Up your putting know how : London Golf Show 09

April 24th, 2009 | GEL Golf, Tuition

If you’d like to attend a putting clinic by one of the game’a foremost flat-stick gurus, get yourself along to the London Golf Show.

And make sure you do so on Friday, May 1. You’ll find the show at ExCel in London’s Docklands. The clinic is to be given by Dr Paul Hurrion, putting coach to a number of top European Tour and Ryder Cup stars and the designer of the GEL Paul Hurrion Signature Range of Putters at ExCel in London’s Docklands

Hurrion, whose clients include three-time major winner Padraig Harrington and the precociously-talented Rory McIlroy, uses a biomechanical approach to putting that has seen him become one of the most respected coaches in the world of golf.

Visitors to this year’s London Golf Show will be given a rare insight into the putting methods that Hurrion has developed following over 10 years of research into the theory of sports biomechanics and which he now passes on to his star clients.

Hurrion is attending the Show on behalf of GEL Golf, manufacturers of GEL Groove Putters, and Assay Golf, the distributor of GEL Putters in the UK.

In partnership with GEL, Paul has designed a range of putters that combines his expertise in biomechanics with GEL Golf’s unique horizontal groove technology.

The result?

The GEL Paul Hurrion Signature Range, is a range of putters that produce greater grip with the golf ball at the moment of impact, therefore enhancing a putter’s ability to produce the desired topspin roll on the ball.

Says Clive Wood, managing director of Assay Golf: “Paul’s illustrious client list is testament to the esteem in which he is held in golf so his appearance at the London Golf Show is a fantastic opportunity for golfers to glean some insider putting tips normally reserved for the stars of the game,”

GEL Golf will be exhibiting at Stand E20 at the London Golf Show where they will be showcasing both the GEL Paul Hurrion Signature Range and the original GEL Range of Putters.

www.gelgolf.co.uk

The doctor’s orders: Putt it like Cristiano Ronaldo

April 20th, 2009 | GEL Golf, Putting Biomechanics, Quintic Video Software

By Mark Reason - Daily Telegraph : 20 Apr 2009

It’s all very well hitting the ball like Ben Hogan, as the Masters winner Angel Cabrera is said to do.
The trouble usually arises when Cabrera reaches the green. Then the big Argentine tends to be more Wogan than Hogan.

We all know the feeling. Think Scott Hoch, who became tagged Scott Choke after missing a two-feet putt to win the 1989 Masters. Or think Doug Sanders, who lost an Open after a nervous stab on the final green at St Andrews in 1970. Sanders said: “Do I ever think of that putt? - only once every four or five minutes.”

Yet we all believe in a cure, in a sort of national health service of putting. Cabrera went to Charlie Epps who showed him a video of all the putts he made when he won the US Open at Oakmont. Suddenly Cabrera believed again and was able to make crucial putts on the 16th (most people forget that one) and 18th greens (twice) at Augusta.

I went to see a bloke called Paul Hurrion. When you walk in the front door you get the same sort of feeling as you do when entering the doctor’s surgery.

But when you go to see Dr Hurrion, the putting coach of Padraig Harrington, you believe he’s got a cure for the disease.  Hurrion says: “I need a player to take ownership of his stroke and this applies just as well to all the amateurs.

“Most amateurs, when they have that 10-foot putt for birdie on the first green and miss it left, they haven’t got a clue. Unless they know the difference between a good and bad putt it’s pure guesswork.”

I confess that I know the difference between a bad putt and a very bad putt, but the rest is a bit of a haze. Hurrion points up to a screen and tells me to watch.

He then shows a short clip of a well known European Tour player broken down into 2000 frames per second. The result is startling. When the ball leaves the putter face you can see it take off and travel 15 inches in the air before it hits the ground. You can also see the ball’s rotation and the fact that it carries backspin.

Hurrion explains the implications. He says: “You’ve got 8 feet uphill on the first green of the monthly medal, but the ball comes off the putter in the air (unbeknown to you). It’s like a bit of a chip. It hits the slope and digs in and misses low left.

“On the next green you’ve got a slightly downhill putt, but after that first one you are thinking: ‘These greens are a bit slower today.’ So you hit it a bit harder.

“But it’s still taking off with spin and this time it kicks off the downslope. Suddenly you’re five feet past and about to give the greenkeeper hell.”  Hurrion’s goal is to create what he calls “pure roll.” The first task in this process is to get a putter that fits you. He has co-designed a special grooved GEL putter and according to Hurrion one per cent of loft at impact is optimum.

He says: “A lot of people have a putter that is too long and the lie too lofted.”

The second and third keys are down to you. Hurrion draws a parallel between Ronaldo and Beckham freekicks. Ronaldo hits the ball so purely, with so little spin, “You can see the logo flying”. Beckham hits it with loads of spin. You want to putt like Ronaldo.

The grip, the forearms and the shoulder need to be square and you need to be stable. Most people tilt slightly forwards or backwards during their stroke. Stability and balance form the second key.

The third key is more depressing. Hurrion says: “The secret to solving most amateurs’ putting is they don’t practice.” And you thought Hurrion had a magic wand. Wrong.

Harrington’s got a magic wand and it’s because he has the right ball position, the right putter, good balance, square technique - and because he practises and practises. And that’s all there is to it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/sport/golf/5188757/The-doctors-orders-Putt-it-like-Cristiano-Ronaldo.html

Guru’s gadgetry helps Padraig Harrington prepare for Augusta

April 6th, 2009 | Padraig Harrington, Putting Biomechanics

by Peter Dixon
The Times - Monday 6th April 2009

You could call it the appliance of science. One reason why Padraig Harrington is the possessor of three major championships and one of the few players comfortable going head-to-head with Tiger Woods.

And it is why Dr Paul Hurrion, Harrington’s putting coach, thinks the Irishman is every bit as good as Woods on the greens and why he believes his man has every chance of winning the Masters that gets under way at Augusta on Thursday.

“There’s no question that he is in Tiger’s class,” Hurrion said. “And the tougher the test, the better it is for him because some of the others tend to give up.” As everybody knows, there is no test tougher than the ice-fast, sloping greens of Augusta. But it is Hurrion - a biomechanist by profession - whose scientific approach to the game within a game has helped to turn Harrington from a very good putter into a great one.

Who, for instance, could forget the way in which the Irishman took the USPGA Championship from under the nose of Sergio García last year with a putting display from out of this world? In his final round he took only 26 putts and had single putts on eight of the last nine greens, every one of them like a blow to the Spaniard’s solar plexus. “It was when all the hard work paid off,” Hurrion said. “It was perfect, the moment when everything came together.”

We are talking at Hurrion’s base, more like laboratory, in a small village in the Midlands, part of an annexe to a house within its own grounds. The only clue that a player with two Opens and one USPGA Championship to his name has been there are the framed and signed flags from each of the majors Harrington has won.

Hurrion, at 37 the same age as the Open champion, describes biomechanics as the science of human movement. He has worked with Jonny Wilkinson, Steve Backley, and the Great Britain bobsleigh team. He is on the International Cricket Council panel that assesses the action of bowlers suspected of throwing.

He has been with Harrington since 2002 and uses all the technology at his disposal to analyse every aspect of the player’s putting. He has high-speed cameras and specially-designed computer software that gives instant feedback on such things as head, shoulder and body movement. The aim, he explains, is to create an efficient, repeatable stroke that works every time.

His cameras record up to 2,000 frames per second and show in the minutest detail how the ball comes off the face of the putter. What the naked eye cannot pick up, the cameras certainly will. If, say, the putter cuts across the ball at impact it will impart side spin that will affect the direction in which it moves.

There are four cameras in all, one to the side, one straight on to show the path the putter takes, one at shoulder height to show how the shoulders move and one above the head. There is also a pressure pad under the feet that indicates how the weight shifts through the stroke. The more the body moves, the more manipulation of the putter head will be needed - and that is the path to inconsistency. “We are looking for perfect symmetry and control, aiming to hit it out of the middle every time,” Hurrion said.

Some of the key areas on which he works with Harrington are posture, stance, balance and stability. The aim is to create a pendulum motion that keeps the putter head as close to the ground as possible. The higher off the ground, Hurrion explains, the greater the margin for error.

Harrington’s unquenchable thirst for improvement means that he knows exactly where to look if things start to go awry. “If you have an eight-foot putt for birdie and it misses left edge, you need to know why,” Hurrion said. “What you need to ask is: Did it miss left edge because I aimed there? Have I pulled it? Have I hit it not quite quick enough and not taken the break out of the putt? Have I just misread it? Did it hit a spike mark or has the wind blown it off course? All of a sudden there are half a dozen variables and unless you can tell the difference, you’re stuck.”

All of which brings to mind García, who had just such a putt for victory in the Open Championship at Carnoustie in 2007 and who stood agog when the ball “lipped” out. It opened the door for Harrington, who went on to claim his first major in the four-hole play-off that ensued.

Watching García on the practice green at the CA Championship in Miami, Florida, recently, it looked as if he has learnt nothing in the interim. It was not so much that he missed the vast majority of the putts he took from about nine feet but the way in which he missed them, with half of them going to the left and half going to the right.

With good technique comes mental toughness. “It’s tough to be positive if you know that your technique is not really good enough to deal with what you are about to face,” Hurrion said. “Is your technique good enough to repeatedly hit the ball on the lines you have read? If you do it wrong, the record books will show you are not as good as you think you are.”

In Harrington, Hurrion has found a hard taskmaster. “After each session you come away with more questions than you have answered,” Hurrion said. “I lie awake in bed at night thinking about it. Then I’ll text him an answer if he’s travelling and he’ll send one back saying, ‘Yep, I’ll try that.’

“The sessions could easily last all day and there are times when you think, ‘Geez I need a break.’ But that’s what makes a major champion. And that’s why our work is done for the Masters.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/golf/article6040490.ece

Padraig Harrington’s major success is mainly in the mind…

April 5th, 2009 | Padraig Harrington, Putting Biomechanics

By Mark Reason
Sunday Telegraph 5th April 2009

Padraig Harrington is a mind apart. Vijay Singh hits ball after ball until his hands are like strips of leather left out to dry in the Fijian sun. Harrington practises thinking, rerunning the same thought time after time, just as he would hit 100 short putts in a row.

The winner of the previous two majors has learned a ruthless sporting intelligence to compare with even the great Tiger Woods.

Silver lining: Padraig Harrington with the US PGA trophy

The other week in America Harrington was answering a few questions as he walked the quarter of a mile from the practice bunker to the practice ground. Harrington was talking about how distractions are a benefit to golfers, how people who have just got married or just had kids often experience a surge in form.

I wondered how much the birth of Patrick in 2003 had contributed to his own surge in form, how much the birth of a son had inspired him to be an “overachiever”. As soon as the awful word was out, there was no scooping it back. Harrington said nothing for a moment. He continued signing autographs, but already he seemed to have walked away.

“Overachiever” is a daft sporting cliché. It is applied to people who reach heights that their physical talents may initially suggest are beyond them.

But why not flip it around and call John Daly, the winner of an Open and a PGA, an overachiever? The American has won two majors and has wonderful physical gifts, but besides Harrington he is a mental pygmy.

Maybe Harrington is still an underachiever. Paul Hurrion has been Harrington’s putting coach since the pair met on a green in Spain at the end of 2002 and continues to be astonished by the Irishman’s attention to detail.

There are flags from each of Harrington’s three major victories on the wall of Hurrion’s putting lab and he believes there are more to come.

Two weeks ago Hurrion flew to Dublin to work on Harrington’s putting ahead of the Masters. He got in on Wednesday evening and at midnight Harrington was still hitting putts, still asking questions, to many of which Hurrion did not have answers.

Hurrion says: “Even now, after seven years, I will receive more questions than I can answer. One of Padraig’s gifts is the mental. But that doesn’t just come. He works just as hard at that as anything else. People don’t fully appreciate that. It’s not a five-minute job.”

For many players, putting is an art. For the world’s best – and Hurrion nominates them as Tiger Woods, Padraig Harrington, Justin Leonard and David Howell – putting is more of a science.

Harrington has worked thousands of hours with Hurrion so that he can release the putter blade square each time. He does not want variables in his stroke, like head movement or an unstable pivot point. And for that half a millisecond when the putter is in contact with the ball, he wants the centre of gravity of the blade to meet the centre of gravity of the ball.

It is not an art, it is an exact science. Understand the science and then you can get creative with things like visualisation. Woods makes a mental movie of the ball tracking into the hole. But Tiger can do that with confidence only because he has near-perfect technique.

Harrington believes that putting, along with strategy, is one of the two keys to winning the Masters. He says: “You’ve got to be in top form with your putter the week of Augusta to be in contention. You can hit a good putt at Augusta from an awkward spot, and if you’ve got it to six feet you’re happy, whereas on a regular flat green if you’re outside two feet you’d be disappointed.”

Mental toughness allied to brilliant technique has brought Harrington to the third leg of the so-called Paddy Slam. It makes him more likely than anyone else in the game other than Woods to keep holing those six footers. Great putting is the aspect of the game that separates the multiple major winners from the rest.

So how would Harrington relish coming down the stretch next Sunday, one of only three men still in with a chance, the other two being Woods and Mickelson. He says: “I wouldn’t be a bit comfortable, but I’d be loving it. I’d be nervous as hell. The shots you have to hit there are so intimidating, so precise, and I’d be panicking big time, but I’d also be loving and relishing the idea.”

But ask Harrington specifically about winning the third leg of the Paddy Slam and his tone changes. He recites monotonously: “If you said to me I’m going to miss the cut at this Masters and win the Masters next year, I’d be very happy with that.”

Harrington has practised that thought and practised that speech and he just keeps hitting it out there, like another practice ball, into the deep blue yonder.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/5099189/Padraig-Harringtons-major-success-is-mainly-in-the-mind.html

Superstar putting genius Dr Paul Hurrion wants to play Bag Tag

April 3rd, 2009 | GEL Golf, Putting Biomechanics

http://www.findthefairways.com/golfnews/putter-genius-dr-paul-hurrion-plays-bag-tag-1325.html

Superstar putting genius Dr Paul Hurrion wants to play Bag Tag this week and has told us exactly what’s in his bag. Paul is the top man where biomechanical analysis is concerned using high-speed cameras, force platforms and computers at his top class Quintic Lab. He is contracted to a huge number of sporting companies and associations including UK Athletics, International Cricket Council (ICC), English Cricket Board, and British Diving.

His real passion lies with golf though and this has led to a specialism in putting analysis and advice, assisting European Tour Professionals and holding PGA accredited Putting Clinics.

The Quintic hi-tech Putting Laboratory is developing and has already benefited many European Tour Golfers including Padraig Harrington, Paul McGinley, Rory McIlroy, Robert-Jan Derksen, Phillip Archer, David Howell, Darren Clarke, Henrick Stenson and Lee Westwood to name a few.

In his victory speech at the 2007 Open Championship, Padraig Harrington thanked Paul for his work behind the scenes. For the last two years, Paul has collaborated with Groove Equipment Ltd (GEL) to co-design a range of putters, the GEL Paul Hurrion Signature Range, using over 10 years of research and development in putting biomechanics. Wow! Sounds like some nice work then. You’d assume that Paul has more than one putter in his bag then?  Read on…

What kind of golf bag do you use?

A GEL Carry Bag - bright yellow & bright blue! I like to carry my bag as often as the courses allow.

What clubs are in there?

Titleist driver 10 degree, 3 wood & 21 degree Hybrid, Irons & wedges, all courtesy of being on the TPI Advisory Board. The guys at TPI fitted me last year, great experience on the launch monitor, testing lots of different shafts and heads. I felt like a PGA Tour Professional for the afternoon (the closest I will ever come!)

My putter is a GEL Sedo 33″ 71 degree lie and 3 degrees loft… It is my personal favourite out of the eight GEL Paul Hurrion Signature Range Putters that I have designed so far! Very solid feel, I like that in a putter.

What else is in your bag?

Plenty of ball markers from different courses, along with a variety of coins from different currencies…they make great ball markers. Plenty of balls (ProV1s), plus food, drinks and chocolate bar wrappers. I still have a bag of 250 wooden tees in the bag! I’m still not sure why I bought so many?

Do you carry a lucky charm?

No lucky charms as I’m too much of a scientist for all that! However, I will never use red tees and I mark my ball with three black dots.

What’s the most important piece of kit in the bag that’s not a club, ball, glove or towel?

The laser comes in very handy for distances and slope, especially playing new golf courses!

What’s the oldest thing in your golf bag?

Probably the bag of tees… and a few chocolate bar wrappers

Which is your favourite club?

My GEL SEDO Hurrion Putter of course! It’s just that it’s the most consistent club in my bag, the one that inspires the most confidence as I am always hitting putts at the Quintic laboratory with it. I just have to remember to take it with me when playing. I have turned up to play without any putters before (when there are over 500 back at the laboratory - it can be a little embarrassing!)

That’s fantastic and a big thanks to Paul for sharing the contents of his bag which surprisingly often doesn’t include a putter! Excellent!

In traditional fashion, we will Bag Tag four others on Paul’s behalf who will hopefully tell us what’s in their bag! Remember that if you write a blog and you want to get involved, just tell us what’s in your bag to be in with a chance of winning some fantastic prizes including an amazing GEL putter! The full details are here http://www.findthefairways.com/golfnews/bag-tag-whats-in-your-golf-bag-452.html





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