How to Increase Swing Speed in 12 Minutes /w Chuck Quinton
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Learn where clubhead speed comes from and how to increase your swing speed in just 12 minutes with this simple explanation!
How is everyone doing?
I don't have my glasses on, so I'm not going to be able to see the screen perfectly, but if we do have an audio dropout, which happens occasionally, just everybody post on there real quick, and I'll see a bunch of questions fly up there, and I will know to check the mic.
I've got a backup mic on, so just in case, we will be able to switch over.
So tonight, first of all, you guys noticed that I posted a poll on there, and so there were two questions, really simple questions.
The first one was, how many of you think that you are near your speed potential?
The answers were 100% no.
None of you feel like you're anywhere near getting your maximum clubhead speed, and that is incredibly frustrating, and so many golfers feel that way.
That's why I posted the poll out there, because you guys are all struggling the same way.
You're feeling the same frustrations, and tonight, we're going to make this stuff incredibly simple so that you can finally understand where speed comes from, because that was the second question, which was, where does clubhead speed come from?
Where does most of the speed come from?
And you'll notice I put four answers on there, and for the most part, three of those four answers got selected, about equal between ground force and lag, and then a small percentage towards hip speed.
Hip speed is one that's talked about all the time on internet chat stuff and on TV.
They talk about, oh, how fast these pros hips move?
But the reality is, you guys know, I published back in 2007.
I did a big, long study with TaylorMade Performance Labs in Orlando and proved that hip speed, you could drop your hip speed down to almost zero and still only lose a very small amount of your clubhead speed.
So hip speed, while important, and it's part of the equation, it's far from being the most important part.
So the other two answers were getting you on the right track.
One was ground force, and the second one was lag.
But the reality is, is that there's one king.
And I used to say this all the time in the clinics, when I was doing the clinics back in Orlando before Craig and Chris took over, the one thing I tried to beat into everybody's head was that by the time you leave this clinic this weekend, you have one job to do.
That's it.
And that is to create, preserve, and release lag.
Okay, that's technically three jobs, but you get the idea.
Lag or leverage from your wrists is where the vast majority, it's about two thirds of your clubhead speed comes from.
And this is not surprising when you look at things holistically.
Now, Rotary Swing's been around since 2005.
And since then, Chris, Craig, and I have done more than 80,000 online swing reviews and more than 10,000 in-person lessons.
The reason that number is important is because out of all those lessons, we've seen the exact same thing over and over and over again.
And the reason that you haven't reached your clubhead speed potential, the reason that you're not getting the consistency that you need, and the reason that you feel like you're working so hard to produce such crappy results is from one thing only.
And that's what this video is tonight.
That's what this presentation is all about tonight, because I'm going to tell you what that one thing is and how to fix it tonight really simply in a really easy way to understand.
So let's get started on what really matters.
The key to speed is lag.
When you understand how to use your wrists for speed and how they create leverage, then the whole world opens up to you.
And now you've probably heard that lag is important, but again, as you saw in these poll questions, not everybody agrees on how you produce speed.
Is it more from your legs?
All of it works together.
But at the end of the day, the simplest way to think about it is in two different ways.
When you think about speed, the simplest way, first of all, is to think of your wrist working like this, like you would be swinging a hammer.
That is a very simple way to create a tremendous amount of speed.
Because you've got this very long lever and this angle in your wrist is potential energy.
And you can see just by standing here without moving my body at all, if I whacked you on top of the head with my club, it would hurt.
There's a lot of speed there, but that's only part of it because this club is not just moving in one vertical motion.
It's rotating and moving in a multi-plane.
So when you think about the second piece of it, I want you to think about not just moving your wrist like a hammer, like you were swinging a hammer, but like you were throwing a ball.
And that's going to be the trick.
And that's going to be the thing that I'm going to talk about tonight that you've probably never heard of.
That's going to help tie everything together that you've ever understood about the golf swing in order to get the true club head speed that you want.
When you think about throwing a ball, this is where I want the light bulb to go off in your head.
If you were to throw a ball and I want you to think about throwing it sidearm, I want you to, and if you're standing there, watch, if you can get up and move around while I'm doing this, I want you to demonstrate or feel this movement with me.
So we know that our wrist has got to move up and down like a hammer, but it's also moving in a way that we're like throwing a ball.
Now the trick to hit to this is I want you to pay attention to my right elbow.
As I do this, as I start to move into throw a ball sidearm, or as if I'm doing the old throw the ball drill, you guys remember that video I published a decade ago where we're talking about using a ball and learning how to throw this ball at that ball.
How would I do that?
When I'm doing that, you'll see that my elbow is in close to my body and then I'm releasing.
I'm letting my wrist release down like I'm swinging a hammer.
And it's also releasing back from this hinged angle to getting back to closer to flat.
Of course, it doesn't, we don't want to flip it.
It doesn't get all the way there.
But when you understand you're putting it all three of these motions together, the trick to getting yourself in that position is going to be in your trail arm elbow.
That's what we're going to talk about tonight.
When you get your elbow in the right spot, a couple of magical things happen.
Before I get there, I want to talk about what you probably are doing right now that's the opposite of what you want to do.
Out of all those 100,000 swing reviews and in-person lessons that we've done, what you can see 95% of the time as a golfer starts down, their trail arm elbow, in my case is a right in my right elbow, begins to work away from my body and begins to rotate internally.
So this is just internal rotation as I take my arm and rotate it towards the center of my body.
This motion is death in the golf swing.
It's the exact opposite of this motion, which is external rotation.
Now, another way of thinking about it without getting all scientific is think about the axiom.
What did I say for right-handed golfers that the trick to the axiom is?
It's clockwise rotation.
Clockwise rotation of the pressure shift in the foot, clockwise rotation of the arm, the elbow, and the wrist.
And now as I put these two together, notice how my elbow drops right into place.
Now, here's the trick to that.
What does that do to the golf club?
Apart from getting the club to shallow out and get on plane instead of going out over the top, what it also does is help me with that thing I mentioned just a moment ago when I said what I tell my students to do in those clinics is to create, preserve, and release lag.
Create, maintain, release lag.
That's your job.
That's it.
That's the whole golf swing.
Creating lag is easy.
You can just pick your wrists up and you've got lag.
Every golfer on the planet has lag at some point because as soon as that club, you set your wrist and the club moves behind your wrist, the club is lagging behind your hand.
So everybody has lag.
The trick is they don't maintain it.
The trick to maintaining it is that clockwise rotation because what that does is it drops my elbow into my body.
And as soon as that happens with the club, and I'll do it with just my right arm only, notice now I have the appearance of having tons of lag.
When you look at my swing on the screen, I realize it's maybe a little bit difficult to see, but you can see my right elbow is right into my body and the club shaft is parallel to the ground when my hands are just in front of my thigh.
That is the trick to the golf swing.
That is the trick to speed is getting your arm here at the point that it matters.
You can do all sorts of other things in your golf swing wrong and incorrect, and still have tons of speed.
Because the one thing you'll see that every single tour pro does on the planet is they create, maintain, and release lag at the right time.
And every amateur on the planet releases lag at the wrong time.
They release it too soon.
And that all happens from that external or, excuse me, internal or counterclockwise rotation.
And you want external getting ready to throw the ball and external rotation and clockwise movement.
So as soon as you put this into your head, this is the whole point of the swing is that you can do all kinds of goofy stuff.
But when you get down here, this is when stuff matters right before we're striking the ball.
If we've maintained lag to this point by simply having that clockwise motion of the axiom, then all of a sudden, all we have to do is just release it.
The trick is what you're doing right now.
And nearly every golfer we've ever seen who doesn't reach their club head speed potential is they're doing the exact opposite.
They are going for, again, I'll do this from down the line.
So it's a little bit easier counterclockwise, right?
So if I have a clock on the wall, looking back behind me, from your perspective, it'll look the opposite.
But I'm imagining I'm looking at a clock back behind me and my hands moving this way would be counterclockwise.
And now you'll see that my elbow is going to move out away from my body as it internally rotates.
And that forces me to cast the club.
Now, as I exaggerate this, you can see the club in my form are now almost in a straight line condition, which is going to cause me to what?
I'm going to scoop and chicken wing and flip through the hitting area.
All you have to do is the exact opposite.
Your goal is to get your elbow right here.
And you'll see as I do all of this with that axiom movement, I get proper secondary axis tilt.
It actually naturally makes me want to move my pelvis forward to get off my back leg to get posted up and pressure over to the left.
And I get into this perfect delivery position simply by thinking about going clockwise rotation and bringing that elbow into my side, which happens naturally.
You won't have to think, pull my elbow in.
What you need to do is become aware that your elbow is moving out away from you and you're swinging like this instead of like this.
And once you get here, hands in front of your thigh, club shaft parallel to the ground, elbow into the body, you're golden.
Then the speed will take care of itself.
You don't have to work harder.
You shouldn't work hard.
The reason a guy my size, I'm 5'9", 170 pounds and swing over 120 miles an hour and I'm 45 years old.
And I don't work hard to do it as you guys have seen my swing millions of times.
The whole trick to this is just the simple concept of doing the exact opposite of what you're probably doing right now.
So when you, all I want you to think about is reversing the movement you're doing now.
If you're going out this way and you see your elbow beginning to internally rotate, which moves it away from your body, that forces you to cast the club.
I want you to practice and a simple way to do this is if you grab a chair, a countertop, a small child, whatever you've got lying around and begin to work to feel what it feels like to have the club parallel to the ground at this point.
So if you have something here that you can, there's a video on the site about using the impact bag to help you move over this, but getting into the feeling of, okay, the club shaft is about parallel to the ground.
I need to make sure my elbows into my body.
And if I do this versus this, and I'll hit the chair every time, if I start rotating internally, then all of a sudden I start getting the proper feeling of that club shaft maintaining lag until the right moment in the swing.
So I hope that helps a really simple explanation of where the swing speed really comes from.
So I'm going to open it up to questions and I'll explain things and anything that wasn't clear.
I'll look over at the questions now on the board.
Let's see.
Craig's on here answering questions for those of you that I mentioned the impact, increased lag impact cube drill.
What's any questions about what I just went over?
Oh, you guys are making this incredibly easy for me.
I appreciate that.
David, yes, this is a great question.
And I was waiting for somebody to pick up on this.
And so David's question is, what about the wide open club face?
If you really exaggerate that moment, the movement with a clockwise movement of the wrist, you would lay the face wide open.
Of course, the simple truth of the matter is, as your body is also rotating this way, it would be so hard for you to get the club to shallow out this much because your body rotation is helping pull the club back out in front of you.
You have to remember you're creating centripetal force by your body rotation.
And that body rotation, the centripetal force, the result of that is what's called centrifugal force.
It's a false force.
But the point of it is, is that it's got to go somewhere.
It's going to act on something just like a kid on the merry-go -round.
If you're on the inside of the merry-go-round, you're not moving very fast.
But on the outside of the merry-go -round, there's a tremendous amount of force trying to move away from center.
So David's question is, you know, if I really try and do this, aren't I going to lay the club face wide open like this?
If your body wasn't rotating, you would, or if you were really trying to overpower it.
But the simple truth of the matter is at speed, you won't be able to do this.
As you begin to rotate your body back, the club is being acted on and the force is trying to throw the club out, which is causing the club to square up.
This is the beauty of it.
This is why tour pros are very consistent.
We don't have to work that hard to try and square the face.
We're letting physics do the work for it.
So you won't actually be able, unless your body wasn't rotating at all, you won't be able to lay the club bases open as I was demonstrating here.
That was just happening because I had no body rotation.
So hopefully that answers that question, David.
Great question.
Let me see.
Romer, that's a great question.
How does this apply to lead arm dominant swing?
Great question.
So first of all, back in the day, one of the first videos I published was a throw the ball drill.
And what we saw all the time is that people threw the ball like this instead of like this.
So what we noticed is that they were just didn't understand how to use their right arm correctly.
But if they use their lead side, then the right arm learned to play nicely with the right or excuse me, with the left.
And so we were able to balance the two out.
But the reality is no matter how you swing, both arms are always working one way or another.
The difference is maybe what you feel.
Because if you're very, very right side dominant, and you're learning to be more lead side dominant, your right arm is already overactive and it's doing a ton of things.
And so you just have to feel that it's not doing anything to keep from interfering with the lead side.
Now on the opposite side of that, if you're, you know, using your left arm to pull really hard, you may have to feel a lot of right arm.
So the reality is both arms are always working in the swing.
And if you train them separately so that you can get a feel for one, even if you're going to swing lead arm dominant, which is more of a body driven motion to let the lead arm propel, you still need to feel the direction of movement for the right arm.
Whether you're Tiger Woods or Ernie Els, your positions are going to be fundamentally very, very similar, if not identical, even though Ernie is very lead side dominant and Tiger is very trail side dominant, they both still get into this position.
So while you may not be trying to actively use your arm very aggressively to do this with the right arm, you still need to get the feeling of where the right arm needs to go.
And it helps to train that right arm in doing that.
Let's see.
Sean's asking, how much wrist hinge should there be the top of the backswing and how to get there?
That's a great question.
So wrist hinge, it's a very, very misunderstood thing in the golf swing.
The long and short of it is that your wrists basically need to be relatively supple.
They don't need to be floppy soft, but you can't keep them super tight either.
Again, think about swinging a hammer.
If you were to really try to get a nail to go through the board with one swing, would you have your wrist very tight or would you have it relatively soft?
Now I know that's not answering your question directly, but if you think about what I'm saying, then the idea of how much you should set your wrist really doesn't matter.
The trick is that it's how you set your wrist, not how much.
If your wrists are tight, it'll be very difficult, if not impossible to time the release so that they release correctly and with speed at the bottom.
So a lot of times what we see is a lot of golfers will take, you know, they don't have very good lag in their swing.
They try to set their wrists a lot early in the swing, thinking that that will pay off in the downswing.
But the truth is it creates tension.
So again, it's like swinging a hammer, but you're out of sequence.
If you're swinging a hammer, there's a natural rhythm to it that you don't have to think about.
Well, gosh, should I, if my elbows moved at 45 degrees, how much should my wrist be set?
You don't have to think about that.
You feel it.
The same thing has got to be true in the golf swing.
As you're swinging your wrist up, the important thing is not how much you set your wrist at the top.
The important thing is where they are down here.
That's what matters.
So if you set your wrist early, the tendency is you're going to build a lot of tension and get rid of the speed too soon.
You're going to get rid of your leverage soon.
So that what we tell people in general is that your wrist should be responding to the weight of the club.
As you swing back to the top, there's a natural instinct to start to set your wrist.
The trick is you don't want to try and override that.
And try to set them at a specific time because you create tension at the right time and nothing will unfold correctly.
All right.
Next question.
We've got a couple of votes here.
So yeah, if you guys have C questions, if you vote them up, that helps me prioritize them.
So George asked, we've got a couple of votes, how to keep arms in front of the chest when you move right arm clockwise and gain depth.
Every image shows the right elbow moving deep behind in a clockwork fashion.
Okay.
So if I understand you correctly, George, what you're saying is that as I'm exaggerating this clockwise motion, that the arms would be getting very deep.
And you're saying, well, how do I keep my arms in front of my chest?
Hopefully it's obvious, but clearly if it's not, your arms aren't moving like this in the golf swing, right?
First of all, once your left hand is back on the club, you're only going to be able to get so deep because the left arm is going to restrict that.
But this clockwise motion that I talk about in the axiom is very subtle.
It's not something you're trying to Matthew Wolfe-esque, although you can swing that way.
Of course, he plays very, very well.
But the reality is that all the tour pros do the same movement.
It's just trying to understand the difference between doing it subtly and naturally, in order to get the feeling of being doing the opposite of what you're doing now.
So that's why I exaggerate this stuff a lot of times where I will pick the club up and really exaggerate it.
Because you can see that if I'm moving continually in that clockwise direction, like the axiom teaches you, if I continue to do this, guess what happens?
Even if I screwed up, even if I did get my arms really deep, but guess what?
I'm on the merry ground.
I'm on the clock.
What happens?
As I continue to go clockwise, what happens to my arm?
They get brought right back in front of my chest.
So even if I really exaggerated it, they still end up where they're supposed That's the beauty of it.
You don't have to worry about nailing all these different positions.
You have to keep the continuous movement.
And when that happens, you don't have to worry about it.
But in the reality, like if you look at somebody like my swing, as I go to the top, my arm movement is, you know, my arms are very quiet.
I'm not, I'm not trying to do this big exaggerated motion.
That's really helpful if you've been doing this and swinging over the top your whole life.
But in truth, it's just a very small, subtle movement.
And as long as it continues to move, your arms will always end up back in front of your chest when it matters.
But it's a good question.
All right, let's see.
Do you create more lag at the top if the left wrist is cupped rather than flat?
You can, but then you have to hopefully square the face back up.
So yeah, I don't recommend getting a very cupped wrist at all.
It's not ideal.
It's a big compensation.
Should we practice this clockwise right elbow independently alongside what Chris Tyler taught in the bootcamp, which should be prioritized for lead side of dominant swing?
So should you practice this movement?
If you're struggling and moving in the opposite direction, absolutely.
If you continue to swing over the top and you can't just figure out why that is, you've got to, you've got to switch gears in your brain and exaggerate this movement to get something to change.
Because otherwise you just kind of keep resorting back to your old movement patterns.
That's how our brains work.
If you've swing, if you've been swinging over the top for 20 years and all of a sudden you're just trying to make a subtle little change, well, your brain wants to revert back to these old dominant movement patterns that have been heavily myelinated.
So you have to kind of wake it up.
And that's what this big exaggeration is for.
So combining this with what Chris is teaching, absolutely.
We're all teaching the exact same thing.
It's just taking something that's specific to deal with a specific problem.
Lag is a problem in golf.
is people don't understand what they're doing that's causing them to cast the club and lose all this club head speed.
And as you saw from the poll, everybody feels like they're nowhere near their club head speed potential.
It's a really frustrating thing, but it all comes from the same motion.
So this right arm motion combined with being lead arm dominant, nothing changes.
If you look at my left arm dominant swings and my trail arm dominant swings, they look exactly the same.
In fact, this video is a lead arm dominant swing, but my arms are still in the exact same spot.
Even if I swing right arm dominant, it doesn't matter.
The positions are the same.
Chris is asking, can you still throw away lag early if you do the clockwise thing?
So if you're moving correctly with the trail arm movement or the clockwise movement or the action, can you cast the club?
You could be unlikely though, because you'd be working against physics.
You would have to do something really aggressive.
If you're moving this way, you'd have to be actively trying to push against the shaft.
This is what's cool about the axiom.
And this is the whole point of the axiom.
The axiom is simply a way to understand how the tour pros naturally create all of these positions in the swing without trying to work through them and learn them position by position.
So when you think about it that way, tour pros never work on maintaining lag.
I've never worked on maintaining lag in my swing ever.
I've always had plenty of lag.
In fact, my goal has always been to get rid of it.
I've always had too much.
And if I leave the club face, if I have too much lag, I leave the face open and I would struggle with blocks to the right.
That's always been my miss when I was younger.
So the trick is understanding that these movements create all the proper positions.
So the point of the axiom and getting this clockwise motion is that it would be very hard, if not impossible, unless I was doing something crazy to throw away lag.
The reason you're throwing away lag is because you're not moving with the overall movement correctly.
So you don't have to try and maintain lag with the axiom.
It's the opposite.
The axiom creates lag by a result.
It's the default.
It's not trying to create lag.
So what I'm doing, helping you understand this little, you know, getting your elbow into this position, this naturally causes you to maintain lag because I'm doing the opposite of what throwing the club head would be.
Throwing the club head way would be counterclockwise movement and pushing against the shaft.
But in this, with the axiom, as I move clockwise, the club not only shallows out, but my wrist is never moving in an action that would cause me to throw away the club.
The wrist is rotating.
And as it rotates, instead of moves this way until the very, very bottom, then there's, it's virtually impossible for me to cast the club.
Let's see.
Jens is saying from club blast parallel, does the body still open to help get the club to the ball?
Or is it just breaks and rotation of the arms?
This is very easy to look at from a kinematic sequence standpoint of all the best players in the world.
Rotation stops dramatically or slows dramatically.
By the time the club is here, there's less than fractions of a second before that club is striking the ball.
So when you look at a kinematic sequence, the hips have virtually stopped, the shoulders and torso have virtually stopped, and it's only the club releasing and the forearm rotating at that point.
So yes, the point of this drill is you get into this position and you're setting the club down the chair.
It's just releasing the club at that point.
There's not enough time to do anything else.
Mike, well, I can't talk about rehab for your, Mike's asking, he has a hard time externally rotating that clockwise movement.
You don't have to have a windshield wiper external rotation of your right arm.
And a lot of players don't, you don't need that.
Think about it just with your wrist, if nothing else.
If my wrist is making this clockwise motion, I'm not doing any external rotation with my arm.
Let's say that I've got a frozen right shoulder or some cartilage damage or what have you.
If I'm just doing it with my wrist, the same thing is going to happen.
So I won't do any external rotation with my arm.
I'll just set it in a fixed position.
But as I do it with my wrist, my two forearm bones, look what happens.
I still get into that same position.
So don't, you don't think, don't think that you need to get this crazy external rotation with your right arm.
You definitely don't from the shoulder.
Can you talk about the release?
Not in this one.
This video, I want to keep it very, very specific about maintaining lag.
The release we can spend hours and hours and hours on.
But the main thing I want you to guys understand is how to get into this position.
We can do another webinar on the release.
And of course, I've done tons of videos on the site on release.
But for tonight, let's keep it really focused on how to maintain lag, how to create lag and maintain it more than anything.
And then another one, we can talk about releasing that lag.
Okay.
So David's right shoulders moving forward and out and toward the ball.
Okay.
So this is another, this is a lag killer.
And this is really what the axiom does the opposite.
So if you're doing something that's causing you to move incorrectly, you just need to stop and think for a second.
The axiom teaches you to move through every single correct position automatically through feel.
But what David is saying is that his right shoulder is moving out toward the ball.
Now I'm going to ask you guys a question.
What direction is my upper body rotating in order for my right shoulder to move out toward the ball?
Anybody know?
Post it in the comments here.
What direction, if my right shoulder is moving this way, what am I doing with my body?
What direction am I rotating?
Anybody know?
David, counterclockwise.
That's it.
You guys got it, right?
So again, the axiom is what you need to think about.
If my shoulder is moving out toward the ball, what do I need to do to get it to move in the opposite direction?
Well, let's look at it from down the line.
So this would be counterclockwise.
Remember the clock on the wall back behind me.
So all I need to do is think about moving it clockwise.
So you can exaggerate this clockwise movement with my shoulder.
And now what would happen if I really, this is, again, I'm doing a huge exaggeration.
But if I really exaggerated this clockwise movement with my shoulder, it would bring me down right into the perfect delivery position.
If it's moving out toward the ball, you're moving counterclockwise and you're doing the exact opposite of the axiom.
So to recap, as we're wrapping up here tonight, your job in the golf swing is to create, maintain, and release lag.
The axiom makes all three of those things happen by default.
It's automatic.
If you're doing something that you're still casting the club, you're still moving your body out toward the ball, you're losing your posture.
It's simple.
You're not doing the axiom.
You're moving counterclockwise.
And as soon as you get that in your head, that every single swing flaw, just about every single swing flaw you can have, happens from counterclockwise movement instead of clockwise movement for right-handed golfers, then everything should start to fall in place and make sense.
So I hope this clarifies some things for you guys.
It helps you understand how to really get your club head speed potential up because it's not that hard.
Obviously, I'm not a big guy, but I can move the ball pretty well.
And it's all through simple mechanics.
And these simple mechanics are exactly what you learn by understanding how to move clockwise.
So I want you to practice getting this right elbow in here, getting a feeling for it.
You'll see as I'm doing this, I'm even exaggerating my right shoulder moving clockwise, my elbow moving clockwise, my wrist moving clockwise, my foot moving clockwise.
And it brings me into those perfect positions automatically.
Thank you guys so much for tonight.
I appreciate you showing up.
Replay will be available shortly.
You guys will receive a link for it in your inbox.
So check that out and post any questions you have in the community and Craig and Chris will be happy to answer them.
Thanks guys.
And have a good night.
Mark
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Mark
Craig (Certified RST Instructor)
Paul (Vinni)