly correlated together.
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So, with most of the data on AMM and most of my experience with rate of closure,
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I'm looking at that axial rotation graph.
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What I've seen is that golfers with a lower rate of closure
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do tend to complain about, they complain less about consistency.
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The guys I've seen who have the higher rate of closure tend to be the ones
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who come in saying, you know what, I just kind of have that two way miss
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or I spray it, my misses are really big, they tend to struggle more with face control.
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So, in this video, we're going to talk about the couple key concepts that I think will help you
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understand your rate of closure issue.
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So, now that we have a definition, let's talk about what I think are the three main predictors.
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So, we're going to look at supination amount, not necessarily rate.
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We're going to look at the club passing your chest and we'll look at the arc width.
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Those are, I think, three really good indicators for looking at what is your rate of closure.
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So, the first one we're going to look at is the club passing your chest because that's the one that
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Johnson Claire found had the highest correlation and totally makes sense to me.
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Basically, if I'm, I'll go slightly off angle so that you can see right around when it would happen.
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If the club is straight out in front of my chest, the earlier that happens and the club passes my body,
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that's going to have a faster rate of closure than if the club is yet to reach its widest point or more behind my body.
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So, from the down the line view, something that looks like that, I'll try to get it a little higher so that it shows up on camera.
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Where the club face is pretty square as in perpendicular to the ground,
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that will actually have a higher rate of closure because my body is stopped turning and it passed it,
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compared to that where the club face has rotated much more but is well behind my body.
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Now, I've had a couple other questions relating to supination and the one I'll tie in from my own experience as arc width.
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I find that arc width has one of the higher predictors of the rotation speed or the axial velocity.
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And that would make sense with what John seeing because arc width is basically the distance the grip is from your chest,
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and it will be widest roughly when it's passing your chest.
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So, amateurs tend to have it passed the chest much earlier, that gives them a lower arc width and a higher rate of closure.
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Tor pros tend to have the body lead longer and so it won't catch up or get to its widest point until later.
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So, those two, the club passing and the club getting wide, you delay those of the lead as possible and that's going to bring down your rate of closure issue or your rate of closure number.
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Now, the one that's kind of the most tricky conceptually is looking at supination.
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Now, to be clear, I'm talking about anatomical supinations, so I'm looking at the forearm rotation to the elbow.
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Alright, not necessarily the hand compared to the absolute, because I could have a whole lot of shoulder rotation, for example.
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Here I have a lot of shoulder rotation, but not a whole lot of supination.
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I've still got a good 30 degrees left in the tank, where here I have pretty much maxed out my supination, but I don't have nearly as much shoulder rotation.
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So, what I tend to see is in order to have your body rotated inside bent and in order to have those arms extend, you're going to have to have a higher amount of supination compared to those golfers who stay facing the golf ball and don't turn their body quite as much.
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Now, the key is it'll usually be a more gradual rate, so it'll supinate for a not necessarily a little start a little earlier and go maybe a touch later in the
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the follow-through, but it will be slower going through that phase.
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The guys who tend to have really fast supination values tend to have the least amount of actual supination.
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So, tying that together, if you want to lower your rate of closure, you want to be more open to impact, you want to have more supination on the way through,
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and you want to have the club stay behind the midpoint of your chest as long as possible.
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If you want to have a faster rate of closure, you're going to let the club pass your body and bend quickly in the follow-through, and you're going to have less form supination.
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So, hopefully that helps you understand the pattern that I tend to teach, especially as it relates to the longer clubs.
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If you're going to try to have consistency with the driver three would typically a swing that is built around a lower rate of closure is helpful,
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and those swings tend to have more body irritation, body powering the swing, and later arm extension with more supination during the follow-through.
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Now, let's look at some actual data using a few slides from Johnson Clear's presentation about rating closure.
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I want to thank John again for being gracious enough to share some of his presentation with us.
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So, here we have one of his slides, and it's showing two swings that had about the same amount of draw, but using two kind of different swing styles.
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And you'll see that the one on the left, the club face, is not quite as rotated as the one on the right, looking from the down the line camera angle.
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But if you look at the actual data down here at the bottom on the screen, you'll see that the one where the club has rotated more actually had a slower rate of closure at impact, significantly slower, compared to the one where the face was held off.
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Now, here's that same swing further into the follow-through, and you can see that the one on the right, remember these both drew about the same.
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The one on the left was holding the face, but you can see it passes body, the one on the right, there was more body turn, and the club was being held more out in front of his chest.
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You can see that even though the one on the right has significantly more rotation at this point, down it impact, the one on the right had slower club face rotation compared to the one on the left.
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Now, this is my favorite slide from the whole presentation, because I really like the image at the top of the screen.
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So what we'll see if we zoom in on that top image is John's got a little wise sticking straight out of his chest, so this line is pointing roughly at his chest.
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Similar to one of my content videos on Iron Man movement.
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So over here on the left, the one with the slower rotation down it impact, you can see that the club is roughly still in front of his chest, and this is probably close to a chef parallel.
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Over here on the right, you can see that the club has passed his chest much quicker by a greater degree, and down it impact it had significantly faster club rotation speed.
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Regardless of the effort to hold the face, it's really this amount of the club passing your body that will have one of the bigger effects on your rate of closure speed.
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If your goal is to get the club out in front of your chest at impact, then you're really asking yourself to have a higher rate of closure and potentially some more variability to your swing.
