The Power of Club Face Control with Mike Malaska

0:00 The way we teach people to play this game, and the assumptions we make of who they are initially destroys their potential to ever really get good. Because at the end of the day, whoever has the best face control when they play golf wins. I don't care what the swing looks like. Look at the tour. There's a lot of really weird looking swings that are really good. Why because through the ball they control the face and they can hit the shots they want to hit under pressure. Today I'm talking to Mike Malaska, who is a PGA National Teacher of the Year who played in two US Opens and was an All American at Weaber State is the correct pronunciation, correct, that's correct. Called it Weber until I was fourteen, so I always never quite know if I got it right. I got well, Mike, thank you for being here, And I wanted to kind of start by asking you. You know, I listen to you on talking about the role of the arm and the hands, you know, and the wrists in the swing, and so much current instruction is based on everything else, it seems, so you know, talk a little bit about you know, your your view on how those play into the swing because everybody tells you, you know, don't swing with your arms, don't swing with your hands, swing with your you know, with everything else.

1:28 Well, okay, let's talk about how you learn things. So when you learn motion patterns hit, throw, catch, it's it's called tactile learning. So you learn from hands, fingers, toes and feet inward. That's how your body learns patterns. This doesn't learn how to make this move. I mean that's a misconception to start right relative to physiology, anatomy, kinesiology, and how you learn learning things. So you know, this doesn't control this necessarily. This learns what to do. This figures out how to accommodate what this is doing. So if your hands are trained and they're on the club, and your hands and arms are trained to do what they need to do with the club, then your body can start play at a bigger and bigger role. But your hands still have to feel and adapt and understand where the club is and be able to direct the momentum of the club to the ball. You can't just stand up and turn back and turn through and the club is going to run into the ball. The physics behind it is impossible. You'd miss the ball by a foot above it. Okay, So something has to sense where that club is in space and time, and as you move that something has to direct the momentum into the correct arc because the arc that you're initially on, if you just unwind, you're not going to come close to the ball because of the physics of circles.

2:50 You know. So when they start talking about body controls, your hands and arms, I've seen very very few people who get a lot better to its. Now, yeah, your body has to move. It's it's a blend. It's a blend of two things, and it's emotion. There isn't necessarily one that overrides the other. But initially all these tour players, I mean, I just did an interview with Nicholas and Jack was talking about when he hits shots and what he sees, and he says, well, the first thing is I fear the shot I want to hit, And he says, and he gets right up in the camera and he goes and then I see it in my fingers. I can feel what the club's going to do. And then once I feel it in my fingers, my hands and arms figure out what they need to do, and my body then taps in and accommodates what I'm doing with my with the club. That's freaking magic. And you see the mistake, the mistake we make as teachers is we assume levels of competency hand eye coordinates and relative to the club in the face that these people will working there don't have, and so the information assumes those levels of control. Now I can stand up and put my hands on the thumb of you, I could do anything I want to do with my body, and my hand could go oh okay, if you're going to do that, I'm going to have to do this to get plucking the ball. But again, I've been I've been hitting.

4:16 Golf balls and baseballs and tennis balls and getting and throwing things since I was three four years old, So I'm I'm pretty good with this stuff, right. So so when I look at people, so when I get to a student, I assess how good are they with their hands and arms with little teenie shots to control the space and make it work. If they can't do yeah, they have to learn that, right well. So you know, I mean, first of all, I mean it's it's really interesting because you know, obviously you know all the you know people you know. I'm trying to. You know, most people who you know, or a lot of people who are playing and maybe maybe that particularly.

5:01 You know, most of us grew up playing baseball, right, We grew up playing basketball, you know, even if we weren't any good, you know, you grew up doing that. And that's really where you know, you have that kind of athleticism and that hand eye that you developed. And nobody ever said, you know, when you're playing baseball. You know, at least when I was growing up, nobody ever sat there and said, well, you got to rotate, you know, through through your swing, right, you kind of felter your way through it. Yeah. By the time you're five years old, okay, you when you understand the human body. By the time you're five years old, you've learned the four basic skills you need to do any athletics thing you want to do the rest of your life. Hit, throw, catch, and kick. Now, once you look, once you learn those patterns, you have a DNA for how you do those patterns the rest of your life. It's about applying those patterns in different planes of motion and applying it to a different title called tennis or baseball or golf or whatever. It might be, but your body is a pattern machine. So the other thing about individual humans is we all have a DNA for motion. How does our body sink? And when you take the golf club out of it and you have somebody do a certain pattern, take a stick and hit something, and you watch how they transition and how their body moves or how they throw a ball, and then you go, okay, that's their DNA for motion. Now, I've never seen anybody that I've had throw a ball or hit something take

6:32 it back and come over the top and use their shoulder. Everybody sequences and moves perfectly. So why all of a sudden when they get to golf. Does that go away? Well, A lot of it's because of the way golf's been taught. A lot of it is because the ball is still, so people's feed are still. And in all sports you play, when you throw a ball, or you hit a ball, or you hit a tennis ball, you feed go steps swinging, step swing, so you're stepping, okay, it's a dance step. And then all of a sudden you tell somebody, Okay, we're gonna put your feet here, and we're not going to move your feet, but we want you to sequence the way you used to. That's very difficult to do. So you actually, in my world, you actually have to allow people to feel the motion that you want the way they do it with stepping, and then you gradually decrease the stepping. All right, because if you start static feet and say, okay, we're going to go back, we're going to change directions and you know, but don't move your feet, I'm telling you you're you're dead.

7:40 Because people don't. People do not have that much what they call spatial awareness, approbe perception. And so so where the industry I think goes wrong is first static feet, second trying to change somebody's natural movement patterns because they don't even know what their patterns are. They don't look at them. They have an idea what their pattern should be, and they try to get everybody closer to the pattern they think is ideal. And that's I mean, if I had to summarize up my whole career, I did that for a while. I understood movement, I understood biomechanics, I got muscle firing patterns, I got all that stuff, and I taught it for two or three years, and quite honestly, it was the worst production I'd ever had out of students, and it was the worst that I'd ever played trying to do the same thing. So I knew there was something wrong because I couldn't even do it. I mean, I could do it on the range, but I couldn't go out on the golf course with any pressure on me at all and pull off what I was trying to teach people to do. So I'm going, what what am I doing here? I mean, I can't even do this on the golf now. On the range, like I said, Okay, no pressure, two or three balls, no big deal. But it's out on the golf course under pressure with a shot that I was uncomfortable with, which is going to happen most of the time. All of that just went to hail on a hand.

9:10 Is it a question of over just an overcomplication of telling people how to move their bodies that puts you in your head when you're on the course, you know, I mean, because I mean that I can honestly say, you know, like from my experience, anytime I'm thinking about my swing, like the other day, I could not drive the ball straight, and with every drive that didn't go straight, and I was hitting everything else great and the you know, and I really try hard not to think, and then I'd be trying not to think, you know, and I'd be so trapped and trying to figure out what the motion was to just get the ball in the fairway.

9:52 Well, see, first of all, you made a mistake there with what you said trying not to think. You can't thin. What you have to do is you have to be thinking about the right things. So when you're trying to hit the driver in the fairway, you have to first think about the motion, and you have to tie motion to face control through the ball. See when I watch people make practice swings, they stand up and make a practice swing and I videotape it, and the swing looks good, But when I slow it down, the face through where the ball is is all over the place. So when they get up and they try to duplicate the field, they might duplicate the motion, but the motion's not tied to the face. Every time, every single time a tour player moves a club, I don't care if it's one hand, two hands, whatever they're doing, and I film them and I film myself.

10:43 I make a swing right through. Here where the ball would be that club face is absolutely perfect. I film amateurs making practice swings and the face is all over the place. And as you know, it. Only takes two or three degrees with a driver to take a ball from forty yards this way to thirty or forty yards the other way. So is it? Yeah? Okay, So the next time plan you type motion into face control, talk. About that I'd like because I'm interested in now. Okay, So so you feel the motion that you want and then you say, okay, there's the motion I want. Now what is the club face? What does the face have to feel through the ball to get the ball to go where I want to go? And then once you go okay, there it is, then you walk up.

11:28 And then that's when you you don't shut down, but you allow yourself to duplicate the motion that you just made. So you're very focused on the feel of the motion. So the next time you're out there, you know, you get a feel for the motion, and then you tie the motion to feel in the face through the ball. And then once you go okay, there it is, then you walk up and set up and allow yourself to stay really focused on duplicating the motion that you just produced, not positions, the motion and the face through the ball. Motion and face through the ball to make the ball be where you want it to go. See, this is what controls the face. So when they say take your hands out of the game, well, I understand what they're saying.

12:13 You want to get to where you're swinging that you don't. It doesn't require your hands to do much to make the face work, but your hand or your only connection with the clubs. So you have to have a sense in your hands and fingers. Okay, what am I going to do with the face through the ball. And if you haven't trained your hands to work the club face through the ball, I don't care how good this moves, You're never going to be really good. So for somebody who you know, how talk a little bit about you know, face control, h you know, and and how to get consistent control of hitting the ball square, because like you're saying, that's that's the difference, right, I mean, that's the pros are always where.

13:03 All right, So here's the deal. One of the clubs I was at, I took a bunch of members. They were playing a little tournament and I was doing a clinic before the tournament, and they were just getting ready to go play. It's like thirty five minutes before they played. So I said, all right, come down to the range, bring your seven iron, bring your driver if you want, but we're just hit seven irons. So they all come down to the range and I get them lined up. I said, okay, put a ball on a tee, and what I want you to do is we're going to set up. We're going to make a swing, and I want you all to make the ball curve to the left. So do whatever you have to do. Let me show you how to do that. Let's get it to curve to the left. And if they couldn't, I went up to them and I helped them. So, all of a sudden, off a tee with a seven iron, they started getting the ball to curve. To the left. It's all right, now we're going to curve one to the right, same seven iron, little easy swings off a tee.

13:46 Some it took longer than others, and then hit it low and hit it high. Now by the time I got them all to hit those shots, and while I was going from one to the others, the others were hitting shots. All of a sudden, It's about five minutes before their tea time. They go, what about my driver? I said, well, no, no, don't worry about it. Just go out, Just go up, hit a few putts, and go play. They came off the golf course and they had a little dinner and they were having a day. They're playing the next day, and they all came in and about seventy five percent of them said, I was unbelievable. That's the best round of golf I've had in years. Why Because I all of a sudden got them connected to face and how to control the ball. So they had a sense of how to make the ball work. Now here's what's interesting. The next day, I didn't have a clinic and I went out to watch them all warm up.

14:33 Guess how they warmed up. They just pound buck with a seven iron, hitting curves. They took the driver out and just started going after it. And I'm going to whool and they didn't play very well, and I go, well, there's there's two definitions of insanity. One is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. And the most important one is finding something that works and not doing it. So what they found was what they found, what I gave them was really the key to being able to play better golf, which is get control of the ball, or as much control as you can, and then go out and play with that. Well, see they discarded that. I went back to, is my head still?

15:18 Am I turning enough? You know? And I'm going, okay, that's part of it. But when you're getting ready to go play, you know, you better take what you have and like I say, take a seven iron and tee the ball up. If you can't take a seven iron, put a ball on a tee and stand there and make it curve to the left, and make it curve to the right and hit it low and hit high. If you can't do that off a tee, you're not gonna you can't do with a driver. Yeah, Because you don't, you haven't triggered the hand eye coordination for the face. So everybody gets out there and the first thing they're working on is shift in their weight and clear their hits and shallow the club and twist on it. I'm going, wait a minute, can you take a club and make a little swing and hit it low and hit it high and curve it left, curve it right, well, no, I go, well, anybody who's any good can do that easy, right, And when you start, when I start warming up, When I'm warming up, I'm seeing trajectories and shots, and I'm feeling what I'm doing with the club and how everything sinks out. And if I'm if I can't make it sync out with a seven iron at one hundred and ten yards, if I'm losing control, I'm not going to go bigger, faster. I'm going to stay there until I get okay, there it is, and then I'll start building it up. And the way we teach people to play this game, and the assumptions we make of who they are, initially destroys their potential to ever really get good. Because at the end of the day, whoever has the bust, the best face control

16:49 when they play golf wins. I don't care what the swing looks like. It's about face control, pack It's not about that. Yeah, you can argue if the swing's better, maybe, but there's been a lot of peace. Look at the tour, there's a lot of really weird looking swings that are really good. Why Because through the ball they control the face and they can hit the shots they want to hit under pressure. I mean, it's it's really my and my thinking. It's really pretty simple, you know. But the way we've approached the game and what we get people thinking about is going to make them better, doesn't make them better, so they fault themselves when I'm not so sure that some of the faults shouldn't be on teachers because you're not really understanding where the person you're working with is. So I'm a control and a hand eye coordination perspective. I'm not saying your information's wall, but it might be wrong for that person at this point in time.

17:43 They can't do it, cannot do it well. And how much of it too is you know, is you know taking a you know, I mean the way I mean and you can tell me if I'm wrong here the way you know, the a five hand Mandycap swings the club versus the way you look at somebody on tour swinging the club, right, are two totally different species and one is and where And it feels like to some extent a lot of us are being taught how to swing the club like we're supposed to be. Rory mcelwood you know, yeah, well, yeah, you know, one of the worst things that's ever happened in golf. Okay, when they started profiling players, so they started capturing tour players swings, and they started looking at a model and okay, here's an average, and they started putting together what the average tour player swings look like, which is interesting because average means nobody really does it.

18:52 It's an average. Okay, so that's it. So they kept using tour players as a model. Well, my question is are tour players the best model? Because I can tell you I've been one, I've seen to They're dysfunctional human beings. Their bodies are flexible in places that you don't even You can't, You couldn't even if you had to, couldn't do what they do. So my first question is how correct is the model relative to the average person who sits at a desk or who is a good athlete but hasn't been hitting golf balls five days, six days a week for the last ten to fifteen years. So we're going to do a model, you would say, Okay, here's the human body, this is how it's designed. What would be the most efficient way for it to move? That would be a better model because it wouldn't look like what a lot of the tour players do. So because when you move the body the way it's designed to move and the way the joints are designed to move, it would take on a certain shape that's based on a functional body that would have more relevance than the tour players. So number one, you got a bad model. Number two, the assumption is that the average person, whether you're a thirty handicapper or a four or five handicapper that's a decent athlete, that you can actually do what these players are doing, which I can tell you I know enough about physiology and testing people physically. They're ninety nine percent of people that

20:24 come to me. There isn't a chance in hell that they can do what these models tell them to do. Now, could they get somewhat ulcer to them, maybe, But the pursuit to become the model actually destroys them relevant instead of Okay, here's what I can do, here's how I move, this is how I hit something. How do we fit that into me playing this game called golf? Because there's a lot of players that don't fit the model. Nichols didn't hit the model. He didn't have much factor it impact. His hips were almost square the target line, his hips, the shoulders were squares slightly closed. I mean, so all of these models would say Jack Nicholas should fix his swing, right, you know, so the same with Trevino, the same with the number of these players. The model would say, oh, wait a minute, your backswing's off. Your impacts, well, impacts an interesting one, but your a hip position relative to your shoulders is off. We got to get you a little more of this and a little less of that.

21:27 And so you know, it's it's interesting when you give the brain a task, it's a task master. So when you say, okay, here's impact, here's the task of impact, then your body starts to eliminate anything and everything not relevant to the basic task based on how you move. That's not how we teach golf. We should teach golf from impact back. You shouldn't teach it from to the top to impact. So the impacts the most important position in the game. So what is impact? What is the commonalities that all these great players have had, and how do you develop that first? Because if you developed that first, then all of your body movement patterns relative to who you are will eliminate the non necessary patterns to get to that basic task, which is impact and face control, because that's how it's trained. What does this want to do? What does this have to do to accommodate it. It's not I'm going to make this, make this move. Not at the learning level, that's not it.

22:32 Absolutely, Mike, thank you for taking the time to do this.