X Factor II: Jim McLean on 30 Years of Tour Research and the Science of Golf Power

Transcript

Lex Statzer: Welcome to Author Hour. Today I'm here with author Jim McLean, author of X Factor II, Load, Unload, and Explode into a New Era of Power, coming out in the next couple of months. Jim, welcome to Author Hour.

Jim McLean: Well, it's nice to be with you, Lex.

Lex Statzer: So let's begin with the X Factor itself. For someone who's never swung a club, what is it and why did it hit the golf world so hard?

Jim McLean: Well, it was all about body generating power in the golf swing, and it was a little ahead of its time because there were no golf biomechanics at this point or force plates. So I used video and, you know, came up with more ideas that I knew from playing myself and playing with a lot of great players of how much the body moved, how we use the ground better. You know, all sports are trying to hit the ball harder. Tennis, baseball, trying to throw a ball further. So it applies to every sport. But we weren't doing that much in golf and power has always been an important part of golf. It's become more and more important. So how you load up on the backswing, how you unload in the downswing and how you use a vertical force in the forward swing to help propel the golf club through impact?

Lex Statzer: It wasn't, from what I understand, it wasn't well understood when it came out, right? A lot of people misunderstood the X Factor. They thought maybe you were telling them to lock their hips or, you know, giving them advice that that isn't exactly what you were trying to say. So what was it like when it was received that way and what was it like trying to set that record straight?

Jim McLean: Well, it was received well because it was produced pretty much worldwide. So it was surprising how well it was perceived. But as things moved a little bit ahead, some people thought I was talking about no hip turn in the backswing, total resistance on the bottom of your body, your feet, which really couldn't be any further from the truth. It's just somebody that really hadn't read the book then because I devoted four pages in the book to how the feet moved in the swing. And I talked about I used corridors or safety zones as I taught the game of golf because there's not one exact way. So there's parameters that you needed to be within. And then if you were outside of those parameters, that's something we would change in the golf swing. But some people looked at the X Factor as being almost no hip turn and all shoulder turn when really the corridors in the book are between 40 and 65 degrees of hip turn. So that's actually quite a bit of hip turn. Some of the modern players are turning even less than 40 degrees right now. So when you coil up, it's like calling up a rubber band so you can you can turn and build some resistance. And then the lower body starts before the upper body. That was something called the X Factor stretch. And that was in the first book as well. And that is what we started to see as we started to measure to our players later on. And so then, you know, the X Factor has had a long shelf life and it's still used, you know, pretty much worldwide in biomechanics to look at their rotations of the body. When I really first wrote this in the magazine, I tried to write an article, a major article on how the head turned, how the shoulders turn, how the hips turned and how the knees moved in the swing. But they thought that was too complicated. So when I, you know, they weren't even going to do the article. This was Golf Magazine and I didn't hear back from them. So after about six months, I called the editor of the magazine. I said, hey, you know what's happening with that article? I sent in, because usually they get back to me and they said, well, it's just too complicated. You know, we all read it and it's just too complicated. And I said, no, no, I don't think that's right. And he said, well, look, all the teaching editors are going to be in New York City next week. You could drive down to the city. I was living in Westchester, New York, and you can come down and talk to them and see what they think. So I drove down in New York City the next week and met with everybody and explained to them what was happening. And then one of the editors looked at it and he said, well, looking down, it looks like it makes the letter X. I mean, we can call it the X factor. So it wasn't my idea to call it the X factor. I said, it's good. I'll go with that. And they also said we can only do two turns. So the most obvious turns were the shoulders and the hips. So I left out the head and the knees, how they move in a swing. But, you know, as I still got that article in it, it was the number one all time best selling cover piece for Golf Magazine in 1992. And then I ended up doing two more cover pieces, a DVD, and then finally I did the book. And now I just feel like it's time after 30 years to, you know, what's happened in those last 30 years and how to update the book.

Lex Statzer: Yeah. So walk me through what did happen in the last 30 years. What's what are you seeing in the data that maybe you couldn't have seen back when the first book came out?

Jim McLean: That's a good question. It's a very big question. So I wrote a whole book on it. But mainly the things that I couldn't tell back then was the amount of vertical force in the swing, how much difference that makes. Now, I talked about talked about moving up because I could see how the pants moved up in the swing. I talked about it for a small chapter. But now we know with force plates, you know, how the vertical force works in the swing and when it happens. So I think that's a big improvement in teaching the game of golf. So I'd say that was one inclusion in the book with more detail on how you leverage off the ground and how you build the torques and forces in a golf swing, which was really impossible to do in 1992.

Lex Statzer: Yeah. I imagine also the technology with a sport has completely changed the game in the last 30 years. What have you been seeing on the on the technology side?

Jim McLean: Well, we have launch monitors now, we use Trackman and Foresight launch monitors at my golf schools, and, you know, that's the ability to track exactly what's happening to the golf ball, how far it's going, how much is spinning and spin lofts. There's a whole bunch of 32 parameters on Trackman now that you can look at. So a lot more detail on what the ball is doing. But as far as what the body is doing, I've had different systems. One is, I think, the best, gears, which you have to put attachments onto your body. And it takes a while to put them on, which is a pain. A lot of people don't want to do that. But it really does give you an accurate reading on what's happening with your body throughout the golf swing or what's moving first. How much is it moving? How much of the rotations? But there are other things that do that as well. There are other things that are maybe not quite as good, but pretty good that you can even do with your your iPhone now. Not really 3D, the gears is real 3D. And there is another thing called Alva out there now that's very good with tracking what the body's doing. And they're coming up with things all the time that improve reading out data for how your body's moving in the golf swing, what's moving first. You know, it's not that you can't, if you really study video, if you shoot video, I think the way we've done it for all these years, which is, you know, precisely one way, the same distance away from the ball. But if you're just using video handheld and you're sort of close to where you need to be, as you know, that's not real research. So you have to have set things the same way. We've been able to do that because I've been at facilities that have had PGA tour events. So what that means, it means it's easier to bring a tripod onto the property. In fact, they won't even let you do that at a PGA tour event now, unless your school is at that property. So I've had, you know, the lucky ability to have that kind of access to the PGA tour. I also know a lot of the players out there over all of these years. So that's, that made it easier for us to do this kind of research where we could actually go on the golf course at PGA tour events and film, you know, exactly the same way because we were there for all the practice rounds. You can't, you can't film during the actual event. So I've had many years where I've had 20 teachers working for me at that one place and then everybody's got a camera. We all do it all the same way. So that's given us the chance to really do something special in research in the game of golf.

Lex Statzer: You have studied a hundred plus tour players a year since 1992 when that first article dropped and you've concluded that there's no single perfect swing. Does that make it a little bit harder to teach the sport knowing that there's not one true method?

Jim McLean: Well, I think, you know, even the casual observer of golf could see that there are different golf swings. They look somewhat similar, I guess, but, and when you look at, you know, where the club's going in the swing and that's dramatically different, but where the body's going is not so different. And that ends up being a lot closer to the same, but there's still differences and there's still different amounts of lateral motion in a swing, different ways to use the feet so that there's still these zones, I think, that are so important. And in any part, looking where the club's going, it's going to be bigger. And looking where the body's going is going to be smaller, but there's definitely differences. In the best players in the world, they all have a different backswing. They're much closer to how they move their body in the backswing, but there's still differences there that's not all the same. And then the change of direction, that's when you change direction from the top of the backswing to move forward, there's a lag or a timing factor there that all good players have. And most of the amateur, not most, but many amateur golfers that I work with or we work with at our schools do it the opposite way. So, you know, we're able to show them what the better players are doing compared to what they're doing on a side-by-side screen. That makes a big impression. And, you know, then we can start with our teaching as, you know, the level of golf where they're at to, you know, what they're able to handle in a lesson. But it's always fun for them to learn more about what really happens with the golf swing and how their body should move. So to me, it's like learning a dance step, you know, like a kid, like, you know, when you learned dance steps, a young girl, then, you know, you watched people and you copied and that's what kids can do. Kids are imitators and they're great imitators. And the more, if you're really coordinated, then you're going to be a really great imitator. If you're not, you're going to be quite a bit more difficult, but you still have imitative power. Now, as we get older, we lose imitative powers. We get more careful as we get older, we get tighter, we know bad things can happen. So we're more careful. And by the time you're 40 years old, 50 years old, coming to a golf school, you're, you know, you're pretty careful person. You've been sitting oftentimes in a chair for a few, 20 years at work, maybe not doing as much exercises as you should be. And, you know, you're really tight and it's a, it's a real process to just get some of these movements into the swing. Most of golf instruction before the X factor, I think, and there was a few other books that touched certainly on, on body movements, but was taught more hands and arms where you just, you know, you swing your hands and arms and your body would follow the hands and arms. And there's nothing wrong with that teaching. I still give lessons like that all the time. And sometimes when you just think of your hands and arms, your body does follow, you know, and if you're a very coordinated person that will happen, but at least you can start to hit the golf ball. You're not going to teach somebody who has not played any, just the body. You've got to get your hands in the club and get a good grip and, you know, how your hands work in the swing. So there's a progression to learning. But, you know, it's the hands, the arms kind of dominated swing. And then there's, as you get better, you can kind of get more body action into it, but you're always going to need a good setup, which is the body and, you know, maybe a good top of the backswing, which is a good turn of the body and a good turn on the way through to the finish. So the body action is always in there. Whether you respond with your body when you think of your hands and arms is debatable, questionable. Some people do and some people don't, but they're both, you know, super important to being a golf coach.

Lex Statzer: Something that's kind of unique to you that you talk about is filming the best players out on an actual course rather than in a lab. And you say that almost nobody else does that. Why do you think it's so important to do that?

Jim McLean: Well, because it's just too hard, as I mentioned before, to take you, get your camera out to a tour event and get a tripod out there. It's pretty much impossible to do right now. They just don't let you bring them into an event when you checked in. But let's say you could bring your tripod in and you can set up straight down the line and far enough back, there's nothing in your way. No other people walking in front of you. And you film somebody and they hit a good shot down the fairway and now you've got, you know, one clip. What we found is to film all day and get three or four good clips is a really good day.

Lex Statzer: Yeah.

Jim McLean: So it takes a lot of people and a lot of days to accumulate a hundred top tour players filmed exactly the same way, face on off a 90 degree angle off the golf ball and straight down the target line and at least 10 yards back. So you get the same stuff shot. You know, you've got the, you know, if you have a comparison and also framing it up correctly. So we hire college educated young assistants every year and it takes them usually a couple of months until they can film well, you wouldn't think that's true, but they mess up, you know, and they have the cameras angled or there's some kind of problem that it's not framed up properly and you look like a little ant in there, you know, it's just mistakes happen, but after a while, you know, I get on them pretty hard, which is a lot of fun, but they finally get it. You know, they finally get it. And then when we have a lot of people, so let's say we have 18 to 22 teachers and we have six or seven or eight assistants. So we've got 30 guys out there at a, at a tour event here in Miami. When they play down here or what up in Fort Lauderdale, we'll send everybody up there or we send people up to Orlando. Yeah. So there's a tour event in Orlando, a tour event in Tampa and a tour event in Jacksonville. So the Florida events, we send people up to film at those, at those tour events as well. So that gives us a lot of tour events here. One, I've got a friend of mine that worked for me for a long time. One of my teachers now he's in Dallas now. So he gets the video with a couple of his guys in Dallas and Fort Worth and oftentimes down in Houston as well. So then we get, you know, we get a, that hundred plus people per year to study and see what's happening. Now, after I've been doing this for a lot of years, you'd think, you know, why do you keep doing it? But, you know, we just want to see what the latest players are doing, what the best players in the world are doing. Right now, Scotty Scheffler, of course, is doing some different things. So it's really interesting to see, uh, you know, what, what in particular, what he's doing because, you know, he's moving so far off away from the target line as feet are moving a lot more so than anyone I've seen, uh, almost in golf. There've been some other ones that have moved close to that. And I taught a great young player in America who moved her feet a lot. And I always kept that in, in her swing. I never took that away, but I got, I got criticized a lot for that. So they thought that was bad footwork. But in the meantime, she was, she was the number one junior and number one amateur in America, and then she was number two in the world on pro golf. And she was just a great ball striker. So they didn't criticize her too much longer.

Lex Statzer: So the still head is one of the most repeated pieces of golf advice out there. And you basically have a video proving that it's wrong. So what is the still head myth and why has it been so hard to correct it?

Jim McLean: Well, it seems so logical that if you keep your head in one place and you swing around your head, which is kind of the way golf was taught for, for a long, long time, because it makes so much sense, but when you really study what the best players in the world are doing as the head has to move with the body, so the head moves where the body takes it. And since your body is moving a lot in golf, if you want to hit the ball long ways and you want to be a really great player, your head's going to move. And that means it's going to either rotate in both directions as you go back and through, or it's going to move back and through, or it's going to do a combination of those two things. So we were talking about Scottie Scheffler. He has one of the biggest head moments sitting in the game of golf, and he's also the best ball striker, hits the ball better than anybody by a long ways. So the way I like to think of this is think of other things, other sports, like throwing a baseball or hitting a tennis ball or batting, you know? So when you are, when you watch a pitcher throwing strikes one after another, you can see that, you know, when they go back, they move their head a lot, then they go down a lot, and then they release their head a lot and they throw the bullets in there for strikes one after another. And if they miss, it's not by much. So how could a pitcher move their head that much and still have that kind of control on throwing a ball? Well, the answer is that we, this system of how your brain works can move in space and still be super accurate. So in golf, we're seeing nobody that's good keeps their head still. The least we've seen anybody move their head is six inches. And when we're looking at that, or we're looking at lateral, which is right and left, so that would be say one inch back, one inch forward would be two inches. And then one inch up, three inches down is four inches. And then out and back. So there's, we look at six ways that the head moves in a swing. But as you know, lateral motion is in every direction. But, you know, if we study those six directions, we basically have it. The average tour player, Rory McIlroy would be one, moves the head 10 inches from the time they take the club away until they hit the ball. We don't count, you know, after they hit the ball. The ball just hit. And then that's an easy way for us to study head movement, looking straight down the target line and face off. And then we can get the six directions. So, you know, that kind of blows away that fallacy of keeping your head still or steady or swinging around a fixed center, which has always made so much sense to teachers and to golfers. And also, it's not necessarily a bad thing to teach. You know, you can tell somebody to keep their head steady and they're still going to generally move it until they work hard enough and they don't move their head and then they're just hitting with their hands and arms because you just can't, you can't pivot your body and move the club powerfully and not move your head.

Lex Statzer: Yeah, that makes, I mean, that makes sense to me. If you're moving that much and you're, you're pivoting that much, I feel like you have to be moving your head, right? There's, it's attached. Yeah.

Jim McLean: Yeah. That was a, that was a significant part of the X-Factor book, a centerpiece drawing of the head moving in the golf swing. And it's still taught and still believed by a lot of golfers to this day.

Lex Statzer: Yeah.

Jim McLean: But, you know, it's just not, it's not what good players do.

Lex Statzer: Gotcha. Speaking of good players, you have seen hundreds of them. You have been coaching for decades, but you've got this line that you keep coming back to, who taught the teacher? So, Jim, who taught you?

Jim McLean: I think it's really an important question. I got that from George Leonard in his top selling book called Mastery. It was used in the New York Times. I think that's where I actually saw it a long time ago. And he talked about the different, you move up levels as you progress. And mostly he was writing mostly about karate and the lessons he took doing that and how he stayed on a plateau for a long time, he didn't seem to get better. And then all of a sudden you would, you would jump up, but he also wrote in there who taught the teacher. So he'd gone to a great teacher in New York who had been a, you know, a grandmaster champion and was teaching now and the importance of having somebody teach you that is really qualified to be a teacher and has done the work necessary to be a teacher. So for me, my greatest teacher was a researcher. I don't know what happened. And no, and he was also a golf professional, but he had been trained by a guy named Bill Glasson who went to MIT, who was an engineer for Hughes missile. Uh, he taught this guy golf and he taught him, you know, how to, where to place the camera and a lot of other things. I don't know what a top research would look like in golf, but, uh, we kind of became partners in researching golf swings. So this was going way back until we first got video cameras, which at the end of 1979, when Sony came out with, well, you could get them before, but there's something affordable, the Sony beta max. Then we could start shooting video. He was at La Costa in California, a top resort in California, which held a tour event, and then we would film the tour players out there and we'd stay out, you know, stay up late at night till two or three in the morning and just studying these videos way back to this going way back to 1980. And then I just did these research projects with Carl Welty, it was his name. And we just started doing them then. And then when I started my own golf schools, but we did golf schools together too out at La Costa, but then we started doing golf schools out of New York. And then when I came down to Miami to Doral, we had the tour event and that started to make things a lot easier. And that's when I wrote the X Factor book was at that time, but we were doing a lot of research for, you know, a decade before that I had a ton of notes taken at maybe a thousand pages of notes that, you know, kind of put these articles together. And also I, a guy called me from California who was, uh, he was a golf pro a teacher, but he was working with a group in San Francisco and they developed a gyroscope in a way to measure movement, I'm not sure what they were exactly using it for, but it had an application for golf. And that's what he called me about. And I'd already written this article for golf magazine. And he said, well, look, you know, we can put these numbers into a computer and he told me what was how they do it. So I said, yeah, well, look, we've got the tour event coming out. Let's we'll measure the, you know, a ton of PGA tour players on the sports motion, motion trainer. So it was a gyroscope, but it still would spit out the numbers of your shoulder turn and your hip, your hip turn, which was really cool. And then we use those numbers in the article, which was, you know, quantifying these numbers that, that I'd come up with, but it showed the differences. You know, there was different amounts of turns, which I mentioned to you, you know, not everybody's the same. There there's within a, a zone I call a safety zone, but yeah, we, we started, we saw that the longer hitters had this bigger differential between the shoulders and the hips. So the longest tours on, on the PGA tour had a bigger shoulder rotation and less hip turn. And there was very explosive in the shorter hitters kind of had the smaller gaps. And, you know, when, when that article came out, I had a number of PGA tour players come to see me who were on the short end of that deal. And, you know, we worked on, on some things that, that helped them. And then I ended up doing two more, two more articles, but getting, I guess, get getting back to who taught the teacher, I got way off.

Lex Statzer: That's okay.

Jim McLean: So that was Carl Welty. And, but I had learned when I went to school at the university of Houston from Jackie Burke, who won the master's in the USO and the PGA two major championships, leading money winner on the tour, and he is very good friends with Ben Hogan and then Hogan came down to Houston and played and Hogan's the biggest name in golf and golf instruction and writing books. He he's got the all time. Number one, bestselling golf book. Five lessons. He's way ahead of his time, but I got to watch Hogan play. And, and that was really great. I got to watch him play seven or eight times. I got to watch him practice. And then of course I get to spend all this time for 40 years with the Jackie Burke. He's Jackie did golf schools with me. He came up to New York and I was great friends with him. So I asked him a million questions about Hogan and about the golf swing. So he was, you know, unbelievable teacher for me. And then I met Ken Venturi in New York was the U S open champion. Also a really good friend of Hogan's. He was the number one analyst for CBS golf for 35 years. Taught a ton of guys on the PGA tour. I watched him teach to our players, but also got to play with him probably a few hundred times. And we, we talked a lot about the golf swing and he was very, very intelligent and, you know, a tremendous player. Claude Harmon, when I went to New York, also a really good friend of Ben Hogan. His sons are great, well-known teachers. Butch Harmon, one of his sons taught at Tiger Woods for a long time and became super famous for that. So those old timers who were teachers and tour players and that's kind of the way it was when golf really first started here in America. Um, the, you played, but there wasn't that much money just like baseball, you know, all the Mickey Mantle had a job in the winter, you know, and so there, it was a different world, but they, they, they got good at teaching the game because they, they had to teach high handicapped golfers and not, not just their friends on the, on the PGA tour, but they were great resources right there. So those, those were four people that were really important to me. I learned so much from, I was a teaching professional in New York at Westchester Country Club, my first teaching position. And Mr. Harmon was right down the street at Wingfoot, which these are famous places in, in New York and in the game of golf, Westchester Country Club and Wingfoot. So, you know, I got to spend time with him there as director of golf at Tamra's Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California, Palm Springs. And Mr. Harmon was right across the street. So I would have lunch with him every week, go out to the range with him and talk to him out there as well. So he gave me some great ideas on, on teaching. So to me, learning from great, you know, the greats of the game, legends of the game was, you know, I can't, you just can't put a value on it for my life. And, and then of course I have a huge library. I've got 1,500 books upstairs. I enjoy reading, you know, I'm trying to listen to everything and we've got, now we've got Instagram and YouTube and there's something new on there every day. And a lot of it's not great actually, but there occasionally is some really good things.

Lex Statzer: Yeah. I mean, talk about a lineup, those names, that is incredible to be able to look back and just have those relationships with people that are so well respected in your sport. It's amazing. You've been able to watch the game evolve and watch the players evolve, be a learner, be a teacher. And in the book, you're candid about your own swing speed dropping as you've aged. And that's a pretty common feeling for any physical activity, right? What has the journey been like to come to terms with that?

Jim McLean: Yeah, well, you know, they say a father time is undefeated. So it, you know, there's just things that happen to you through your life. And I actually kept my speed up really good until I was 65. I'd say I could still swing at 119 miles an hour on the track pan, but then it, you know, it drops and, you know, I'm getting close right now to not breaking a hundred miles an hour, but I'm 76 years old, so it's just, and I don't play that much either, not nearly like I used to, but you can still keep your speed quite good if you do a moderate amount of exercises, maintain your flexibility and swing a golf club often, you know, not just once a week, but you can maintain good golf speed, but most people don't do that. And it really drops off, you know, terribly drops off or they never had speed. So one of the, probably the number one thing people want when they come to my golf schools is to hit the ball further. That's right there with consistency or hitting the ball further are the absolute two number one things. But I think everybody wants to hit the ball further.

Lex Statzer: Okay, Jim, where can people find X Factor 2 once it comes out and where do they go to keep up with you?

Jim McLean: You can find it on Amazon for sure. I'm, I know there's going to be other outlets, not really positive of what those are, there'll be an audio book coming out, which that'll be a little bit after the book, so I'm hoping Lexi, you, you can tell people where to get the book.

Lex Statzer: Yeah, absolutely. Amazon's the main one. Most major retailers are going to have the book stocked. So Barnes and Noble books, a million bookshop.org all those main places. Once it comes out, absolutely. We'll be available. Do they have, do you have any social media or a website or anywhere people?

Jim McLean: Oh yeah. Yeah, I'll have Jim McLean.com. We'll have it on my website. I have an Instagram account, McLean golf. I have it on X as well. There are quite a few followers. So if anybody wanted to follow me there, that will have, I have information coming out on the book, of course.

Lex Statzer: Of course. Perfect. Well, Jim, it's been so much fun. I cannot wait for X Factor to hit the shelves. Thank you so much for joining me on author hour.

Jim McLean: Thank you very much, Lexi.