Dear Sixer,
Yes, unfortunately, some people who believe they are scientists change the speed of the stroke. Why? To try to make the stroke look better on paper in terms of path, square at impact, rotation pattern, and closeness of fit to what the herd on Tour looks like. This is wrongheaded.
You cannot "slice-and-dice" the stroke motion apart from the touch timing. Let me repeat that for the people who fiddle with the timing of the stroke. YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE STROKE TIMING WITHOUT CHANGING THE TOUCH. What a good teacher does instead is integrate touch timing and stroke motion.
That requires that the teacher actually KNOW something about good, bad or indifferent timing patterns for touch. The people who want to change stroke timing don't know what makes good touch timing, and they also don't know why a particular stroke timing "looks" bad or whether it could be trained to look better without changing the stroke timing. All they know is that the herd stroke timing is probably better than any amateur stroke timing, so they want the golfer to change his stroke timing so it looks more like the herd timing.
How do you integrate touch timing and stroke timing? Physics and physiology. Touch timing requires knowing how instincts are trained by the objective timing patterns of physics in the world and knowing also how the physics affecting body motion timing makes good touch better or worse. Stroke timing requires knowing how the physics affecting body motion timing makes a good stroke better or worse and how physiology of muscle tone and body postures adjusts the stroke to a given timing pattern.
A golfer CAN make strokes with lots of different timing patterns smoothly and accurately, and can even learn to do this consistently, but that is not all that needs learning. The golfer really needs a stroke timing that works extremely well with touch timing.
Touch timing is best when it comes out of the dominant timing pattern learned by the instincts from the world. This pattern is how gravity times free-fall of all objects exactly the same and how pendulum swings always have the same ratio back and thru even if the tempo or total swing time is different and how pendulum swings are always a smooth pattern of acceleration that naturally peaks at the bottom of the stroke. You MIGHT be able to get away with using a timing pattern on the green for touch OTHER than this dominant instinctive pattern, but it won't be as powerful and repeating or as simple and effective and will require that you really bear down to learn your odd pattern and repeat it well and accurately.
The instinctive, natural timing pattern for touch in the human brain is a "rhythm" of "same time in backstroke from ball to top of backstroke and same time in forward stroke from top of backstroke to end of follow-thru". This is the essence of what constitutes a "swing" in the natural world, whether it is the leisurely swinging back and forth of the arms and legs when walking, or the swaying of a tree branch in the wind, or the ticking swing of a clock pendulum, or the motherly rocking of a baby's cradle. This natural swinging pattern is delivered by the world to the human instinctive brain more often and consistently than any other "odd" rhythm. In terms of the rhythm or ratio of the backstroke to the forward stroke back to impact, the dominant touch timing pattern is 1 unit of time to top of backstroke and 1/2 unit of time back to bottom of stroke.
This being the case, does this touch timing serve as a good stroke timing? Sure it does, because it is NOT a total timing but is a ratio or rhythm regardless of the total overall quickness or slowness of the stroke. The physiology of an accurate stroke and the physics of an accurate stroke is dependent mostly if not entirely upon what the golfer chooses for the total timing of the stroke. A quick stroke is a violent stroke with greater forces requiring management by muscle tone. A slow stroke produces mild forces requiring management that can be handled with "softer" muscle tone.
If you learn a "fast" swing that has a good same back-and-thru rhythm, you can also perform a slower swing with the same rhythm and then a faster swing with the same rhythm. But within a broad range of stroke "tempos" or total timing, a golfer can have equally effective touch timing, so long as the rhythm is stable. "If it ain't got that swing, it don't mean a thing."
Those guys who claim that a putter motion needs to be accelerating to and THEN past and thru impact are really saying that this is what the Tour herd does, so you should too. But a natural, instinctive stroke has the speed peak at the bottom after smooth steady acceleration that never changes to a faster, quicker rate of acceleration. An instinctive golfer doesn't want to worry about CONTINUING to speed up the putter PAST impact, since the instincts always PICK the size of the backstroke in light of the amount of time the downstroke will undergo smooth acceleration to reach the CORRECT peak speed right at the bottom of the stroke, not somewhere past the bottom. Golfers simply don't know that this is what the instincts DO when the golfers makes a stroke: plan the correct peak speed for the putt's distance and green surface and then select the top of the backstroke (size of backstroke) SO THAT the instinctive rhythm and acceleration patterns generate the chosen peak speed at impact.
Golfers don't know this or trust it, but this is what happens instinctively, so like it and use it or lump it. If golfers would rather not have instinctive touch that takes advantage of the dominant timing pattern in the brain and that is simple and easy to repeat, then I suggest golfers "lump it" and change their stroke timing to match the herd and pick a rhythm pattern OTHER than the one the brain knows most deeply.
The desire to speed the putter faster and faster thru and beyond impact comes from NOT knowing about or accepting the relaxed, natural, instinctive rhythm. The misguided belief is: "Unless I hit the ball with the speed I choose, the ball will not get to the hole." But the instincts NEVER choose a backstroke that fails to result in a swing that gets the ball all the way -- any failure here is down to the golfer not paying attention to what the world requires, and not the response of the instincts to what the golfer appreciated about the requirements of the world.
That means that if you are a golfer who is not able to relax and make a happy swing with the putter, then you need a Plan B stroke that is not as effective for touch as an instinctive rhythm, so do like the herd does. The reason the herd player's stroke does not look as good when he relaxes and swings versus when he speeds the putter faster thru impact is that relaxing gives the herd golfer jitters and emotional worries about "controlling" the putter in motion. Well, Sir Isaac Newton used to teach that if you leave a swinging thing alone, it will mind its own business and keep heading where it's going. That means that ANY stroke timing will swing straight along a path if you just leave it alone. Golfers don't know or believe this, so they "worry" that the putter will wander off line unless they keep pushing or pulling it faster and faster. An instinctive golfer doesn't feel this need to control something that doesn't ever go nuts by itself -- it only goes nuts when the golfer goes nuts.
Part of this is bad biomechanics of the not-relaxed golfer. Bad biomechanics means fighting gravity while making the stroke motion. If you are fighting something, by all means keep fighting. In the stroke, if you fight gravity while making the swing due to not understanding good biomechanics that avoid fighting gravity, you SHOULD keep accelerating past impact, because if you quit this, only muscle tone will prevent gravity suddenly ruining your stroke. I've never met a golfer who understands this, so it's not unexpected that they learn to keep fighting thru impact against gravity. There is, however, a setup posture and movement in which the golfer and gravity are not in a fight, but gravity is HELPING the golfer's stroke stay straight online.
The idea that unless the golfer uses a speeding-up action thru impact the nerves and muscles of the hands and arms will make a mess of impact is simply bogus. Yes, there is a slowness of the stroke and a looseness of muscle tone below which the stroke doesn't work well, and yes there is a quickness of stroke and tightness of muscle tone above which the stroke doesn't work well, but there is a fat broad range of stroke timing in which a golfer can perform a very nice stroke motion. What he wants is to settle on a stroke timing AND RHYTHM for BOTH the stroke and the touch.
The touch timing is mostly the swing rhythm of same time back, same time thru. The stroke total timing (tempo) is mostly optional. The acceleration pattern, however, is almost entirely a question of knowledge, relaxation, and acceptance of the unchanging reliability of Newtonian physics with comfortable muscle tone versus desire for control and worry about the Sun falling out of the sky in the middle of the stroke. An acceleration pattern that continues to speed up the putter past impact does violence to the instinctive rhythm, and therefore supplants it and requires the golfer to use something not as good and simple and strong.
Yes, you can use a herd stroke timing pattern and still have good touch, but even the herd players would have BETTER touch if they knew more about touch timing and get off the "worry timing" that concerns only the stroke. It's usually better to have your integrated stroke-touch timing and rhythm "cake" and eat it, too.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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