Snap a wet towel and the tip moves faster than your hand ever did. Your arm slows down on purpose, and that lost speed has to go somewhere, so it floods into the towel and explodes out the end.
That is not a trick. That is physics, and it is the same physics your body uses to hit a golf ball. Understanding it will change how you read every lesson, every tip, and every slow-motion tour swing you ever watch.
What the research actually says
In 1993, biomechanist C.A. Putnam published a study in the Journal of Biomechanics on what is now treated as a basic principle of human movement: proximal-to-distal sequencing. Strip the Latin off and it means near to far. The parts near the center of your body move first. The parts far from the center move last.
Putnam showed that in a properly sequenced motion, each segment accelerates, peaks, then decelerates to pass its energy outward to the next one. The hips slow so the torso can speed up. The torso slows so the arms can fly. That deceleration is not a flaw. It is the whole point. The slowing of one link is what launches the next.
In 2006, Kibler and colleagues in Sports Medicine described the same system as the kinetic chain, with a phrase worth keeping: the core is the engine, and stability at the center is what lets force pass cleanly from the ground to the hand.
The Titleist Performance Institute later put golfers on 3D motion-capture and drew the result on a screen. They call it the kinematic sequence, and for the best ball-strikers the graph is always the same shape. Hips peak first. Then torso. Then arms. Then club. Four peaks, in order, ground up, each one rising and falling just in time to launch the next. A staircase of waves.
The pattern is so reliable that TPI uses it to diagnose what is wrong with a swing. Which means there is a right shape and a broken shape, and a machine can tell them apart.
"Effortless power" is a measurement, not a feeling
When the sequence runs clean, you barely feel like you are trying. The ball just leaves. Golfers call it effortless power, and they are not exaggerating. The effort got distributed across the whole chain, so no single part had to strain.
That phrase is the tell. When you hear it, you are hearing a kinetic chain that was never interrupted.
How the modern swing cuts the chain
Here is where it gets uncomfortable, because the swing taught at most academies makes three specific cuts to this sequence.
Cut one: two centers. You are taught to load onto your trail side, then slide laterally onto your lead side before rotating. The chain runs cleanest around a single stable center, and a lateral slide is the center itself moving. Energy that should climb the chain leaks sideways into the slide.
Cut two: the clumped fire. On motion capture, modern-taught golfers tend to show hips and torso firing almost together instead of in sequence, because the coil wound them so tight they unwind as a unit. The waves collide instead of cascading.
Cut three: the manual release. In a clean chain, the club releases by itself; the sequence simply runs out of links to hand off to. The modern swing breaks the sequence upstream, so the natural release never arrives on time. Instruction patches this with a deliberate, hand-timed release inside a window measured in hundredths of a second. You are timing by hand what your body used to do for free, and that is the hardest thing in golf.
Tour pros survive all three cuts because they have decades of conditioning and full-time teams holding the timing together. Amateurs get the same broken chain with none of the scaffolding. The leaked energy is also why your lower back pays the bill.
What I saw on the force plate
I spent eight months running motion-capture and force-plate analysis comparing modern-taught golfers against students of my father, Kevin Keding, who spent forty years teaching a single-axis swing in Wilmington, North Carolina.
The modern swings showed two centers of pressure, hips and torso firing as one clumped block, and a hands-timed rescue at the bottom. My father's students produced the textbook staircase: ground, hips, torso, arms, club, each curve cresting and falling cleanly into the next. They swung faster, with visibly less effort and less load through the spine.
The machine does not care who is moving. It measures pounds and milliseconds and where your speed went.
The takeaway
Power in a golf swing is not a positions problem. It is an order problem. Your body already knows the order; every rotational sport on earth trains it. The question is whether your swing model lets the sequence run or forces you to fight it.
Stop chasing positions. Start protecting the sequence.
The full case is a free 30-minute book. The swing is a $98 course.
Golf's Great Lie lays out the research, the story, and the motion-capture data behind everything in this article. The Axis One course teaches the swing itself: one axis, one pivot, one sequence. No subscription, because a swing you own is the entire point.