An Experiment Of One - SuperSpeed Golf System

[DaveLeeNC]

I am old (DOB 1949) with multiple arthritis issues (knees and shoulder), but am otherwise healthy and fit. I was never long but have lost at least 30 yards off the tee in the last 10 years. Driver SS is down to the low very 80's. The joint issues preclude me from doing lots of swings, but the Superspeed system does not require that. So I bought their club set (senior golfer set) and got a Swingspeed Radar from a (ex-golfer) friend. The basic beginner cycle here is 6 weeks and I am 3 days short of that - but close enough. 

 

First there are a bunch of caveats. 

 

1) Inner/outer rotation of my left forearm (left arm to the side, forearm points straight out, then point left/right) is a major problem for me (shoulder arthritis) and the result is that I CANNOT do meaningful left handed swings. So I just did not do them. 

 

2) The step-through motion, for some reason, just super-triggers the bone-on-bone in my right knee (does not happen on full swings). So I did not do those either - replaced those with a second set of regular swings. 

 

3) 3 swings with each club just did not feel like much work plus I often got my best speed on swings #4 or #5. So I did 5 swings per club vs. 3 swings per club as the system states. This also (maybe) compensates to some degree for not having the off-side swings in the mix. 

 

4) The senior golfer set of 3 clubs are 'super light', 'light', and 'medium'. All of these clubs are meaningfully lighter than my off the shelf driver. I have serious questions about whether or not what I am doing with these clubs is 'correct' in this regard. There are no over-weight swings here. About the 3-4 weeks in (when I realized this) I added an additional set of swings with my driver. It just seemed that I should at least have one set that was NOT an underweight swing. 

 

5) My sense of what was going on here was different than I expected. I felt like I was 'learning to swing harder' rather than doing something that allows my normal swing to be faster. That is just what I sensed. 

 

I set up my 5 wood (hitting whiffle balls off a mat in the back yard) as kind of my standard swing measurement and that was 77 to 79 mph. When all was said and done I added around 8 mph to my swings with the superlight club (yellow), 8 mph to the light club (green), and 5 mph to the medium club (blue). Of course these are 'maxed out' swings that I would never take to the golf course. My normal swing with a 5w is pretty much unchanged. For reference my top end for the yellow club ended up at 100, green was 96, blue was 93, and driver was 85.  I did not calibrate the driver until pretty late in the process. But that is also unchanged. 

 

My instincts tell me that this lack of an over-weight club might be an issue with improvement. And this whole process has certainly sensitized me to the fact that I 'do not swing hard' and there is a meaningful difference in SS between my on the course swings and swinging hard. 

 

Quite frankly I am not sure what to think about this. But I am inclined to continue but add some weight to at least one of the clubs. And maybe I will experiment with swinging harder (maybe). I have always been a kind of "80% level effort" type of guy - really hard swings do not come naturally to me. 

 

dave