Ryan Faust at Game Plan Performance Center
Scott Kramer
“I can fix your swing in 30 seconds,” promised Ryan Faust – a man I had just been paired with during a recent golf round. I was telling him that since coming back from a devastating injury, my tee-shot distance has fallen off by about 30 yards. As it happens, Faust owns a three-bay golf studio called Game Plan Golf Performance in San Marcos, Calif. just north of San Diego. Watching my swing, he suspected my power outage was due to a weight shift issue but he’d be able to quantify it using dual motion force plates in his studio.
A few weeks later, I visited Faust’s very cool office. He undersold his ability, and was actually able to fix my swing in less than 30 seconds using amazing state-of-the-art technology and keen insight. Essentially, I stepped into a hitting simulator bay to take some warm-up swings. Standing with one foot on each of the force plates, I hit balls into the screen. There was a camera facing me, one behind my back, and another to the right of me capturing the rear view of my swing.
When I was done with warmups, I lined up to hit. Through the magic of those force plates, Faust immediately noticed that 62 percent of my weight was on my back foot, which likely caused me to shift weight improperly on my downswing and throw my hands into impact too much – in an effort to catch up to my hips and muscle my drives. That was pretty much all in the first five seconds of analysis. Long story short, he was spot on with his assessment. Once we widened my stance, balanced my weight slightly forward, pointed my left toe forward and stretched out my backswing a bit, I got my 30 yards back – and then some. Faust told me that like many people who recover from injuries, I had probably been swinging to prevent further harm rather than swinging away at the ball. Playing on a real course later in the week, I was actually driving the ball up to 45 yards longer per tee shot than I had been the past eight weeks. All because of my weight balance. Amazing.
But it was Faust’s insight that was even more astounding. He not only uses the technology, but he clearly knows how to master it. He took an unusual career path to get to where he is, having worked in a corporate environment for 16 years with many hours sitting at a desk. But then he discovered performance fitness, developed a passion for it, and zeroed in on golf. He is an excellent golfer on his own and is certified by several golf-related performance organizations, including Titleist Performance Institute. In other words, he knows the game, he knows fitness, and he knows how to communicate both.
Although the fix for my game seemed immediate to me, that’s not always the case with swings. “I don’t think anything is instant with golf,” says Faust. “Everything you feel changes from one swing to another, or day in and out. We have the data to tell us why something is happening. And then with our camera system and the feedback mechanisms we have, we understand the inputs of how we get those data to create the shot. So if you’re hitting fades or slices, we can understand why. Is it the club coming out, is it because of the clubface, because of a pressure shift, or whatever the million things it could be. So then we understand why it’s happening, and now we know what the fixes are. If you work with us, we talk about what the fixes are to not do that, and we ingrain them. Then when you get outside, you work on the mechanics that we worked on in here.”
While I was wowed by Faust’s interpretation of all my swing data and how he knew exactly where to apply fixes, I might’ve been even more impressed later that day when he sent a follow-up email recap video. In that footage, he showed me an overlay of my “old” swing over the “new” one, along with a voiceover explanation. That made it so incredibly easy to see the before-and-after differences, and serves as a specific reminder of what I need to keep doing on the golf course.
There are golf performance studios all over America with experts who can help you. But if you’re ever in the San Diego area, your game may well benefit from Faust’s expertise and this mind-blowing tech.
