Introduction
Golf training has come a long way in the past century. A century ago, you had to shag your own balls or have your caddy shagging for you to learn your distances or even practice. The first driving ranges didn’t come around until the early 1900s, with Maniac Hill being one of the first in 1913. We now have massive practice complexes that are as nice as the nicest courses. We have Top Golf, and their competitors with high-tech driving ranges that they gamified! Instead of going to a range and hitting balls outside, you can go to an indoor driving range and hit using simulators. Let's talk more in-depth about where golf was, where it is now, and where it is going.
Past Golf Training
In the past, golf training used to be comprised of feel, and watching the ball flight. We had an incorrect take on what the laws of ball flight were. Before Trackman came along and changed everything, the laws of ball flight were believed to be the opposite. The laws of ball flight used to be club face controlled the trajectory, and the club path controlled where it started. Trackman came along and, with irrefutable data, changed the laws of ball flight to be Face controls where it starts, and path controls the trajectory.
So simply put, the face sends it, and the path bends it. In the past, people would guess the feel of the swing and depend on a coach or friend to tell them what they were doing; that method is highly flawed. From the wrong angle or height, you will see something different than, say, if you were shorter and standing a foot left of where the other person was, you would see something different; depending on feel was no better. The video also came along, and people started to get a more in-depth look at their swings.
With video came the super popular among coaches, V1 software, and the development of plane training. This was done by drawing a line up your shaft from the ball up past your shoulders so you could track whether the club was on that line up and back down, or if you were below or above that “Plane,” the problem with the plane is that if someone had more upright clubs, their plane was more upright. The plane also locked you into a particular position at the top; as my readers know, this is not ideal. Everyone has their own swing; forcing them, no matter what, into a specific plane was very bad for some players.
Mirror work during this period was significant. You would stand in front of a mirror and take the club back and check your position with the mirror. It is very time-consuming, but it helped you get into a position you wanted to be in without needing a video camera or stop. Mirror work is still a great way to train at the beginning of a new swing change!
Current Training Landscape (The last 10 years)
Over the last ten years of golf training, like with everything, there has been a technological revolution. As I spoke about earlier, Trackman brought a revolution in golf training. We knew more about the golf swing than ever before; we were learning so much. Even the idea for wedges and drivers changed. In the past, people thought you wanted to hit the driver as low as possible and wedges as high as possible. Now you want to hit wedges with a ton of backspin as low as possible and hit your driver as high as possible with as little spin as possible. All of this is thanks to technology advancing and understanding more about the physics involved with ball flight.
With the Trackman and other high-tech devices coming out, coaches started to need hitting bays indoors to store all their technology for assisting golfers. This tech brought about the K-vest, which gave a 3d render of your swing and allowed you to see precisely how much rotation you had at different points in the swing. K-vest was incredible when it first came out and incredibly helpful in golf training, but it was only available to serious coaches.
As more coaches moved into hitting bays and got high-tech setups, they did away with V1 and moved to Swing Catalyst. The Swing Catalyst hardware was a pressure plate to put in your mat so that you could visually see a heat map of the weight transition on your feet during the swing. It allowed you to see exactly how the weight was being transferred, and you could adjust weight transition and train it. It gave significant data, and the software included video software, so you didn’t need V1 anymore. So most setups had the Swing Catalyst software, Trackman, and video cameras, so you knew everything the swing was doing. You could watch videos and see weight transition; you knew exactly what the club was doing at impact and how the ball flew. For a swing coach, this was incredible, but only if you were a swing coach.
Zepp and Blast Motion were the only personal high-tech training devices that came out. Blast has a tempo mode, but it’s set to a 3:1 ratio which doesn’t work for everyone. Zepp helped you take a swing, but it was only to help with one kind of swing, and it didn’t tell you what swing it was. Nothing is individualized to help a player with their ideal swing.
The Future of Training
As golf has grown more popular, the number of swings on tour, what they look like, and how they work has changed considerably. With players like Bubba Watson, Matt Wolfe, Jordan Spieth, and Scotty Sheffler, to name only a few, proving that there is no true ideal swing. That is where the future of golf training is going. Instead of high-tech devices teaching you how to take someone else's ideal swing, the CTRL Swing Master training aid teaches you how to take your best swing every single time. See, everyone hits the ball differently, has a different experience coming into golf, and has a different body type. You can’t force all those people to the same swing; it just won’t work!
Instead, the future of golf training is a device that registers what you do best and helps you do it every single time. CTRL is the future of training. The CTRL Swing Master uses individualized plain English feedback to help you train, like having a coach with you on every single swing, enabling you to groove your swing to something you can do every single time. No more data that you have to try and interpret to what you need to do; CTRL tells you precisely what you need. The CTRL Swing Master is excellent with a coach, but you can use it at the range alone. You are no longer building bad habits while hitting golf balls on the range your coach has to fix.
The bottom line is that if you aren’t practicing with a purpose, using the CTRL Swing Master, you are wasting your time. Don’t be the guy that stays left in the dust because you didn’t want to try CTRL. The CTRL Swing Master is the best training aid and the best way to break the number you are trying to break!
Conclusion
The CTRL Swing Master is ahead of the game as golf continues to grow, and you can be too!
