How to Get Your Hips Open at Impact - Pt 2
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Struggle to get your hips open at impact? This video shows you how to get your hips rotated wide open stress free while being easy on your back.
In the last video, I talked about how starting to fall into this lead side is what you see in all great players.
And there are three checkpoints.
You want to look in your own swing to make sure that you're starting to load up correctly in the backswing to make your pressure shift back to the front.
Which is what we're going to talk about today.
And the rotation of your hips happen more easily.
I've experimented with, I think, just about every golf swing idea under the sun, and probably most of that in the last three months.
I've been trying to feel exactly what I think the GOATs, the greatest players of all time, Bobby Jones, Hogan, Nicholas, Tiger, all these great ball strikers, What they feel in their golf swings.
And this is one of the things that's consistent among all of them is that.
As they're going back, they're all naturally easily getting back into this lead side.
And what you can check the three checkpoints are that as you go back, this lead knee, hip and shoulder are all lower than the counterparts on the right side so my left knee is lower than my right knee my left hips lower than my right hip and my left shoulders lower than my right shoulder so now as I start to naturally shift back into this lead side as I'm falling back to the left it makes it very easy to get back over there and that is something that's really really important because there's two basic ways to shift your pressure back to the lead side and I've been studying this with force plates for the past four years with 3d force plates and almost 20 years with pressure mats so I have a pretty good idea of what the tour players do in their swings and what all great players do and what high handicap players do and the number one thing that all higher handicap players do compared to pros or really really low scratch or better players is that amateurs or higher handicaps shift later in the downswing or or show more specifically I should say show a pressure shift off the trail foot to the lead foot much later and this is hugely important because this shows that there's a major dysfunction in your golf swing and what I'm going to talk about today is the two basic ways that you can get there one we can kind of fall onto this side or two we can push off this side both of them will help you move back to the lead side one of them is what the pros do and the other one is what most amateurs tend to do and so you can probably guess which that is but let's walk into it a little bit because I want to explain to you to help you understand what it should feel like to shift your weight and be able to get your hips finally fully open like the pros do because this is so important to make room for your arms to make get your pressure shift over to get a better strike on the ball and so on so here we go the first thing that you want to think about is pressure and weight are not necessarily the same things if I'm over here I've got all of my weight on my right foot but if I have all my weight on my right foot and I start pushing into the ground with my lead foot even though most of my mass is over here I actually have perhaps an equal amount of pressure depending on how much force I'm driving through my other foot my pressure is now evenly distributed now this makes more sense if I think about it on the left side because this is what we're generally doing in the swing we're trying to get back to the lead side and if you've tried to get your hips open forever and your hips are never open like you see in the pros and this is just to be clear the one thing you should always be checking for you should be able to very easily see both butt cheeks at impact and if you can't it means that you're probably doing something majorly wrong in your swing so how do we get there again we can push or we can fall and that's the key so as I mentioned earlier the pros all tend to shift back into shift their pressure back to this lead side very early in the downswing and really what you can see is talked about in the last video by the time they're here that by the time the club shaft is about parallel or the end of the take away almost all of their pressure shift that they're going to have on average to the trail side is done they're not going to keep going all the way back and that's what most golfers do because they keep trying to get their arms lifted and loaded so they keep shifting more mass more weight more pressure to this side and then in a quarter of a second which is how long the downswing takes trying to get back to the lead side and it's hard to do and so there's not enough time to move that your whole body laterally and try and rotate your body will prioritize one or the other it will tend to rotate or it'll tend to move laterally but it doesn't tend to do both very well at the same time so when you think about it if you're here and you're done shifting pressure this side and now you're starting to kind of what we kind of call recenter you're starting to get your mass or the the center of your pelvis and center of your sternum back kind of 50 50 by the time you get to the top of the swing but if you're 70 80 on the right foot at the top of your swing you're cooked you're not going to have time to get back over so that's why that first video was so important why i want to do it by itself because i want you to give yourself time to start feeling this motion where your arms are still going back in the backswing and you feel and again i'm exaggerating this you feel that you're trying to get your pressure back 50 50 by the time you get to the back top of the backswing so now what the heck do we do from there that's the real key so once we're here now you would think okay what do i want to push hard off the back foot now both jack nicholas and tiger woods i've heard both of them say they push really hard off the back foot in the downswing so surely that must be what you do right well the force plates say otherwise and this is one thing you got to be careful with what the great said and i've been studying this stuff for so long there are so many things that they said that they did that they don't in fact they often did the opposite and it doesn't matter who you can take tiger woods or jack nicholas or even mo norman mo norman thought the back of his left hand was you know facing the ground in the in the release position but it wasn't it feel and real are so wildly different in the golf swing and that's why i've been going through this last several months of study of trying to translate what they said they did into what they really did and using technology and data to verify that so that you can have an accurate feel in your golf swing and so the feel that i want you to focus on today is not pushing off the trail foot now if you have a wide stance and you're hitting a driver can you push off the trail foot sure but we're going to talk more about that in a moment why that might not necessarily be the best idea if you've got a bad back so hold on just a minute i'm going to come back to that topic what you rather should think is that as i'm kind of falling into this lead side and again these movements are not huge i'm exaggerating so it's easy to see but as i'm falling into this lead side the quickest way to transfer pressure now remember the pros all transfer that pressure back to the lead side really early and really quick and amateurs are kind of slow to get back over there the quickest way to do it would be that unweighting the trail foot rather than driving off the trail foot now you would think like wait a second i gotta get my weight over here i gotta get my pressure i gotta get my mass over to this lead foot so surely i want to push and nicholas and tiger both said push but here's what's crazy about that and the force plates they don't lie our brains they lie to us all the time our feel is always so wildly different but what's really happening is that as i push i'm creating force that the ground can feel but this pressure plate can feel so even though i'm driving mass over here and my weight my my mass is over here my pressure is still hanging back here so the more i push off this trail foot the more the pressure plate is feeling force detecting force and it feels pressure back here so my pressure may be 60 40 or 70 30 right now even though i've pushed myself over here in the downswing that's not what we see great ball strikers do on the tour it's not what i see low handicaps do it's exactly what i see high handicaps do driving hard off this foot and it makes sense you know in other sports in baseball we do the whole squish the bug thing where you hang back on this foot and you pivot off this hip and you drive everything forward in golf golf and baseball i think there are definite similarities in a baseball swing and even a baseball throw but i really think golf kind of sits in its own space it's more of a lead side dominant motion even if you want to feel a throwing motion your lead side has to do a lot of work otherwise just take your left hand off the cleft and play all right-handed you have to have a balance in an ideal world we're going to use both arms and hands both sides of the body together to bring the club through but when it comes to pressure shift the simplest way to feel it is and if you want to get both hips open is to get here you're falling into the side just let gravity help you you know you've already got you've already got these angles set so that your body is like oh yeah i could pick my right foot up really easy i don't have to drive off of it all i gotta do is fall into that lead side and feel that this foot's unweighted now once i'm on the lead side and i've got my center of my hip over my ankle like we've always talked about feel how easy it is to pivot and get both hips open i'm going to turn down the line so you can see this so if i'm on my lead foot and i've got no like 10 of my pressure it's what's really it's just going to feel balanced my toes just on the ground here from here it's so easy to get both hips open now try the same thing but put your pressure 50 50 and try and turn your hips it's a little bit harder when your pressure is 50 50 and if you're doing it dynamically and you're pushing off of this trail foot you're going to create more lateral motion well now you could try and create rotational force here but again we would see that your pressure is still hanging back on the trail foot and in the pros we don't see that let's take a look at one right now we're going to take a look at justin rose with a short iron because it's so great to see how little movement he's making but shifting his pressure hugely all the way over 90 by the time he gets to impact let's take a look at this okay so i've got justin's nine iron here with the face on and down the line view and the pressure and force is on the right now as he goes back as he starts he's at this stage and swing he's literally 50 50 so perfectly centered as he's getting ready to start the club back as he goes back you're going to see him peek out right there at 67 so a little past the takeaway as i mentioned most pros are done by the end of the takeaway or a little bit later than that depends on the club that they're hitting too so but in this case justin's just before left arm parallel he is done shifting to his trail leg and is already beginning to see as you can watch this number up here on the top right hand corner of the screen as he's starting to move back or recenter and so by the time he gets to the top he's not quite 50 50 but you can see that he is starting to move back into that lead side if we put a little line here on his hip to give you a reference point you can see that right in here he starts to move back to that lead side and even though he's still not quite 50 50 there's probably a little bit of pushing right here off of this trail leg to help that initial shift to get back over to lead side but now from here you're going to see look at how rapidly this number this 46 percent number up here on the top left is changing and going ramping up so fast look at how fast his pressure shifts and so now he's already at i think that's where he peaks about right there 92 of his pressure is on his lead foot now if he was pushing still late in the downswing you would see not only his right knee turning his right hip moving laterally and starting to want to move vertically to compress his lower spine which i'll talk about in a moment but he would be having way more pressure on his right foot but right now it's only eight percent there's hardly any pressure on that trail foot at all he's planted on that lead side and is able to pivot and you can see as he gets into impact from the down the line view on the left you can see even with a nine iron you can see both butt cheeks very clearly which is like i said generally the exact opposite of what we see with most amateur golfers and so this is a great visual for you to feel as you're going back you're loading to that right side starting to recenter get back to the lead side and then once you're on that side you don't need to keep shoving off that right foot to push more mass over there if you feel the need to do that you need to go back and look at the backswing component of this video so that you're starting to set yourself up to fall back into that lead side and start to feel that dynamic stretch so as you as you can see in justin's swing he's not driving hard off this trail foot he's simply unweighting it and this makes the golf swing really simple and really easy to get onto this lead side and then you can turn into your hip and this is an important differentiation between how you move your hips because this is what probably the hardest thing to understand in the golf swing and the thing that we see most commonly that most amateurs never ever get right and so what a lot of times what happens is golfers think they should turn their hips going back and turn their hips going through because that's a hip turn and we refer to it as a hip turn or hip rotation i think a better way of thinking about it is as you're coming down you're turning into this hip so think of your left leg your lead leg doing this i'm moving my hips into it not trying to turn my hips or twist my hips that will tend to cause you to push really hard off this trail foot and again that's not what we see in great players we see an unweighting and then a really simple easy pivot on this into this lead leg so not trying to turn my legs to turn my hips i'm simply getting onto this lead leg and turning my body into it now as i mentioned earlier another cautionary tale i want to tell you because i experimented with this and i felt it myself is if you push off the trail foot there's another catch that can cause some serious issues with your back and because i have a very fragile back from all of my two-wheeled adventures that i've had over the years and my excursions with testing the bounds of gravity i have found that as you move into side bend which we see in all great players you're going to see them move into side bend the side bend is okay it's when you have side bend with rotation that you run into trouble and that's what we talked about i did an interview with one of our medical panel neurosurgeons a long time ago dr mitt suppler and we talked about the best way to herniate a disc is to get into a lot of side bend with a lot of rotation a lot of twisting of your spine and that's a beautiful way to destroy your back now compound that with compression and now you've got the trifecta effecta and how would you do that well we know all great players are going to get into side bend some of them are going to get into side bend with a twisting of the spine that's not ideal and that's how it's very easy to see who's going to get injured on tour and who's not but if you're just in side bend if i'm just like this how am i going to hurt my back if i start driving off my right foot to drive this hip toward the target not only am i twisting my spine very forcefully because i've got a lot of strength in my right leg and my right hip just as you do so i can get into the side bend as i'm coming in impact and then drive my hip forward super painful but i'm also the ground as i'm pushing off of my trail foot i'm pushing my hip up while my up my shoulder is going down so as i'm getting into side bend and driving off my trail foot this hip's going this way shoulders going this way i'm twisted boom blow out your back very very easily and because i've been experimenting with the simple the different ways that you can shift your pressure rotate your hips turn your hips i'm all about effortless stuff and i don't want pain in my back so as i go through here if i'm going to get into side bend what i want to do is fall into side bend and not have any upward motion off of this leg because then i can move into side bend to get my shoulder down to keep the club tracing down the plate the the target line much longer just to give you an idea let me grab a shaft here real quick what i mean by that and i'm going to talk more about this stuff and with updating you guys and all the research i'm doing but as i get into side bend as my right shoulder stays down as the lead side's pulling it through watch what happens to the club as long as i keep that shoulder down do you see how long i can keep the club traveling straight down the plane line that's what you see in most modern tour players and the goats that they get this shoulder down and most amateurs look again the opposite this right shoulder is going to be high so we've got the club coming out across the line and then working across really quickly so it might be pointing down the line and working down the time for a split second as long as you have the ball in the perfect spot you time the swing perfectly you're going to get the ball to go straight down the line the pros the goats they're like no no that's way too much work i want to be really consistent so as i get into side bend i can keep this club traveling down the line as long as i maintain that side bend but if i'm driving my hip forward by pushing off the trail foot and driving up off the ground to compress my lower back no bueno so a simple way to think about it as you work on what you did in the last video where you're starting to fall set yourself up to fall into this lead side and then just unweight this foot and then pivot and you'll see not only can you get into side bend like this with no pain on your back whatsoever but look how open i can get my hips with no force i'm not pushing off this trail foot i'm just pivoting and that will make you get yourself set up so you can rotate your hips get a lot more speed out of it protect your back and get your hips wide open like you see
Joe
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