What happens when a biomedical company designs a putter “from the body out,” applying years of biomechanics knowledge to the most frustrating component of golf?

Well, this.

Would you putt with something that likely looks so vastly different than your existing flatstick? If the answer is “no,” you might very well change your mind after reading this interview with BioMech CEO, Dr. Frank Fornari.

I spoke with Dr. Fornari by phone and asked him how home a biomedical devices company ended up making putters.

Well,  I worked on many different projects studying physiology and motion analysis for a variety of agencies including NASA. Fast-forward about 25 years…we’re looking to develop motion analysis systems to be used for physical therapy, which is one of the things BioMech does. So we have systems that measure motion in real-time…giving you feedback, giving your therapist feedback. I started playing golf after a long time of not doing it…and I started looking at putting. Putting is half your round…it should be the simplest motion we make in golf…and it’s become the most complicated. So we made a model based on the proper physiology and physics of the stroke…and ran a number of mathematical equations, and this is the stick that came out of it. 

B.A. Tell me a bit about the design of the putter

F.F.: This putter is designed from the body out. Biomechanics: you can’t make the mechanics without the biology. You are not Iron Byron…you’re bone, muscle, nerves, neurotransmitters, skin. We started with the premise that golf equipment should be an outgrowth, an augment, and optimize how your body moves. We wanted…the least amount of energy for the most amount of gain.

And from the healthcare perspective, the number one expenditure is cervical and back problems. If you take a look at the spine angle that people putt at, it’s the worst possible position you could be in. If you’re in that position for a long period of time during the round you’re going to have back problems and neck problems. So you can actually practice putting.

Tell me about the underlying science

In all rotational sports, golf, tennis, bowling, there are optimal angles that your body needs to be in. There’s a differential angle between your leading and trailing shoulder. So you’re trailing shoulder, if you think about all those sports, is below your leading shoulder to allow you to rotate back and straight down the line for wherever you want to get that projectile to go. There are also certain muscles that should be used in all these motions.

Basically the musculature of your legs and core were genetically developed to know how hard to turn to generate the proper distance for a projectile, and that goes back to when we had to throw rocks and spears. You don’t throw with just your arm and hand, right? Your arm and hand just connect the projectile to your legs. Your arms and hands are the remnants of antennae…there’s a ton of nerve-endings that tell you what you’re touching, where you’re going, whether something’s hot or cold or sharp, and there’s directionality to that. If I ask you right now, where’s your right thumb? You know where it is, instinctively. You hands and arms have gamma loops. They’re connected to the spacial part of your brain that knows where you are in Cartesian space. There are nerve centers in your hands and arms, so if you get too close to something hot, you generate adrenaline, your hands and arms start to shake and you run away from it.

So, imagine if you’re putting a five-footer for par is analogous to fire. You’re going to get nervous and it’s going to affect your hands and arms. Your legs and core don’t shake, because they don’t have those receptors. So those are some of the reasons that we’ve veered off [from traditional designs] in putting.

I know beyond design, you have some unique ideas about how to setup and putt…

[Traditional instructors] teach you to make your legs stiff as a board, which you don’t ever have any stiffness in any motion in this world. Putting is no different. It’s exhausting. It doesn’t allow you to maintain any balance, when you’re stiff as a flagpole. We’re taught to square our shoulders up, which, once again, you’re going to lock out your trailing shoulder from rotating straight back and then try and move a putter that’s sticking out way ahead of where our eyes are in an arc using your hands and arms. And you can’t judge the speed of that, because once again, you’re not connected to the center where, like, your baseball throw is or your rock throw is. And you’re going to try to put a ball in a hole, where, if you’re off 1/16th of an inch from eight feet, you miss the putt.

So we simply said, let’s develop this stick. It got people in the proper shoulder tilt. This putter is, if you will, an orthotic. You set it down. The lean angle is about 12.5 degrees, which, if you put your hands together in front of you without doing any work, that’s about 12.5 degrees. So you set it down, you wrap yourself around it, right hand low. You hands and arms, with the shaft leaning against the inside of your left arm are now out of the stroke. So that club face is going to be stable. and liberating the shaft from the face of the putter allows your alignment to be better.

We tested this. We took about 100 really good golfers putting from 12 feet with their putter and asked them to line up a putt and they were about a cup out on each side. If you look down at traditional putters, the shaft is in the way of 1/3 or 1/4 of it, and the shorter something is, the harder it is to tell if it’s lined up. So, if you had a picture frame at home and it was 20 feet wide, you could really see if it was level. If it was an inch wide, you really couldn’t tell.

This alignment system is a curvilinear line in the middle that makes a T when your eyes are exactly over that line. You want to be looking right down and over the line of the putt. You don’t want to be bent with your eyes and ball in a different spot, because every angle is different based on the putting distance…your brain just doesn’t like that. It likes to look right down the line.

So we’ve got you set up down the line, we’ve got your shoulders in the proper tilt, we’ve got you lined up better. The fulcrum, this is the longest putting stroke in golf because the fulcrum is about a foot above your leading shoulder. So because your eyes are in the same sport over the ball every time, the rest of your body is in the same spot, we just collocated the proper angle of incidence from which to strike the ball. And the ball doesn’t wobble, it doesn’t skid because you’re striking it, literally, at almost the same spot every time.

So from your waist up should be one piece. Much like the rest of the golf swing. Much like shooting a basketball or throwing a baseball. So now you just liberate your knees. Make a small weight shift, moving your entire body with your quads. It’s the same thing your would with an 8-iron bump-and-run or with any other rotational movement, whether it’s bowling or hitting a driver.

Now, you’re using the mass that’s in your body, rather than the 20 or 30 pounds of mass that’s in your putter and arms. So judging the distance, much like throwing a rock, becomes simple.

And the stroke…?

If I gave you a baseball, and I said, “Throw it 30 feet away,” you wouldn’t even think about it. And if I backed up 10 more feet, you’d just turn harder. That’s the same concept.

So you can take the putter back three, four, five inches and just turn a little bit harder, and you’ll dial in the distance. It becomes so simple to do this.

And because the face doesn’t turn, and you’re using the mass of your body, the moment of inertia on this putter is negligible. Whether you hit the ball on the toe or the heel or anywhere, it doesn’t turn the face because the putter is stable against your leading arm.

Because you’re taking a shorter backstroke and coming straight through, you’re not taking a big, long backstroke using your hands and arms trying to decelerate because you’re off balance because your legs are locked down—you either have to slow down or recoil, because if you don’t you’re going to fall forward.

With this putting method, you’re stably shoulder-width, a little open to the hole and the center of your mass never leaves the middle. So you simply load your right side a little, release down the line and accelerate through the putt. And you’re balanced, so a thirty foot putt is just as easy to make as a five-footer.

You’ve mentioned that this putter and component method takes a lot of stress off the back?

The lie angle of this putter is between 13.5 and 15.5 degrees. So you’re spine angle and your cervical position are such that we’ve taken nearly all the stress off your back and neck. I’ve had people with for our five hours on the green putting with these things—with back problems—and they come up to me and say, “My back feels great.”

After a 5, 6, 7, 15, 18 holes, because you’re bent over putting, your back muscles are tired and they’re sore. So what you’ll start to see in almost every golfer’s round, they start to lift up during their regular swing because their backs are sore, so they’re topping the ball, they’re mishitting it. But this putter, it actually keeps your back so healthy, you can stay in that zone where’s you’re striking the ball where you want to because you’re back isn’t fatigued or sore. So it really helps the rest of your golf game as well.

Is this primarily a game-improvement putter?

This putter is for everybody. I’ve had PGA Tour pros use it. Every single person that uses it gets better. Everybody. If you think about this putter being the house, and your other putter being the gambler in Vegas. Over time, this putter will win, because it eliminates, statistically, the bulk of errors that you would have with your putter.

What’s on the horizon for BioMech?

Putter heads only come in about three flavors: blade, hybrid, and mallet. We have three putter heads coming out this year. We have an adjustable grip that allows you to change the length of the putter. We have some new shafts. Very sophisticated carbon fiber shafts with some differential stiffness in them based on how you putt the golf ball. So it becomes a putting system. Instead of spending hundreds and hundred of dollars for three putters, you could spend four or five hundred dollars for this system and have three putters, three possible shaft combinations, and it’s adjustable.

And maybe by the end of the year, we’ll have the first prototype wedge coming out with the same technology and angles as this so you don’t blade or skull or shank a chip shot again. If you’re a high-handicap golfer, you’re hitting one or two greens per round and you’re spending a lot of time around the greens chipping. These wedges make a lot easier for you to get the ball not only on the green but closer to the hole.

Everything we do is data-driven. We use the scientific method. We try to disprove any hypothesis that we have. It’s all about the data, including what the putters look like. The optimal goal is to build in the aesthetics as well as the functionality.

This year we’re rolling out a motion analysis system for putting. It’s going to be on the market hopefully in two to three months. It’s really a medical tool that we morphed into a way to teach you to chip and putt.

If I told you that one tenth of all golfers can take a golf lesson. We don’t think that’s the way it should be. For a small monthly subscription, less than a sleeve of golf balls, you can have these sensors…in real time…a band attached to your wrist…high-energy bluetooth…it tells you, in real time, what you’re doing wrong. And it can send that back to your teaching pro. And it’ll generate a report from some of the world’s best teaching pros.

It’s a hard game. It’s hard enough as it is. If you don’t have that teaching pro, it’s next to impossible. And you can generate this data 24/7, instead of having to go to a facility and be on a machine for 15 minutes and then go away.

What has the reception been like since the AccuLock Ace came on the market?

Last year, when we came on Tour, the announcers were like, “That’s a weird-looking stick.” But this year it’s like, “That’s really high-tech looking!” So we’re winning the battle slowly (laughing).

Technology drives tradition. We’re not using persimmon woods or wooden shafts anymore. So when better technology becomes available, it just becomes what’s traditional. If it’s good, and it works, and the science backs it up, it will become what people use. People will migrate to the optimal outcome all the time. You know, if there are five hospitals and four of them have high mortality rates, they’ll go to the fifth one.

At BioMech, because we’re all data driven and have a much better understanding of how the body works than most companies, we feel that this [putter] just makes sense for people. And if they use it, they’ll see that their putting will improve. Not only will you make more putts, but the quality of your misses will be much, much better, which is, at the end of the day, just as important. I’d rather have tap-ins than three and four-footers. Then I’m happy playing the game. I’m not depressed on the next hole, and the game becomes fun again.