This last weekend, we once again had the pleasure of watching Tiger Woods playing in a Major Golf Tournament, the 2009 Masters. He injured his knee prior to the 2008 US Open, and the last we saw of him was winning that tournament in a lot of pain.
He may not have won this years Masters tournament but his swing truly is exceptional and it is alwyas worth taking a look at some video and snapshots of his swing to do some video analysis. So why does Tiger Woods have a perfect golf swing? The answer is TIMING.
Tiger shows an almost perfect example of a concept we discussed in our last post with Andy Murray's serve. Tiger creates club head speed by perfectly sequencing and timing the movement of his knees, hips, shoulders, wrists and club. In golf this is known as the kinematic sequence. The kinematic sequence in a golf swing is a little different to that of a Tennis serve, but in the end the idea for both is to create club head speed or racquet head speed by storing and then transferring energy from hips to shoulders to club or racquet, with perfect timing.
Lets have a look at Tiger Woods' swing in slow motion from some YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcP6X7dEUo . We have seen this video before, but it is a really good one. In this video we have a side on view of Tiger's swing (side on to the direction he will hit) and we can see the club throughout the swing. This makes it a great video to analyze. The video was also filmed with a high speed camera with a high shutter speed, which is why we can see the club so clearly in each frame even through ball impact.
OK lets analyse this swing by looking at the way Tiger stores and transfers energy to the ball through the golf club. If you stop the video at 0:33 seconds, you will see that Tiger is now at the top of his back swing. During his back swing he turned his hips and his shoulders away from the direction in which he will be hitting in order to store up energy for his swing.
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