RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Influences of Motor Control Adaptation and Human-Equipment Interaction on Issues Related to Golf-Club Design and Optimization
G.B. Shan1, *, N. Betzler 2, B. Dunn 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 1
First Page: 27
Last Page: 33
Publisher Id: TOERGJ-1-27
DOI: 10.2174/1875934300801010027
Article History:
Received Date: 25/02/2008Revision Received Date: 23/04/2008
Acceptance Date: 26/04/2008
Electronic publication date: 16/5/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
In the current sport-equipment industry, equipment evaluation and/or optimization are mainly done through pure mechanical procedures. It is known that any change of performance environment would cause one to adapt certain aspects of his or her movements to the changed environment. Variation of sport-equipment is counted as an environment change for human performance. Yet, the equipment-induced motor control change is hardly studied and less considered in golf club evaluation/optimization by industries. This study aimed to elaborate on two aspects related to equipmentinduced motor control change using biomechanical analysis of golf swing. The results showed that mechanical variations of clubs did cause significant changes in motor control during golf swings. This would suggest: 1) equipment-induced motor control adjustment would alternate the results of pure mechanical optimization and 2) a reasonable approach for the optimization of golf club should consider both mechanical and biomechanical factors. The results of this study should serve as primary evidence for initiating more and more biomechanical tests related to optimization of golf clubs in sportequipment industry.