The Data Behind Aldrich Potgieter’s TOUR-Leading Distance

Dr. Rose analyzes the kinetic and kinematic data which underpin Aldrich Potgieter’s TOUR-leading distance.

hey everyone it’s Dr rose i’m here at the TPI lab and we’re going to look at one of the young superstars that I think a lot of people are excited to watch play golf that’s Aldridge potter he is from South Africa he’s just a a young 20 years old but he’s already leading the tour in driving distance and ball speed uh we had him here last year and I’d like to take a little deep dive into his data to kind of show you what makes him so strong and powerful let’s let’s start with ground reaction forces so on the force plate so one of the things that you’re going to see uh which I think a lot of great players a lot of people that create power can do really well is they take this lateral force in other words in golf we have a weight shift we weight shift from our back leg to our left leg that lateral force needs to be turned into rotational force right so we take this like a pitcher going down a mound when they hit the ground they turn that into rotational force golfers do the same thing the way they do that is they break their lateral force and turn it into rotary so we actually look at how much they can break with their lead leg typically if I look at a player’s lead leg versus their trail leg most of the time on the PGA Tour they push with about 29% of their body weight on their lead leg and they push with 20% with their right leg so in other words if I’m a right-handed player I push with 20% of my body leg with my right leg and then I push with 29% of my body weight on my lead leg the brakes are heavier it’s usually about 40% more if we look at Aldridge he’s 63% more right so he’s got these super brakes where he can really stop the momentum and turn it into really quick rotation and we can actually measure how much rotation he has and his total torque is incredible too so he’s he’s able to be able to create these spinning rotational mo motions that really help get the club moving and I’m going to show you one other thing that is a superpower for him is when we get to his final ground reaction force in other words when he’s done pushing from the ground and now all the energy is going to transfer up through his body we look to see where that is in his swing most players do this around club vertical on the down swing so the shaft would be vertical if you look at Aldridge here and you look to see where his club is when he’s pushing his last I mean it’s almost like he’s lagged it so much the club’s still behind his head so he has a lot more time now to take these forces and transfer it through his body to the club so he can apply these forces longer which makes you hit the ball farther so he’s got these incredible brakes he can actually transfer that into rotation he does a great job of creating rotational torque and then he does all this really early in his swing so he has time to transfer now what’s really cool is we’ve saw that on the force plates i can now go see well how well does he transfer through his body using 3D let’s go to the 3D computer and I’ll show you what he does over there all right all right so now we can look to see how he takes these ground reaction forces and transfers it through his body this is what we call the kinematic sequence and his sequence is absolutely perfect right he takes energy from the lower body from his pelvis as it rotates it then transfers to his trunk which is this green one here then it transfers to his arms and then to the club and he just does this in a perfect sequence but that that’s that’s awesome but I want to show you some really really cool stuff that he does number one is how much he turns his shoulders so he gets this big shoulder turn he actually gets to 99° almost 100 degree shoulder turn right that’s that’s a lot of mobility to be able to do that he also gets a big separation between his upper body and his lower body he gets to at the top of the swing 56 degrees separation between his upper body his lower body average on torch is 45 so he’s getting this big torque this big stretch before he fires and now I think one of the secret powers for Aldridge is he sets the club really well in other words he creates a lot of lag in the club so he’s gonna maintain this this lag in the club very late in the swing and if I take him to the top of the back swing I can actually measure the amount of lag he has 77.8° so think about here let’s take from this arm to here that’s 90° he’s 77° at the top okay so it’s about here right on the down swing as he starts the down swing that goes from 77 to look he’s still going down he’s still going down he’s still going down he’s still going down 663 so it keeps going another to 11° lag as he’s starting his down swing where most you know amateurs as you start your down swing you almost start releasing the club and casting he’s increasing the lag as he goes down to 66° so now from a very short period of time from hair to impact he’s going to release this club and now because he’s releasing the club in such a short period of time he does it faster and it creates more speed he gets his club moving if I look at RPMs like how fast it’s moving if I get him to impact average on PGA Tour is around 2300 degrees per second aldridge topped out here at 2603 the kid knows how to develop some speed excited to watch him in the future