Golf instructor Mike Finney delivers a passionate, opinionated, and often hilarious talk at Open Forum about how the golf instruction industry sources its knowledge — and why it needs to do better.
Finney divides golf instruction into three "silos": Silo 1 (hard science — The Search for the Perfect Swing, peer-reviewed research, physics, biomechanics), Silo 2 (faux science — The Golf Machine, MORAD, Stack & Tilt, and their invented jargon), and Silo 3 (feels — what tour players and famous instructors say based on personal experience).
Finney explains: You can be a great teacher from any silo, but the hard science in Silo 1 offers the most reliable foundation — and the instruction community needs to engage more with researchers like Sasho Mackenzie, Paul Wood, Frederick Tuxen, and Phil Cheetham rather than treating invented terminology as gospel.
Along the way, Finney covers Newton's second law, Euler's rigid body dynamics, the D-plane, shaft deflection, Karsten Solheim's engineering legacy at Ping, and why drawing 2D lines on a screen is "malpractice."