What is up Champs and Champettes! We are back and we are on Principle number five. We are working on our arm swing and we've got a nice little Sports Science hack that's going to help keep everything streamlined and online. So let's get into it!
We are trying to make things as simple as possible and have as few moving parts as possible and that is what this principle number five is going to be all about. You can look around on the pro scene and there's certain names like Simon Lizotte and Cole Redalen that are starting to implement exactly what we're going to talk about today.
What we're going to be talking about with the arm action here is really more specifically about the elbow itself, and how we're going to be sort of holding that elbow to the wrist angle at about 45°. This is a sport science term called "freezing degrees of freedom" and I'm going to show some examples here and you're going to see what I mean. This elbow stays quite fixed when I'm coming on the back stroke. When we're working forward it unwraps slowly. That's the thing this is under control and this is smooth. This isn't jerky this is smooth. So let's see some examples.
Some people might ask well where's the power going to come from? How am I going to get the putts there? The power is going to come from essentially moving the disc forward on a bit of an arc upward. We're moving toward the basket really as much as possible and we might have to get a little leg more if you're used to just whipping this elbow around at 20 feet. You can go back and check out principle number three part two which has a little hack about adding more more power through your legs.
Now we're going to talk about our deltoid here our shoulder muscle. If you're just using the elbow you're really only activating the lateral aspect of your deltoid, and you can stand up in the kitchen and you can feel that. It's only going to activate the lateral aspect of your deltoid. When you start working on an arc like this it activates the anterior deltoid, the front deltoid, and you're going to feel that. This really helps stabilize the shoulder is another way to think about it. Instead of just activating the lateral aspect of the deltoid, by also activating the anterior aspect of the deltoid, it really stabilizes everything. It really keeps everything online with much less room for error, and that's a big thing that we're going for in the PuttConfidently Approach.
So just try it. It works for me it works for a lot of people. Again, you see Simon doing it. Simon made a point and I think it was kind of this time about two years ago in 2022 and he said he was sick of missing Circle one putts. He started working in this way and you can go back and watch the videos and watch the transformation. It just happens to be when he started winning all these tournaments and I know he started playing smarter golf too, but hitting his 25 Footers consistently is also a big part of why he's he's winning tournaments now.
One other thing I would add to this sort of fixing of the elbow is to keep the wrist below the elbow. It's not 100% necessary because you can you can fix the elbow and still have a bit of a spin putt, but getting the wrist below the elbow really helps activate that interior deltoid a little bit more and it helps with Pace a lot. If you have the disc really close to your body you kind of end up putting at one speed a lot and you don't have as much touch.
