“Golf suffers from a lack of clarity in instruction,” said Andy Plummer, founder of the Stack & Tilt golf swing instruction system during a recent visit to Clay Health Club and Spa in Port Chester. Plummer, who has coached numerous PGA Pros including Mike Weir, Aaron Baddeley, and Steve Elkington, was in town to work with Stack & Tilt instructors along with Michael Manavian, in the facility’s Gears golf swing studio. He couldn’t heap enough praise on the technology.
“The Gears system is one of the most important tools in the game,” Plummer says. “I come to Clay to do research.”
Gears uses eight strategically-placed cameras shooting at 360 frames per second to record the player’s swing in real time. Sensors—28 or them on the player’s body and 14 on the golf club—allow the system to analyze an almost infinite number of data points.
“The suit takes five minutes to put on, but it will change your golfing life,” according to Plummer. As the player swings, the computer records the complete motion from multiple angles while projecting it onto an avatar displayed on the screen. The single greatest benefit, Plummer says, is its ability to superimpose one swing over another so the player can see changes as they are made.
The demonstration at Clay included a couple of swings recorded by Met PGA Junior Champion James McHugh of Rye. Without warmup, the young man hit a seven iron 186 perfectly straight yards. When someone in the audience observed that he didn’t exactly need much instruction, Manavian pulled up a sequence of swings by a rank beginner that came to the studio earlier in the season. He showed how the player’s swing improved immediately with the help of the Gear system feedback.
“Mike Manavian uses technology to make golf easier to understand,” Plummer says. “The value of instant feedback is how quickly it enables you to learn.”
