Note:  Stay tuned this week for a podcast of my recent interview with John Little followed by a post about my experience with The Max Golf Workout.

The Max Golf Workout by John Little is a revolutionary look at how we as golfers work out.

The author of several books, Little developed a strength training system called Max Contraction.  The idea behind Max Contraction is that optimal strength training should involve maximum weight, held in a fully-contracted position for a brief period (30-60 seconds).  In addition, he has found through research that the optimal recovery time for maximum muscle growth is, at the low end, about a week, and can be much longer.  What that means is that those of us who go to the gym several times per week and lift light weight for a high number of reps are training both inefficiently and too frequently.

He adapted that concept to golf in The Max Golf Workout.

In addition to suggesting that we strength train ineffectively, Little is critical of a lot of information coming from the fitness industry today.   He says that stretching is, at a minimum, not effective, and may even be detrimental to joint health.  He is also critical of the fitness industry as a whole, citing profit motive as a basis for many forms of training and training equipment out there.

Far from simply being a criticism of conventional fitness wisdom, the book contains plenty of information about how to adopt the Max Contraction system and why it’s a good fit for our biology and physiology.  Certainly, many of us can stand to lose a few pounds, and Little also shares the results of a study showing that strength training can help in that area.  He also covers the basics of proper nutrition.

Chapter List

1. Part One: The Data
   1. Where are all the Tigers?
   2. A Strong Golfer is a Better Golfer
   3. A Revolutionary Study - And its Implications
   4. Second Revolutionary Study - The Once a Week Workout
2. Part Two: The Method
   1. Understanding the Process
   2. The MAX GOLF Workout
   3. Tips for More Productive Workouts
   4. Advanced Training
3. Part Three: Additional Considerations
   1. Max Nutrition for Peak Performance and Weight Control
   2. Senior Benefits
   3. Questions and Answers

The Good

• The book is well-written, easy to read, and interesting.
• Little backs up his revolutionary claims with data from his own research studies as well as citation of independent research.
• It really is a fascinating concept.
• The book contains a question and answer section, addressing many questions and issues you might have with the program.
• Not only is a specific workout program given, but there is information provided about nutrition, weight loss and the benefits of strength training for seniors.

The Bad

• You may be disappointed if you’re just expecting a workout manual.  There is a fair amount of discussion involving biology and physiology as well as study results.  To me this is a good thing, but I recognize that some people may not care for that.
• The book isn’t highly golf-specific.  There is definitely golf-specific material, but much of the book is applicable to anyone who is looking to strength train better.  Again, not necessarily bad, but might not be what you’d expect.
• One place in the book where Little and I disagree is a section in the questions and answers chapter where he discounts the role of mental game in golf.  His point is well taken, that a good mental approach isn’t going to add distance to your drives, however, I would turn that around to say that a bad mental approach can prevent you from achieving what your body is capable of.

Conclusion

I’ve read a handful of golf fitness books and have studied the subject extensively over the last year or two.  Fitness is key to my quest to become a golf pro.  Without a doubt, this book delivered on its claims of providing a “revolutionary new perspective on strength training for golfers”.  In fact, it provides a revolutionary perspective for anyone interested in strength training.

In the introduction, John Little asks that we empty our minds of preconceived notions about how training for golf is “supposed” to be.  I did that and I was floored by what I read.  Is it possible that we can train so infrequently and in such short bursts and yet see such dramatic results?

It wasn’t enough for me to just open my mind.  I had to give the workout a try.  Stay tuned later this week for a post about my findings.

In the meantime, if you can open your mind and drop the preconceived notions that you have, then I think The Max Golf Workout might change the way you view exercise and how we train for the things in life that we like to do.  I highly recommend it.

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Further Reading

John Little’s Home Page
The Max Golf Workout (Amazon.com)

Short putts are supposed to be easy.  Three feet?  Bah!  Except, try making 100 in a row and then say that.  Too many putts are missed in the two to five foot range, assuming you’re not picking them up as gimmes.

One of the common problems in this situation is a tendency to forget that a putting stroke involves a backswing and a follow through.

Often, a player will be intimidated on a short putt by a little break or touchy speed and will take the putter back a little and then pop the ball with little or no follow through.  Or, maybe the backswing will be longer than necessary and then the player is forced to slow down through impact.

These situations both lead to short putts not getting to the hole, or not having enough pace and taking too much break, missing on the low side.

At a minimum, the follow through during a putting stroke should be the same length as the back swing.  In fact, you’ll probably sink a few more putts if you make it longer than the back swing.

Here’s a technique I find useful.  On the follow through, I let the putter follow the ball along the aim line as long as I can.

Normally, I putt with a square to square pendulum stroke.  My intention throughout is to keep the putter face square to the aim line.  I try to keep hands and arms out of it and swing from the shoulders.

With these short putts, if I let the putter head follow the ball to the hole (or along the aim line if I’m playing any break), then I’m sure that I’m not going to leave the ball short because of deceleration through impact.  In fact, the only way I can go wrong is misjudging the distance and not taking a big enough back swing, or misreading the break altogether.

As a side effect, this helps me make sure I’m moving the putter face square to the line.  If I’m not, then I’ll feel myself compensating as I try and follow the line after impact.

A good player to watch do this is Phil Mickleson.  On short putts, he takes a short back swing, and then lets the putter follow the aim line so his follow through is longer than his back swing.

If you’re missing short putts, give it a try.  Take enough back swing to allow you to swing smoothly (no slapping or popping) yet still allow enough pace so that if the hole was covered, the ball would finish about 17 inches past.  On the follow through, let the putter follow the aim line as long as you can with the putter head.

Things are starting to click now.

In my lessons, we’ve been addressing a few problems.  Here’s a rundown of the tweaks I’ve had to make:

• Stop taking the club way inside to start the swing.  I’ve been concentrating on taking it more back along the line.  To me, that action feels like I’m taking the club back outside the line and re-routing it on the downswing.  Of course, I’m not, but it’s way different than taking it back inside the target line.
• Stand a little closer to the ball.  Over time, I’ve begun reaching for the ball a little.  This is a change that I’m not having too much trouble with.  However, I’m catching a lot of shots on the toe, I think I’m subconsciously trying to avoid a shank because I’m standing that much closer.  When I concentrate on not hitting the ball on the toe, I hit it solidly.  It’s just a matter of gaining trust and confidence.
• Tempo.  I identified tempo as the secret of golf a while back, and without a doubt, it’s been my primary focus.  I’ve found that it’s critical for me to establish good tempo early at the driving range or on the course.  Once my tempo gets skewed, it’s very hard to get it back.
• Decrease the hinge in my wrists on the backswing.  In the effort to get my wrists cocked correctly, I’ve gone the opposite direction.  That leads to a number of problems.  That tweak has been the one that has paid off immediately.  Limiting that to 90 degrees or so on the backswing has led to more solid contact right away (the angle may increase slightly on the way down, but 90 degrees at the top is all I want).
• Let the club face open up a little on the backswing.  During the backswing, when the club gets parallel to the ground (where the hands are just about waist-high), the club face should be vertical.  When I get to that point, the face is quite closed.  I used to have the opposite problem of rolling the face too far open at that point, so I have to keep a careful watch on that.

That’s quite a list of things I’m changing.  So far, I haven’t been able to take the changes to the course yet.  I’m seeing higher scores now.  I’m at the stage where I have good stretches of comfort and confidence at the range, though.

None of these tweaks are ingrained yet, so on the course where I have to trust my swing, it’s just not happening.  I’ve been playing less lately, instead choosing to spend a lot of time on the range.  Turning these things into muscle memory is the only cure.

Mostly, my on-course troubles are limited to my irons.  I’m hitting my driver as well as ever.  It’s going long and straight and it’s the club I have the most confidence in right now.

Having so many changes to make presents a little bit of a challenge during practice sessions.  It’s very, very difficult to effectively work on changing more than one or two things at a time.  It’s also very, very difficult to live with the poor shots that come from concentrating on wrist hinge, while ignoring club path, club face, and a closer ball position (remember it’s not a setup problem - it’s the re-routing of the club due to the different setup).

That makes improvement a little slower than I’d like.  I think the best way to proceed is to always concentrate on tempo and to hit 10-20 balls while concentrating on one of the other issues.  Then, focus on another one.  Once these things become comfortable for me, and most importantly - automatic- then I’ll have succcess on the course.

I’m definitely feeling more optimistic and charged than I’ve felt in a while.

When I first set out to write this post, it was going to be a list looking at some of the more creative players in golf history.

That plan changed some as I leafed through the August 2008 issue of Golf Digest.  In Jim Flick’s column (p. 48) he related a story that I found so fascinating that it made me want to shift gears and talk about the role of creativity in golf.

Flick shared a story where his colleague Mike Malaska was on the range practicing next to Johnny Miller a few years ago.  Malaska asked Miller what club he’d hit to a green 100 yards away.  Miller’s response: “I could use any of 14 clubs.”

Sensing that he was misunderstood he tried to clarify his question.  Miller stopped him and then went on and hit the green with every club in his bag, including the driver and putter.  After that display, he went on to add that the minds of the most talented players are programmed to think creatively and that they’re problem-solvers at heart.  They see many ways to execute a shot and then pick one.

Obviously, I was fascinated that Johnny Miller could hit a green with every club in his bag.  I mean, come on, if that doesn’t impress you, then you may want to take up another game.

I was more drawn, however, to his thoughts on the role of creativity in talented players.  I’ve said before that golf is both art and science.  Creativity definitely falls onto the artistic side.

How many of us have the sort of creativity as players that we might find in top players?

The player that’s probably at the top of the list in terms of creativity is Seve Ballesteros. His creativity and shot-making ability are the stuff of legend.  I’ve heard stories of him hitting 3-irons out of greenside bunkers.  I’ve heard his contemporaries remark, only half jokingly, that they thought he was wild off the tee just so he could get himself into trouble that he could then work to get out of.

Think about that for a moment.  How many of us would even consider hitting a 3-iron out of a greenside bunker, even as a low-percentage, last resort?  Not many.

I bet a vast majority of you reading this wouldn’t even set foot in a greenside bunker with anything other than a sand wedge.  Some players don’t even consider the other wedges in their bags, let alone longer irons.

In some ways, creativity is a gift.  I know I certainly don’t think I could paint or sculpt anything worth looking at.  At the same, creativity in golf is a little different.  As Johnny Miller put it, talented players are problem solvers.  It becomes like a mathematical problem to them.  There’s the science creeping into art.

Creativity in golf is about seeing the alternatives. Really, it’s about seeing them and then boiling them down into the best choice, when the best choice may not be the safest or most obvious.  It’s about seeing the risk and reward.

When I first read Flick’s article in Golf Digest, I was briefly disheartened, because I don’t consider myself to be all that creative.  My thought was, where is the limit of my golfing potential, if I’m not a creative person?  The trouble was, I was thinking about it in terms of artistic creativity, not in terms of considering all possibilities, which is more mathematical.

After thinking about it some, I think being creative golfers is something that most or all of us can do. All we need to do is open ourselves up to many possible alternatives on every shot.

This is something we can work on in practice.  Never hit a 3-iron out of a greenside bunker?  Why not give it a try?  Never hit every one of your clubs to a 100 yard green?  Try it.  (As an aside, hitting 100 yard drivers is a great way to work on tempo.)

Hitting odd-ball shots in practice is a fun diversion.  Even more so if you have someone to compete against.  Challenge yourself to hit wild hooks and slices, intentional worm burners, sky-high flop shots, 100 yard drivers, long-iron bunker explosions.  Hit the things that you’d never consider on the course.

By doing that sort of thing, I think you’ll find that you expose yourself to possibilities on the course that you never dreamed of.  Open up those alternatives and you’ll allow yourself to become a more creative player by building confidence that you can pull off things that are not considered to be the “norm”.

What do you think?  Can creativity in golf be honed like any other skill, or is it strictly a gift?

I’m always fascinated at the number of different variations of putting grips I see.  It isn’t just down at my local course, either.

Tune in to any PGA Tour event and look at the number of variations you see.  Fingers overlapped and interlocked in different ways.  Hands rotated around the shaft to different degrees.  And that’s just variations on the conventional grip.

Then you have all sorts of unconventional grips:  left hand low, the claw, the saw.  There seems to be a construction theme going, so somewhere out there, I’m sure there’s a player putting with the jackhammer or the wrecking ball.

What this tells me is that the putting grip is virtually irrelevant.

It’s pretty widely accepted today that the wrists should stay firm during the stroke, but this was not the case in the past when greens were bumpier and not cut so low.  There’s some debate about whether the putter blade should stay square or open and close slightly during the putting stroke, but many players putt well with either of those styles.  Most players try to make some sort of pendulum-like stroke.

If a player’s grip allows those fundamentals to be achieved, then all is well.  From where I’m sitting, I can count dozens of grips that let that happen.

So why are there so many putting grip styles?

Simply, because putting is about the confidence that comes from mental and physical comfort.  No matter how much time you spend practicing a solid putting stroke, you will never putt well without being mentally and physically comfortable while doing it.  And it’s possible to do that and meet the technical requirements of good putting with any number of different grips.

There are times in a player’s life when that mental and physical comfort zone breaks down.  It happens to most at one time or another.  Putts just aren’t dropping.

So, what happens then?  Many players will spend time on the practice green trying to work out out.  Sometimes that’s effective.  Other times it’s not.  Once confidence begins to break down, it begins to snowball. It starts to go lower and lower on its own.

At that stage of lowered confidence, the player will usually do one of the following:  change putters or change putting grips.

Some players change putters like it was going out of style.  And many see immediate improvement in their putting games - for a while.  It’s not necessarily that one putter is technically superior to another.  It’s the confidence they gain from the switch.  They think it’s a better putter for them, so it is.  Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it really is a better putter.  But the fact that the player putted will with it for a while is the telling sign.  The putter didn’t suddenly wear out or lose its magic.

Changing grip style accomplishes the same thing:  a boost in confidence.

We’ve already established that there are so many possible putting grips out there (even at the highest levels of play) that there’s no correct way to grip the putter.  Therefore, unless there’s a specific technical flaw that needs to be addressed, changing putting grips is simply a way to trick the mind into getting back that mental and physical comfort that was enjoyed previously.

In my case, I putted with a conventional-type grip for years.  It served me well.  At times, my putter was automatic.  In the last couple of years, for some unknown reason, that stopped.  It probably happened when I was out of commission for a couple of years with a bad back.  It’s easy to lose the touch during a long layoff.

Late last year and early this year, I was really struggling.  I just couldn’t get any putts on line.  My pace was OK, but I wasn’t making solid contact as much as I need to.

Early this year, I tried something radical.  I went with “The Claw” putting grip.  You may have seen Mark Calcavecchia using it.  It felt physically comfortable.  It also felt mentally comfortable.

Right away, my putting improved.  I was dropping more putts.  Most importantly, my confidence increased a lot.  I putted that way for almost four months.

Recently, though, I’ve been struggling again.  So, I made a change at my last putting practice session.  I went back to my old grip.

To my surprise, the result was exactly the same as when I abandoned it for The Claw.  From the first putt, it felt more comfortable, both physically and mentally.  I started making putts and was hitting the ball more solidly.

The only conclusion I can draw is that the change gave me a boost of confidence. It was like my subconscious was thinking, “OK, we just did something different, so we’re back on track.”

It isn’t that one putting grip is better than another.  It was just the confidence that can come from something new.  It’s same the reason why players keep the golf club industry afloat by buying new drivers every year.

Certainly, there are some things I need to fix in my putting stroke still.  I need to get some more work in on my Pelz Putting Track.  Really, I have to find that confidence without the need to change things up.

Changing grips to correct a technical flaw is one thing.  But changing for the sake of change, just because that somehow boosts confidence, is not something I’m a fan of.

I guess I have to admit that if it works, then who am I to argue?  That’s why I asked in the title whether the next putting grip is the best putting grip.  Is it simply that change of scenery that brings about some improvement?

Have you changed around your putting grip recently?  Did it work?