Get Perfect Tempo in Your Golf Swing

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Why do the pros we see on T.V. always look so smooth and effortless and you always feel like you are working way too hard and not getting the results you deserve? Well, in this video I'll show you why and more importantly, I'll show you how to get better tempo that will lead to effortless power in your swing.

  • Focus on shifting your weight first.
  • Rotate your body keeping your arms straight and relaxed. 
  • Try to get the club to rotate at the same rate as your sternum throughout the backswing. 


Have you ever found yourself wondering how golf pros on T.V. look like they are swinging so smoothly and so effortlessly, yet they still hit the ball a country mile?

Have you found yourself looking for a way to make your swing work just as efficiently as theirs? Do you find that you are just working way too hard on your golf swing and just not getting the results that you think you deserve?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then you want to pay close attention now!

I am going to show you why you have such a hard time getting effortless power in your swing and more importantly, I am going to show you how to correct it. I am also going to show you a great way to make your backswing buttery smooth and loaded with power just like the pros you watch every weekend.

Good tempo in the golf swing is hard to come by for a lot of us and often times we struggle trying to slow things down in the backswing. But, why?

The Cause...

The major difference between your golf swing and the ones you see on T.V., is purely driven by how you prioritize the moving parts of your body in the backswing. Most golfers that struggle with tempo, tend to get their arms and shoulders working very hard at the first move off the golf ball.

The Effect…

Moving the hands and arms very quickly to get the golf club started into the takeaway and backswing, feels very powerful to us. It feels like we can swing the golf club at 150mph with no problem at all.

Well, this is the problem...if you are getting the club moving as quickly as you possibly can into the backswing, you are eventually going to have to change the direction of the club to get it back down to the ball right?

By starting your golf swing this way, you are signaling to your brain that you want the hands and arms to be the primary power source. You are also not allowing your body to rotate and load up the big muscles that are critical for power and speed in the swing.

If you are wanting to swing the club at 100mph, you need to have 32lbs. of muscle available for you to do so. If you’re like me, you do not have that amount of muscle available to you in the arms and shoulders. However, you do have more muscle available to you in your core and your trunk.

In order to activate these big muscles in the golf swing, you must learn how to shift your weight and rotate properly. Check a video called “How to build your swing from the ground up”, for perfect explanation.

The Fix…

Now that we understand how important engaging big muscles in the golf swing can be, it’s time to slow the hands and arms down and focus primarily on loading up your trail side and rotating your body properly in the backswing.

Every move that the golf club makes in the swing is going to be driven by how we move our body. No matter how much we yell at the club and tell it to move into a perfect backswing position, or tell it to hit that stupid white ball on the ground, it will not do the work for you. Trust me, I have tried to make it happen.

If you want to work on building more power, all while getting better tempo in your swing, then try shifting your weight to load up your trail leg and then rotate the golf club into the takeaway and backswing at the same exact speed as your sternum. Keep your arms relaxed and allow your body to move the arms and hands and you are not starting to build up that power and you will develop great tempo as the kicker.

After you have learned how to load up your swing and build better tempo, it is time to put it all together. Watch this video called “Load the right glute - Shorten swing - Start transition”. You will be amazed how many swing faults you can overcome. Good luck on your game!

Have you ever asked yourself the question why does a tour player always look like they're swinging the club so smoothly, yet they're able to generate a ton of club head speed and hit the ball for miles? Have you been working on things in your golf swing to kind of smooth things out and really never been able to get a lot of that effortless power that you see on TV? Well in today's video I'm going to show you how to get your golf swing started off on the right foot by loading your body up the correct way. I'm going to give you guys a really simple drill that's going to help you get better tempo and a more powerful, loaded back swing.

                Okay guys. So, the objective of today's video is to start to give you a good way to develop better tempo in your golf swing which, in turn, you can start to use for more effortless power, and you can stop working so hard and get a lot more club head speed. I know I started the video off by saying, "Why is it that golf pros always look so smooth and they're able to generate speed to where they hit the ball over 300 yards?" Well, the difference between them and what you do is that they prioritize their back swings around load and rotation, which in turn gets the golf swing started off on the right foot. We start to develop more width, which in turn we can use for lag on the down swing. We call up our big muscles, get those things loaded up that we can use for power.

                Now, one fact I want you to understand - in order to swing a golf club at 100 miles an hour, you have got to have 32 pounds of muscle available to you. 32 pounds, that's quite a bit, right? I don't have 32 pounds of muscle available to me in my shoulders and my arms. Where do I have 32 pounds of muscle available? Well, I've got it in my biggest surface area muscles - my lats, my glutes, my core. I want to get those muscles engaged first because that's going to help us start to develop that power. It's going to help us with our down swing sequence and it's going to be less arms driven to where we feel like we have to work so hard. So that's the difference.

                One of the things that I want you to understand is that if you've noticed that your golf swing goes really fast and you haven't turned your body at all, your arms and shoulders feel really loaded up, your hands are really close to your shoulders, then we need to shift your focus over to the more important parts of the golf swing, and that's going to be load and rotation.

                To help you further understand what I'm talking about here, I want you to hold your arms out in front of you here, okay? Put your hands touching each other, your palms touching each other. We're going to use my sternum as kind of a center point here. What I want you to do is I just want you to keep your sternum really quiet and just push your arm across your center, and keep pushing. What you're going to notice is that your right arm starts to break very quickly. What does that translate to in the golf swing? Well, if you start to break your right arm really early, you're going to notice that your swing arc is very narrow, you're going to notice that your body hasn't turned a whole lot.

                Now, number one, you haven't really established a lot of width, which if you watch golf on TV, you'd see that 99.99% of these guys all have an extreme amount of width in their takeaway. But it's also signaling to the body that the hands, the arms, the shoulders are becoming the primary power source. It's getting your shoulders really loaded up and in turn they're gonna start to fire. Which, when they fire very early, you're gonna start to throw the club away.

                So now, to focus yourself on how important core body rotation and load are, put your hands back out in front of you here, I want you to try this out. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna get our sternum to rotate at the same rate as our thumbs. So you see how my thumbs are up in the air here? I'm just gonna do this several times over. And what you're gonna notice if I go down into golf posture here and I just rotate my chest at the same rate, or my sternum at the same rate as my hands, both my arms stay very straight and very relaxed. This is, in turn, allowing the golf club to move and it's establishing more width. You'll also start to feel your core engage. You won't feel tightness in the shoulders and the arms, you'll feel nice and relaxed up there. But if you do several reps of this you'll notice that "oh man, I feel these muscles starting to engage again, I didn't even know I had these." But, I can start to feel my body really using those, and that's really critical for you in effortless power.

                You can actually try this drill, when you start to put a club back in your hand, you want to try and keep your sternum rotating at the same rate as your club head. So the goal is that this club is gonna be moving, the club head is gonna be moving at the same rate as my sternum throughout the entire backswing. This is gonna help promote more rotation in your golf swing, it's gonna help ... As long as you're shifting your weight, you're gonna have more width. Which, in turn, now if you've got a lot of width at the top of your swing, you can translate that into more lag in your downswing.

                So try it out. Get the golf club ... Start without a club first, but the goal is to get this club head rotating at the same rate as your sternum all the way through the backswing. And now you'll have a much more loaded backswing, just like the guys you see on TV.

                Okay guys, so now that you've seen this really cool drill on how to develop better tempo in your golf swing and you've seen the importance of how to build load and rotation just like the guys you see on TV, there's gonna be a video over here in the recommended videos tab to the right hand side of video player. It's called "Load The Right Glute, Shorten Your Swing, Start Transition". This is a great video that's gonna show you how to kind of tie all this stuff together. It's gonna get you more lag than you've ever seen before, and it's gonna get your golf swing really driven by your lower body and your downswing.

                Try this video out, okay? Work these two drills together. You're gonna see that you have way more speed in your golf swing, and you're gonna have a much more smoother tempo.

 

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Djamil
Hi, I am a very tall player, i would like to know if when you are very tall you need to start the takeaway and backswing more slowly?
November 1, 2015
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Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Hello Djamil. The muscles and movements of the body will remain the same. No need to change your backswing pace to put the body into the correct positions.
November 2, 2015
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David
Chris, Nice work with the, "Perfect your golf impact" series. Can you and the team please make a video and respond to the proper tempo time one should take from takeaway to impact? I have read about the 3-1 ratio and heard that the PGA Tour Averages between .9 - 1.2 seconds. I have the Tempo Timer Swing Radar and am swinging too slow by these standards. Can you please advise on the best way to speed up the backswing, keep from being too positional in the swing, and what problems too slow (time, not clubhead speed) of a swing causes ? Thanks. David
November 1, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Hey David, Glad to hear you enjoyed the video. I have researched this topic a bunch and I can work on doing a video that will address ratios and the ins and outs of them.
November 2, 2015
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Anthony
This is a great drill to build tempo in the backswing by keeping the arms and body in sync with the thumbs and center moving together. What drill or move (like the backswing) can you make in the downswing to keep the arms in body in sync.
September 1, 2015
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Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Hello Anthony. The Re-Shaping Your Swing for Lag will be the best and/or the How to Swing from the Ground Up.
September 1, 2015
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Evan
Can't find drill?
August 29, 2015
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Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Hello Evan. The mentioned video is in the Recommended Video Tabs to the Top Right of your page. Load Right Glute: Shorten Swing, Start Transition Drill.
August 31, 2015
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Thomas
i think of moving my bell button at the same rate so that the butt end on the club continues to point at it. I assume that is equivalent?
August 27, 2015
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Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Hello Tom. Early on the belly button will match in the takeaway and that is okay. However, once you start leaving the 9 O'Clock position the shoulders will rotate further than the belly button.
August 31, 2015
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Thomas
agree. For me if i get the first foot of movement right the rest follows.
August 31, 2015
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KC
I understood that. What was confusing is that other tips on tempo usually relate to a ratio of take away to downswing and how to keep transition smooth etc. in order to build power. Is there a "tempo" recommended in the rotary swing system? If so how do we measure it in order to improve our "tempo" and therefore our swingspeed and power?
August 26, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Hey KC, I know you mention that you are confused because "other tips" use a different way of teaching you how to get better tempo in the swing based on ratio. Let's stop and look at the swing from a very black and white picture...Where do we want to have clubhead at it's fastest point? Impact right. Ok, so now that we know where we want speed, how do we get max speed to happen at impact? This could be a pretty long answer, as there are many different moving parts that lead up to impact. On average, a tour player will move the golf club (6 iron) between 22-26MPH through the takeaway, backswing AND even in the downswing it is still moving 22-26mph AND then speeds up to 96mph 3 feet prior to impact. My point is, what are we trying to achieve in the takeaway and backswing? The main goal is to load up our big muscles to help aid in power and proper downswing sequence. The other objectives are to establish width and create a swing plane. Other than that, the only point that I was trying to make in this video was to help prioritize your swing in a way to get things loaded up properly. Hope that helps.
September 1, 2015
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Brandon
Hi Chris - I noticed RST endorses using Tour Tempo and its 3:1 backswing to downswing ratio. Is there a tempo number that RST generally recommends ?
January 25, 2016
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Hey Brandon - That can vary from one student to the next. We agree that temp can and will change from one person to the next. I have a fast tempo in my swing but its based purely off the DNA of width, leverage and rotation that my swing has in it
January 25, 2016
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KC
Good information in the video, but there really was nothing involved or demonstrated on actual tempo.... will check out the next / recommended video - maybe it's there.
August 26, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Hey KC -- Sorry if I didn't make it clear enough. The point is to get your clubhead to rotate at the same rate as your sternum in the takeaway and backswing and that way you remain in sync and dont allow the arms to load up too quickly. Try it out!
August 26, 2015
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Anthony
Chris, great video, my problem in the backswing is my shoulder plane is too flat, my shoulders almost turn parallel to the ground. My question is on what plane should the shoulders turn on and what do you think causes a flat shoulder turn. Thanks
August 25, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Hey Anthony, glad you enjoyed the video. You want the shoulders to rotate perpendicular to the spine throughout the golf swing. If you are noticing your shoulders turning flat, you could be pushing hard from the lead shoulder or trying to wrench the trail shoulder down too hard. More than likely it is a lead shoulder push causing your problems.
August 26, 2015
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Steven
Great Video. Thanks Chris!
August 25, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Thanks Steven! Glad you enjoyed.
August 26, 2015
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Steve
this helps a ton. Great video Chris
August 25, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Thanks Steve! Glad you enjoyed.
August 25, 2015
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chris
Thanks Chris, excellent tip and explanation. This makes perfect sense, but have never noticed or been told about matching up the arms and chest rotation. Now the big question... is there a similar technique for the downswing? Keep the great videos coming - Chris.
August 25, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Thanks Chris and glad to hear that you enjoyed it!!! There is a big difference with what we are looking to do for the downswing sequence. We want the lower body to drive and pull the upper body down into the hitting area for the release. Watch Chuck's build the swing from the ground up video as well as the "move 3- the downswing" video for clear understanding.
August 25, 2015
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William
Another fantastic video, Chris! I had a 'lightning bulb' moment on the golf course yesterday and that was to swing in 'slow motion' as Clay recommends. It really allows your body and mind to 'sync' the bio-mechanical positions we're looking to achieve at each point in the swing - still not right, but getting better. I'd rather hit it better 'slower' than mis-hit it 'faster'... I sometimes hate this game! William
August 25, 2015
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Chris (Certified RST Instructor)
Thanks very much William and trust me, we have all tended to hate this game at some point, but then you have turn around and love it all over again on the next shot. Crazy game.
August 25, 2015

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