Golfers who have to yell over the noise of their own clubs on the golf course, may want to consider wearing earplugs during their practice rounds.
The problem of noise on the golf course is a result of all the equipment that is involved in hitting a golf ball, and there is no way to completely eliminate it. However, by wearing earplugs during practice rounds, you can eliminate up to ninety percent of the noise from your game.
If you are a golfer and are interested in hearing how these ear plugs will help you out, then check out my site where I give you details about how these ear plugs work for golfers.
The most common way to play golf is to hit a ball with a club and let it roll down an incline. The ball is going from high to low, and the low end of the sound spectrum is always going to be lower than the high end–just as if you were taking your voice and moving it down an incline.
But if you can make that sound softer before it reaches the hole, its energy will be spread out over a larger area. That way the sound of your clubs will be less noticeable. If you are playing with others, you may be able to find a spot on their course where the sound of your clubs doesn’t reach them.
In golf, as in all sports, equipment has a certain noise, and you have to deal with it. You can take the easy way out and buy silence: for about $100 these days, you can have a sound-deadening insert for your driver, or $1,200 for one for your three wood. Or you can use a bit of effort and learn some tricks to bring down the noise without paying that much.
One trick is to use the shaft itself as a kind of muffler: when you hit the ball, you shake the shaft against your body so that it makes a noise like someone dragging his feet over gravel. Another one is to swing slowly on top of the ball so that it comes off the clubface slowly; this is harder than it sounds, because if you move fast enough through the air to make an aerodynamic impact on the ball, you will make more noise than if you were just dragging the clubhead across it.
There are tricks for other noises too. The main thing is to remember that golf is an acoustical battlefield and do what you can to reduce your side’s noise level. And since there aren’t any rules against making noise yourself, sometimes body-shaking works better than trying to minimize your opponent’s
The question is, what’s the point of this? If you play golf for the noise, then you should buy a bagpipe and play it quite loudly. The sound of a bagpipe would be terrible, but it would be like playing a club with a big mouthpiece. A lot of the sound you hear is wind whistling through a long pipe, so a loud bagpipe would make the same noise as no bagpipe at all.
If you play golf for the beauty of the course, then I’d recommend buying an electric guitar and wearing earplugs. There are parts of Pinehurst that are very beautiful, but there are also parts that are not beautiful at all. It’s hard to see why they made them look like they did. The original courses were all round courses. They got rid of them because they were very hard to maintain in wet weather: every time it rained, they needed to be completely redone.
If you are on a golf course, and the guy ahead of you stands up to take a swing, you can be sure that he is doing it for a reason. He is using his body in a way that will produce sound.
The reason could be anything from the need to warm up his muscles before taking a full swing to the desire to drown out the giggles of his caddie.
Our own desire for silence has a similar explanation. In order for us to hear what our partner is saying we have to push away sound. When we stand at the top of the tee, we are not just thinking about where our ball will go; we are also trying to keep out the noise made by everyone else’s golf balls, and by the caddies and their carts and even by stray dogs and cats.
A few years ago I wrote an article about the physics of golf. It was very popular and I got dozens of letters from readers, some of them quite technical. Every one of them had a single thing wrong with it. In every case the problem was the same: they had no idea how far away you can hear a golf ball. They heard it on the fairway, where it usually sounds like a cannon blast. But they assumed that if you could hear it on the fairway then you could hear it farther away, too; and since the ball is going to come to a stop before it gets to wherever you happen to be standing, there’s nothing you can do about it once it’s gone beyond your line of sight.
But in fact the sound pressure level drops off as 1/distance2 . So if you’re ten yards from the green and you take an iron shot that goes out 200 yards, then in 40 yards of open space you will have an SPL equivalent to a shot that went out into the next county. That is not good for your ears. If your club hits the ball, get right up on top of the green, and then try to find out where it is going (by looking at where the ball is coming to rest). If
When you are trying to hit a golf ball, all that matters is the position of the club face at impact. If you know where the ball is going to land, it doesn’t matter if you’re hitting a tree trunk or an open window.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to do this well. To do it well, you need two things: a good idea of what the club head will do in various situations and a good idea of how it will feel to hit the ball.
To get the idea, you experiment with different types of clubs and then find out how they feel when you swing them. You try to swing them in exactly the same way as before; but because you can’t see what’s going on inside your body without stopwatches, it’s easy to forget once you start swinging that your muscles are being asked to move in unpredictable ways. That’s why there’s such a difference between a swing that is smooth and one that feels jerky.