The Hermetic Tradition and Hermes Trismegistus with Gary Lachman #GJWMotivation #GJWpsychology #GJWh

All right, Dan, it's been five months, I think, since I was out here at Rustic Canyon here with Dan Martin. Every once in a while, I'll do a Google Scholar search or I'll search science.com for the term golf. Whenever you see these articles about motion control and people getting better at golf or getting better at any skill, really, the term that always keeps coming up is movement smoothness. Really in anything they try to do, if it's surfing or if it's badminton or if it's ping-pong or anything they're trying to do, or even something really complex like balance beam, it's always, at the beginning, jerky when you're trying to do it. If you see somebody play pool, it's jerky, but an expert is going to look smooth in everything they do. Justin Turner is going to pick up the ball and smooth, and everything they do is smoothness. In golf, this term, as far as in the graphs and all the stuff that they can see, this jaggedness and smoothness is almost more evident than anything else. I was thinking about the video that I did with you months ago when we were first using the Pro. People said, wow, that was the smoothest swing you ever made. I forget what club it was, but it went 15% further than my normal shot. How can smoothness be learned, and what is the importance of smoothness, and even how can it be defined? Let's start out with defining it. What is the smoothness of an expert? Sure. Well, I would say the smoothness of an expert is the ability to change, or is the ability to harness the physics and the forces around you. In anything, let's just take walking, for instance. We all walk pretty smoothly, barring an injury. When you walk, you don't actively move muscle, which would be the awkwardness you're talking about. You fall into motion. There's the gravity of earth pulling you down, and your muscles are counterbalancing. You've learned how to use the least amount of energy to get it started, and then the way you transfer momentum through your joints makes you a motion machine with absolute efficiency. Riding a bike would be the same thing. Wobbly at first, once you calculate, oh, motion makes me stable, my brain goes, oh, bingo, it's easy. Going downhill or flat takes almost no energy, let's say flat with a bike. What you're starting to see is you're starting to see a player, or in any sport, golf, baseball, it doesn't matter, motion smoothness is the ability to literally, I'm going to say, fall into motion, and then let your brain understand how to harness what's available. Your muscles then become a reactive, or your brain becomes this reactive muscle coacher of how to extend and lengthen and how to pressure at the points and times to allow the task to become the most efficient, the easiest, takes the least amount of energy with the most amount of power. The smoothest swingers in golf, that's what they've done. They don't have any magic pill of what muscle to move. They've learned to react to the universe around them and the physics around them to maximize their technique. When an expert's hitting, well, let's talk about when just an amateur's hitting or a poor player. Sure. People hate when I equate amateur with a poor player. That's not fair. Yeah, because there's a lot of really good ones. When a poor player is hitting, you're saying that they're initiating the motion, and they're trying to get it going. When a good player's hitting it, there's a sense that you're falling into it? Yeah, to a degree. Your initial energy into the ground is, you can get a tremendous amount of force just by being in a big turn and just sitting in the right direction. Sitting creates rotation, then rotation transfers angular momentum through the body outward. Once you get it going, laws of physics say the power in transferring angular momentum through various segments in a system is incredible because it keeps going. It wants to keep extending. The longer you were, the faster it would get going. Players get messed up as they start to feel like, well, I got to do something or add something to that process. Being a skilled athlete is the absolute opposite. It's like, what's the least amount I can do to let the motion get out of me? When you're trying to hit a ball with a rigid stick, you don't get close to that instinctively. That's kind of like going with a bow. You feel like you can put some torque energy into it. You can use leverage to move it because it's rigid, but it's not the most powerful natural force available, if you will. The first thing you say, get rid of the stiff. That's right. There's a whole conjecture in shafts too. If you have a really good golf swing, you should be able to hit it dead straight with a driver with a ladies flex and an extra stiff. If you're really skilled, the testing robots don't have any ball flight differences when you change the shafts on them. That's what Rocco Mediate said. It takes him two swings. Any shaft, he can hit it dead straight with two swings. The fitting process for him is really just what's comfortable. Anyway, if I remove the shafts with my training of the pro, let's even say I got rid of the grip and I just had to hold the ball, and this was my apparatus, I cannot add force to this thing. I have to learn how to move to get it to get out of me. Rapidly, I can learn the timing of how that force moves or how the extension of angular momentum. I'm going to try not to call that a force because we get so much into forces and torques in the golf swing. I'm going to try not to use that language. Momentum is trying to get out of me. That's my intent. I need to learn to align momentum. I got two skills that make smoothness. Getting momentum to transfer efficiently, so understanding what that feels like, and then actually being able to align it. I think once you understand the feeling, aligning is easy, but if you never get the feeling, it's just always work from your muscles trying to move your bones to make it go. Nobody can sequence a swing. Okay, I'm going to fire my hips, my thorax, my arms, and then my club with a stretch-shorten cycle. It doesn't work that way. Okay? I'll argue you can definitely do things with your legs into the ground to create a torquing to get more rotation to a swing. I don't think there's any doubt about that, but you don't need to do that much. I think people over-exaggerate how much needs to be done, and they try to then use their muscles to move something, and now you're jerky. If I thrust my hips early, well, then everything else gets thrown behind, so now I've got to thrust something else to make up for it. Show that in a face-on. Yeah, yeah. Because this is a real common thing. Yeah, so this is what we call a spin-out. It's like, oh, use your hips more. Boom. Okay, I thrusted my hips using pressure in the ground, but now I'm like, oh, crap. I'm tilting back, and I've got to get this back. That player will actually end up with more of a flip. That's exactly right, which then leads to early extension. All these things. Again, the body now is forced to react to different things. Now, if my body knew smoothness was this allowance of energy to get out of me, so I'll use my pro kind of down the line here, I can't go into it. It doesn't work. If motion's extending away from me, my body has to stabilize. If I actually put a little bit of more sitting down into the swing, and I've trained my muscles to not add, but to extend, or to be lengthened, to avoid what's called myotatic reflex, then you can start to really feel the energy of a swing. Okay, let's focus on one. There's a lot there. A lot going on there, yep. That's okay. That's good, actually. Let's focus on one thing. You said that the experts, they know how to sit in the right direction. Yes. How can we use, because I know a lot of B, or some B better golfers have gotten the pro. I know that a lot more will be getting it around Christmas time, or giving it. If they have it, what can they do to learn how to sit better? Because me, when I'm swinging very poorly, I'll be taller, and there'll be no sit. There'll be a this, or a this. That's exactly what we're talking about. So how can we learn to sit the right way? Well, let's put it this way. If I needed to align this, let's just say I wanted to align the pro to the ball, okay? I have to move in such a way that momentum extends away from me, and my body then becomes a counterbalancer. So it can't move in the same direction as momentum's extensing. It can't move in the same direction as the swing, too. Oh, so you're saying the pro is going this way, so your body's going like that. That's exactly right. So everything's extending. Momentum extends on a line. You shouldn't think of it as a circle. It's a big mistake in a golf swing. It's not a bunch of circles, okay? I know there's rotating objects, but things rotate and then stall very quickly in a swing. So it's only like a partial, partial circle, if you will. But the momentum is extending behind you and downwards to get the swing to finally hit the golf ball, okay? So that's what we call parallel to the line of action. I've got some videos on that as well, which is a very hard thing for people to understand. But line of action is kind of like my thorax center to the ball. Everything extends actually a couple feet kind of behind me downwards that's going to allow the swing to go. More about here? Yeah, about there. So yeah, a lot of people actually have them kind of keep their eye on something behind so they can actually have a more of a sense of allowing the pro to go. So if I'm looking for that kind of understanding in getting it to extend to the ball, I want to feel like the way that I move allows the extending to go this way, okay? If I try to direct that, well, my pro bends, okay? So if I try to jump ahead of it, it tilts my pro behind me, okay? If I'm over the top or with my chest and I try to rotate back to the ball. So direction becomes very obvious with the pro very quickly is that I have to be, if I want to align this to that golf ball, I have to move in such a way that allows it to actually run into it. So show me the sitting. Good. So the sitting would be once I'm at the top of my swing. For me to start to create rotation here to transfer it to here, this needs to go this way. Why? So it's backwards because that creates rotation. If it goes this way, there's no rotation. No. Okay? If it goes this way, well, that's a later thing. And you're saying you're going, you're also going this way in anticipation of the force that's going to go that way. Correct, exactly. So I'm going to pump energy into the swing by that movement. Okay? So that's where I'm going to get my first energy and that's going to move my thorax. Okay? So this is where, this is where we get really danger in watching a tour pro hit a ball and we go, oh, they're moving their hips. Especially like in slow-mo. You see the hips go first and then, yeah, right. No, they're sitting. Well, if I sit, guess what? That's rotating. Okay? So what I want to do is I want to move in a direction that takes advantage of all the stretch I have in my body and then it connects to energy to here. And then very rapidly, your arms and the golf club start ripping away from you very quickly. This is how I do videos, by the way. Everybody always says like, you just said what he said. Like that's how I learned though. And I think of when you teach a lot of lessons, it's like, I don't understand something until I repeat it back and, uh, and kind of get it that way. That's very interesting. So they're not going here and then spinning towards the target. Correct. You're saying they're going here and they're loaded and just the sitting, there you go. The sitting makes, makes spin. So there's no like active spin force. Yeah. And now there's conjecture on whether you can do that. So I don't want to get it. I don't want to get into how much you can use the kind of your feet to do that. The danger is if you start over muscling and you don't understand the flow of energy through your body, I don't think you should be pursuing that. Okay. Whereas if you start to understand the energy flow through your body, I'd only takes me kind of jump in for a second. So with the pro, cause it's so light, it only takes that much. And then instantly this thing is flying. I love to do this. Just jumping out of me. Okay. The direction that jumps out of me, once I understand where that direction is, I'm going to hit whatever I'm aiming. That's whatever I'm set up to. I just need to make sure I get a little movement in the right direction. Now think about a golf club. It has more mass. Okay. So it's going to, it's going to resist, it's going to have a little bit of resistance to it. So my sitting gets a little more aggressive. Okay. If I want a little more energy, I can get taller. I can sit harder. Let's go long drive guys like Kyle Berkshire. Way up to way down. Okay. Now, does that make the arc? It's kind of like this elliptical shape and a little harder to line up probably, but it's powerful. That's exactly right. So I need to, but I need to understand that this then allows something to flow from me. And that is where I think we get in trouble with the golf. It isn't do this, then do something else. It's do this, learn the flow of energy. That's why the pro has to stay straight because you got to train your hands and your arms to allow momentum to extend. So the pro needs to be straight because a lot of people haven't seen, you mean between the grip and the, that's right. If this, if this thing's bending, I'm doing, I'm putting a force or I'm moving in a direction that's unproductive. So show us a really good one that we can slow-mo face on that will not have the grip bend the rope bend between there and there. How long did it take you to learn how to do that? Or you did it, you were a good golfer, so you did it already or no, it just took intent and it took a willingness to stay away from golf isms. And I had to learn to feel the physics of a swing. It's so difficult to learn with a golf club. It just is. Right. So the physics of a swing, when the club shaft flexes, the brain doesn't like it. It feels funny things going on. So to really discipline your hands takes a lot, a lot of work. You'll notice I hold this super light when I do it really well. So a bad one would be, let's just say if I move, let's just say I move out of order, forget my hands. So now I'm trying to jump into it and it's going to bend every time. It goes back to what we're talking about. Smoothness. Smoothness to herky-jerky just like that. Yeah. So I know that people hate this. They go, you never do that in a golf swing. Well, you don't swing a golf swing. The way you bend. Yeah. And you're right. So when I swing my golf club. How is this helpful because you're bending your left arm so much. But I can't feel the force. I need a player to feel that is unmistakable once you understand it, which is the extensive quantity of angular momentum. Once you feel it, it is unmistakable and it can be felt in the club. It trains your brain to react to something. That's why, you know, you've swung the pro enough times. You swing it, then your club feels like it's pulling on you. You trained your brain to react to angular momentum. Now most people go, oh, that can't be it. No, that is it. Now I got to feel what is it like to actually align that force.