Pete Cowen On Building A Repeatable Swing Without Injury

So I mean, you, you had this, and I, I don't wanna get into everything 'cause I know you've talked about these things in the past, and people can find that if they're interested.

But you had this, what I would consider to be a very good, uh, career.

Unfortunate that we had the injury with the slipped disc.

But in a lot of ways, the injury that took away the playing also got you thinking more about the body and thinking about technique, and maybe put you on a little bit more of the path to being the coach that you've become.

And I just, I know you've talked about Ramsey and the spiral and things like that, but can you maybe talk to me a little bit about when you started looking into this and looking into the spiral, how that transformed your way of thinking when it came to the golf swing?

Well, it was, uh...

It- I tried to go back too quickly each time.

After six months, they told me I could go back, but it broke down, broke down, broke down.

So I suddenly had to realize that my technique was obviously causing the injury, and it was very poor.

And it was rock and block, you know, tilt, very much of a tilt.

Uh, so, uh, luckily I had a friend that was an orthopedic surgeon, and he looked after me.

And he was a golfer, so we started discussing, you know, better ways of moving the body to prevent injury, basically.

Uh, and obviously then I spent a lot of time hitting loads when I eventually was fit enough to hit balls again.

I spent a lot of time hitting, uh, balls three feet above my, three feet above the ground.

Li- literally off a three-foot high tee and just made the body work properly in, in a rotational sense really, uh, rather than a, you know, a, a, a r- rock and block, uh, you know, tilt and a tiltAnd so I suddenly started seeing the body moving so much better, what I could do.

And then obviously started matching up the arm, hand, and club movement to that particular body movement.

And then we discussed it with a few of the clever people, if you like, um, orthopedic surgeons and n- neurosur- surgeons.

And, uh, they, they all of a sudden said, "Well, the way the body moves is definitely much more in, you know, keeping with the movement you're trying to make now, uh, from the ground up working up correctly.

You know, basically, your feet against the ground and then you're turning against your feet." So I suddenly realized that there was a better way of doing it.

And then obviously from there I started thinking about how I could get the arms, the hands, and club movement without lifting them.

And then it was the muscle structure within the body that allowed me to do that really.

So it was really almost studying the martial arts as well, how you push to pull.

I, I just find that very interesting because now with the technology that we have, ForcePlates, 3D motion capture, a lot of smart people have come into the industry and helped us along.

But at this time when you were working on this with your orthopedic surgeon friend, there, there really wasn't, and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like there was really a connection so much between the body and how the body actually works and how a golf swing should match that.

And it seems like maybe you had to figure out quite a bit of that.