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Once they got a simulator? Ha, I’m sucking and have digressed curious if I’m the only one. Had a GC4 for a month now and hit most days
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Yes, but I think it was a good thing. You are figuring out what your body is doing during the swing. It takes a little while to associate a feeling with moving a data parameter. Knowing your club delivery metrics doesn’t make you better but it does give you feedback on what’s changing. Knowledge is power but it’s only half the battle. I think of it as each investment in your game reduces the learning curve. Adding an instructor to the mix will reduce it even more.
If you have not taken any courses on reading and understanding the data then that should be your first stop. My favorite was Trackman University. I think Foresight uses Peak but any one of them is a good investment of your time. -
As mentioned above there are some great courses offered by Foresight which have been a great resource for me (and my son).
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What Mat are you hitting off of for the simulator?Comment
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I started losing distance and hooking the ball because I would stop my swing at the ball and not following through. I am working through it a lot better now.Comment
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Having a good simulator set up has definitely improved my ball striking, distance, etc. However, having a GC Quad and two high speed cameras has made me more neurotic. Watching the swing of a 53 year old amateur regularly and (in my mind) NOT comparing it to the perfect swings we see on TV every weekend is difficult. My results are really pretty good for practicing an hour a day, but I find that I keep going back to micro managing the details of a perfect swing (which will likely not happen). I also find that I don't play much regular golf. It's so much easier to walk out to the garage and play 9 holes at any of a number of different courses using the best camera based launch monitor you can buy.Comment
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You still need instruction. Practicing the wrong swing for an hour a day will not show improvements. I still work with my teaching pro and so does my wife. We then go back and work on our swings and tempo for a month. Then we will go back. Both of our handicaps have lowered. Working on the right things seen in the eyes of the teacher vs your camera is where I would start. But having the camera will tell you if you are going back to old habits. I think the Sim was the best purchase I have ever invested in, both for golf and sure entertainment for our MN winters.
Good Luck.Comment
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My experience was a mixed bag of sorts.. When I first got the simulator it became a video game for me with clubhead speed / ball speed. I was just chasing big numbers with all my clubs and over swinging and it was costing me on the course. After a year of trying to kill the ball all the time I decided to chase accuracy and consistency over pure power and my game has really improved. I will say that from the get go, the sim did help with wedge yardages and that was the one club that I saw improvement with right from the beginning. It also helped that that was the one club that I was not trying to chase speed numbers with and just wanted to dial in yardages. Got really good at knowing what 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120 yard shots felt like and got really consistent with those shots. Driver was the one club that regressed initially and now is really solid for me after a year of nearly throwing out my back trying to kill it. If I could have given myself advice when I first got the monitor it would have been to not obsess over distance and speed and work on refining my stock swing. Good luck to you. I will say the longer you have the monitor and the more you practice the better you will get. But like others have said, if you practicing bad habits and not working on the right things you could be doing yourself really wrong.
Side note, I was in a league with a guy who built a hitting bay in his garage, but didn't have a monitor. He hit balls all winter and was really excited to see if all his winter work paid off once the weather broke.. Turns out he ingrained a severe hook and fought like hell all summer to get rid of it.. So beware what you practice and be sure you are getting ball flight and shot shaping like you are wanting before spending hundreds of hours whacking balls.
Other side note: I'm not a huge fan paying for instruction. With all the youtube and free instruction that you can find online there are a few fundamentals that hold true for every golfer. Specifically if you have a decent launch monitor you should be getting great feedback on all the metrics you need to start hitting better shots yourself. This is from a guy who taught basic grip, stance and swing as an assistant to the pro as a junior golfer growing up. Also from a guy who took tons of lessons working towards making golf a potential career and came to conclusion that a lot of guys giving instruction are crap to being with and only working on cookie cutter swings and not personal strengths. The physics don't lie. Reverse engineer how the club impacted the ball for the ball to have done what it just did. Look at your LM #'s and get a friend to film you. Find a buddy who is a single digit hdcp to spend 20 mins with you on the range every once in awhile and save the money. Unless you are a sub 2 hdcp looking to make a mini-tour or get a scholarship you are better off keeping the cash. I had a few other hard facts about teaching golf as well, but I'll save those for another post.
Some of my general rules of thumb when I was teaching:
If you can't swing driver over 90 mph it's going to be difficult to get you into single digit hdcp range from normal 6200 - 6500 yard men's tees ( not impossible, but more rare unless you have the natural athletic ability to swing somewhat fast )
Short game is much more important than anything else ( 100 yards and in should be practiced a lot )
You have to hit 1000's of balls / week to become a consistent ball striker, so put the work in to get the results out (You can't fix your swing in a single bucket at the range during a training session..)
Some people need golf instructors, but it's like a fitness trainer at the gym.. You know you need to work out, but some people need to pay another person to help them do what they already know they need to do in the first place. If you are capable of motivating yourself then you can go it alone.. If you need to pay you know who you are.
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I really only use my sim ,GC2, in the colder months and seldom during the warmer months unless we hit a long period of rain. It is good for keeping your golf muscles intact. Improving your golf swing is hit or miss depending on how disciplined you are. It is very easy to concentrate on chasing ball speed,distance etc. without much regard for direction,. I found the best use was to practice as if on the course i.e. drop balls at some fixed distance to a green and hit shots from there, keeping track of your results.
Sim golf has not all that much to do with golf IRL. In sim golf you always have a flat lie, with the ball sitting up perfectly. Unless you play in the desert that is nothing like real golf. Putting in sim golf is a waste of time if you are looking for putting improvement for the same reasons. You can practice you stroke on any smooth run without a sim hookup.
That said sim golf can be amusing as a high class video game which may or may not improve your actual golf score. Digging it out of the dirt works a lot better for practicing if you can arrange to do so. If you live in the tundra or can't get out to the course then it's a lot better then doing nothing.Comment
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Thanks to all for your time giving feedback. I’m at 13 handicap so you get the full picture. I was very inconsistent, slice one, hook one, one perfect. Took yalls advice and got a quick lesson. I was “sliding” my hips hard forward before the rotation which was throwing my clubhead angle way out of wack, sometimes a lot open with a big hip slide and sometimes super closed with no hip slide as my hands were used to compensating for it. Just my “athletic” way of just trying to get more power I assume, I didn’t know I was doing it. What do you know! I’m hitting a lot better on the simulator now practicing the fundaments I was taught, ha. Greatly appreciate everyone, that was a root problem a simmy without a camera will not show. Thanks againComment
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Glad to hear you have the root of the issue. For me, I try to tell myself to swing around my spine. Help prevent swaying or getting on my toes. When I go right, I slide and hips got ahead and when it goes left, no lower body (that happens when it is cold). Good practicing.Comment
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