Dear Simon,
This whole-body putting is interesting but not fundamentally new or different. What is happening is just integrating or coordinating the lower body with the upper body by including the hips in the motion. A good shoulder stroke does this in a different way.
I disagree with this statement you make:
"Putterhead path: Naturally arcs because we stand to the side of the ball and the lie angle of the shaft determines the arc path (So not at all straight back and through)." The notion that the putter's shaft angle REQUIRES a stroke path gating or arcing around the feet is simply false. The human body is not required to move in that way simply because the hands have a putter in them, whatever the shaft angle. The body movement determines the putter path; not the other way around. Whatever the shoulders do in a shoulder stroke, without arms or hands active, the putter path will result accordingly. I see this mistaken notion usually as the main premise for people who refuse to believe the putter path can be straight, even though anyone can simply move the putter straight along a baseboard by just moving the shoulder frame vertically with a parallel alignment.
Back to body putting: Ben Crenshaw has some right knee release in his stroke dynamics, which is a result of the way he solves a certain hip problem in moving the lead shoulder vertically upward in the thrustroke. When the lead shoulder moves vertically upward but the pivot at the base of the neck remains over the same spot vertically, the rear rib cage digs down at the top of the pelvis. A "pull" results (and the lead shoulder heads back behind) when the golfer allows the rib cage to slide over the front of the hip as the lead shoulder rises. There are two ways to solve this and avoid the pull: 1) keep the rib cage headed straight onto the hip; and 2) lower the rear hip out of the way with some "give" in the rear knee.
The "knee putting" you refer to is basically the same, except the golfer does not let the shoulder frame change off level during the stroke. (Actually, Butch Harmon refers to this as "Hip" putting.) This sort of whole-body putting is just moving the hips so that the putter moves laterally, with little or no rising going back or going up.
The hips can either swivel around or can sway laterally. What you describe is a swiveling or gating action in which the hips turn back and then turn thru. Butch Harmon describes a sway or lateral straight-back and straight-thru action of the hips.
The
Pivot Putter invented by my friend Karl Schmidt is basically the same sort of putting technique that you describe, except that the putter is anchored against the thigh rather than the belly. Karl's putter has teflon skids on the sole to make it slide along the ground without any rising in a gating action that pivots around the anchor point.
Another similar technique is taught by David Lee and his
Gravty Golf. David has an ArcMaster putter, and he teaches a whole-body action without hands in his belief that separating power from the hands allows a sharper sense of touch or feel (whatever that is).
Personally, I view all these techniques as legitimate and experiment with them from time to time. My preference so far has stuck with conventional putting but the search for optimal technique goes on. If the USGA ever really bans belly putting, it will probably be by a rule prohibiting anchoring the putter against the body, and that will rule out the belly putter, the pivot putter, and certain forms of long putting, or at least require unanchoring.
In general, I agree that the more the whole body is involved in the stroke, the better one's distance control becomes, and potentially the more stable one's form of the stroke also becomes. In my view, this is mostly attributable to the brain and body having an "action" orientation to the world as a whole, moreso than the brain and body orients to the world one body part at a time. Thus, the deeper the putting action is rooted in the whole body, the better.
The body's center of gravity (COG) is located below the navel inward a little. In your gating knee putting technique, the COG will arc about in a smaller version that reflects the hip swiveling. Getting that shape of the COG trajectory the same putt after putt does not seem as easy to me as other putting methods. It probably depends critically on the elusive sense of "feel" in the weight shift as experienced in the knees -- too subtle for me to bet the farm on. I've tried David Lee's style quite a bit, and this always seems to be the basic problem of getting the repetitions the same -- the cues for guiding the body action are too elusive and unclear in comparison to other methods.
Golfers can do very well with certain putting techniques, provided they personally have an idiosyncratic capacity for that specific technique. But viewing the matter more broadly on behalf odf all potential golfers, the specific dependencies of a technique may be a little too precious or subtle for wholesale recommendation.
For my money, the hip putting that is lateral seems better to me than the gating swiveling hip action. The COG moves in a straight line in accord with the body's innate sense of left and right. And hip action seems better than knee action. But on balance, a vertical shoulder frame action that properly solves the upper body / lower body connection at the hips seems prefereable to lateral hip putting. I find it more difficult to move the body's center of gravity sideways in a straight line than I find moving the shoulders vertically above the balls of the feet with the center of gravity more or less stable. The shoulder action fits within the body's sense of left and right and up and down at the balls of the feet, so it is well-guided by body cues. And the COG need not wander about, as the shoulder action can be done either with a stable lower body or at worst with some Crenshaw-style knee action.
It's great that there is a style of putting that works very well, but I am pretty cautious when it coems to labelling something as optimal, or even as "better" than other styles.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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