L.A.B. Golf, Golftec – and the World’s Worst Golf-tech Video

Recently I saw a post from the folks at Golftec that was intended to explain “lie angle balancing”, which is the latest hot new thing in putter design from the folks at L.A.B. Golf (home of the $600 – before options – putter.)

https://x.com/i/status/1956742227587224055

Here is a screenshot of the post in question. Last time I checked some 1,400-odd people had viewed it – and I hope that at least some of them thought to themselves, “What the absolute hell is this kid talking about?”

First let’s talk about the text of the post:

They wrote “Rather than balancing a putter around the shaft […] @labgolf putters balances their putter based on lie angle.”

Well, I’ve got news for you, folks – the lie angle is the angular relationship of the long axis of the shaftof the putter to the club head, so balancing the club around the shaft and balancing the club around the lie angle are the same thing – so right off the bat you can see that they are playing a little smoke-and-mirrors game with you.

Now let’s break down the problems with the video:

1) The term is “lie”–“angle” – two words, not “line-gle”, as the kid[1] in the clip pronounces it.

2) When he picks up a “standard putter”[2] he mentions “a potentially differing weight from the end of the club to the head of the toe”. What the hell does that mean? What I think it is that they are trying to get across here, however poorly expressed, is (the obvious[3] fact) that more of the mass of the club head lies to one side (the toe side) of the axis of the shaft than to the other (the heel side.) This imbalance causes the club to rotate about the shaft such that the toe of the club is lower than the shaft. This is called “toe hang”, and most putters have some amount of it.

3) He starts out with the “standard putter” balanced on a finger and held with the toe up, and says “when I let go of this club you’ll see it has the tendency to swing wide open[4].” Here he is using misdirection to emphasize this supposed undesirable aspect of the design of this non-LAB Golf putter. Pretty much putter ever made will swing down, dropping the toe, when held in this starting position. What is important is the angle of the face relative to horizontal when the putter is at rest.

4) He then takes what appears to be a left-handed[5] LAB Golf putter with a center shaft, balances it on a finger and (allegedly, because his other hand is not visible in the video) releases it, resulting in the face remaining vertical, saying, “so when I let go of this you’ll see how the face stays square.”

What he is calling “square” here is what anyone else would call 100% toe hang. No explanation is offered as to why this configuration is desirable, what benefits it has, or what stroke shape it is suited for (based on the conventional thinking that a large amount of toe hang is suited for a stroke with a large arc in the horizontal plane, 100% toe hang suits a massively arced stroke.)

And let’s talk about toe hang for a minute.

While one putter manufacturer touts a “toe-up” design that “significantly reduces the negative effects of torque, promoting a smoother and more consistent motion and allowing the putter head a greater opportunity to return to square at impact”, it is a generally accepted fact[6] that the greater the arc in your putting stroke (arc in the horizontal plane, to be clear…) the more toe hang your putter should have, ostensibly in order to facilitate the opening and closing of the face as the putter is swung back and then forward.

Since toe hang is caused by the center of mass being well out toward the toe, away from the shaft, in the horizontal plane as the putter is used, and the putter is being swung in the horizontal plane, what force is acting on the putter to make it rotate?

Gravity acts at 90º to the orientation of the moment arm between the location of the center of mass, and inertia – which can be treated as a force in a dynamic situation like this – would cause the toe to hang back as the putter is swung back, thus closing the face, and again, in the opposite direction as the putter is swung forward, opening the face. This is the opposite of the description I have read of the reasoning behind “big arc, more toe hang”, which is “toe hang facilitates the opening and closing of the putter face in the backstroke and follow-through”.

I have never agreed with the arcing-stroke school of putting because my engineer’s predilection for finding the simplest solution eschews the complexity of a motion that requires timing to ensure that the face of the putter is square to my intended line at impact. Is this “big arc, more toe hang” thing another one of those old wives’ tales of golf like “hit down to compress the ball” (don’t get me started on that one) which no one actually understands, and which doesn’t follow physical reality but which everyone nods their heads and agrees with because they don’t know any better?

I think so, yes.

5) Finally – to close out the video, the world’s worst spokesperson[7] says “LAB will fit you first to your “linegle” (sic) which will then determine how they get the shaft axis and the head balance within each other, hence the lack of twist.” This is gobbledygook that is worthy of a Republican legislator explaining why cutting your medical benefits and giving tax cuts to billionaires is really a good deal for YOU.

The bottom line is that this video does worse than promote misinformation; it gives no actual information at all, while purporting to present a wondrous new concept in the guise of an amazing revelation. It is a load of unrelated BUMF, nonsense statements strung together by someone who has no idea what he is talking about, and no concept of how to present information clearly.

Please – PLEASE – Golftec, do better. If you feel the need to promote putters that cost what we used to spend for a high-end driver, First – use a presenter who can at least sound like he knows what the hell is talking about; Second – illustrate and explain the physical differences between the putters that are being compared and present them each in the same way, visually; and finally – explain, or at least make an effort to explain, how the $600 putter achieves its radical physical characteristic, and why it will (supposedly) turn your basic 18-handicapper into Steve Stricker or Brad Faxon on the putting green.

And for goodness sake, send the kid in this video clip back to the stockroom to count sweaters.

[1] Don’t at me – at my age anyone under 40 is a kid…

[2] Do the folks at Edel Golf know that this kid used one of their putters like it was the “Before” photo in a weight-loss ad?

[3] Or it should be…

[4] The club face is not “wide open”, because “open” or “closed” is relative to swing path; it is, in this instance “toe down”.

[5] Important rule for experiments/demonstrations: Compare apples to apples. 

[6] I use the phrase “generally accepted fact” in the sense of “widely spread concept that may or may not actually reflect physical reality” – about which more later.

[7] Who is this kid, anyway? He doesn’t introduce himself, and offers no bona fides as to his qualifications (if any) to explain the complex dynamics of the putting stroke and how different configurations of putters affect it. He could be the stock-boy, or just some junior sweater-folder at the local golf superstore.

Graphite putter shafts, Part I: Why the big manufacturers with skin in the game are doing it wrong

I spend more time practicing putting (on the carpet in my office, which stimps at about 13, I figure) than any other part of my game, and I read with interest all the articles about putter design and the putting stroke that I come across. I also follow new developments in putter design, many of which turn out to be pointless, ridiculous, overhyped, or just plain wrong (see my review of the Stability Shaft by Breakthrough Golf Technology, on which more later in this column.)

In pursuit of better putting I have experimented with counterweighting by adding grip weights to my putters, for which there is a factual physical basis, unlike many of the spurious putting “innovations” which are touted in Golf Channel infomercials and even by big-name manufacturers. Extrapolating the concept of increasing stability by redistributing mass from the shaft to the ends of the club, the next thing that I wanted to do was to replace the steel shaft in my putter with a graphite shaft.

Changing from a steel putter shaft to a graphite shaft can save as much as 100 grams, freeing up that mass to be moved to the head and the grip end of the club while keeping the same total weight; a change which, as I explain in the counter-weighting article, increases the club’s stability in the long axis, which benefits speed control.

But before I talk about my putter-shaft experiment, let’s look at the current state of the art in graphite composite and multi-material putter shafts.

Who is making graphite putter shafts, and why?

There are three manufacturers that I know of that are currently marketing graphite-composite shafts, or shafts incorporating graphite-composite, for putters: Odyssey, with their Stroke Lab shafts (though not available as a retrofit item); Breakthrough Golf Technology (BGT) with their so-called Stability Shaft (retail cost $129.99 to $299.99); and LA Golf, which markets a line of graphite shafts up and down the bag, including three for putters (retail cost $419.00).

Of those three companies only Odyssey specifically cites the redistribution of mass as a benefit of the use of their graphite-composite shaft, and their Stroke Lab line of putters include the use of additional weights in the head and the grip of the club to redistribute the mass saved in the shaft. Both Breakthrough Golf Technology and LA Golf, however, cite the so-called “low-torque” characteristics of their shafts in preventing “head wobble” as the prime benefit.

These three manufacturers differ not only in the claims they make for the benefits of their composite shafts, but in the details of their construction. The Odyssey Stroke Lab shaft and the BGT Stability Shaft are multi-material units which combine a graphite-composite tube for the upper portion of the shaft with a length of conventional steel shafting for the lower portion which mates with the putter head. The Stroke Lab shaft uses unspecified means to bond the steel and graphite sections of their shaft together; the BGT design uses both an aluminum stiffener and a separate aluminum connector between the two sections.

The LA Golf putter shafts, on the other hand, are 100% graphite composite material, but like BGT, their advertising cites the “stiff, low torque” characteristics of their shafts in preventing head wobble or deflection that is “caused by traditional shafts” as the advantage of their product.

So let’s break it down:

Manufacturer            Construction Type                    Claimed Benefit

Odyssey                   Graphite upper/steel lower        Improved mass dist'n

Breakthrough Golf     Graphite upper/steel lower        Improved head

Technology                w/aluminum stiffeners and       stability

                                connector midshaft

LA Golf                     100% Graphite composite         Improved head

                                                                              stability

Both BGT and LA Golf claim that conventional steel putter shafts are weak—weak enough to twist in response to the forces exerted on them by the inertial forces resulting from the movement of the club acting on the mass of the club head.

The following quote is from the LA Golf website:

“Recent data shows that outside 12 feet, when a player begins forward motion the head wiggles slightly and that instability can change your putt line even if you read the line correctly and put the perfect stroke on it.

The head also wiggles when you strike the putt even fractionally off center (which everyone does) causing you to lose distance on the roll.”

It is, of course, utter nonsense to attribute the motions described in that quote to flex in the shaft; to do so is to reveal a complete lack of understanding of the magnitudes of the forces involved, and the ability of the structures being discussed to handle the forces to which they are subjected.

Of course, the people who want you to shell out anywhere from $130 to over $400 for a new putter shaft are counting on the average golfer taking their quasi-scientific marketing jargon at face value—but if you keep reading you will learn how they are leading you astray.

What do they mean when they say “torque”?

What the ad copy for golf club shafts refers to, incorrectly, as “torque”, is the torsional stiffness of the golf shaft. It’s measured by clamping the butt end end of the shaft in a fixed position and applying one foot-pound of torque—that is, a force of one pound acting at a distance of one foot from the center of the shaft—at a point further down the shaft and measuring how much the shaft twists. (The results obtained from this test can be greatly affected by the testing method—especially by the length of shaft between the clamping point and the point at which the force is applied—so comparisons between the data given by different manufacturers are not necessarily valid.)

This “torque” number can range from three or four degrees for a steel shaft to upwards of eight degrees for the more flexible graphite shafts—but these numbers are only really relevant for full-swing clubs: wedges, irons, hybrids, and woods; clubs in which the club face contacts the ball at speeds of up to 125 miles per hour (Note: PGA Tour pros average about 110 mph of club head speed with driver, and some go much higher.) Those high club head speeds produce very high resultant forces on the club head, and therefore, significant torsional forces in the club shaft.

For putters the force acting on the shaft, even as a result of impact with the ball, is orders of magnitude lower than for full-swing clubs, and the torque input to the shaft resulting from inertial forces acting on the club head before contact with the ball are so far below the threshold which would result in deformation of the shaft that they can be ignored.

The bottom line…

The claims that are being made by Breakthrough Golf Technology and LA Golf—that larger, heavier modern putter heads “overpower” a conventional steel shaft, and thus require their expensive, over-engineered offerings, which are actually no stiffer in torsion than a generic $9 steel putter shaft—are complete nonsense.

The all-graphite composite shafts from LA Golf are the right idea, but they appear to be doing the right thing for the wrong reason—and they cost waaay too much.

The sophisticated multi-component shafts such as the BGT unit and the Odyssey Stroke lab shaft introduce complexity where simplicity will do; the complexity adds no value, and actually compromises the potential effectiveness of lighter-weight graphite composite construction by the use of a steel lower shaft. The BGT Stability Shaft is the most egregious offender of the two, due to their use of two aluminum components mid-shaft, at the junction of the graphite and steel portions, which returns mass to the middle of the club.

In Part II of my look at graphite-composite putter shafts I will walk you through my home-workshop experiments, in which I modified my bargain-bin Tight Lies Anser-style putter as an experimental test bed.

Stay tuned.

Putting, Part IV: Harvey Penick was right…

Scrolling through my Twitter feed the other evening, I came across a tweet from the British golf magazine National Club Golfer (@NCGMagazine) with a video featuring golf coach Gary Nicol (@GaryNicol67) explaining how in putting pace determines line, and gives you options for how to deliver the ball to the hole.

Now, I have insisted in the past that pace and line are of equal importance, because they are co-dependent. There are multiple combinations of line and pace that will get the ball to the hole – a higher line requires a faster-moving ball (more pace), and a lower line requires a slower-moving ball (less pace) – but a change in one always requires a commensurate change in the other to get the same result.

But that’s where I was wrong – in thinking about “…the same result”  – because as I watched the video clip I realized that while my assertion is accurate, it is only true in a limited-case scenario; pace and line are of equal importance and precisely co-dependent only for getting the ball to the same position at the hole – like in the illustration below:

Slower pace (in blue) requires a higher line; faster pace (red) requires a lower line. Pace & line are directly related, and of equal importance – if you want to get the ball to the same target on the cup.

As Gary Nicol explained in the video clip, there is a usable target width at the hole that is essentially three balls wide, as shown in the next illustration. Recognizing this fact, you can give yourself a wider target line to aim at, essentially the full area shaded in green, instead of thinking that you have to hit a narrow, very specific line at just the precise speed. Keep reading and I’ll explain how this opens up your possibilities for making more putts.

The size differential between the hole and the ball allows a target area that is about three balls wide, giving the golfer a wider selection of line than they might think at first. Higher line still takes a slower pace, but learning to recognize the wider target area will help you make more putts.

Why pace rules in putting

I touched on this concept, a bit, in my June 23rd post, Putting is hard – but you already knew that, right?, in which I wrote:

“…(T)here is a minimum ball speed that will get the ball to the hole, and a range beyond the minimum within which the ball will go into the hole and not bounce or lip out.

To further complicate matters, this speed varies depending upon how close to center the ball is when it gets to the hole. A ball traveling at a speed which allows it to fall into the hole on a dead-center hit may lip out if it arrives at the hole off-center. The more off-center, the slower the ball must be moving when it encounters the edge of the hole.”

Right there you have the basis for pace having the edge over line in importance: There is a minimum ball speed which will get the ball to the hole (“Never up, never in” as the old saying goes) – and if the ball comes up short, it doesn’t matter if it was on the right line.

The real argument for stressing pace over line is right there in the second paragraph from my June 23 post: it is the fact that, on a given line, pace also determines whether the ball will actually drop once it gets to the hole. Even if the ball hits the hole dead-center, it can hop out if it is moving fast enough (≈ 5 feet per second or faster, by my calculations); that max-allowable pace drops off dramatically as the ball’s interception point with the edge of the hole moves off center and the dreaded “lip-out” comes into play.

So, from the minimum speed that gets the ball to the hole, to the maximum speed at which it will actually drop into the hole and stay, there is a range of speeds which you must keep the ball within if you want to make that putt. And for every speed increment within that range, there is a target window within which the ball will actually drop – and if you haven’t figured it out by now, the slower the ball is moving when it gets to the lip of the hole, the bigger that target window is.

Wait, there’s more…

I started looking at the dynamics of the interaction between a moving golf ball and the rim of the hole – as in how to avoid the dreaded lip-out – and I started getting dizzy before I had even finished listing all the variables, so let’s just go with the broad concepts, without getting mired down in the math: A ball that skims the edge of the hole, with the center of the ball just inside the apex of the rim, has to be moving pretty slowly to drop into the hole – but at that low speed it will drop into the hole from any point at which the center of the ball is inside the diameter of the hole. In other words, at the minimum speed that gets the ball to the hole, the target window is pretty much the full diameter of the hole – 4-1/4 inches.

Conversely, the faster the ball is going the narrower the window gets. A faster-moving ball’s greater momentum increases the likelihood of the ball lipping out or just plain skimming over the edge of the cup, because it passes over the free space beneath it before it has had time to fall the distance required to let it drop.

Bottom line: the slower the ball is going, the more options there are for the line that will allow the ball to drop – which means that pace rules over line when it comes to making putts.

Harvey was right

There is one caveat to this discussion. Since the putting green is a highly variable surface, with grain, and bumps, and small irregularities – not to mention the dimpled surface of the ball itself – the ball tends to wander and not hold its line if it is moving too slowly. 

“I like to see a putt slip into the hole like a mouse.”

  – Harvey Penick

This factor dictates a minimum speed – which puts me in mind of the putting maxim of Harvey Penick, the revered Austin, Texas golf pro who taught such greats as Tom Kite, and Ben Crenshaw, who was one of the greatest putters the game has ever seen. Harvey said, “I like to see a putt slip into the hole like a mouse.” Harvey knew what he was talking about.

There is another putting maxim which defines a reasonable upper threshold for ball speed on the green: Get the ball to the hole at such a speed that it will roll no more than 18 inches past the hole if it misses. There are two reasons why this is good advice: 1) that 18-inches-past speed is not so high that you will have squeezed yourself into a narrow target window; and 2) if you do miss the putt, you have a short comebacker.

Speed rules

So there you have it. Pace dictates line, and the lowest speed that gets the ball to the hole on a steady course gives you the best chance of making the putt. Practice hitting your putts with consistent speed, and when you are warming up on the practice green before a round, do some distance drills and get a feel for the speed of the greens you’re going to be playing on. It will pay dividends on the course that will show up on your scorecard.

Counterweighting: What it is, and how it will help you make more putts

Welcome to Part III of my totally unplanned three-part series on putting – counterweighting.

After the introduction to my review of the Stability Shaft turned into its own article on why putting is hard, and after spotlighting how counterweighting the putter I had rebuilt with that fancy new shaft helped bring back the feel I was accustomed to, I figured I owed it to my audience to expand on the advantages of counterweighting.

In this article I will explain, without, I hope, sounding too much like a science fair exhibitor, the physical effect that counterweighting your putter has on its performance, and why adding weight to the grip of your putter can help you make more putts.

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First, let’s talk about MOI

MOI, or moment of inertia, refers to an object’s resistance to rotation, and is a function of the distribution of mass. It is measured with respect to an axis of rotation, which is an imaginary line that passes through the object’s center of mass (commonly referred to as center of gravity, or CG.) The higher an object’s MOI, the greater the amount of force required to make it rotate; and the greater the force that is required to rotate an object, the more stable it is. As you can imagine, stability is a desirable trait in a putter.

MOI is a term that is bandied about quite a bit in connection with the design of putters, but it is usually spoken of in connection with the club head, not the entire club. The MOI of a putter’s club head is measured with respect to a vertical line through the club head’s CG. Move material away from the CG and the MOI goes up, reducing the club head’s tendency to twist around the vertical axis; that is, making it more stable.

Stability about the vertical axis is a good thing in a putter because it helps the face remain square to the swing path, which in turn helps to ensure that the ball comes off the club face in the intended direction. Putter designs have been taking advantage of this physical property ever since Karsten Solheim hit upon the idea of moving material to the heel and toe of a conventional blade putter, creating the ubiquitous Anser-style putter.

Coming to grips with moment of inertia

Stepping away from the putter’s club head, let’s look at the other end of the club – the grip. Putter grips typically range in weight from 50-55 grams to upwards of 124 grams – a fraction of the weight of the club head; the shaft connecting the two weighs, on average, about 110 grams or so.

In a hypothetical “typical putter” – thirty-five inches long, with a 350-gram Anser-style head, a shaft that weighs 110 grams, and a mid-range grip of about 60 grams – the total mass comes to 520 grams; a little over a pound. Nearly 70% of that mass is concentrated in the club head – the last inch of the total length of the putter – skewing the balance point, which is the CG of the full club, well down toward the head.

Add some weight at the opposite end of the club, in the grip, and the balance point moves closer to the grip – not by a lot, but it only takes a small amount to make a noticeable change in the way the club feels in your hands, especially in motion. But… while adding weight to the grip end of the club does affect the balance point, it is the effect on the club’s moment of inertia, its resistance to rotation about that balance point, that is the point.

It’s all about that mass – and where it’s at

Think of it this way: if you took a plain putter shaft and put the combined weight of the head and the grip of our hypothetical “typical putter” in the middle of the shaft, it would require little effort to rotate the shaft in a circle, like an airplane’s propeller, by holding it in the middle and rotating your wrist. Take that same mass (equivalent to about ten golf balls, by the way), divide it evenly in two and put the two masses at the ends of the shaft, like a barbell, and it would take much more effort to rotate that configuration – by my calculations, a bit over 10 times as much. 

Now think about what happens when mass is added to the grip end of a putter. With the mass more widely distributed toward the ends of the club, it has less tendency to rotate about the center of balance; it is more stable – like the “barbell” configuration in our example. Imagine hanging the “barbell” vertically by one end, and moving it through a putting stroke – with the mass so widely distributed to the ends of the shaft, the ends of the shaft move together, almost as one.

By spreading the main mass concentrations further apart along the length of the putter, increasing the moment of inertia, the putter moves more uniformly both backward and forward in the stroke, with less tendency for the grip to lead the club head. More stable, more consistent, motion means less lag, less head wobble, a more consistent strike in terms of both direction and speed – and as a result, better control of both line and pace.

When I transplanted the counterweighted shaft from my Odyssey Tank Cruiser into the club head of my bargain-bin Tight Lies putter, that 30-gram weight (plus a bit more for the threaded fitting in the end of the shaft) transformed a pretty good putter into a really good putter – more stable, and more consistent. Similarly, when I fitted the Stability Shaft in the re-shafted Odyssey putter with the 50-gram Super Stroke weight kit, I regained the smooth consistency that I had missed when the putter first came back with the new shaft. 

What’s the bottom line? Counterweighting works

The change in moment of inertia that is realized by adding 50 or even 30 grams of weight to the grip end of a putter makes a noticeable change in the feel of the putter in your hands – and has a positive effect on the level of control you have over the strike you put on the ball.

The result? Better control of ball speed, better control of direction – and all other things being equal, more putts made.