Seeing Your Way To Lower Scores!
Custom club fitting needs video swing analysis to help golfers shoot lower scores!
Taking and analyzing golf swing video and swing photos is a valuable and often important element of true custom club fitting. At a minimum, video is used to identify the swing tempo time for a golfer, and also when the golfer releases his or her wrist cock during the down swing. This information is important to help identify the right shaft flex profile that is appropriate for an individual golfer's swing.
Maybe more important, video analysis and review can help the golfer and the fitter really see what he is doing during his swing. Sometimes a golfer can immediately see simple swing issues that he was not aware of, and that can be corrected. And in some cases, video can help the golfer understand that it might be better to get some instruction first and then be fit for golf clubs – to make the actual fitting more successful.
Based on my experience as a fitter, I would say that almost every successful driver fitting is enhanced by viewing swing video. And many successful putting improvement sessions have resulted from identifying putting setup and fitting issues that could only be seen by taking and evaluating photos.
So – what are some of the tools that club fitters – and golfers – can use to produce and create useful swing video for review and analysis? Here are a few tools that I have found useful in the past….
1. The most simple tool that most golfers have available is the camera that they have in their smart phones. Smart phones can take high-quality video and photos. And there are ways to connect smart phones to tripods so that you can get good stable video and photos. One neat smart phone connector is available from ChargerCity – here is a link on Amazon.com for this – http://amzn.to/18Qk0vw .
2. A smart phone app called Coaches Eye is the next step up to using your iPhone or other smart phone for collecting and analyzing video. You can take video with this app, put lines and marks on the video, add audio to the video, and also send this video to others through the app. I am starting to use this app more and more in my fittings. Here is a link to the Coaches Eye software – http://www.coachseye.com .
3. I have also – for higher video resolution – used a Casio EX-FM25 camera to take video at frame rates of 240 frames/second. Video with this or similar cameras can be analyzed using a number of software packages specifically designed for golf analysis. One of the available packages is V1 software – there are expensive and inexpensive versions of this software available. Here is a link to all of the available versions of this software – http://bit.ly/17XRHZ9 .
Video is a great tool that every golfer should consider using to help understand how he swings and how he might improve. And video is invaluable to make truly custom club fittings successful for golfers of all levels of ability. Maybe "Seeing Is Improving!"
The Fit Is IT!!
Tony
