Know Your Numbers: Hinge

Casting is a swing flaw that many amateur golfers have tried to correct at one point or another in their career. Besides the difficulty of trying to correct the flaw, another issue is defining it and the degree to which you are affected by it. In the past, casting has been subjective and only viewable to the individual golfer through video. But now ClubHub has created a way to measure how much you cast, or don’t cast, and gives you a way to monitor it in every swing on the range and on the course with the new Hinge parameter.

Hinge is the first new parameter to debut after ClubHub’s initial release and was created through studying ClubHub’s extensive swing data to see at what part of the swing are players losing power and how that can be corrected. We found that by knowing how fast the club head is traveling on the downswing, relative to how fast the hands are traveling, you can determine if a player is casting the club. Also, by giving this motion a numeric value we have provided a way for players to be able to know whether or not they are throwing the club from swing to swing and fine tune their practice. No longer do you have to take video of a swing, stop, look at the video, and try to correct based on what you see. Now you can turn the audio feedback on in the ClubHub app and listen to your Hinge results after each swing without stopping your momentum on the practice range.

Through our research and consultation with golf professionals, we have found that values over 2:1 indicate an early release and values below 1.5:1 indicate that the player is maintaining a good wrist angle throughout the downswing. If you are getting values of 2:1 or higher there are a few things you can do to work on getting those numbers down.

• Stop, drop, and swing: Right before you start your downswing you can practice stopping and dropping your trail elbow down to your trail side, toward your trail hip. This will square the clubface to your target and give you the ideal inside-out path, with your downswing coming under your backswing.
• Your hips won’t lie: Another key move to adding lag is starting your downswing by bumping your hips before any other body part starts turning toward your target. This will correctly start the kinematic sequence. Forgetting to bump your hips will most likely result in an over the top swing and potentially hitting fat.

Hint: It is possible to get a value below 1.0:1 if you add lag in your downswing and move your hands faster than the club head, à la Sergio Garcia. Check out this link to see it for yourself.