Clinic - Downswing & Release

The keys to the kingdom - learn the secrets to sequencing for a perfect golf downswing.

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Weight shift is what allows everything to start to sequence correctly.

That's how important it is.

Sequencing is the golf swing.

It's the most important part of the golf swing.

If you don't sequence right, even if you hit all of these cool looking positions, you'll have zero power.

So what do we do in the downswing?

Our first thing, how many of you have heard your swing starts from the ground up?

We've all heard that a million times.

What does that mean?

What do you mean the swing starts from the ground up?

Your legs move first.

The top of your back swing, your legs move first.

Exactly.

And what most golfers do?

Exact opposite, right?

Shoulders and arms are the first thing to fire.

Why do you think that is?

And not very many people throw a ball like this, but anybody who's learned how to throw a ball will at least try and take some sort of step usually.

Why is that such a natural movement?

And yet when we hit a golf ball, the first thing we do is take our arms and shoulders and huck them at the ball.

That's right.

Your brain's number one governor for when to fire a muscle is what?

Tension.

That's it.

Remember your brain's kind of stupid.

It needs repetition and it uses really simple calls as to understand what you're asking it to do.

And one of the biggest things that it listens to is tension because it doesn't want to injure you.

So when your body gets a lot of tension in it, what is the first thing it wants to do?

Get rid of that tension, right?

Not rocket science.

You know this stuff already.

So when you go to the top of your swing and you've taken your left arm and pushed it really hard across your chest and lifted your arm up, where is all your tension?

It's all up here.

So of course you're going to fire those muscles first.

So what should your shoulders and arms be at the top?

That's right.

They're activated, but they're not tense.

Your arms have to help swing the club up to the top, but a lot of that momentum is being created with weight shift and rotation.

Just by shifting my weight and turning, my hands have momentum in them.

If I allow that to keep going, it'll help me get all the way to the top.

My arms can be totally chilled out, which means at the top, I can have no tension or relatively no tension up here and focus on getting my lower body to move first.

My wrists have to be soft and supple, not talking floppy and loose and out of control.

There's a balance between these two, but your hands cannot be rigid because then the club won't be able to down cock on the way down, which I'll talk about in just a second.

The big thing I want you to understand is how much weight shift is involved because hardly anybody shifts enough.

Now, how many of you back when Tiger was really, really good, how many of you would say Tiger slid in the downswing?

Anybody?

You think he slid?

Really?

How come?

Yeah.

When we're saying slide, let me define that so people are not familiar with stupid golf terminology stuff.

A slide is generally considered a big lateral movement.

That's what we would call a slide.

So when we think of sliders, who are you guys you think about?

Miller, Watson.

Yeah, Colin Montgomery.

Exactly right.

Weisskopf.

All those guys were big hip sliders.

That stuff has pretty much completely gone away.

Colin Montgomery is one of the last throwbacks for that era.

But that's what we generally think of as a slider, a hip slider, right?

Now, would you say Tiger was a hip slider?

No.

If anything, you look at Tiger's swing, especially when he was really at the peak of his game, he looked really efficient.

He was just turning back and turning through, right?

I want you to look at the amount of lateral movement that was in Tiger's swing.

These lines are exactly where they were at the top of his backswing.

How much did he move in the downswing?

Well, let's look at this red line.

The red line at the top of his backswing is right about the center of his hip socket.

Pretty close to it, right?

Where is that red line at impact?

His right hip socket, which means he's moved what?

The entire width of his pelvis has moved from where it was at the top of his swing, which is here, all the way to there.

That's a lot of lateral movement, like about six inches, give or take, right?

Now, nobody would say Tiger slid his hips.

He looks like he's just turning back and turning through, but that's how much his pelvis is moving.

That's how much you have to move, just to get into neutral, which is having your left hip stacked right over your left ankle.

As you can see here, Tiger's in a perfect impact position.

If you drew a straight line down from the center of his hip socket, it'd go right through the center of his knee and right through the center of his ankle.

He's perfectly protected in that point.

He's not going to risk any knee injury, any ankle injury, any hip injury.

He's stacked or posted up.

That's what it means to post up is to fully contract that left glute, pushing your foot into the ground and having all of your weight stacked over on that left side.

So most golfers don't understand how much they need to shift.

And I hear this all the time.

Well, I'm afraid of slide sliding.

I'm afraid of swaying.

You're not moving enough.

Well, swaying is the last thing you need to worry about or sliding.

Anyway, you need to move laterally and it needs to be more than most people think.

So I want you to burn this picture in your head that every time you move in the downswing, you're moving a lot more than you think.

And what this does is this weight shift allows you to create a proper swing plane.

Without this, you can't without doing some stupid manipulation of your arms and hands to try and shallow out the club.

Let me show you what I mean.

Not back then.

Well, I don't know when that was and when he started.

That's 2007.

The only injury he had back then was a knee injury and that's because he used to jump at impact with his driver when he's trying to wail on it.

So if you're jumping off the ground, where's your weight?

One ball of your foot.

You get rid of that.

He's never did that with his iron.

Look at his foot.

If your foot was under his ankle right now or your hand was under his ankle, be crushing it.

His shoe is actually starting to roll up off his toe.

All of his weight is firmly planted.

You put him in a driver and what was he doing?

This kind of stuff.

That's how you blow out your knee.

Did he have back issues back then?

None.

When did he get back injuries?

Anybody know?

Anybody watch any of my videos on YouTube?

That's right.

2010, I put out a video in December on YouTube that said with Tiger's swing changes that he's making, he's going to injure his back.

About two years later, done.

I knew I was right.

I just didn't know when it would happen, but it happened.

And now look at Tiger, he's done.

His career is over.

He will never recover from what he's gone through.

And it's all from putting too much rotational and sheer force on your spine.

There's two things in life that your spine hates.

Rotational force, which unfortunately the golf's got a lot of it, and compression force.

When you compress your back, we've all done that, like arch back, you're trying to pick something up off the ground.

It's because you're compressing your lower back and we hurt our little back.

Get a pinch of nerve or something like that.

Slip a disc.

And rotational force.

When Tiger went from releasing the club with his hands and started trying to rotate his body, How many of you watched?

And if you watched a lot of golf?

And you watched him do his practice drills and he would try and take his chest and do this kind of stuff.

All he's doing is trying to get his body to start rotating through the hitting area, which is the last thing on earth that you'd want to do, which we'll talk about more later tomorrow.

So when you start doing that, you're starting to use your entire body to try and hit the ball to release the club.

And so you're trying to move every single internal organ that you have, all of this mass, as fast as you can.

And it's just a recipe for disaster.

So we'll talk more about it later.

But the point of it is, back when he was good, injury-free.

When he started making changes the way that he was moving, every injury in the sun blew out his back, had neck problems, hip, you know, everything.

So we can prevent all of this stuff and go back to being injury-free Tiger back when he was really, really good by just learning how to move correctly and understanding where our weight needs to be at impact.

But let me get back to how important this weight shift is.

You'll notice at impact, if I drew a line on Tiger's spine angle, that that's probably more than where he started at address, right?

Because if I move that club back where it was kind of just inside his knee, that's about where he was at address.

And now he has more.

Why does he have more axis tilt at impact than he does at address?

Exactly.

Did his head move forward?

No, his head's in the exact same place where it started at address, right?

So if your head's in the same spot, but your hips move forward more, what are you going to have?

More spines.

We call it secondary axis tilt.

It's just happening second in the swing because you have an initial axis tilt and then you have a secondary axis tilt.

The secondary axis tilt is what makes all the magic happen.

When you want to get the club to shallow out and drop down on plane, where did my hands go?

From your perspective, what does it look like my hands are doing?

Going straight down, right?

Am I trying to move my hands straight down?

I'm not moving my hands at all.

In fact, even if I tried to fight it and keep my hands up here and force them to stay, where are they going?

Where am I?

What am I moving?

I'm moving nothing but my hips, right?

So I'm moving from one place and it's making it look like all this crazy stuff is happening that you've heard about and read about.

Like, oh, drop the club down into the slot, all this other nonsense.

The club gets moved into the slot by your hips and nothing else.

As my hips move laterally, what is that doing to my spine?

It's increasing my tilt.

Remember what I told you?

What does axis, what does spine tilt do in the swing?

What does it determine?

Swing plane, exactly.

So now what would the opposite be?

Let's say I'm going to be one of those guys.

I don't want to shift my weight at all.

So what, what else can I move?

My arms and what?

Shoulders.

The only options I have.

If I'm not going to move my lower body, what else can I do?

Where's the club going to go?

It has no choice.

There's nothing else that can do it.

If you transfer your weight, tons of great things happen in your swing.

The club automatically shallows out.

If my hands are soft and my wrists are soft, what's going to happen to the angle between my arm and the club shaft?

It's going to increase.

We call that a down cock, right?

So that's lag, which we'll talk more about later.

So if I'm going, if the club head's going this way and now my body starts going this way, which pulls my hands in the opposite direction, that weight and momentum of the club sets my wrist.

So now I have this big angle here.

Did I try and create lag?

No.

Just get my hands soft.

So now I have this huge angle.

All I've got to do now is let it go.

All of that down cock, swing plane, shaft, all that stuff is created by weight shift.

That's how important weight shift is.

If you don't shift your weight, you'll have to try and manipulate the club to get on plane or swing over the top.

You have to try and manipulate creating lag, which won't work out.

And you'll have a really hard time releasing the club, which is the whole point of the swing.

At the end of the day, the whole big payoff is to release the club.

That's where all the speed comes from.

That's where all the fun comes from.

So when you're doing this correctly, it all starts with weight shift.

Every good thing that you want to happen in your swing.

If you did nothing else right and you just shifted your weight and you kept your arms pretty relaxed, you'd be shocked at how well things are going to work out for you.

How do we learn weight shift?

Well, there's a lot of things we can do about it.

We have a bunch of drills on the site that are all about weight shift.

I really like these step drills where you're learning to move with a little bit of rhythm and you're literally physically picking your feet up.

This drill alone forces you to shift your weight because I'm picking a foot up in the air.

So where's all my weight?

Well, it has to be on the foot that's on the ground.

So 100% of my weight and 100% of my weight.

This is obviously more weight transfer than we want.

But if you're one of those guys that just wants to do this all the time and swing from upper body, it teaches you and forces you to move with some rhythm and 100% weight transfer.

And then we start making these steps smaller, and we start making them smaller.

And then we slowly start lifting our heels, and we slowly start making it until it's more like a normal golf swing.

Yeah?

How much secondary axis tilt is it fully?

It's all going to be predicated on your stance width and your impact position.

So if you're hit, if you set up correctly with your stance width and the proper amount of axis tilt, that amount of secondary tilt is predetermined, right?

Because it's only going to be, if my head's exactly where it was at address, but my hips in neutral, that's going to be the amount of axis tilt.

So it's roughly going to double.

Make sense?

Yeah, it's predetermined, right?

Because you've set your stance at a certain width, you've got a certain amount of axis tilt based on your spine, and you just move into neutral.

That's a guaranteed fixed spot.

You're always going to be in the exact same spot, which means you're always going to have the exact same amount of axis tilt.

So how would we do that?

It's a really interesting thing.

If I moved too far, so I move outside of neutral, your body has this amazing little safety mechanism built in.

If you took your tricep and you extend it as far and hard as you can, how far will your arm move?

Straight.

Just to neutral, just straight, right?

I can't move it any further than that.

What would happen if I moved it further than that?

Break your elbow.

I'm going to hurt something, or I'm going to dislocate my elbow, I'm going to break something, right?

So my brain's just like, no, you can't go any further than neutral, right?

Your hip does the exact same thing.

If I move from the left side, I'm going to contract all the muscles that I have to pull myself over, my left glute, my adductors, hard as I can.

Where's my hip socket?

It's right in neutral.

I can't move any further than this.

My left foot, my right foot's in the air.

I'm trying to move as hard as I can to the left side.

How would I get over here?

That's right.

I don't even have any muscle to move from this side to move myself into that position.

It doesn't work.

I physically am unable any more than I can make my arm go 90 degrees the other way.

My body won't allow me to do it.

The only way you can move past neutral is to push off the right side.

If you pull from the left, it pulls you into neutral.

These muscles are designed to move you into a certain position.

It's just how we were engineered.

So when you move from the correct side, all of that stuff takes care of itself.

You'll never slide.

The only way you can slide is to push off the right leg.

Make sense?

Yeah.

If you push off the right, not only will you be able to blow out your hip, but you'll also be able to blow out your back.

You can kill two birds with one stone.

So weight shift and moving from the right side, which is the left side, if you're a right-handed golfer, is paramount.

Yeah?

I have trouble trying to, I'm going to do the hip bump, slide over and then go.

To me, it's like a dance step and I have two left feet.

So how do you go back and, to me, if I'm trying to slide and hold this back and it's like too much going on?

You're in the right place because it's exactly what we're going to do this afternoon.

Okay.

So we're doing the intellectual stuff and I'm going to teach you how to do it.

I got to teach you what I want you to do and why first, so you understand, so you buy into it.

Like, all right, I'll commit to doing the work because now I get it and then I'm going to show you how to do it and very specifically how to do it.

And we'll give you some drills out there that show, we'll actually do the step drill because it's one of my favorites because it forces you to do stuff and learn to teach you how to do it naturally.

Like, I can walk you through this whole sequence of movement and show you exactly what muscle and supporting muscles and all that stuff to use.

That's not going to do you any good.

You don't need to be, you know, you don't need to understand anatomy like that.

Using drills and simple stomp drill, it forces you to activate certain muscles that are the exact same ones I want you to use and it exaggerates it.

So your brain is like, oh wow, I want to really fire that muscle because a lot of times we, you know, especially in our daily lives, if we don't have very active jobs and we sit all the time, we start telling our brain to disengage these muscles and let them lengthen and relax.

And it takes a while to get them to start firing again.

So I have some other drills and exercises, like if your left glute won't fire to make all that stuff happen.

So, but yeah, it's exactly what we're going to do outside is teach you how to move your body first.

And it all starts with weight shift, right?

If you can't get you to shift your weight, right?

The rest of the stuff doesn't really matter because it allows the club to shell out, the arms to remain in reserve so they don't have to be all tense and it helps you create and maintain lag.

Impact position.

At the end of the day, nothing else matters more than this.

But the trick is how do you get there and create this proper impact position is the big difference.

You've got to shift your weight.

We've got to be set up correctly.

We've got to move correctly.

All these things have to happen for this to happen correctly.

But the big thing that I want you to understand about impact is that it's predominantly controlled by the lead side.

So if you're a right-handed golfer, it's your left side that's doing all of the work.

How come the left side is doing it?

Why don't we use our right side?

Because it's way more coordinated, right?

We're almost all right-handed.

That's it.

If you're pushing, you're now trying to drive that trailer, pushing it down the highway, and it's going to jackknife and you're going to wreck, right?

It's kind of like what your golf swing is.

It's a big jackknife.

If you're pulling it, the clubface is always going to stay in a nice line as it's following along with the lead to the left side of the body.

As soon as I push it, the clubface can start releasing incorrectly.

It can start rotating incorrectly.

Here, the club is just going to stay along, follow along nice and mellow.

So the left side is predominantly responsible for a couple things.

One, it controls loft.

And the second thing it controls, your left hand, clubface angle.

Loft and clubface angle, how important are those two things?

It's everything.

That's exactly right.

There's nothing else that matters more than this.

If the loft is adding loft at impact and pointing out to the right, I don't care how good your downswing is, the ball is going to go off to the right and really high and weak, right?

Loft and clubface angle are the most important things in the world, but they have to be created.

You have to create the movements with your body to allow the left hand to remain in reserve.

If you're firing your arm from the top, because all of this stuff is tight, by the time you get to impact, the club head is taking over your hands and you're no longer in the driver's seat.

Sir Isaac Newton's been sent off here in the physics of the club.

We're going to force and overtake your hands.

So if we move correctly and our arms are nice and relaxed, that allows us to come into impact with a nice, mellow, controlled hand position so that we can control loft and club face angle.

The left side of the body is really responsible for all of the impact alignments.

And when we talk about impact alignments, we're talking about the position of our joints, position of the club, club face angle, shaft lean, all those things.

The things that we look for is number one, we want a flat left wrist.

Why do you want a flat left wrist?

Straight?

Well, no, I can hit it straight with a cupped wrist because that's going to dictate club face angle.

So my club face is still perfectly straight, but my left wrist is cupped.

A flat left wrist would be anatomically flat.

So if you put like, I had a watch on, you put a pencil or ruler through there, it'd be perfectly flat.

This would be cupped.

This would be bowed.

As I'm doing this with my wrist, what is this doing to the club face?

More or less loft, that's right.

So the position of your left wrist controls the club face loft, and the rotation of the wrist controls the angle.

So these two things working together determine where the golf ball goes.

So as my left wrist is flat, what's happened to the club face now?

Have I added loft or delofted loft?

Delofted a ton, right?

I've turned my pitching wedge into an eight iron.

Now if I do this, I've turned it into a 70 degree wedge, the ball's going nowhere.

How do people get into this position?

Is this a good position or bad position?

Bad?

How come?

I've added a ton of loft, the ball's not going to go anywhere, right?

Not enough weight.

Okay.

What if I had all my weight over, but I'm still like this?

I see this all the time.

How would I get here?

How, but how?

What?

There we go.

So if I take my right hand and I try to use it to hit the ball, my right wrist is in this position at the top of the swing, right?

Everybody's is going to be bent back and cocked, right?

Where can it go from here?

Out.

So if you're trying to use this right hand to hit the golf ball, what's it doing to your left hand?

That's right.

So the way that everybody gets into this cup position is again, pushing versus pulling.

That's right.

If you're pushing against the shaft, it has no choice but to break down.

If you're taking your right hand completely off the club, everybody naturally gets into a perfectly flat left hand position.

This is the whole secret of golf and why it's so hard is it's the non-dominant side of your body that's supposed to hit the golf ball.

Why wouldn't you just turn to the other side of the ball?

I get asked that all the time.

Can you, are you right -handed?

Have you ever, ever played baseball or throwing ball or anything?

You play ball?

Okay.

So if you can throw a ball, right, how well would you throw it from outfield to the left hand?

Not very well, right?

That's the reason.

Your body understands this kinematic sequence of how to transfer your weight, pivot, and then finally release with your arm.

But then you put a ball in your left hand, even if you're, you know, Ricky Henderson or some great baseball player, you're trying to do it left-handed, it's not going to look very good because you don't have the coordination to learn how to sequence for power.

And that's the trick with it.

You can switch and play golf the other way.

And I've had guys do it and they learn how to control the ball right away, but they don't learn how to build power and it's not natural.

This sequence of how to coordinate rotation and weight transfer and unwinding, a lot of us develop it naturally at a young age because we're throwing rocks or sticks or whatever it is.

We just kind of naturally figure this out or some of us don't, but, but if you played any sports growing up, you've kind of have this sequence that you've done thousands and thousands and thousands of times.

I find that it's easier to train somebody to coordinate control than it is to try to do power.

Power is happening way faster, so much more stuff that's going on.

It's easy.

It takes a while at first.

It's going to take you several weeks to a month or whatever to get really comfortable using your left hand to learn how to control it.

But once you do it, it's done.

You don't have to try and learn how to coordinate every muscle in your body.

You're just learning how to use the left side.

So generally, that's my suggestion.

I do have guys who switch over, but I think it takes a lot longer to learn how to play the opposite way.

Left wrist flat.

So we've talked about that.

It's all about controlling the loft of the club face at impact.

If you hit the ball too high with a lot of spin, it's really floaty, doesn't go anywhere.

I can almost guarantee you that you're flipping it with your right hand.

That's exactly what's going on.

So we're going to teach you how to do, literally keeping the left wrist flat.

It's just really taking the right hand off at first and just learning how to pull through with your body and letting the left arm swing pretty easy.

Left wrist rotating.

This is a big one.

Most people think that the club face should not be rotating through impact.

And you hear that on TV all the time.

I think Johnny Miller says that stuff all the time, that you should hold the club face square to the target as long as humanly possible.

It's the exact opposite of what's really going on.

The club face doesn't work like that.

It's not designed to work like that.

The club has a shaft that's attached in the heel of the club.

And because it's swung on an inclined plane, it's designed to do this.

If you, if they wanted the club face to stay square through the hitting area, where would they put the shaft?

In the center.

Just like you want a center shafted putter, right?

That's what a center shafted putter is for, is to keep the club face from rotating.

The golf swing, there's no center shafted golf clubs.

So if you want to hit the ball really short, try to hold the club face square to the hitting area.

Because what it does is it slows the club face down.

When we talk tomorrow about the release, you're going to see how much of a big difference it makes.

But long for now, for today, just understand that this club face should always, always be rotating.

From the moment it first moves away from the ball, it's rotating open and all the way into impact and beyond, it's always rotating closed.

It never stops rotating.

For hip spinners, your spine's going to feel really upright.

So I've been talking a lot about axis tilt and how it's a huge pet peeve of mine.

If you don't have axis tilt and how I'm going to keep making you go more and more over.

But if you're somebody who drives really, really hard off the right side and get your hips really open, you're going to have too much axis tilt.

And there's such thing as too much axis tilt.

Then you'll start coming way from the inside.

But again, it all comes from where you're moving from.

If you start moving from the correct side of your body, you won't be able to do that.

As soon as I tell you to stop or make you stop pushing off your right leg, you can't have too much axis tilt.

So if you hear me saying, The reason I mentioned this is every now and then.

I get like a really serious hip spinner who gets his hips really open and has a massive amount of axis tilt.

I'll be telling them something that's the opposite of what you should be listening to.

And so you may hear me tell somebody next to you on the range to do this.

You're like, Oh, I'm going to try that.

He's telling him, I'm going to steal that piece of information.

And it just completely wrecks what you're doing.

Don't listen to what I'm saying to somebody else is the reason I put that on there.

The glutes have got to be engaged in specifically the left glute.

The hips are rotating during the downswing, but at impact, what are they doing?

They spin faster, right?

No.

Oh, they do.

Yeah.

How come?

They stop so that your arms can release.

That's right.

If you keep spinning your hips, which again is another thing that you hear on TV all the time that you should turn your hips or your chest to the target as fast as you can, complete nonsense.

If you were to throw a ball, what do your hips do when you get ready to release the ball?

They come to a complete stop.

What would happen if I kept turning my hips?

I'd throw it in the first base dugout, right?

You stop so that all of the energy that you've created from your momentum, from your weight shift and your hip rotation can then be transferred to your arm.

If you keep turning your hips, that never happens.

It's like dragging the club through.

Think about like snapping a towel.

If you're going to snap your buddy in the locker room with a towel, what do you do with your hand to get it to snap?

You stop and actually move in the opposite direction.

Now move in the opposite direction.

You ever seen anybody do that in the golf swing?

Who?

Does anybody do that?

Who?

Rory.

That's right.

Good job.

Rory McIlroy actually gets his hips to reverse direction at impact.

He's the only guy I've ever seen in the history of the game do that.

He gets into impact and right as he's releasing the club, he actually moves in the opposite direction, which is the equivalent of snapping that towel and moving your wrist in the other way.

And I'm not recommending that you try and replicate that, but you want to try and get your hips to decelerate, at least decelerate so that you have a stable platform to hit from rather than having this move all over the place, which then affects everything else.

So that then you can release the club with some control, but also some power.

In order for your hips to decelerate, what do these muscles need to do?

They need to engage.

That's right.

If they contract, that's what decelerates your hips.

So when we go outside today, we'll do some drills where I'm actually going to have you stomp your heel in the ground and feel what it feels like to properly engage those hips.

And you'll feel all of a sudden that your hips will slam on the brakes.

All right, left hip and neutral.

This is a huge one, big one for me.

I've had golfers with labrum tears and stuff in the past, labrum tears in your left hip.

That's like a nine month recovery.

So no golf, no doing nothing for nine months.

It's a painful surgery, painful recovery and completely preventable.

The last guy that I knew that tore his labrum, he was pushing really hard off the right side.

And in event, you know, it's inevitable.

Eventually, your body's going to break down.

If you keep doing this stuff over and over again and keep getting way past neutral joint alignment, you're putting so much stress on your body that eventually is going to catch up with you.

So left hip and neutral, get that weight stacked really on that left side.

When you go out there today, I want your right foot to roll to the inside, not because you're picking it up, but because you're shifting over enough that your right outside of your right foot gets light.

That's when you know you've shifted enough.

And as long as you're not, you don't feel yourself pushing off this right foot, you won't be able to move past neutral.

We're going to move from the left side today.

Your upper body, your torso, your chest should be square to the target line.

So if this was my, these stripes in the carpet were my target line at impact, I want my shoulders to be square, but my hips should be what?

How come my hips should be open and my shoulders square?

What's that?

What moves my shoulders in the downswing?

My shoulders, right?

No, my hips, that's right.

My shoulders only move in the downswing because my hips move them.

That's critical to understand.

It's one of these hard things to understand at first.

During the backswing, you are actively rotating your upper body against your lower body.

So you're moving from the upper half.

But in the downswing, you're done.

You don't do that.

So once you get it wound up, this stuff is now done.

And the lower body takes over and does all the work to bring the club back down into impact.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

I did print that out, didn't I?

So we'll talk about that more outside when we get kind of get set up out there about being connected in it.

And we talk about it more in the backswing stuff tomorrow.

So upper body square.

Like if you look at Tiger's position here, notice how his lead shoulder is really low.

Like you were talking about how yours is popping up.

That's again, just pulling really hard from that shoulder.

And if you look at his shoulders and upper body, they look pretty relaxed.

Just visibly, you can look at this and say, he's not really doing a lot, but he's moved a lot.

This red line here is his secondary axis tilt, right?

So he's got a lot of secondary axis tilt, but do you see anything wrong in this picture?

Or is it just a perfect impact?

Look at that yellow line.

Let's try and diagnostically figure out what's going on there.

What am I showing with that yellow line?

That's right.

Now the image I showed you on the one before, he was in neutral, but now he's not.

Now this yellow line is drawn straight up vertically from the center of his ankle.

The center of his knee and the center of his hip socket should be right over this line, but it's not.

And why would it be out past neutral?

No, he is.

Well, one, it could be just.

Over there.

Is there any time where maybe you'd want to do that?

Yeah.

If you're trying to hit one really low and generally a little bit of a cut, like a low little sliding cut, sometimes it helps to get out in front of the ball a little bit, because it helps you hold off the release a little bit more.

And so in certain circumstances, certain golfers may want to do that.

Now there's other ways to do that shot, but this guarantee, not guarantees, But for a better player, virtually guarantees that they won't close the clubface through the hitting area because he's just a little bit out in front of the shot.

And so it helps him hit a little bit lower and a little bit of a cut.

I'm not advocating that way of doing it, but this is what's going on here.

He is actually hitting a low cut here.

But that's why you see that.

And if you look at the one before, he's stacked dead over that ankle because he's hitting a normal shot.

Right foot rolled in.

I talked about this.

I don't want to see your right heel up in the air all weekend.

Every time your right heel comes up in the air, you owe me a hundred bucks and I charge your credit card.

This is how I pay for my race car tires.

So every time this thing happens, there's no reason for the entire rest of the weekend for your right heel to ever come off the ground.

And the only reason it will is if you push off your right foot too much.

You do this, your right heel will be up in the air right away.

There's no reason for me to be like this.

I moved my right leg.

So every single drill that we do, you're going to finish like this.

My right foot's rolled in.

Where's my weight stacked over my left side?

My right foot's really relaxed.

I can release the club.

I can even get into almost a full follow through here.

So keep them right, right heel down.

Now, eventually as you get comfortable not pushing off the right side, I want your heel to come up, but I wanted to get pulled up by the release of the club, not you pushing off your right foot.

Does it make sense?

So every single drill this weekend, your right heel stays on the ground.

It rolls to the inside, but it never comes up in the air and you'd be like, God, Chuck, I got that.

That's easy.

No, I can make a lot of money doing this.

Yeah.

So right heel stays down.

So the left side of the body to accomplish all of these things that we want to accomplish in the downswing and an impact, it's all done by the left side of the body weight shift and the left side creates perfect impact position.

The right side's job is to help stabilize the left side because it's not in a real good position, real strong position to do all of this stuff on its own.

So the right side is the helper and it does help add speed, but that's the last thing we need to worry about right now.

We want to learn how the technique and do it right.

And we'll add speed later.

That's the easy part.

Make sense?

Any questions on anything we've covered?

So when we go out today, we're going to do some of this stuff and a lot more different stuff, but we're going to start working you through the whole process.

But any questions on anything we've covered so far?

When you talk about left wrist flat, you defined it at impact.

What about at the takeaway at the top?

At the top, it should be relatively flat.

The wrist is always flattening.

So at address, it's going to look like this because of your grip.

As you start to go back, It's slowly going to start to flatten as your wrist starts to cock, and the right wrist starts to hinge back because the right wrist is flat.

At address.

But at the top of the swing, it's like this.

So that flattens it out.

So at the top, it should be relatively flat.

And then as it comes down, it starts to flatten a little more.