New Post: #6 - Technique Tuesday

Hi Friends

Another week, another Technique Tuesday newsletter,

Tiger Woods…Greg Norman…Ben Hogan. What secret do these and nearly all golf legends share?

Well, apart from being multiple major winners, they share the identical swing tempo.

What do I mean by “swing tempo”?

John Novosel an avid golfer and inventor, was studying film of golf swings, he studied PGA greats and was looking to see if he could find what fundamentals they all possess and why they could all hit the ball effortlessly and powerfully.

Novel made a startling discovery, nearly every champion demonstrated identical time proportion in his or her swing, a common ratio between takeaway and downswing. John called this “Tour Tempo,” and when measuring it, he found it to be a 3:1 ratio. 3 parts to the backswing to 1 part for the downswing to impact.

Some pros have a slightly faster swing and some slightly slower, but they all have the magic 3:1 ratio.

Below are the most common elapsed times and frames for touring pros,

(The numbers here are derived from a digital frame counter, Broadcast video is comprised of 30 images per second, so through using the digital frame counter, John was able to time the backswing and through swing to impact)

The first number is the amount of frames in the backswing and second number is number of frames in the downswing to impact

21-7 (Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood)

24-8 (Tiger Woods, Sam Snead, Tom Watson, John Daly, Ernie Els)

27-9 (Jim Furyk, Hal Sutton, David Toms, Michelle Wie)

The book is quite old now, I purchased mine in 2015! and it comes with a CD with an audio of the ratios, so you can put your headphones in and swing along, finding which ratio works best for you.

But its now 2024 so there is an app available on Apple or Android.

Right, I’m off to the range to sort my tempo out

Thanks for reading,