Dear Neville,
As always, a penetrating question that points us all deeper into a solid understanding! Thanks.
The short answer is that the putterhead rises in all stroke styles, not just the shoulder stroke, and the problem this introduces is the same for all styles -- returning the putter shaft to vertical at the bottom of the stroke before impact with the ball. This takes care of the concern about the vertical dimension of putterhead movement at impact. And in this one particular problem, the "vertical-plane" shoulder stroke is superior to the gating arms stroke because the bottom of the stroke is registered more distinctly in the shoulder stroke's setup and series of positions than it is in the gating stroke.
The pivot of the shoulder stroke is in the center of the clavicle just at the base of the neck. That's because the clavicle connects the two shoulder sockets. The clavicle is in effect the wedge or fulcrum about which the shoulders see-saw or teeter-totter. This is the one part of the body that ought to remain stationary during the stroke, not the head. It is quite possible to putt effectively while waving or wagging the head to and fro, so long as the focvus stays on keeping the base of the neck still. If a hummingbird in flight keeps the head and eyes still, the golfer in putting ought to keep the neck still. It is just a bonus or a helpful support if the head and eyes ALSO remain still during the stroke, but the golfer's image of his or her body in motion needs to keep the clavicle still beneath the neck. This pivot is actually the same for an armsy or handsy stroke, or even using a belly putter with some shoulder action involved. Arnold Palmer is depicted in a very nice drawing at address for putting with a long nail stuck down thru the back of his neck out the clavicle down to the ground at the ball to illustrate the pivot.
Todd Sones (pages 40-42 in his Lights Out Putting) faults the shoulder stroke because it requires the rising of the putter going back and then thru, and he says this rising makes it hard for the golfer to contact the ball solidly. He does not get into details about the rising pattern itself, and he does not compare or contrast the rising action in the shoulder stroke with any rising or absence of rising in the stroke he advocates. What he DOES say is that the most important fundamental is solid contact between putterhead and ball. He then writes that his "arms stroke" is the best way to make that happen. When he describes the arm stroke, he says the shoulder move, but only as a result of the golfer consciously moving the arms; he says all the rest of the body must remain still; and he says that the arms should be moved so that the putterhead moves straight back for as long as practicable, but this is only an ideal, and that even if the putterhead moves slightly inside going back, the golfer's focus needs to be on keeping the putterhead "moving on the tangent" to the stroke path. When he says the golfer should move the arms, he does not say how or in what manner, other thanm suggesting that straight is good (pages 44-50). He describes the arms in his style of stroke as separating from the sides going to the top of the backstroke or top of follow-thru, whereas he says in a shoul;der stroke the arms stay with the side and do not separate. He also describes Brad Faxon's stroke as one that moves the forearms for the stroke and that he "maintains the triangle" shape during his stroke (page 51).
Sone's description is incomplete in a few crucial respects, and has a couple of internal contradicitions. First, ALL strokes cause the putter to rise going back and then rise past impact, with the exception of only two sorts of strokes. One is the stroke made by swiveling the shoulders in a perfectly horizontal way around a pivot of the center axis of the upright body. This stroke simply drags the putterhead around the body along the curvature of a circle, and so long as the shoulders stay level and keep facing the putterhead, the putter stays as low as it began. Nobody putts this way (yet). The second way is if you start at address in a posture of body parts that allows you to EXTEND the putter farther from your body as the putterhead moves along a radius of curvature less than a circle or even along a straight line like a putt line. This extension can be accomplished by a combination of torso dipping or elbow straightening or arm lifting away from torso, etc., but is usually done mostly by elbow straightening. So golfers who extend the putter away from them to keep the putter low and close to on line can be seen to setup with a crook in their elbows (like Sones) and a slight extending of the arm that unbends the elbows in the stroke as the putterhead goes farther from the feet and therefore would naturally be rising except for the extension.You can just detect in Sones' photos of his own arms stroke that in the follow-thru his right elbow has straightened from what it was in earlier in the stroke (compare side-by-side photos on pages 45 and 46 to see his right elbow unbending). The same is actually happening on the backstroke as well with the left elbow. This elbow action is not noticeable, because the sensors on either side of the elbow joint are made for much more stressful loads, to warn you that you are in danger of injuring yourself, and not really for fine calibrations of elbow positioning. So it's natural Sones doesn't really notice or comment about this.
The problem arises from Sones' statement that in order to naturally "hang" the arms and hands, the golfer wants to hang the HANDS directly beneath the shoulders. Actually, I don't usually see a normal adult whose hands hang naturally beneath the shoulders. Because of our adult-age history of muscle development, our forearms and hands are constantly aimed a little forward of the upper arm, so there is a "natural" (stress-free) state such that the ELBOWS naturally hang directly below the shoulders but the hands naturally hang a little forward of the shoulders. That's why pants pockets are not on the sides of the pants. Both Pelz and Sones make this mistake. Sones depicts the arms-hands hang on page 28, and where he has the ELBOWS inside the shoulder line, has the ELBOWS crooked or bent to start with. This setup is one that does not really have the arms hanging, because the crook in the elbow requires tension to keep it crooked. If a golfer with Sones' setup and elbows crooked suddenly died of a brain aneurysm, his elbows would uncrook and his arms dangle as the tension of life left his body in the relaxation that is death. This crook is the elbows is an undesireable "play" in the length of your putting "triangle," and it is only the rarest of arms strokes that does not "naturally" involve some change in the triangle by unknowing lengthening of the arms in the stroke as the elbows surreptiously open like unseen clam shells in the bay at night.
The upshot of this is just the point that Sones' stroke also risies on either side of the ball, and the rising is not eliminated but perhaps only mitigated a little by the unknowing arm extension involved in moving the forearms back and thru while also trying to move the putter straight.
Anyone who has read Horton Smith's book on putting, The Masters Secrets of Holing Putts, will recognize Horton's style of arm extension to overcome his gating stroke in an attempt to keep the putterhead moving straight. Using the arms as described by Sones without this sort of arm extension, it is frankly not possible to move the putterhead in a straight path except in a rough approximation where the actual curvature is so mild right near the ball it passes for straight.
Sones depiction of the arms stroke is also incompatible with "keeping the triangle intact." He deliberately moves the forearms away from the sides so his arms are not moving in coordination with the line between his shoulders (the base of the triangle). This is sort of a flapping action of the arms beneath the base, and not a coordinated move of the whole triangle staying constantly in the same shape.
Now, back to the rising and falling. Many golfers who are taught a straight shoulder stroke are taught to hang the arms like Loren Roberts -- that is, really relax! The elbow will not naturally hang anywhere than straight below the shoulder socket, as it must. This means the hands end up slightly outside or beyond the shoulders, but not a lot. As I hope I have shown, the hand position has no direct effect on the putterhead trajectory or orientation if the motion is one of the shoulders in plane. ALL strokes (except the two weird ones noted above) involve some rising of the putterhead as the path of the stroke takes the putterhead farther from the center of the stance, back or thru. Whatever that stroke path is shaped like, the rising of the putterhead is radiused about the pivot point of the stroke. Sones does not directly state that his stroke style eliminates rising, and so far as my rereading of his book goes, I can't see where he say anything about rising or absence of rising in his style. That's just as well, because his putterhead obviously rises (see any photo of his stroke in the book, such as page 49).
Apparently, he thinks the DEGREE of rising in the shoulder stroke is the problem, but he doesn't say so or discuss what he means. What I really believe is that he has tried the shoulder stroke and had the common experience of golfers not well trained in how to make it: that is, as the stroke gets longer, the untrained shoulder-stroker allows his head to run with the shoulderframe going up to the top of the backstroke. This head turn moves his eyes off the ball and alters his inner ear balance, and so makes his solid impact difficult to accomplish coming back down. This is a very common early experience in properly teaching the shoulder stroke. The cure for this is to SHOW the golfer how to keep the head still and yet rock the shoulders back. For heavens' sake, it's not hard to do. But really, you just want to keep the base of the neck still while rocking the shoulders.
The image I use is that of a coat hanger with the hook hanging on the back of the neck and the shoulders tipping back and forth under the neck. Harold Swash actually advises that the cervical spine must be parallel to the ground for this shoulder action to work properly, but I don't. The shoulders are not even connected to the spine, and can move independently of the spine's orientation at the neck. The shoulders are mainly connected to the body at the sternum just below the clavicle, and this connection is actually a moveable hinge or joint.
When you move the shoulders back in a shoulder stroke and keep mthe triangle intact by keeping the base of the triangle coordinated with the putterhead, while also keeping the head and neck and eyes still, making solid contact couldn't be simpler or more automatic! This is especially the case with a "vertical-plane" shoulder stroke movement, where the neutral position of the level shoulders at address is also the bottom of the stroke coming down. This position is a whole constellation of body cues shouting out "here's the bottom of the stroke" as the turning muscles involved in the stroke hit their "sweetspot" of relaxation and level at the bottom. The shoulderframe simple drops back to the bottom of the stroke and then makes solid impact. The face stays square to the line and the stroke path at all times without hand manipulation, and knowing inside your body where to move the shoulders is easily referenced by the symmetry of the body and the location of the shoulder sockets directly above the balls of the feet and the squareness of the shoulders to the puttline.
Sones' main criticism is that the shoulder stroke makes it hard to avoid hitting down or up on the ball, with bad effects (on line and distance, although he mentions only line). Since all strokes have the putterhead rising, this problem of stroking the ball well and straight is COMMON to all styles. Billy Casper early on used his wristry stroke to solve this problem by practicing hours on end returning the puttershaft to vertical before he made impact with the ball, regardless of the pattern of his hands in moving the putter. The same is true in Sones' arms stroke ("the putter must be moving on the tangent to the path at impact" means this, in a poorly worded fashion) and in a shoulder stroke. That's why the ball must be played slightly forward of the bottom of the stroke. Moreover, the degree of rising of the putterhead just past the bottom of the stroke is the real question, and the answer is practically none! If the ball is played two inches ahead of the bottom of the stroke, and the golfer successfully returns the putter shaft to vertical at the bottom and then contunues with the stroke in its ongoing radius of upward curvature, he will move the location of impact on the putterface from the vertical center of the face to slightly below the midline. This is exactly where pros characteristically hit the ball with the putterface, as studied and reported in Werner and Grieg's How Golf Club Really Work and How to Optimize Their Design. The radius of curvature is that of a cirle with radius from pivot at clavicle to sole of putterhead, and this is usually about 4.5 feet, or a circle 9 feet in radius. This is 360 degrees worth of circle in 108 inches. Moving the putter from the bottom of the stroke two inches to impact is merely 1/54th of 360 degrees, a verfy tiny slice of pie indeed!
By hanging the arms truly and leaving the hands where they hang, combined with keeping the pivot still in the motion of the coordinated triangle plus returning the putter to vertical before impact, the shoulder stroke promotes an automatic, no-thinking, repeating SOLID impact that rolls the ball with great beauty and consistency.
So, I believe that Sones does not properly understand stroke dynamics generally, and specifically the issue of the rising of the putter. In the "gating" stroke, there is BOTH the opening and closing of the face to the target line AND the rising on either side of the stroke. In the shoulder stroke, properly understood, the face stays square to the line and the target and the rising is not significantly higher where it counts (near the ball), does not require the head to turn with the shoulders, and poses a problem at the bottom of the stroke that is actually common to all putting styles asper's, Sones' mine, and others) of getting the putter shaft back to vertical before impact to avoid bouncing or bounding the ball at the start. It's just a matter of proper teaching.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com
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