“Lewis, can I have a lesson with Trackman?”
This question is the inspiration behind this week’s blog in our Trackman series, so let’s get stuck in.
What is Trackman?
In case you have missed the previous blogs in this series, Trackman is a launch monitor which tracks the club and the ball. We use it exclusively in club fitting to help us determine which clubs are best suited for you (click here to learn more about trackman fitting) and we can use it to help understand your club delivery in a coaching session.
“But why would I have a coaching session on Trackman, instead of a normal session on the driving range?”
As a coach, the last thing we want to do is guess. Its why I have spent a lot of resources (time and money!) over the past 5 years diving down every rabbit hole across many different routes… so I am guessing as little as possible about your movement patterns and why the ball does not do what you want it to do.
The golf swing is such a fast-paced motion, which is often over in less 1.5 seconds. This means trying to predict how your club is being delivered can be very difficult, although not impossible. Some coaches will use the subsequent ball flight to make an educated guess on how you delivered the club. However, this educated guess is what the name suggests… a guess.
Using a launch monitor such as Trackman, takes the guesswork away from how your club delivers. We can accurately say that you are delivering your club like X, Y and Z. This will help not just you as the student understand why the ball reacts like it does, but also it helps us dictate how we are going to help you.
What can we measure?
Trackman is measuring over 30 different parameters, from the club, ball launch and ball flight. In coaching, we are going to be paying a little more attention to the club delivery numbers. The main focus’s will be:
Club Path – the direction your club is travelling in, relative to target.
Face Angle – The direction your club face is pointing at impact, relative to target.
Angle of Attack: The up or down movement of the club, relative to the ground/horizon.
These are the three most generic delivery parameters which will influence strike and direction. There are plenty others we are looking at, but for today we will focus on these.
Understanding how you deliver each of these parameters alone, can have a massive influence on your club delivery! I have seen many students who simply can not answer why they think their ball is going consistently offline, but when they understand it is because of one of these numbers, they can sometimes fix it themselves! Also, we as coaches get caught looking at ball flight thinking “they must be delivering it like this” then Trackman proves us wrong and tells us something different. We are taking the guess work out of helping you improve. I like to compare it getting your car serviced or updating your MOT, we can drive past the garage at 40mph and hope the mechanic can see and hear certain issues, or we can let him inspect and plug in clever machines to help diagnose issues we may run into.
What I love most about coaching with launch monitors is we can help you make swing changes through different movement patterns and see what we are working on is making a positive influence on our club delivery. Let me give you a case study…
Michael is a new golfer who wants to understand how he should swing it before picking up what he called bad habits. One of Michaels biggest issues for strike is his attack angle is positive. This means his club is travelling in an upward direction into the ball, making iron striking very difficult when on the ground and not on a tee. When working on his pressure and movement patterns, we found his angle of attack progressively worked negative, so he was hitting down onto the ball and getting that elusive compression we all search for.
Why such quick progress?
Utilising the feedback of the launch monitor numbers, Michael’s brain was understanding how to influence angle of attack. This type of feedback and learning lasts much longer than relying on coaches’ feedback because he can make the association between positive movement and good club delivery faster.
Hang on… do not you use GC-Quad too?
Yes, we do… we love GC-Quad and Trackman!! Unlike others in our industry, we recognise the advantage of both units and do not have a preferred one!
GC-Quad utilises cameras to understand club delivery and ball flight, instead of Trackman’s radar-based system. If you would like to learn more about the difference between the two systems, click here.
Most students are recognising the value and importance of utilising the latest launch monitors to understand your club delivery and ball flight and achieve faster results in coaching sessions. If you would like to join them, get in touch with our team to schedule a lesson with technology.
