Our SuperSpeed Tour Ambassadors had a great year in 2023!
This year at the PGA Show we were excited to present some case studies specifically related to how these great players use the ground to create speed in their golf swings. We looked at three players, Padraig Harrington, Cheyenne Knight, and collegiate player Max Moldovan.
We presented this data with our friends at Smart 2 Move on Thursday afternoon at the PGA Show.
We’re going to go through a couple different things here today I’m going to do a couple little basic overviews of kind of the philosophy of how we look at at uh Ground Force here at superp speed some of the protocols that we like to use uh with our players and then I
Really want to jump into doing some really cool case study work with everybody we’ve got a number um of tour ambassadors at super speed uh probably headlined by padrick Harrington and I want to show you kind of what we saw with him uh middle part of last year uh
Which may surprise you for the player that um led the champion stor driving distance and honestly was you know hitting high 170s in ball speed when we started and I want to show you after uh also a very interesting case on the LPGA Tour of a a player that’s seen a lot of
Uh of gain in her her speed and in her career in the last year in that Cheyenne KN maybe some of the most interesting groundforce data that we’ve ever seen on the lpj t and a recent player that we started working with last year uh named Maxwell moldan uh who plays at Ohio
State right now will be turning pro end of this year who saw some huge gains uh in just a short amount of time doing some of the right uh kind of drills for ground reaction force so let’s go ahead and get into this you know first thing
That I would look at is at super speed golf we look at swing mechanics in general is kind of a holistic uh concept that we call the speed pyramid so this really looks at how a player is interacting with the ground how those forces and torqus created are going to
Influence the body rotationally how that rotational sequencing is eventually going to translate out the arms and club and hopefully right into the golf ball to max out club speed so I think it’s a good way to think about how all of these things connect together um because I
Think we can really get caught in the minutia sometimes of you know diving way too far into just looking at how that player’s using the ground or just just how they’re sequencing or just how they’re lagging the club into the ball when really all of those things need to
Work together in the best way possible for that player to really create optimal Club speed so just as a little overview if a lot of you around haven’t don’t have a lot of experience with looking at Ground reaction forces it’s probably a review for most people but some of the things
That we really look at when we’re looking at all of these you know vectors rolling around in graphs we’re really looking at how big biger these forces we call that magnitude how big is that Force Vector we’re looking at the direction or line of action that that
Force is moving because the force is going to influence the body in a certain direction and we’re also looking at where it’s coming from or point of application when we put those things together and we have a good idea of how big a force is which direction it’s
Moving and where it’s coming from we can have a really good idea of how to then Coach that play to improve the efficiency of those forces now in a very basic sense we look at something called the kinetic sequence and we’ve seen this pattern with just about every highlevel player that we’ve
Ever tested where we have lateral Force being created first and I really like to look at this specifically as Trail foot lateral force or how that golfer is pushing away from the ball with their right foot that reaction force is then pushing the player toward the target and
We’re going to have that kind of motion of lateral plane Force pushing away from the target the reaction force pushing the player toward the target the next one we like to look at is confusing in the world of of gol instruction but it’s called torque really here we’re looking
At how does the lead foot push toward the ball how does the trail foot push away from the ball that resulting Force couple creates what we call torque which is going to help the body body rotate that’s a big deal for a lot of players where go a rotational sport the last one
In that sequence that Peaks is typically what we call vertical force and here we’re going to look at vertical Force combined but also coming out of how the lead foot of that player is creating vertical Force seen that to be very highly correlative to speed in in what we’re looking
At all right let’s get into these case studies I think that’s the fun thing to look at I really think it’s probably the most valuable part of what we’re doing how this actually get used in application out in the real world with players that are trying to do this for a
Living and also amateur players that are trying to get to that next level the first one that I want to talk about uh is an LPGA Tour player named cheyen Knight now a little background on Cheyenne Cheyenne played at the University of Alabama was an All-American uh came out on tour had
Some early success um had a couple years where she didn’t have a win and uh we met with her I want to say say this was in May of last year Cheyenne started out from a club speed standpoint at about 8889 miles an hour with a driver ball
Speed of about 128 now she’s working really hard to even get to that point I’m looking at it and saying I mean something wrong with this this is Scotty Sheffer six iron like we got to fix this we got to get better because this is a
Player that has won on the LPGA Tour being in the bottom 30% of driving distance and every other as of her game is firing in on all on all cylinders I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more pure wedge shot I don’t I’ve seen players short games from all over the
World and I mean I’m telling you this girl can get up and down from anywhere she’s a great Putter and she’s had to be right because she’s not out there with the ability to make 15 birdies around I love working with those kind of players and I love working with those kind of
Players on speed because those kind of players if they get just a little more speed and they get into the middle of the pack all a sudden it’s like the floodgates open for him so I want to show you some of the things that we saw
With Cheyenne right off the bat uh first thing I want to show you is point of application of what we were seeing with the way she was creating lateral force in her swing and that’s really on this side here but if you see where that red
Dot is you know pretty far to the outside of her foot she was a player that was definitely kind of getting behind the ball a little too much and letting a little bit too much um pressure get toward the outside of that foot so we’re seeing a point of
Application a little too far out um when we look at her lateral Force production we’re seeing about 15% of body weight but even though we’re seeing that 15% of body weight and I’d like to see more than that I’d really love to see that be up in the 20 plus range the
Way she’s doing it she she doesn’t create a lot of force for a lot of time so that’s something we call impulse we’ll talk about that a little later um but she’s not getting a lot of total Force production from that trail foot this gets kind of crazier so this is her
Torque number and it’s happening at a good point you know in the downswing you know this is where we want it about 100% that’s just not enough here and if you ask Cheyenne how do you create power how are you trying to create power she would
Tell you that her goal is to create as much rotation as hard as she possibly can so this is what she’s trying to do to create speed okay we’re not getting enough quite out of there in the torque side vertical Force is really interesting here now total combined
Vertical force of 168% for Cheyenne and her situation I wasn’t shocked that it was a little low it’s not crazy low but it was a little low what’s very interesting here is Cheyenne’s actually creating more vertical force from her Trail foot at Peak than she is from her
Lead Foot now that’s very atypical for what you see with a lot of players and this really comes from a desire for Cheyenne one of the goals that she had is she is trying to figure out out how to make the ball roll as far as possible
She’s trying to figure out how to almost beat physics you know and and say okay I’m going to launch this thing at seven or eight degrees with no Spin and a lot of the shots that we saw would carry like 210 212 yards and roll 30 or 40
Yards if she’s in a situation where that’s a tight lie on The Fairway she’s trying to maximize roll that’s how she’s trying to get distance right now this is kind of a result of that goal that she’s trying to put into play in her game now another concept that happens when we
Get into this situation where we don’t have as much force coming off the lead side we’re a little lacking in total lateral Force production we’ve got a lot of these different situations uh that we need to really work on here is we end up in a situation where she’s going to be
Reducing other types of torque in her swing one of those specifically is something a concept we call moment arm when we’re looking at it in physics now this is a really key point because moment arm for a player like Cheyenne is the only chance she has to create a ton
Of downswing loading and get a bunch of speed um out of the transition of golf swing what this is if we’re trying to create torque with the upper body you know you you’ve all seen you’ve all tried to like open a bolt or something and you have like a little tiny wrench
And it’s almost impossible and then you get like the long torque wrench and you have more distance so it’s really easy then to open that o open open that wrench pretty simple formula um if we apply 10 lb of force to a 6 in or/ foot wrench we’re going to
Get five footp pounds of torque okay we can do one of two things to increase the amount of torque we’re going to get we can either increase the amount of force we’re producing so if I could apply 40 pounds of force instead of 10 I’m going
To get 20 pounds of torque instead of 10 now for a player like Cheyenne do we think she’s going to be able ble to apply four times the amount of force to the golf club and transition I mean I don’t think so I don’t think that’s the
Best way to go about it and you’ll see how I Circle back on this in a second because this is force we’re looking at about applying to the club but it’s affected by how we do it with the with the ground the other option is we figure
Out a way to make the wrench bigger so if I can now apply 10 pounds of force to a two foot long wrench I get that same increase as if I were going to be applying four times as much force so let’s look at what this looks like in
The swing here’s an example of a player that does a very good job creating moment arm in his swing this is Cody Blick he’s on the corn fairy tour lateral force on the trail foot looking kind of like that as a vector vertical Force looking a lot like that is a
Vector okay if I take the resultant force of that you’re going to see it pushing toward the target significantly and pretty high right if I take his Center of mass and I draw an imaginary line in 3D to that Force Vector that that’s the size of the wrench for Cody
So if you look at a player like Cody Blick or John ROM or a lot of these players they’re going to tell you and it doesn’t it it the club feels like a feather when I’m trying to transition it feels really light it’s really easy to
Do that has to do with this mechanical advantage they’re getting from this long moment arm let’s see what Cheyenne’s looked like with her situation we saw in some of those forces where she’s getting a lot of vertical off the trail side so first of all this is actually what her
First vectors look like you know at this point in the swing and transition so we got lateral Force going a lot more up right it’s not going toward the target it’s going the trail foot’s going more up vertical force is actually pushing back a little bit and it’s not very big
Right so her resultant force is coming right up through her body well if we extend that out and make that moment arm Chey’s got that like 2-inch wrench that’s going on and this was interesting as we interviewed her and we talking to her about it she came up and she’s like
Yeah I mean I feel like I am doing absolutely everything in my power to make the club change direction and she’s like I’m feeling I’m swinging as hard as I possibly can to make it happen it’s just not going and we’re like well I mean obviously we didn’t do this is not
What you do with a torol he like well sh it’s obvious like I mean obviously you don’t have a large enough moment arm there’s this you got to lay that Force down I mean she’d probably look at us and go crazy what we did is we gave her some very simple
Drills in our side we’re going to try to make the forces bigger that’s great right but I need this lateral Force Vector to be going more toward the target cuz that’s going to make this resultant Force come out here like we saw with Cody and I want to see a whole
Lot more vertical Force coming off the lead leg okay here’s her actual program that we built for her again like April May of last year um we had her doing some very cool drills one was skaters skaters if you’ve seen is like a lateral bounding drill where you’re focused on
Landing on the inside of your foot especially on that trail side uh we did some we did a step back drill which is in all of our super our level two super speed protocol where you kind of counter swing forward step back plant swing and go again a lateral Force drill trying to
Get all of that going um did some Force pedal work on the trail foot so got a force pedal under the inside heel of her Trail foot having her Smash down into that as she’s swinging back um did both Force pedals Trail inside heel and Lead
Ball um that’s kind of starting to get into those work on getting the lead ball of the foot working more in vertical Force lead leg jump backs are a force pedal drill I put it under the Lead Foot actually have the player jump and leave the ground before the club gets through
Impact which seems crazy and wild but it works really really well and then an application drill of just trying to apply those fields to the actual golf swing all of these drills are going to be in our new super speed ground reaction force protocols we have three
Levels of those coming soon um with our app that’s going to be releasing here in a couple months so that’s Cheyenne’s program so we kind of left her her go um for a while she had some really great success the overall success has been fantastic I
Mean she’s gained over 10 mph of ball speed at this point put her in that like 140 range which we still want more but that’s certainly less behind the eightball in the LPGA Tour um she got a win last year which was a really fun
Event had a 20 and one record in the solheim cup and just finished fourth last week here in Orlando so you know if I think if there’s any place in the world where 10 mph ball speed is going to make a huge difference in a career
LPG is the place let’s see though what changed cuz one of the things that we always do with our players at super speed is we’re always test the drills that we give them before we let them go off and work on them which seems like an
Obvious thing to a lot of people that know what they’re doing coaching but you’d be shocked how many people don’t do this well we tested all of these drills and said okay what’s going to change and this is so this is going to be data from about a half hour after we
Worked on this stuff about a half hour retested here’s what we got well lateral Force went up to 18% doesn’t seem like a lot but that’s a 20% gain in lateral force in 30 minutes that’s a big deal um we then looked at torque because that lateral force was able to move more
Everything else is going to exponentially get better we got her we basically freed her up for the ability to be able to start to now create rotational torque which is how she wanted to create power in the first place that’s a 40% gain in rotational torque vertical went up to a total of
187% and we started to get a bigger um percentage of that going from the lead leg okay I think that’s the key here is I just wanted the lead side to be more than the trail so once I saw that I was like okay great job all this is going
Off to the races work on this program so uh that’s kind of where we are with Cheyenne she’s doing fantastic all right who wants to talk about Padre I do not so that is a non-measured moment arm it’s coming in the future with smart to move you can see some of
The stuff they’re doing with center and mass that’s kind of an estimate just for a graphic of where it was I don’t know if it was a quarter of an inch a half an inch two Ines 3 in I know it definitely wasn’t a foot or so which is what she
Needed so we definitely were working on that one way or another so padri Herington go ahead one more the biggest key for her was to initially get more lateral Force which is going to free her Lead Foot up to work better in the swing because she didn’t get enough
Lateral Force so she ended up way too far behind the golf ball all the time she’s too much on her right side the whole time therefore the front foot can’t work toward the ball to create torque right and we also can’t work down to create vertical Force so yes lateral
Force in this case and point of application of lateral Force essentially allowed the other forces to work better for her and her swing so without really even attacking those they got a lot better so it’s it’s a chain reaction with all this the kinetic sequence chain reaction of this is the most important
Part in coaching ground reaction force now without further Ado I got to share some of the data with our kind of lead Ambassador padrick Harrington because this one is kind of goofy too and he’s a crazy guy and we love him but we met with him last May uh down in
Texas and he came out and he’s swinging the golf club you know at 118 miles an hour and has 178 or so ball speed when we were starting and he was peing vertical Force at impact now for those of you that work with ground reaction force system you probably see that all
The time with your amateur golfers probably one of the most common things is we’re not getting vertical Force peaking early enough to really take advantage of it in the golf swing well there it is at impact Padre Harrington pretty crazy you know 171% of body weight still for a player with that much
Power is way low way lower than what I’m expecting okay this was after we did his drill program for about 45 minutes with him on the Range we got that Peak happening now it’s hard to see on there but the club’s about parallel it’s still not early
Enough but it’s a lot earlier than it was so that was kind of the main goal of our whole program with padri was getting vertical Force peaking earlier and now backstory on padri on this too I mean he’s working with our super speed stuff for the better part of the last 10 years
He’s doing everything he possibly can to chase speed and he’s winning uh he’s winning that race I mean he’s leading the champions tour in in in every stat distance everything you want he’s probably top 15 20% on the PGA tour at age 52 he does have an existing left knee
Injury that he got in the gym over the time of covid and this is an interesting case because this is how this how like something physical like that can affect a player long term so it was something that he did in the gym it had nothing to
Do with his golf side at all it was just a gym injury and the way his body wants to protect his knee is to not let it extend and not let it really work and it started to get this point where he’s not then getting as much vertical force and
It’s very much happening too late in the process um so that’s kind of the why now the fixing it is is another kind of situation first of all this is what happened with padrick this is where we went we went from pre-drill 175 ball spill post drill 185 ball speed um which
Is ridiculous just by that little bit of change in timing of vertical Force the drills that we had him do a lot focused on lead side we use Force pedals under the Lead Foot getting him to try to push down early we did a lot of counter
Rotation Swings with him and then the other thing we did was our rocker drill which is in a lot of our protocols as well so essentially having him go back and forth between his feet getting the clubs swinging before he was going so that we could work on the timing of when
He was pressing the hardest with his lead foot that’s a pretty simple program but I mean you can see the results right there one of the things I want to talk about with padri his was very different than Cheyenne’s like the lateral Force he was creating here he does it for a
Long time so one of the one of the struggles we had was he wants to be push ping into this side so hard for so long which does some good things it ends up creating a lot of what we call impulse which you can now measure on these smart
To move plates showing a ton of total Force production on the trail side his problem was he’s pushing so hard on that side that by the time he transitions he’s not he he he doesn’t have enough time to get there so we’re trying to make this actually a little bit higher
Peak here with less total for him so that he can get to his left side a little bit faster all right last one I want to talk about is a new player we just started working with in December uh this is Maxwell mivan uh he’s I think number six on PGA
Tour you right now he be turning pro uh here in in you know probably in the next months probably May June after he graduates from Ohio State and by the way just on a side note I went to Georgia so coaching a Ohio State player is hard for
Me I told him it up front but we’re okay he’s a great kid uh we really like it how do these numbers look for those of you guys that you know are pretty uh familiar here with with uh with ground reaction force do we like 8.7% of body
Weight in in lateral force or that’s AP Force I I have that highlighted the lead leg atga 19% of body weight or 76% rotational torque those good so this is a kid that’s like needs speed he’s at 170 ball speed or so playing in College um you know his game is really solid
He’s doing really well but that’s not enough speed those numbers look absolutely atrocious to me I mean this is maybe the worst I’ve ever seen with a player at that level in in first assessment you know vertical Force at 87% on the lead and 139 total I mean
This kid’s not using the ground at all I think it’s also very interesting that when we talked with Max we’re like Max how do you create speed and he’s like oh I turn as hard as I can I if I want more I’m going to make my back swing longer and turn
More like okay that sounds good so then went through a whole physical screening process our whole process collected all the data did his power testing his power testing numbers were very interesting so we come out he’s got almost a 22in vertical jump so that’s powerful that’s highend of PGA Tour averages um upper
Body is about 21 in when or 21 feet when we’re doing a seated chest pass that’s also kind of on the upper end of PJ tour averages core strengths is is on the bottom end by a long shot for him so from a standpoint of what he thinks he’s
Trying to do to create speed I’m trying to rotate and create rotational speed that’s his weakest area of speed production his body he’s never even thought about using his legs and and jumping kind of power in the swing even though he played basketball since the time he was five and in through high
School and you know vertical jump power is probably the easiest pattern he has so I’m already it’s clicking in my head well that’s what we’re going after we’re definitely going to need to do that in order to get more vertical jump I got to make sure that lateral force is working
Well so that the other ones can so this is what we built for Max he had two separate protocols for ground reaction force the first one is really one working on lateral force on the on the trail foot it seems kind of common but man I’ll tell you how many players don’t
Do this well enough this is a program a lot of them end up with and then we worked on things that do uh specifically work on lead leg vertical force my favorite of those drills are reverse jumps and I can’t really do it with the microphone but basically it’s a vertical
Jump where your arms are going to go up as you squat down and then they go down as you jump because if we think about the gall swing in the gall swing we’re kind of going this way as we go back and then we jump and our arms are coming
Down so that coordination is something that a lot of players don’t have and it’s very important to be able to create vertical speed all right well let’s look at these let’s see how we did with Max this was about 45 minutes after after we we did the initial Force assessment spent about
45 minutes working through these two drill programs then we measured data to see how he did here we go so uh lateral Force jumped up to 15% and increased impulse by a lot that’s a 72% gain in lateral force in 45 minutes AP Force which if you remember was kind of that
Lead foot pushing toward the ball went to 32% that’s a 68% gain in AP Force after this rotational torque when up 62% all right now this kind of stuff is possible again if you can assess this stuff and give people the right drills to work on it these are the kind of
Things you’re going to see especially with good athletes vertical Force went up to 125% on the lead leg 167% 76% total this is the one I still want to see bigger with Max but I mean that’s still about a 44% gain on the lead leg
And total of a 27% gain I mean those are insane numbers now I had a feeling that Max was catching on to those Trail foot drills a lot faster than he was the lead leg drills the lead leg drills were a little harder for him so I was expecting
To see some big gains in that over time here’s where we were day one so this is where we started so when we started out he was right around that 113 Club speed range 170 ball speed post drills we got up to 118 Club speed at Max and 175 ball speed well I
Was pretty excited so a month in so this was January 11th he sent me a text from his simulator in Ohio State Club speed 122 ball speed 182 so again like it took a little while in that case for some real translation of where we’re getting
But you know he’s already hitting a lot of the goals that we had set for him in this initial program um so I mean obviously this is a pretty happy college player getting ready to turn pro here’s what these drill programs look like so when our app releases in a
Couple months these are going to be available to everyone so our level one Ground Force program really works on kinetic sequence and point of application of force and all of these drills a lot of them that you’ve seen in these tour programs are right there level two works on Direction and timing
Of force so these are other drills that are going to really start to optimize line of action of what we’re doing and our level three protocol is all about just making forces bigger um so that’s kind of where we are in ground force with super speed we’re really excited
About all this coming out you know come come check out if you want to learn more about our app or the new protocols or the things that we’re doing um but yeah I’ll at this point any questions on any of these uh case studies that that we presented
Today all right well thank everybody I thank everybody very much thanks to everybody here at smart to move check this stuff out is absolutely fantastic and have a great time at the PGA show
