356. Ft. Marty Jertson: More Distance This Off-Season, Proper Club-Fitting, & The Stack Speed System

0:00:03 – Jeff Pelizzaro
The 18STRONG Podcast, episode Number 356 with Marty Jertson, director of Product Development at Ping and co-founder of the Stack System. What’s up, guys? Welcome back to the 18STRONG Podcast, where we’re here to help you build a stronger game, because we believe that everyone deserves to play better, longer. This week, I’m super excited about our episode with the Director of Product Development at Ping, Marty Jertson, who is also the co-founder of the Stack System with Dr Sasho McKenzie. So in this episode, we’re talking not only about the product development and everything that Ping does to make some of the greatest golf clubs on the planet. We talk about club bidding, we talk about data and how they use that data to develop different clubs to improve every single year, but then we talk about the Stack System and building speed. You’ve probably heard of the Stack System because of guys like Matthew Fitzpatrick and seeing the speed that he’s gained and him winning the US Open and that becoming a big talk of conversation with being able to gain speed even at the highest of levels. Well, the stack is one of the reasons behind that gain in speed, and there’s over 30,000 golfers on the planet now using the Stack System. So, no matter what level you are utilizing the Stack System to gain speed, to gain distance and really more control over your game. So we talk about that with Marty. We talk about his game. He’s played in multiple PGA championships and PGA level tournaments, and this product was really designed because he noticed himself not being able to hang with the guys on the tour. And that’s really where the story starts with the Stack System. So you’re really going to enjoy this episode and we’ll get into it right after this.

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0:02:54 – Marty Jertson
No, actually I think that in 2018 was my first time to St Louis. I played saw, I think Colistro turned me in around the area. I have a lot of family from Kansas City but it’s a lot. It’s a ways away, obviously, but they came down and went to the event, which was really fun. But of all the PGA’s I played in, I think the crowd was the most like electric there. Like, I think, because golf you know, big golf doesn’t come to St Louis and in that area that all and I think that’s one of the reasons the PGA of America loved having it there at Bel Rive and the crowd was electric and there were so many kids. I remember like it’s fun for me because I’m just a working guy, like normal guy, like who somebody wants your autograph. It was fun for me being around some of our other pink tour players, like Fee Down, some of these guys and so many kids there, so family oriented, so many kids there. The crowd was just super into the goal. So it was very refreshing. I had a great time.

0:03:54 – Jeff Pelizzaro
My nephew. He was there Tuesday. We were talking about how it, you know, rained a ton on Tuesday but got kids were there, like you said, to go get autographs and get things done. They stuck around as long as they possibly could. He’s got a flag with I don’t know how many different names on it and he stuck around and I think Kepka was like one of the last guys to come through so he got Kepka’s name on. It ends up going on a win, and so you know he was. He was super happy, but I mean just the whole, like you said, the electricity of the event, tiger Woods being there. Obviously, from what I, from what I heard, I wasn’t there on Sunday, but they said that on Sunday it was like hearing thunder, like just all the people running from one spot to another with with Tiger, and you made the cut that weekend. You played all four rounds that weekend. Could you, could? I mean, were you out there for any of that? Could you hear it? Could you feel it?

0:04:42 – Marty Jertson
So that actually is. So I made the cut in 19 at Beth page. But this is part of the story, because in 18, this part of my story was in 18, I played at Belle Reeve and I got up here with Luke Lewis and he obviously he’s been playing great lately but he gets the ball so far he was hitting it even further than it and I was kind of like demoralized by my distance in 18 and it was Belle Reeve was kind of soft, so he was all carry and distance mattered a ton that week as well as, like your precision iris play. And so the next I worked on some things to gain a lot of distance and I re qualified for the community championship at Beth page.

This kind of relates to Tiger, cause I did play all four rounds of Beth page when I made the cut and I was two groups behind Tiger. So I teed off two groups behind Tiger and anyone on tour is like hey, you either want to be playing with Tiger or you want to be at least two groups away, Cause if you’re in the group of head or the group behind, the crowds are all coming in to get get their spot, or if you’re in the group behind. Everyone’s like trailing away. So actually it was perfect because I got to experience the Tiger Roars, cause he actually he missed the cut at Beth page but he made an eagle whatever he’d make a birdie. It was just like electric the Roars. There’s nothing like that. It was fun to actually be playing in the event in this close proximity, when we experienced a little bit of that, that’s.

0:06:11 – Jeff Pelizzaro
that’s so amazing. How many PGA championships have you played in?

0:06:15 – Marty Jertson
I’ve played in five PGA championships and one us open, so six majors total.

0:06:22 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Okay, and now? Are you a PGA professional, pga instructor, or is that? How did you get into the PGA championship?

0:06:31 – Marty Jertson
Yeah. So yes, I am a, I’m in. I think my whole job and career is kind of like a mystery. Sometimes I even have a hard time describing it. But yes, I am a PJ of America member. So I think most PJ of America members the most common is you work at a golf course HintPro, thapro, assistantpro, gm, that type of thing.

But you can be a PJ member and work in other avenues, like I think you know, mike Small, the golf coach at Illinois. He’s a PJ member. You’re allowed to be a golf coach. You got to kind of be employed anywhere in the industry. So you know, I in my role at Ping, I’m able to be a PJ member through one of the classifications there and then obviously now also have a Speed Training Aid company, the stack system. So both of those kind of qualify to be a working professional golfer and it’s kind of like getting your masters in the golf industry. Actually, the education process to become a PJ member is pretty rigorous. Takes most folks, you know, three to five years to kind of go through the whole bookwork, education, certification process.

0:07:37 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Now. So let’s go back to kind of your history, because you went to engineering school, mechanical engineering degree, colorado School of Miners. Is it minors or mines?

0:07:47 – Marty Jertson
Mines minors school mines yeah.

0:07:50 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Very, I heard you talk about this on the show with with your buddy, sleaze and Colt and kind of dove deep into your past. But give us a little background on. You know what took you to engineering school, what then got you into, you know, going on to the golf path and actually getting into having a career in the world of golf.

0:08:09 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, I mean, I think with a lot of kind of folks that do interesting things, like there’s, there’s luck along the way, you know, and knowing that you know me, the right person at the right time, or one little micro decision that sends you down a path. So I think my journey is very much like that, like I was a pretty good junior golfer, but not great right In songs, always kind of this. You know, on the fringe of oh man, I should go try to play for a big D1 school and commit to golf. And I think in the back of my head I was like I’m just not as good as some of these other kids that are kicking my butt and all the junior tournament. So I had to make that decision. Should I go try to play for a D1 team and not do engineering because the coaches won’t let you but it’s just not allowed. I don’t know what it’s like now. Or should I go to you know a better academic school where I could still play golf but make golf the number two priority? And that’s what I chose to do Chloro School, mines Now their academic program is amazing.

They have the number one football team. D2 right now in the golf program is phenomenal. So I was kind of at the beginning of that ramping the golf team up from you know kind of like a hobby golf team to now we’re a legitimate team. That’s, if you’re in, want to do math, science, engineering and you also want to play golf, it’d be an awesome place to look at. So that’s kind of how I ended up there and I grew up in a small mining town copper mining town, and so a lot of the you know kind of folks that ran the mines in my town were alumni from the Colorado School Mines. That’s how I, that’s how I knew about the school and had a great time with their way of D2 golf and and spent the summers in Colorado and and that kind of shaped my future of you know, getting a little bit better at golf through college and.

But then I kind of graduated from school and I was faced with decision like, do I do my engineering degree or do I play professional golf? And I gave from golf, you know, a run for about a year and I think I realized that the math just is not on your side. As a mining tour golfer. I realized, not faster than a load of my friends, and then it kind of got in the door and been doing my thing here ever since.

0:10:23 – Jeff Pelizzaro
What did you start? What was your first role at Ping?

0:10:27 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, it was kind of like a sort of like an intern, so to speak, even though I’d already graduated and I helped set up. You know Ping is very committed to making product in American manufacturing Super fun. We have about 800 employees here at our campus and a majority of those, the biggest chunk of those is manufacturing jobs. They’re building the gold books that you’re getting, and so we have, you know, 350, 400 employees that are doing that assembly, work, the loft and lie the gripping, the epoxy, the custom waiting, all that stuff. So my first job was working on the assembly line doing manufacturing, engineering, what’s called lean manufacturing, taking some things from like the Toyota way and how Toyota builds product in Japan and bringing some of those lean manufacturing techniques that allows us. The end goal is we can build a driver that goes into our manufacturing line and exits it about 30 minutes later. It’s literally drawing, while it’s in transit, out to the customer.

So, where before that, it took, like you know, days to build one driver.

0:11:34 – Jeff Pelizzaro
And then did you soon thereafter get into the designing portion of the clubs, or is that something that you kind of have to work your way into and is that something that you were really excited about doing, or you’re just kind of like I’m at Ping, we’ll see what happens, and go from there?

0:11:50 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, I think the design part was super intimidating to me. Like it was like how is this done? I had a little bit of what’s called count or 3D design experience, but that seemed very daunting to me to learn a new skill. It was scary, like I didn’t know if I had the belief in myself that I could actually do that one day. Right, I was kind of interested in it, but I’ve always kind of, I think, like a lot of folks out there like questioning, like can I do that? And so, yeah, I was brought in and it’s very much when you do it, when you become a product designer.

In our culture we kind of have like to have an apprenticeship model, because there’s the learning curve is so steep and you cannot learn this in school. Like, I think that’s one of the big conclusions you go to school to learn baseline things, foundational things, but every but when you get out of school the real learning starts, right, I think that’s, you know, a big thing I’ve learned over the years. So it was a. It was very daunting to learn that and I had some great mentors that taught me the ropes of the foundational pieces, the design product, and then a really big learning curve to get good at the 3D design and I spent a lot of time where my brain was thinking and seeing every little object I saw how would I create that in 3D? And so there was.

There was quite a few years of my life behind the computer doing a lot of 3D work and trying to really get good at the CAD side. And you have to marry that with the with the physics side. There’s tons of golf physics that goes into it. So yeah, I kind of I kind of apprenticed into that design role and started to slowly take on more and more projects and gain confidence, because I didn’t really I kind of struggled with that at the beginning, that you know kind of a lot of that self doubt. And then my confidence got higher and I started to become more interested in things beyond club head design, shafts, grips, friction span, wedge and putters, club fitting, and now it’s kind of been the basis of. I think you know how my career has evolved over. You know now 20 years doing it.

0:13:56 – Jeff Pelizzaro
What was the first club that you had a piece of like from start to finish?

0:14:02 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, the first one where I was like you know that was exciting time. But a high pressure time is when you get your first official project and you are literally the chief engineer, like you’re in charge of everything the graphics, how it looks, the manufacturing kind of, you know, cost optimization side of things, durability testing, player testing, performance testing. And the first one was the Rapture hybrid. Really cool. It kind of paired with our for the gold enthusiasts out there, historians our Rapture driver, which had composite in it, was our first driver that had composite back there in the in around like 2000, five, six time frame. And so I designed is the early days of hybrids.

So you know there wasn’t like a rule, there wasn’t a playbook to follow. You had to kind of pioneer what the shape should be, how it should spin, the loss and materials. And I designed this really cool multi-material construction, tungsten, sole plate, high strength face all welded together. You could loft in Lyon and this type of thing. And it was, it was. It was super fun seeing that club out in retail in the golf shops for the first time. I’ll never forget, you know, working on that one.

0:15:17 – Jeff Pelizzaro
When you’re you know there’s so many things I would assume that you can put into a club.

You’re talking about the different medals and and ways to to piece these things together, and I mean the chemistry of it. I mean I don’t even know where to begin asking how, how you start to come up with different, different ideas of how do we make these clubs better. I mean, obviously, year after year after year after year, you guys are coming up with new technology, different ways to to make a club better, but then also I’m assuming, there’s quite a few regulations you have to stay within and you know you have to be attentive to, you know what are the rules, what’s USGA approved or what you know. How do you first even kind of start looking at okay, here’s what we have right now, like your current clubs right now. Is it something that you guys are thinking about All right now? How do we, what are we going to do next? Is it? Is it that simple, like just starting with that question and then, or is it gradually kind of improving on what’s already out there?

0:16:17 – Marty Jertson
That’s just a great framework and I think the questions that you asked are a lot of like golf consumers think about like, what are we doing? What are we doing over here? That’s exactly the problem, you know, and I think paying is is a very fun place to work and our team is super talented and we have a great kind of core mission, which is don’t get too hyper focused on the technology side. Stay very focused on defining the problem that the golfer is facing. What is the pain point, right? And so instead of sitting down saying, hey, we need to implement this technology, we at first sit down and say what problem are we trying to solve? What is the pain point for the golfer? Like in some of them can be very simple like we need more ball speed. Right, for the driver to go further, we need more ball speed. Do we need this driver to spin more, spin less? Do we need it to be more forgiving? What is? Then we go into what is the technical definition of forgiveness, like, what is forgiveness? Oh, we need the ball speed to higher at all portions around the face. We need impacts low on the face to be more similar in distance as hits high on the face. And then we say, well, how can we do that? Okay, well, we can make the moment of inertia higher or we can change the face curvature. What levers do we have to pull on? And so we start always start at the problem for the golfer and work back towards what is the technology that we can use to solve those problems. And Ping’s been super committed to that and I think it’s really paid off to help our brand be such a good long term brand that some years were bringing enormous innovations to the market, like turbulent and you talked about Jeff.

One one question is I think a lot of people are thinking the exact same thing as yours oh, they’re all regulated right. Like well, one of the ways to force an engineer to be creative is to put a wall in front of them Because you’re forced into creativity. Engineers and designers a lot of times struggle If things are too open ended like it, like if you have no rules or no regulations. Sometimes that would be harder than no one you got to play within this box. I can kind of sneak around over here, sneak a little performance over here.

Turbulent is a perfect example that there’s no USG regulation on how aerodynamically efficient you can make a driver right. There’s no that. Now they do have regulations on features and where you can put features and the size and shape. So I think that’s a great example of cracking the code. On having a driver that’s very big but it’s aerodynamic, it’s dry coefficient is like we have a driver that’s super small, right. So that’s a way that that’s one example where we can kind of have an innovation that’s not even in the spout and being regulated, and then we have some really strong patents on that and protected things that nature.

0:19:19 – Jeff Pelizzaro
So the Turbulent? What exactly is a Turbulent?

0:19:24 – Marty Jertson
That’s a great question.

It is what it sounds like it. Is it Turbulents there? No, I’m just kidding. So it’s these tiny little. Well, they’re not tiny, the size and shape of them are very exact, but they’re little ridges right on the crayon of the driver. So that’s where the face meets the top of the driver. There’s these ridges, and on our driver we have six of them. What they do is they create a micro layer of Turbulents that takes the airflow. We have some really cool videos that we’ve done in the wing tunnel.

So the airflow going over the top of the meat in the face and joining the crown, it’s very blunt. It’d be like a pickup truck or something To make a driver go be very forgiving. It’s naturally not very aerodynamic, and so what these ridges do is they give the airflow more momentum to stay attached to the crown, because normally you get this vacuum effect. You get a low pressure area that creates like a you can think of it like a vacuum, like sucking the driver back, words the wrong direction, getting a net force on the driver going the wrong direction. And that’s what normally happens if you don’t have Turbulent. It’s like a pickup truck, huge weight back there, sucking the ruin in the gas mileage of the pickup truck.

So what Turbulenters do? They keep that airflow more attached to the crown, give the air momentum and it reduces the drag coefficient significantly. So super cool. We developed that using Flow CFD software, which is like a virtual wind tunnel, and we did a lot of little experiments getting the size, shaped, spacing, contouring. We doing some wind tunnel testing down here at Arizona State University.

0:21:12 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I mean, you guys probably just have the coolest toys to play with ever, I would imagine.

0:21:19 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, we got some good kids. Like we have a really cool Mark Nellis motion capture system which is kind of measures the twisting, drooping, lead lagging, how the shaft bends, basically, if we do that it like on 700, 800 frames a second, it’s kind of got like a live MRI of your Gulf swing. And that’s one of our favorite, favorite research pieces of kit that we have here.

0:21:41 – Jeff Pelizzaro
That’s so awesome. You mentioned that you guys always work from the problem back. What are, what are some of the the top problems that you guys are constantly trying to solve? I’m gonna guess distance accuracy, and you know which one do you guys tend to do? Lean towards one or the other, is it? You know, working on a little bit of everything.

0:21:59 – Marty Jertson
There’s been a big kind of money ball revolution in golf and it kind of goes down to the. The core of it was like a new statistics that showed up in all Cold strokes game and this was originated by kind of a gone father of golf statistics names mark mark Brody and his son, chris Brody works with me and for me. Here is my colleague, but you know solving problems here, so we’re very, very tied to that and I bring that up because it’s helped given a really good Framework on what our priorities are. Shouldn’t we focus more on distance? Should we focus more on accuracy? And the other cool piece that we have access to now is a long of all in course data. So I think that’s one of the coolest things is that People evaluated golf equipment through a custom fitting and then you go play golf and it’s kind of like, okay, good luck, we’ll never see again and see what you need new clubs in three, five years. Those days are kind of gone. Now we can throw things like Arcos, which is you know stats, smart stats, tracking, gps, integrated. We know what clubs you’re hitting when on the golf course, where you might be better or worse. We can start bringing that on course big data into our design and fitting environment and it’s super exciting times, I you know.

Quite frankly, I think we’re just scratching the surface on that front and that’s helping us drive those priorities. Where on the golf course can we help golfers play better golf? So that’s exposing some things like your club gapping, that’s the spacing, the yardage spacing you have between all your clubs. We’re doing some really fun things that are driven by on course data. You know on course play. So I think you know of course we want the driver to go super far. We also wanted to go straight. We’re using really cool analytics to give us that ratio of how much further versus straighter and we actually have that boiled down to like a actual simple ratio. You know if your everyday player should be hitting it further in a ratio of two to one, as Compared to their straightness from up, from a statistical standpoint, stroke being standpoint. And then you know we want the copes to sound good, we want to feel good, and then we’re we’re using on course play data To help prioritize gapping and things of that nature.

0:24:16 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I didn’t realize that you guys had and I should have realized this that you had access to all of that, on course, stuff from Things like Arcos, and that’s amazing to me. That and just I mean goes to show how much is involved in the research that you guys are Doing and really trying to figure out. What are the different gaps? Where do people like me versus you know, super low handicappers? You know, guys like you professionals, when you guys are, I mean, obviously you have such a wide array of products for different levels of golfers. Is there one you know, handicap level or or grouping of handicapped levels that makes up the biggest demographic and does that drive a lot of what you’re doing?

0:24:57 – Marty Jertson
Yeah for sure that’s a great question. Yeah, is that? Bug Ping was founded by, you know, a frustrated, really good smart, frustrated engineer, carson soul, I mean. So he, he kind of solved the problem for himself, which was like he was. He was like a, you know, high-handicap golfer that wanted to get better and the game seemed too hard and he wanted to bring better engineering through the equipment. So we ask ourselves that question a lot.

If, if we could only have one model of product for the entire market, what would it be? And by for that’s like our G series product, like our G430? You know, max driver in our G430 irons. By far that’s kind of like our modern-day I2 and for those that golf historians out there, they know the I2 iron which was the number one iron for like a decade in the golf marketplace. Our G430 is that iron that if we only made one it would work amazing for everybody. And but the peak of the market is your high handicapped golfer, right, your weekend warrior. They’re trying to get a little bit better when they can. But they got families, they got John’s, but they get out there on the weekends and they want something that’s gonna have plenty of forgiveness. Go relatively far go, relatively high, and that’s where our G series product is.

0:26:20 – Jeff Pelizzaro
What would you say to? Because I think that demographic is a lot of the people listening to the show We’ve got, you know, instructors and medical professionals listening to, but I like to think that our main demographic listening is obviously the fitness minded golfer, many of them probably in like the 35 plus range and Varying in all ranges of handicaps. But what are some of the things that you would suggest to to that crew Regarding what’s it, what’s most important when you’re looking at new clubs? I know I’ve heard you talk about club fitting and how important that can be. What are some of the recommendations, just simple, low hanging fruit things that you would tell these people?

0:26:57 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, great. Question number one is Don’t be intimidated to go get a club fitting right and be open minded. Be open minded. We’ve built some great tools. If you find a good pink club fitter out there, we have some amazing fitting tools to get you dialed so you can have your line.

Be open, that you can gain Distance or performance through the club designs and equally as much, it’s like a Venn diagram. You want to gain performance through the fitting and you need to marry those two together. You want to have them both have have both the fitting in the, the product engineering Benefiting you okay. So the fitting is super important, equally as important as the product. So be very open minded to try some things like you might have a Superfast club at speed but you might be better because your transition or now you need to launch the ball in a little bit of a softer shaft, you know, so kind of maybe drop your ego a little bit, then you you might have tried in the past right, so that might be something to think about, but definitely get.

You, get on, get a club fitting on a launch monitor. That’s super important and be mindful of not only your one best shot. That might happen you want to look at how consistent they are. You want to look at your how good or your missus. Golf is very much a game that you want to kind of control your misses and you want your misses to be better. So that’s one I think valuable piece of advice when you go into that fitting environment Is, yes, look at your good shots you want to hear your good shots great. But also look at the shots that you don’t hit as good, and that’s where you can really differentiate from better product in Proc that the engineering of the design is as good as your missus. I.

0:28:45 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Like you say, don’t, don’t focus on one shot that you hit, perfect, because I feel like that’s typically how we think in our head, like oh, my seven, I was one 165, because I did it one time and I probably sculled it. So club head versus shaft, I know that. You know, I’ve heard so many times. You know the shaft is super important. What are some of the things about the shaft and I heard you talk about this in the episode on the sub part, talking about and you even Just mentioned about the transition and how that plays a big deal in in what shaft is right for you. But club head versus shaft is one more important than the other or does it just kind of depend? And that’s where the fitting really makes the biggest difference?

0:29:25 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, so you’re gonna control most of the performance through the properties of the head. For example, you know I can’t give you an L flex shaft and an X flex shaft and that will not change how the ball flies as much as me giving you like a nine degree driver versus a 20 degree driver. So the head is the most important from a launch condition in a performance standpoint, but that’s not saying the shaft is not important. The shaft is really a fitting lever. So again, it’s you want to marry them both together and what the shaft can do for you is you want it to kind of match your, your, your kinetics. How do you apply force to the club? Right, this is like your signature, how you apply force and torque, and you mentioned, jeff, like your transition. So the transition is super important because that’s where you change the direction at the top of your backswing and how you apply force and torque to the handle through your hands.

There’s a lot of biomechanics that goes into why everyone does that a little bit differently, but that is the secret sauce of of shaft fitting Is fitting you to the right shaft for A your club at speed.

B whether you need to hit a little bit lower. But the most important thing is that you kind of fall in love with how that shaft is going to behave, bend and deflect, with how you individual golfer apply force and torque through the hands to the handle during the transition, and so a tons of our research goes into how do we build better tools and make that very easy, because that sounds hard and mysterious and overwhelming and intimidating. But we have tools to help our fitters do that and get you into the right shaft. So you have two players that both swing the club. It’s the same speed at the bottom, but they’re going to need totally different shafts based on how they transition it. One might apply a force like more straight along the shaft during the down swing and one might pull down on the handle and deflect it more. And you want to marry how much what you do there in transition to the stiffness of the shaft.

0:31:46 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Can you give us an example of two guys on tour that you know? You know, like two different style swings or two different transitions that maybe give us a better visual of and maybe what you know, if you happen to know what they’re using? Yeah, totally.

0:32:00 – Marty Jertson
So like a smooth transition would be if anyone out there could picture Louis Ustazen like, sweet, swinging, silky looking. I want that swing. Oh, it looks so good and he has what we call a smooth transition. So and this is a really fun story he is typically used.

Even though he swings it like 100, you know, in swing to 118 club speed he is used very soft shafts. He’s even used a shaft out there called the auto flex for a while which is basically like a ladies flex in terms of the bending stiffness Well, and he kind of experimented down with the little for a little while. But he’s typically used the equivalent of an S flex or stiff flex shaft, even though you know, if you go off some some fitting algorithm it might be. Oh, he needs a triple X based on his swing speed. So he’s wanted.

You can visualize him where the club and the shaft go in and then they return closer to the same trajectory on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you guys can kind of visualize well, a Victor Hovland’s the modern day example. Or Cameron champ, both very high club and speed. Cameron champs off the charts. He’s in the you know, the top of the PJ tour for club at speed but they have what we call a very abrupt transition where in that change of direction they’re pulling down on the handle a lot and that that creates a lot of deflection in the shaft. So for those players we need a shaft that’s going to minimize or optimize that deflection, and that’s generally a shaft that’s much, much stiffer in the butt section. And so if you give those guys, if you swap Louis shaft with Victor Hovland, they got the same club at speed. Both of them would go crazy and have a erratic results because we’re not marrying out their kinetics in that transition.

0:33:54 – Jeff Pelizzaro
And that just goes to reiterate the importance of going and having somebody look at your swing, somebody that understands it, have the track man, be able to tell the different you know scenarios, look at the different numbers and fit you for the proper one, right, Exactly.

0:34:09 – Marty Jertson
Yes, yeah, you are. The shaft is all about fitting, it’s all about matching it to you individually, absolutely.

0:34:18 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I want to take just a second to thank our new partner, which I’m really excited to announce is First Form. First Form is a company that is here in St Louis, based in St Louis. It’s a nutritional company that is doing incredible things in the world of nutrition and one of the reasons that we decided to partner with First Form is obviously we’re very impressed with their dedication to their products and the quality of their products. But really it’s the dedication to them and them helping their customers get real results Aside from just the products. We got a chance to go and actually visit the facility again here in St Louis and really walk the halls of the corporate offices. But we got to see the manufacturing plan or the warehouse, and it’s not just a place where they’re packaging supplements and shipping them out. It’s a culture, it’s a community and you can see that amongst the employees. You can see that their culture and their core values that are not just pieces of art on their wall. They’re actually living them there and they’re helping to expand those into the community and really that’s why we partner with First Form.

Obviously, their products are incredible. Otherwise we wouldn’t suggest them either. We use them on a regular basis, so you’re going to be hearing a lot more about their products and what they can do for your fitness, what they can do for your golf game, the protein powders, the multivitamins, the protein sticks, the hydration packets All of those products we’re going to highlight in future episodes. But we just wanted to really celebrate our new partnership with First Form. You can go to their website, FirstFormcom forward slash 18STRONG and we’re going to be doing a giveaway every single month with anybody that buys through that link. So go to FirstFormcom that’s P-H-O-R-M com. Forward slash 18STRONG. That’ll take you directly to their website and you can check their whole suite of products, including some of their fitness apparel and anything that’s purchased over there. You’re going to be enrolled into our list for our giveaway.

So we talked a little bit about your experience from 2018 to 2019. You know, seeing these guys just bomb, bomb balls, it was really wet out there. It’s my understanding Is that kind of where some of the you went and worked on your speed a whole lot. Is that where the idea of the stack started to percolate a little bit, and how did you and Sasha McKenzie, who was your partner and co-founder in the stack system, how did you guys even start to work on collaborating together and give us the story of that.

0:36:48 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, I think my whole career has been trying to create products and I think there’s a good this is like, I think an advice I’ve read or learned about is you want to try to solve your own problem and then, if you can do that, you have like maximum skin in the game and then try to scale it and help others Right. And I think and I’ve tried to create I’ve almost created like a whole ecosystem around that, because golf is such a painful sport. It’s so hard you go out there and so rare to win. Like almost every time you quote unquote lose if in a second or worse than that. It’s such a painful sport.

So, yes, in 2018, when I played the look list when I was in St Louis, that was the tipping point for me, where I was like that was my, I think, third PGA championship and I was like I could definitely get in another one of these, like I could qualify again through the PGA national championship and all those things. My skill was good in a lot of areas but by far, I was at that point where I was hitting it way too short to compete at that level and my life’s dream, my Corona dream, was to make the cut in major Like I was. Like man, I want to play the weekend in one of these things. I don’t want to just come up, come over here, be the club pro, not play the weekend, and off you go and pack your bags and kind of is what it’s going to be. Everyone could cancel. Now I want to. I want to define the odds here and play the weekend.

It was fun to watch Michael blog through that this year by the way, it’s super fun watching him and I’ve talked to him a few times about it. So, yeah, that’s when the whole I guess the pain of like how do I solve it further? And so Sasha, dr Sasha McKenzie, who’s probably golf leading biomechanist he’s been a consultant for us at Ping with research, research on things like shaft video, just talked about club fitting, the biomechanics of the golf swing and how those can help with design and club fitting, and so you know he. But he’s also a track and field coach. He has tons of experience with fitness training and things of that nature, his wife’s track and field coach and a PT that’s kind of what they do up there in Canada. So I talked to him after that event.

I think he was down here for a conference. I was like, man, I need to hit it further. And he was like, well, number one thing, we got to get you a little bit stronger. So he, we, you know I got a ground on the deadlift protocol that he gave me spread sheet, all planned out perfectly, and I’d never even done that. You know I was doing other training stuff, some kettlebell stuff and things of that nature, but I was like, okay, I’m in. And you know I started doing that in my garage. I got my, my trap bar, you know, started out with a couple 45s and boom, there I started then.

Every time I needed to level up I’d go to play, to get in sports and get some more plates and what do you know, there I was, like you know, three or four months later I was like deadlifting like 400 pounds out of nowhere and I was like holy moly Okay.

So that gave me some potential. I had some back. My back was dicey, I think you know in my early twenties the hernia disc things, that nature. My back feels to go right now like zero issues. So that’s been super fun. I think that’s a fun finding.

But I kind of have that base, that base level of strength, and then it was like, okay, how do I get faster? Those are kind of two different things. I need to have the strength and the base level of strength there to make sure I, you know, felt good, have the potential for more, more vertical force. So I kind of have that now in my system, so to speak. Then I need to work on the technique and the speed training side. And he had dabbled with some research on speed training and the thing with speed training. People have kind of done this in golf they will do like gross level, what’s called over speed and overload training, where they would go like super light, super heavy, nothing in between. And he he knew from his research that you had to get much more precise with the speed training. You had to be very precise with the resistance levels, just like you would be when you’re programming weightlifting right. And so we kind of built that hardware that turned out ended up being the commercial product which is now the stack system. That allowed us to have very precise loads on the end and then cycle and build a training program and protocols around having that very precise loads and that has absolutely been the secret to both my speed gains and now that we productize into the stack system. Basically, when folks use the stack, you’re you’re literally getting social McKenzie designing your protocols for you, like it’s all all of his brain kind of packed into the, the algorithms in the app, which is super cool and then a lot of fun.

So that turned my personal game around and helped me gain tons of speed and distance. I mean, I was one you know, I think for the golfers out there that kind of know ball speed I was. I was in the one. I had regressed into the 160s ball speed range, which was low on the PJ tour.

By the time I hit Beth Beach in May of 2019, I was playing golf with high 170s ball speed, which means you’re, which means I was up back to above kind of standard in terms of distance, and then I even dabbled with playing in the 180s a little bit on the golf course, and now I’m trying to, you know, kind of maintain those gains and things of that nature, but it was an absolute game changer in a hundred percent the reason why I was able to a hit my driver further in Beth Beach. But then the other benefit that people don’t talk about is you hit your irons higher right, and so that was that landed steeper, have a little bit more speed out of the rough and all the. There’s other ancillary benefits that come to more speed than just hitting your driver further.

0:42:39 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, I think that’s what we. We think of most is just the driver just off the T box when you were playing with Luke. Give us an idea like how far behind a guy like him were you at that time in 2018? And what maybe would be his typical ball speed?

0:42:55 – Marty Jertson
Luke at the time was in the 190s ball speed. I think he’s actually maybe tighten things up a little bit. I know he just won on tour and his I saw some of his ball speed talk TV that were a little bit less so he may have relaxed his speeds just a little bit, but he was literally like 50 or 60 yards by me. So he was in the 190s and I was in the 160s and I would tee off and I’d be like, okay, I’d like, and there was no, there was hardly any roll there, kind of Zoysia fairways, and it was whether it rained that week and hot and humid in the summertime.

So I my we were kind of exaggerated by the conditions. If you weren’t from our conditions I’d be rolling it out there a little bit more. But he was all carrying to like 330, 340. And I’d be all carry out there to my like 280 or whatever it was at the time. I’m just going oh, like mulling, but if I went back there with my speed today I would have a way better chance of bell reef.

0:43:54 – Jeff Pelizzaro
When I look at the stack system and I haven’t had a chance to use it, but I have several clients that have used it and the thing that I was blown away by is the intuitive intuitiveness of you know you think of it’s just a club that has some weights on it that you swing. Really, I mean the biggest piece is the app and the algorithms and, like you said, it’s basically Sasha McKenzie in your phone. So it’s not just a blanket program for everybody. It’s based on your performance, what you’re doing. So give us a little insight into how that works. And I mean, obviously, that had to take so much time and effort to put all that stuff together.

0:44:29 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, so we needed hardware that could do it. I mean, it’s definitely a hardware software, you know, combining holistic solution. We needed, we needed hardware that gave you very fine spacing so we could change the loads, right, so the hardware has five weights, but we need to do the combinatorics on how we laid out all the masses of those weights. It gives you 30 different combinations. Right, I feel like you’re going into to do curls or something. You know if you didn’t have all those weights, you’d have like 10s, 50s and 100s. I mean, how are you going to progress, right, you know through that, through that range, and so we needed the hardware to do it. And then so the hardware gives us very tight spacing and then you are absolutely right and the key is that everybody gets their own individualized programs.

The first thing you do when you onboard to the stack app is you go through what’s called a baseline session. This is like your assessment, and we have you swing your own driver, you get warmed up, you all that. We have you swing your own driver. Then we have you swing the stack with light, medium, light, medium, medium, heavy, heavy loads and we generate. The app then generates what’s called a force-fellocity curve and based on that force-fellocity curve, it then generates a customized program with specific training loads for you. And then what’s cool about that is that, let’s say, you’re going through your program and as you level up your speed, so if you start getting faster, the app looks at your previous workout and will generate adjustments not only to just one six-week program. That’s not frozen and baked in time, it’s constantly looks at your progress. It will start to level up with you as you go through it.

So every workout is customized. Every single workout that you do is customized in the app. And then once you get done with a training program, which is nearly around six weeks six, seven, eight weeks you do another equivalent of that baseline or assessment session, post-test, post-program assessment and then it compares how you’ve done are there any changes in your force-fellocity profile? And it will kind of ping the AI which is getting like that and saw Joe’s brain in there and they were training the algorithms with everyone who’s doing it and formulate your next program will give you the highest probability to gain more speed and the folks that have gained the most speed do it over two programs. So folks gain a ton of speed in your first six weeks. The folks that go two programs gain a massive amount of speed, like 10 to 12 miles an hour in COVID speed.

0:47:19 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Holy cow, I’m blue, we have so one of my friends and clients, so the podcast studio is also a test to a gym here and so, and we have a hitting day out there.

And so one day I’m walking out and I hear I just hear my buddy Andrew going 96. Like. And I’m like, what are you doing? And he’s like, oh, I’m talking to the app. So you know, yeah, had the little speed monitor, so you have to have the speed. I have to have a speed monitor to do this correctly. But it was cool because he’s just you know he would record what it was and you don’t have to go type things in. It’s like he just speaks it out loud, the app captures it, puts it in the spread. That means I was like holy cow, this is just amazing, so so cool.

0:48:01 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, so that’s what we call that kind of voice entry mode, because you know, eventually we’ll probably have like a radar solution, that Bluetooth through the app. But for now you can just throw your radar down on the ground, you swing and that, yeah, you just talk it in and you can turn on dictation mode and Siri in the app just captures it. Boom, you can train hands free and it’s totally seamless. It has the timers in there, so it controls your rest times absolutely perfectly. And we continue to try to what we continue to kind of refine those in the app. If you break a personal record, the app goes crazy for you. It’ll start cheering for you. So we really drive a lot of the incentives in the app and that is super fun is being able to do that for Do you find that some people are almost a little intimidated when they hear speed training?

0:48:49 – Jeff Pelizzaro
and you know, I mean because I’m thinking of somebody like, obviously, myself, but you know somebody like my dad who’s in his late 60s and is probably thinking I’m not gonna do that, I don’t wanna hurt myself. You know, what would you say to somebody that is kind of in that position and in that mindset where this might seem a little intimidating, might seem like too much to do? What’s your response to anybody with those questions?

0:49:11 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, no it’s good, I think, especially for the. I think especially for folks that are that age, like they’re a little bit older, like hey, is it too late for me to gain speed? Or you know things that nature. Well, on the intimidation side, I would say that you know speed training, if you’re a golfer that wants to get better, is the lowest gaining speed is the lowest hanging fruit. The lowest hanging fruit to lower your sport. Like it is the easiest thing to do with the stack. Like it’s just, if you do, just give us six weeks and you’re gonna gain speed and it’s the most correlated skill to golf handicap. Like if you plon handicap and speed, that’s the most macro level correlated skill. So if you increase your speed you’re gonna lower your handicap.

Okay, so that’s number one. Number two, in terms of kind of the injury side or oh, I might get hurt and things of that nature you are way more probable to get hurt actually playing golf because the forces that occur when you hit a golf ball or the ground or a root or a tough lie or things of that nature are in order of magnitude higher than anything you would experience with speed training. So you’re much more likely to get hurt playing golf right Than you would be speed training. So that’s kind of one thing. Obviously, you wanna we say that with make sure you kind of or in good physical condition, you don’t have any underlying injuries and things of that nature. That’s where the baseline strength level and everything that you guys do is super important because there’s pairing speed training together with your overall fitness training. Make sure you’re in good shape for both playing golf and quality of life off the golf course.

And then I would say also that we have had some of our best reviews from our stack. Customers are golfers that are 60 years of age and older and we have we actually have a good number of golfers in their 80s that are doing speed training and gaining speed and sending us notes over and saying this is a game changer, it’s really fun, and they like the structure of how we have it. Like I think that’s one of the fun things. So one thing we’ve done cause we have tons of when now we have close to 30,000 users that are doing the stack and we charted.

We charted age on the X axis and speed on the Y axis and what you see is you see this peak in club and speed. This is just of all of our users, right? You see this peak around 40 years old of club and speed. And then after that, after you hit age 40, up to our 80, 90 year olds that are using it, you see this decline that’s going down about one mile an hour per year. So if you are over the age of 40, approximately gaining like maintaining speed is actually gaining speed. That’s another perspective to have on this for the older golfer. Right, if you’re maintaining, you’re gaining on your peers.

0:52:17 – Jeff Pelizzaro
One of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot lately on the show is simply the fact that that whole crowd, and I would say even the 35 and 40 and beyond, tend to just kind of neglect the need to move fast and to keep that in your, just in your repertoire. And whether that be speed training, whether that be doing some things in the gym that just get your body and utilizing all of our tissues, tend to get a little tighter, a little stiff, a little less elastic, and it’s something that we can train. And obviously you guys are seeing this with the stack, and I mean up into your 80s, you can make improvements or at least really prevent any kind of loss there, or most of the loss. So that’s just so refreshing to hear, especially because you have the science and the data behind it to show people like, hey, once you hit 40, it’s not over, you still put in the work, you can make significant, significant gains.

0:53:11 – Marty Jertson
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. We have stackers that have trained in their mid 50s, early 60s that have gained. Maybe they’ve lost five miles an hour speed or last decade, but now that they go with the stack they do a couple of programs and they gain 10, and now they’re faster than they’ve ever been in these 55 or 60. This is definitely possible.

The other thing I was gonna say, which I’ve personally changed my mind on or I guess was an unintended consequence of the stack is that there’s a lot of value to swinging fast and training without the consequence of hitting the ball right. So I think a lot of golf coaches and teachers are very focused on hey, I need you to get to hit the center of the face and things of that nature. There’s plenty of time to work on that skill. You have three technique and golf lessons. There’s a lot of value to swinging an object fast with no consequence to hitting a golf ball. That was definitely something that I’ve really leaned into and enjoyed and that a lot of our customers I think are enjoying about training with the staff.

0:54:23 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Technique was gonna be my next question, because I’ve had people say well, I don’t wanna ingrain. If I’m already working on my swing, I don’t have my technique down, I don’t wanna ingrain this improper swing and be swinging out of my shoes. How much are you thinking about technique at all when you’re swinging the stack, or is it simply go as fast as you can?

0:54:44 – Marty Jertson
I think so that’s another thing. I work on my technique while I’m stacking. So let’s say I have a, you know, some restriction. My hip turn here and I wanna get in more side bend. I want to increase my hand path length. I want to work on getting more spike, the pressure under my lead foot more earlier in the transition to get more vertical force. I will actually do those wall stacking and it’s way easier to take that swing change again because I have no consequence to hitting the ball. I’m working on movements. I’m working on very like kind of internal focus of things and then when you go play golf, those things are in hit a golf ball. Those changes are baked in more because I’ve trained them while training the stack and one of the other things about speed training with the stack it’s because you get feedback on your speeds, literally every single swing. It’s maximum feedback. You get feedback on your speeds.

Golfers can self explore what things are gonna increase their speed. Right, let’s say you’re a golfer, you start with hip mobility and you’re gonna go in there. You’re gonna be like I’m gonna try lifting my lead heel, I’m gonna do the step drill, I’m gonna step with the right hand of golfer. You’re gonna take a little step with your left foot, will go in the transition of your swing. You can experiment with those things. I’m gonna try a bigger shoulder turn. I’m gonna let my neck come back. I’m gonna do all these things. A longer hand path I’m gonna try some things with my wrist angles. I’m gonna try a faster backswing and you can see immediately does that spike your speeds graph?

So the instant, continuous feedback to help drive your speeds is another great benefit in the stack. I just think people need to get over that worry that oh, it’s gonna ruin my tempo, it’s gonna ruin my technique. You’ve seen that Fitzpatrick literally training on the stack and winning the US Open. Do you think it’s 40 of them or not? You know Victor Hoffman. He’s got crazy on the stack. He’s driving it longer and straighter than ever.

0:56:56 – Jeff Pelizzaro
It’s so fun to watch these guys these days and I was talking to a PGA Tour player the other day and he’s like man. I was watching Fitzpatrick hit the ball the other day and it’s just amazing to see from a year and a half ago or two years ago or whatever to now and just how different it is and how much change he’s made. It’s pretty special.

0:57:15 – Marty Jertson
I think what’s fun about him is he’s not a mega athlete. You know, he’s not Brooks Kepke out there all buff and ripped and do all the stuff. He’s in great shape, don’t get me wrong, but he just looks like your average bill person, is somebody we could all relate to.

0:57:32 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Totally All right. I got to ask you about the stack putting because you know we think the stack, we think speed we think. But then I hear, no, there’s a stack putting now.

0:57:42 – Marty Jertson
There’s more.

0:57:43 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Tell me more. Tell me more. So give us a lowdown on stack putting. I know we’re running a little low on time here, so we’ll give kind of the short, brief version, because we got some questions asked before we close up. But stack putting where did this come from and how’s it doing? I think yeah.

0:57:59 – Marty Jertson
So I think both Sasha and I, like we’re busy people like everyone else, like we got jobs, families, like all this stuff in a big theme for both of us is what is the most effective use of time when I’m practicing or training? We don’t want to waste time, right, so we again, we wanted to productize this. People go to the putty green and they have it’s too open ended. They have no idea what to do. They have no idea. You ask people that miss left or they miss right. People can’t remember. If they do give you an answer, who knows if it’s right or wrong? They have no stats to back it up and so stack putting is like having Sasha so guide you to play 18 holes on the putting green. That is the most intentional practice of 15 minutes on the putting green.

The app guides you through playing 18 holes on the putting green. It tells you which putts to hit and you’re hitting the putts that matter the most. From a strokes game putting perspective, that means the puts that mean the most to your score, the lower your score. And then it gives you really cool analytics to show you what your tendencies are Right, so it’ll. It could show you that you miss left or right, or 90% of the time to the left, and without tracking it you wouldn’t, you would have no idea, like people don’t, don’t know that information.

So that actually the analytics in there are really cool. Spider diagrams and things of that nature are more advanced and more nuanced than even PJ Tour players get with shot link data. So, yeah, it’s super cool. Then you can create your own little programs in there with the creative mode and then you could also track very detailed your on course, putting stats as well. So, yeah, if you’re if you’re a stack or a speed trainer, you get actions to it or you can just download and do stack putting directly. Now, very intentional focus putting practice, awesome, I love there’s a quote.

0:59:52 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I’m trying to think who was. I think it was Trent Werner, another another PJ instructor that we work with, and he said golf is the worst practice sport on the planet.

And what’s so cool is seeing things like this that are coming, coming about to really help guide us. Just like you were saying before, when designing clubs, if a designer doesn’t have any kind of like walls or anything like any direction, like we can go anywhere. And same thing with putting practice golf go to the driving range is like you can go, spend hours and hours and come back and not have achieved a single thing.

1:00:24 – Marty Jertson
We’re trying to change that, we’re trying to do it. So the stack, the speed training it tells you exactly what to do, when to do it. Send a calendar, swing it when the countdown timer goes on. You can put reminders on your phone, send them to your calendar and then putting is the same way. Do exactly this. And people love, not that not having that open, open emptiness.

1:00:44 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Awesome. All right, Marty. A couple of questions just to finish up here with the 18STRONG crew. First of all, you caddy shack, or happy Gilmore guy.

1:00:53 – Marty Jertson
I have to go caddy shack just because it’s I think it’s going to stay on the test of time better, you know. But I love them both. But I’d slight, slight tip of the needle, the caddy shack.

1:01:06 – Jeff Pelizzaro
If you get to pick a walkup song, what’s your walkup song to the first T box?

1:01:12 – Marty Jertson
I’ve been playing this song lately in my car before my tournaments. Try to get me pumped up. I don’t even know how I found this thing, but it’s by DJ Snake. He’s, like you know, EDM type artist or whatever, called bird machine and my big name is. My big name is journey bird for birdie you know, and I’m like I want to be a bird machine when I go out and play this tournament, so I don’t know why it’s a strange one, but let’s begin me pumped up.

1:01:36 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I cannot wait to listen to that song. All right, is there a book that you’ve read in your past that has meant a lot to you, that you’ve learned a lot from and that maybe you tend to recommend to people?

1:01:50 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, I feel I have so many domains of life, like you got my family life, my work life, my corporate life, my startup life, then my, my golf life, my fitness life I kind of have a favorite in each category. I’m in the golf world, I think I mentioned every shot counts by more Brody Yep. So from a golf domain perspective of my life, I like that one. I really like joc-o-wheel-anks, I think extreme ownership. I loved applying that to aid my personal life, my family, my kids. You know how to empower people, build people up and bring that into the working world. It’s kind of a contemporary one. I like the older books that stand the test of time more, but I love the principles in that book.

1:02:34 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Excellent If you could pick a dream for some who’s who’s your dream for some that you get to play with Anyone in the world, past, present. You can, and you can take them anywhere.

1:02:44 – Marty Jertson
You know what, man, I’m going to say? I’m living the dream because right now I’m playing. I’ve been playing along golf this summer with my wife and my two boys. My wife, my two boys we got the perfect foursome and they’re they’re getting old. I have to really like enjoy golf and just kind of move around the golf course, and I’ve actually I’ve loved that more than anything. Playing with my family, that’s so awesome. How old are the boys? They’re seven and nine, almost 10. Great age.

1:03:11 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Great ages, great ages, all right. So follow up question to that If you could take that foursome. We’ve got the 18STRONG jet. We’ve got a fueled up ready to go. Marty’s taking the wife and the kiddos anywhere you want to go play golf. Where are you going to take?

1:03:26 – Marty Jertson
them. It’s hard not to say Augusta, because how else are you going to get on that thing unless you’re on the 18STRONG jet? Flying right in there. I’ve been there a few times but man, that’s the one that I mean. You know, even people very connected in the golf industry never, never, get away to get on that thing, augusta let’s do it.

1:03:46 – Jeff Pelizzaro
What’s the coolest place that you have been able to get on?

1:03:51 – Marty Jertson
Man, I’ve played some great courses over the years, you know. I think Oakmont was a great one. I mean I played the whole course with my wife and my father-in-law. I played there a couple times Turnberry in Scotland. I’ve been able to play some of the great links courses in Scotland. Yeah, I mean the whole course is. The whole course, quite frankly, was very tough to be, you know, just for the whole history of it, and being able to play that a few times has been awesome.

1:04:18 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Very cool. All right, is there a social media account that you’ve been following, maybe geeking out on a little bit that you recommend to the 18STRONG crew, and this could be golf, this could be fitness, this could be anything, this could be the bird machine guys.

1:04:34 – Marty Jertson
There’s one I really like. I really like what these guys do is called data golf, and they do. They have a lot of great analytics on their website. That’s kind of you know, free to use and explore. It’s a great way to explore like applied statistics from the golf industry and they always run really cool little 10 bits and nuggets from golf tournaments around the world. So data golf super fun to check it out. If you’re either a golf golf gig or a general data geek, check them out.

1:05:05 – Jeff Pelizzaro
All right, I didn’t prep you with this question, just going to throw this one in there. If you got to play your home course and you’re playing against our buddy Drew Sleazy Stoltz, how many shots is who beating who by? You get to pick the course.

1:05:21 – Marty Jertson
Man, drew, drew. I gotta say Drew plays more golf than me, right? So that I think we’re going to be pretty tight. Actually, I think I’m probably at the most if we’re playing a lot of golf, like give them like one aside. But he’s part of these amateurs here in Arizona that play more golf than the pros and, quite frankly, probably play better than the pros.

1:05:45 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Is there a? Is there a transfusions handicap in there at all?

1:05:51 – Marty Jertson
Exactly. Sleazy man is good man. I tell you what he needs. I think next year might be the year they get that four ball championship That’d be sick.

1:05:59 – Jeff Pelizzaro
That would be sick, all right man. Last thing what’s the best piece of golf advice that you’ve ever been given?

1:06:06 – Marty Jertson
Something that started with me a lot, you know and I think has helped me in big tournaments, in a general, even teach my kids is one very simple quote, which is move to relax. I think a golf you kind of like, even when you’re putting everyone’s holding their frozen, you’re like dense still lighting up a thousand times and then you know, and then the anxiety builds and things of that nature. I’ve turned into being like a very kind of static player to moving a lot. I waggle, I move when I tap my putter. I’ve, you know, kind of prime my nervous system before I try to hit a long drive, like the waggle is very big how you move before you swing. So I would say, even when it’s like short game stuff where you’re trying to be very precise on your putting, you’ll be afraid to move waggle, jiggle, wiggle, move to relax.

1:06:58 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Very cool. All right, Marty. Last thing where can everybody find you find information about the stack? We’ll link it all up in the show notes.

1:07:05 – Marty Jertson
Yeah, definitely Thestacksystem.com Check us out there. Social media we got some really cool social media. You can see all of our stackers out there training and sharing their progress, gaining speed and having a lot of fun. So join that community. On the social side Folks can find me, or primarily on Twitter, twitter slash X, now at at Jerty Bird, j-e-r-t-y-b-i-r-d. Give me up, I’m so into kind of the whole trying to get better community and, you know, connecting the fitness side to the speed training side, to the design, the performance. So fun to have some good, fun conversations there.

1:07:42 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, man, this was so good and thank you so much for taking the time. It’s really cool to see what, first of all, you guys are doing at Ping, obviously, but what you and Sasha were doing and really, you know, trying to bring us all to a better way of practicing, better skills and really kind of dialing everything in. So thanks for your time here, Marty. Yeah, you got a lot of fun to join. Jeff, thanks for listening to the 18STRONG podcast. Don’t forget to go follow us over on Instagram at 18strong, and if you found this episode helpful and want to help us spread the 18STRONG mission, we’d really appreciate if you shared with your friends. Train hard, practice smart and play better golf.